(Dis)Empowering Gendered Characters In Disourse: A Sociolinguistic Study of Daniel Mengara’s Mema (2003)

This paper seeks to gain a full insight into how the phenomenon of power game- empowering and disempowering gendered characters- is discursively enacted in Daniel Mengara's Mema (2003) from a sociolinguistic perspective. It takes the view that language and context co-constitute each other; i.e. language contextualizes and is in turn contextualized. This implies that an individual's language would naturally vary along with the context of use. It follows from this de facto to argue that there is no such thing called an absolute powerful/powerless person, sex/gender or social group in social life, given that it is the role that a person, a sex/gender or a social group takes on or is assigned in a given context that exudes if s/he/it truly holds or exercises social power or not. The study draws on Norman Fairclough's and van Dijk's notions of power and Michael A. K. Halliday's concept of register combined with qualitative approach to explore in four selected discourses from the novel how gendered characters and their relations of power are discursively represented. The findings reveal that Mema is surprisingly empowered at the expense of her male counterparts (Pepa and the male speaker) D1, Akoma is positioned as powerful also at the expense of her husband, Nkulanveng, in D2, but Nkulanveng, the male elder from Biloghe's village and Old Meleng are all discursively empowered respectively in D3 and D4