Across these intertwined narratives, Aidoo reveals how deeply language shapes gender and power in African societies. Patriarchy speaks in both whispers and commands, glorifying women’s sacrifice through idioms, and romanticising their suffering through proverbs, as seen in Esi’s conversation with her grandmother, Nana. Also, through casual conversations, patriarchal language is used to reduce women’s ambitions to “Western” delusions.
The words used to describe the body, the harm, and the resistance all shape how women feel about themselves and how they are seen. If the term “sexual violence” is pushed into euphemism, the conventional structures for understanding and naming that violence shift. A woman’s personal narrative of “survivor,” “advocate,” or simply “woman who was harmed”, for instance, becomes harder to anchor. Over time, the erosion of precise terms weakens individual agency and collective recognition.
Throughout the film, gendered language serves as a weapon of subjugation. When Patrick says Irene is “good for nothing,” and Appiah praises another woman as “a woman of virtue” because she “knows how to cook, wash, and [work] like a woman,” language becomes a tool for erasure and female subjugation. Each insult and “compliment” reinforces a hierarchy where womanhood is synonymous with servitude. As Nigerian critic Obododimma Oha notes, female subjugation thrives through symbolic violence—through everyday words that strip women of dignity while elevating men.
That evening, the evening I became a woman, began like any other. I had stepped out just before dusk, when the sky still held onto the last of its colour—soft purple, pale blue, kind orange. The sun spilled its light in gold ribbons, coating everything with warmth, so that everything glowed with the godlike radiance of love. It had become my ritual to walk through the quiet suburbs to the hills, where I could climb the rocks, breathe in the green, and look out at Accra lying still on the horizon.
In Primary Four, our Ga teacher, Mr. Ayibontey, had told us, “March is the sunniest month of the year.” He wrote it carefully in Ga on the blackboard—O-tso-ki-ri-ki-ri—and said it was so-called because “the sun burnt with a furious blast.” March, to me, was heat, unapologetic and alive. But the evening I became a soothsayer, there had been a downpour.
The danger of society’s insistence on the single, simplified version of a woman’s story lies not just in invisibility and misrepresentation, but in the erasure of that complexity and flattening of her humanity. When women are portrayed solely as sexual objects (not subjects, for women are rarely the subject of sexual desire), intellect and agency are dismissed.
Literary scholar Abrams describes this as the dynamic interplay of four key forces: the author, who brings intention, emotion, and craft; the reader, who makes sense of the story through curiosity, lived experience, and interpretation; the text, shaped by language and structure, which then becomes a meeting ground for both; and the world around them: the cultural and historical moment that gives words their resonance and relevance.
In the Bible, for instance, Adam’s naming of creation in Genesis 2:19 is more than a simple act of cataloguing the elements of nature. It is an assertion of authority and recognition, an act that binds language to identity. Across traditions, from creation myths to ancestral rituals, naming has carried the weight of power, belonging, and existence itself. This concept underscores the universal truth that naming is an act of power.
Despite strides in education, leadership, and activism, research shows that women make up only about a quarter of all people featured as news sources and subjects in global news. Even when they appear as the subjects of news stories, women’s stories are underreported and often underrepresented. To put it matter-of-factly, female sources and subjects are usually underquoted and mostly relegated to the sidelines.
The language we employ to describe ourselves and our experiences profoundly shapes our identity and influences others’ perceptions of us. How we speak — and are spoken about — is never neutral; it carries cultural assumptions about which traits are valued or devalued, often along gendered lines. While women’s emphasis on connection, empathy, and community building is often recognized as a valuable strength, it paradoxically carries an undertone of perceived weakness and usually leads to implied expectations.