Folk Culture and Nature in Temsula Ao’s Laburnum for My Head and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: An Ecofeminist Reading

Abstract

Nature has been idolized at times as the mother nature and also exploited profusely like women through the centuries. The idolizer as well as the exploiter is the patriarch. The patriarch not only subjugates nature and women so as to make his ends meet, but also justify his patriarchal ideology. Temsula Ao’s touching description of human life and human condition like in her Laburnum for My Head are set in the backdrop of the lush green forest of North-east  India. Women must see that there can be no liberation for them and no solution to the ecological crisis within a society whose fundamental model of relationships continues to be one of domination. They must unite the demands of the women's movement with those of the ecological movement to envision a radical reshaping of the basic socioeconomic relations and the underlying values of this society. (New Woman/New Earth,Rosemary Ruether, 1975, 204)