Labelling and Othering: (Re)Engaging Wangari Maathai’s Madwoman Tag in Unbowed: A Memoir

Abstract

This article is an interpretive analysis of how Wangari Maathai’s autobiography Unbowed: A Memoir (2007) revises the author’s Otherness through theorising and practising intersectional environmentalism. The article argues that Unbowed becomes a space where Maathai’s struggle for environmental restoration and democracy intersects with her feminist agency. This article isolates Maathai’s practice of feminism as one that took cognisance of ecological justice to revise her Otherness, using it as a space enabling her to speak against societal injustice. To negotiate and, in effect, humanise the environment and use it as a locus for emancipating Kenyan women, Maathai reworks the label of madness attached to her and (re)uses it as a tag with some degree of privilege. Using literary criticism methodologies to engage Maathai’s autobiography, this article examines the implications of self-definition for those operating within liminal spaces. Of importance is how Maathai uses the madness label, aimed at silencing her, to create a hierarchy of privilege. The article concludes that through subtly agitating for ecological justice, Maathai found her voice to self-define herself, revising Otherness and liberating Wanjiku (the Kenyan poor). She does this by refocusing the hierarchies of subjectification embedded in the label “mad.”