Pepertua K. Nkamanyang Lola

The Lock on My Lips Pepertua K. Nkamanyang Lola

The Lock on My Lips foregrounds gender, narrative and identity in its representations. It tells the story of a woman who defies traditional patriarchal boundaries that deny women their rights, most especially the right to landed property and buys land in her name. Discursive constructions, 'travelling concepts', metaphors, multiple perspectives, narrative, imagery, folklore, anthropological objects, and mixed-genre plot structure (narrative-(poetic)-drama), combine to tell the story of gendered beings and thus pave the way for exploring the interdisciplinary potentials of the play-text. Land and genre are gender markers. Land is definable through power and authority, constitutes the material with which masculinities are constructed, and thus becomes a space where women are excluded. The play equates land with patriarchal ideology of male virility and supremacy, but creates a mixed-genre fragmentary structure to disrupt the very patriarchal power erected through the metaphor of land.