Blindness as a Symbolic Trope in Sembene Ousmane’s God’s Bits of Wood (1960)

Abstract

This study interrogated blindness as a symbolic trope in Sembene Ousmane’s God’s Bits of Wood (1960), situating it within the broader literary tradition where blindness transcends physical impairment to signify ignorance, arrogance, and ideological limitation. While classical texts such as Sophocles’ Oedipus the King have long employed blindness to explore paradoxes of sight and insight, its significance in African literature has remained underexplored. The research adopted a qualitative textual analysis, guided by literary symbolism and postcolonial theory, to examine how Ousmane has deployed blindness as a metaphor for colonial oppression, socio-cultural presumptions, and patriarchal constraints. The findings revealed that blindness in the novel functioned on multiple levels. First, it critiqued the assimilationist colonial project that instilled in Africans a sense of inferiority, alienated them from their traditions, and created a form of cultural blindness. Characters who have internalised colonial ideologies have rejected their own heritage and become complicit in structures of domination, exemplifying the destructive consequences of ideological blindness. Second, the trope interrogated gender relations, exposing the blindness of patriarchal assumptions that have confined women to subordinate roles. Through characters such as Ramatoulaye, Penda, Dyenaba, and Maimouna, Ousmane has been used to foreground women’s agency, showing how they transcend traditional limitations to assume leadership and mobilise resistance during the strike. The study was justified by the limited scholarly attention given to blindness as a symbolic trope in African literature, despite its centrality to Ousmane’s narrative. Its significance lies in demonstrating how blindness illuminates intersections of colonialism, gender, and identity while broadening discourse on symbolism in postcolonial texts. The research contributes to literary scholarship by showing how Ousmane reconfigures blindness into a critical aesthetic and political tool for articulating human limitation, resistance, and solidarity.