Dramatizing Silence and Women’s Agency in Angel’s Diary

Abstract

This article examines the different mechanisms used by women in Angel’s Diary, a popular television theatre text aired on Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC) to demonstrate their agency. Using Angel’s Diary as its point of reference, the article interrogates the dynamics of women’s position that characterize their existence and their inexorable struggle to affirm their potential in a limiting and unequal society. The positioning of women in the society is informed by historical, economic, political, social and cultural experiences in Africa that place a woman in a marginal locus. The article therefore deals with strategies that women use to overcome the inequalities, dominations and ‘normalized’ practices that are manifestations of domination and silencing apparatus of various aspects of women’s potential. Methodologically, the paper employed qualitative approach in reading Angel’s Diary. Content analysis of video tapes was the primary method used. In content analysis, I interrogated ways employed by women to subvert social norms, forms of domination and the eventual resistance to emancipate the self. The article found out that women characters in Angel’s Diary employ strategies such as the journey, music, monologues, and silence to transcend the limitation created around them and perpetuated through the father figure.

Key Words: domination, subordination, silence, agency, subversion, resistance, family