Invisible oppression and female resilience in Faith Ben-Daniels' Mimosa: An Africana Womanist Reading

Abstract

Faith Ben-Daniels' Mimosa offers a useful literary space for examining how oppression can remain socially obscured even when suffering is publicly visible. Taking the collapse of Mimosa Mart as its central point of departure, this article explores the institutional, domestic, and interpersonal pressures that deepen the crisis for victims and their families. Particular attention is paid to corporate negligence, failures of record keeping, bureaucratic delay, gendered expectations, and the emotional burden placed on women who are expected to hold families and communities together in moments of distress. Through close textual analysis, the discussion focuses on Yaa Saah, Naa Lamley, Akua Darko, Rosalind Grey, and the male and institutional figures with whom they interact. Read through Africana Womanism, the novel presents female resilience as a relational practice expressed through spiritual endurance, adaptability, sisterhood, intergenerational counsel, professional integrity, public testimony, and constructive collaboration. The article nevertheless treats resilience with caution. Endurance acquires ethical and political force when it protects dignity, restores visibility to those who have been ignored, and presses institutions towards accountability; it becomes problematic when it merely absorbs the consequences of injustice. By placing Africana Womanism in conversation with structural and symbolic accounts of oppression, the study contributes to discussions of gender, grief, institutional power, and communal agency in contemporary Ghanaian fiction.