Abstract
Tanga, a girlchild-woman in Calixthe Beyala's Your Name Shall Be Tanga, like the manchild in Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born or the manchild Oskar in Nurrudin Farah's Maps, is one of those significant fictional characters that can be called "widowers of their childhood" (Beyala 47). The protagonist, Tanga, as a girlchild-woman is challenged to live as a girl-child without a beginning known as childhood, though much of the world readily accepts childhood as a universal experience. In that the referent girlchild-woman appears a minimum of thirty times throughout the text, the classifications of girl and woman as well as child and adult are blurred. By categorizing Tanga as neither a child nor a woman during the entire novel, Beyala suggests at the very least an ambivalence towards such categories and at the most a view that "child" and "woman" are theoretically inadequate terms by which to classify Tanga.
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