Participants in this panel will discuss various novels from sub-Saharan female writers. More specifically participants will take a close look at these writers’ narrative strategies and the ways in which such narratives constitute a first and crucial means to resist all oppressive sources and re-imagine a voice their own.
Through an analysis of works by Francophone West African female writers Calixthe Beyala, Ken Bugul and Werewere Liking, Mariama Bâ, and Marie Ndiaye, this panel examines the various narrative strategies elaborated by women authors of Senegalese and Cameroonian origins to transcend identity politics and Manichaeism. The innovative narrative strategies of these authors enhance the development of a transcultural imagination as it relates to concepts of time, tradition, colonization, and postcolonialism. On a more personal level, their novels reinterpret the notion of African local tradition as it relates to women. Participants in this panel will argue that, by means of innovative literary forms and styles (incorporating underlying traditions, strategic use of storytelling, unprecedented autobiographical narratives), African women writers subvert fixed representations and cultural dichotomies. They develop a new therapeutic poetics against the alienating effects of such binary discourses in order, ultimately, to develop and acquire a radically new sense of self. Indeed, their works exemplify African women writers’ and/or protagonists’ struggles to rethink and re-imagine a voice of their own and to pursue an alternative narrative space, which might allow them to escape the limits of more traditional universalizing narratives.
Werewere Liking’s novels undertake a fictional healing of the rift in the Cameroonian psyche, rooted in the encounter between the people of Cameroon and its colonizers In today’s postcolony, Liking’s Bassa tradition lies like a dormant, unexpressed text within the Cameroonian unconscious. By giving voice to aspects of this text through the agency of female tale tellers, she enables Cameroonians to reconnect with the past, bridging the rift in the postcolony’s national psyche. As she carves out a new place for women, she is modernizing the tradition of epic poetry transmitted by the mbon hilun (griot) on which Basa identity rested. The use of non-traditional forms such as the novel, and pan-African myths such as the Sundiata epic in combination with more recent heroic stories is clearly a modern version of the mbon hilun’s work, but now reaching far beyond the confines of Basa society. While Liking’s work traverses both African and Western cultures through time, and the use of women’s voices, Calixthe Beyala’s characters traverse intercultural space, following a trajectory that most often leads from Cameroon to Paris, or at least from rural to urban. This paper will contrast and compare the approaches used by Liking and Beyala to express the transcultural imagination, as it relates to, African concepts of time, tradition, colonization and the postcolony.
De L’Autre Côté du Regard, Ken Bugul’s latest autobiographical novel, is a history of her family centered around the loss/abandon of her mother. Many critics have analyzed Ken Bugul’s striking first autobiography, Le Baobab Fou, and the success of this first work might be partly attributed to some of its controversial content, such as drugs, prostitution or homosexuality, still taboo in most African writings. However, I will suggest that De L’Autre Côté du Regard proves even more singular, as Bugul introduces us to a journey into the true intimacy of her family. Moving back from colonialism to the personal and familial space of childhood, Bugul hopes for inner peace and reconciliation with her roots. In this presentation, I will show how Bugul transcends identity politics and Manichaeism. I will analyze how, far from claiming to be a spokesperson for colonized and victimized Africa, Bugul reappropriates her own intimate experience of Africa, through a subtle play with styles and memories. I will also demonstrate that this novel proves a new approach to the intricacies of the self, through Bugul’s powerful and innovative narrative, and reaffirms the relevance of autobiography as the preferred form of African female writers. Through the coexistence of these two allegedly antonymous elements, Africa and the individual self, I will ultimately show how Bugul finds a balance within the excruciating opposition between tradition and modernity, Western and African cultures, the French and the Wolof, the individual and the collective.
A cursory reading of Thérèse Kuoh-Moukoury’s Rencontres essentielles, Philomène Bassek’s La Tache de sang, and Calixthe Beyala’s Tu t’appelleras Tanga leaves the reader confused by the controversial subjects of the novels themselves. In Kuoh-Moukoury’s novel, one considers the female protagonist, Flo, to be weak and perhaps too westernized at times. The pseudo-polygamous triangle that Flo creates in a plot to save her failing marriage may initially be interpreted as the desperate act of a depressed woman who is driven even further into madness by her low self-esteem and powerlessness. Similarly misinterpreted, the drug-induced abortion of the 11th child of a 55-year old mother without her initial consent is perceived as a conspiracy against the mother by her eldest daughter and her female physician friend and colleague. Finally, several events between Tanga and Anna-Claude in Beyala’s novel have been considered homoerotic, symbolizing (according to some) a total rejection of men.
A closer reading of these novels coupled with anthropological studies from Cameroon reveal underlying traditions, which, if uncovered, render a completely different reading of these texts. This paper will analyze polygamous traditions among the Fali as applied to Kuoh-Moukoury’s novel, the ‘anlu’ in Cameroon as it applies to Bassek’s work, and finally the complex tradition of the ‘mevungu’ and how it is manifested in Beyala’s work. The use of underlying traditions in Cameroonian women’s literature represents a writing style or narrative strategy that is particularly evident among these authors and this style will be explained, compared and contrasted further in the paper.
The primary female characters in Tu t’appelleras Tanga, by Calixthe Beyala and Rosie Carpe, by Marie NDiaye offer a new source of narrative identity for the female subject. The authors achieve this by re-interpreting the relationships between mothers and daughters in these two texts. In the past, the African mother has served as a conduit for culture, tradition and racial identity not only as a story-teller but also as a personal model for the daughter to follow as she develops her own sense of self. In Beyala and NDiaye, the mother no longer incorporates any sense of tradition or specific cultural history in the eyes of the daughter/narrator. The mother’s presence in fact de-stabilizes the very notion of racial and social identity by her inability to take up a recognizable role as ‘mother’. The ‘je’ who speaks in these novels has therefore no coherent historical or cultural background to rely upon; she speaks from a kind of negated space where she represents a different idea of the daughter. As a different daughter, she then creates or represents a different mother, a kind of anti-mother in the traditional sense, one unable to ‘parent’ children. This inversion of the daughter’s place in history, as creator of identity, as anti-mother, rather than the guarantor of the preservation of the positive identity as ‘mother’, comes across clearly in these two texts. The female narrators of Tu t’appelleras Tanga and Rosie Carpe symbolize a new female narrative presence; a daughter who is no longer expected to speak and act in the place of the mother, to carry on her identity as it were, but to pose a problem of interpretation to the reader. This new female narrator substitutes passivity for action. Her passivity concerns specifically her destiny as both woman and mother. However, this notion of passivity is actually a radical action. It’s the passivity described in the Swedish Academy’s citation of J.M. Coetzee for the Nobel Prize in 2003, “ passivity is not merely the dark haze that devours personality. It is also the last resort open to human beings as they defy an oppressive order by rendering themselves inaccessible to its intentions.” The inaccessibility of the female narrator in these texts is actually a revolt against the lack of options open to her in her society. What these female narrators convey so well is the impossibility of action due not only to the lack of a positive historical past (the role of the mother) but also to the absence of any positive present or future (the daughter’s destiny).
A multiplicity of critical reception of Mariama Bâ’s First Japanese Noma Prize for Africa Award-winning Une si longue lettre (1979) has largely noted the impossibility of classifying the genre of the work, due to the author’s narrative strategy of double-, multiple-, or plural coding, mixing of genres, appropriating and abrogating of Western forms of knowing, communicating at different levels at once, in order to protest, resist, combat, and subvert fixed ideas about African identity, and denial of African epistemologies. From these postcolonial, feminist, and postmodernist standpoints, Une si longue lettre is variously a letter, diary, memoir, European autobiography, novel, and bildungsroman.… These attempts to measure African fiction with Western yardsticks fail to uncover the indigenous Wolof culture and traditions that remain dormant and ill deciphered. This study will demonstrate that Une si longue lettre is indeed a female articulation of relationships between individual and community from the Senegalese (Wolof) perspective. We shall employ a modern written form of the traditional oral taasu genre, an indigenous Wolof female autobiographical narrative form, to examine and question received and fixed notions of genre, gender, style, and discourse. The innovative narrative strategy of taasu (laudatory and satirical poetry) allows the taasukat (performer) to vaunt her self-identity, achievements, and represent self without inhibition or hindrance from neither family nor community. In the end, it is the ultimate form of matriarchal resistance against patriarchy, phallogocentrism and imposition of literary expressive forms on the ex-colonized.