• The First Wife
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Archipelago Books

The First Wife

The First Wife

by Paulina Chiziane, translated from the Portuguese by David Brookshaw

$18.00
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African Literature Available as E-Book
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After twenty years of marriage, Rami discovers that her husband has been living a double – or rather, a quintuple – life. Tony, a senior police officer in Maputo, has apparently been supporting four other households for many years. Rami remains calm in the face of her husband’s duplicity and plots to make an honest man out of him. After Tony is forced to marry the four other women – as well as an additional lover – through polygamist custom, the rival lovers join together to declare their voices and demand their rights. In this humorous and feverishly scathing critique, Mozambique’s first published female novelist explores her country’s tradition and culture, values and hypocrisy, and its subjection of women.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9780914671480
Pages: 250
Publication Date:

Praise

In the style that characterises her writing, the novel pulls no punches, and the polemic it constructs is passionate and engaging. Niketche is alive with intrigue and happenings…It is this sense of strength, of resilience, of passion, and simultaneously of acceptance, of resignation that both excite and irritate that make Niketche such an enjoyable and provocative read.
—Tony Simões da Silva, African Review of Books

Daring, biting in its critique. It describes the plight of women caught between Mozambique's traditional culture and its colonized societies.... Brave work.
—Kirkus Reviews

The story of Rami and her journey toward something resembling freedom is told in lyrical, circular prose that heightens the universality of the situation in which she finds herself ... a careful examination of tradition clashing with modernity ... Slowly, painfully, as tradition looms in the background, Rami and the other women in Tony’s life begin to discover a space for themselves and what it can mean to be more than a part of a 'loving hexagon'.
—Publishers Weekly

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