Abstract:
Through an academic lens, this thesis study comprehends the duel colonization of the female character of Fatima Bhutto's The Shadow of the Crescent Moon. The issue pertains to the complex structure of the oppression of women in postcolonial Pakistan, where women remain oppressed under the local patriarchal system coupled with the colonialism of the past, which still holds its potent influence within the militarization of the modern state. Other studies lean towards the political aspects of the novel, but none have used a postcolonial feminist lens in this complex critique of the novel. In this work, I used qualitative methods of text analysis to broaden the understanding of the novel using postcolonial feminist theorists, including Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Kirsten Holst Petersen. The study spent an inordinate amount of effort examining the characters of Mina and Samarra, who’s opposite but complementary situations represent an extreme case of the complex female oppression and awful political system. Mina is a complex character whose silent grief is not a quitting issue, but a complex response and a testament of the psychological suffering from the political violence of the state. The Mir Ali area is described in this study like this: Mir Ali is described as a confinement area of a military camp where rooms in a military prison can be confined in controlling and dominant spaces of households. Bhutto’s narrative explicitly addresses the philosophical double colonization where it is not just the two DE prior dominating systems where an element of distance can be observed but rather a type of domination system where the constituent systems are integrated to form a cohesive controlling authority. It can be argued that Dina’s absence and Mina’s memorial stand as politically significant proof of Samarra’s defiance and silence a consequence of the amalgam of forces that seek to control and eliminate her. It is MS Bhutto who has openly articulated and documented in her text the pain and the suffering that constitute the strength of women’s resilience, the exercise of agency within the postcolonial sphere, the innumerable instances of hegemonic intervention, the control of dominant structures, and the erasure of complex and multifaceted texts from literature that have been marginalized. The literary efforts of MS Bhutto, certainly, attest to the immense power literature has in dismantling the dominant structures, the control of hegemonic power, and the reclamation of texts from the dominion of history that has been rendered invisible.
