Gendered land-politics writing must avoid the essentialist feminizing of soil that mars Ngugi’s novels.

Evidence

One of the key challenges facing Maathai, as a writer and activist, was how to dramatize the gendered dynamics of Kenyan land politics without submitting to the sentimental essentialism that mars Ngugi’s novels. To understand the angle of her approach requires that we engage the metaphoric underpinnings of the GBM’s gender and civic politics. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 372