The Depiction of Women in Ladan Osman’s The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony

Abstract

The study examined the depiction of women’s roles and spaces in Ladan Osman’s poetry collection The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony. Somali society places women mainly in domestic and reproductive spaces, and contemporary poetry often mirrors these expectations. Using qualitative textual analysis, the study selected poems that foreground domestic chores, motherhood, marriage, beauty practices, and experiences of violence. Purposive sampling was applied to identify poems where female speakers confront or internalise patriarchal demands. The analysis was guided by post-secular feminism and stylistics to show how imagery, metaphor, and voice reveal the daily labour of women and their restricted mobility. Findings show that women are portrayed as caregivers, food preparers, bearers of children and guardians of family honour, and that these roles are enforced through socialisation in the family, religion and clan. The poems also expose scenes of surveillance, sexual objectification and gender-based violence which keep women indoors and silent, even when they are injured or recovering. At the same time Osman gives the women interior spaces of imagination where they dream of flight, water and self-possession, which signals a search for wider social participation. The study recommends that scholars and cultural actors treat Somali women’s poetry as a record of gendered experience and as a site for public education on women’s rights. It also proposes that Somali community leaders and refugee support agencies promote programmes that reduce domestic burden and protect women from violence so that the wider social space opened in the poems can be realised in practice.