摘要：This study aims to locate the voice of the native African women in Okot p' Bitek's 'Song of Lawino: The Woman with Whom I Share my Husband'. This poem gives an outlet to the feelings of a native woman named Lawino who responds to her husband influenced by Western culture and education. Lawino becomes the voice of the native African women who are treated as lesser human beings along with their men by the Western people. Okot p' Bitek is successful in situating his work in postcolonial canon by aptly establishing a counter-narrative in his work that sufficiently dismantles the Western narrative about the natives of Africa, who are colonized by the West. As it is a great challenge for the writers from the colonized world to counter the narrative of colonizers, and they cannot often do justice in giving space to the voice of the colonized. This poem has been analyzed in light of the postcolonial theory that provides a powerful tool to de-structure colonial narrative. Textual analysis has been used to analyze the poem. The study shows that Okot p' Bitek's Lawino defends her culture and native people to the fullest extent by meaningfully situating her response against the Western narrative. Colonial literature has often represented the natives of Africa, in the African context, and people of Asia, in the Asian context, as uncultured, uncivilized, and backward people. Such (mis) representation of the natives has been so much popular that it was deemed to be true. As Said (1978) has termed such type of representation as to be the structure of lies that is far away from reality. Postcolonial writers and readers assume the responsibility of dismantling such representation, in the colonial texts, by bringing the voice of the suppressed/oppressed people whose voice is not given space in colonial texts that predominantly keep the narrative of the colonizers intact.
