Gender, Trauma, and Resilience in Amba Bongo's Une femme en exil

Abstract

Une femme en exil (2000), a fictionalized memoir by Congolese immigrant writer Amba Bongo, recounts the narrator's experience as the victim of injustice, arrest and torture before fleeing Mobutu's Zaire for London, where she eventually rebuilds her life and establishes herself in her new country. This article explores ways that gender is a factor in both her trauma and her road to recovery. Gender figures importantly as one of the reasons for her imprisonment as she involves herself with a women's movement in defiance of the patriarchal order of her society. Gender also plays a role in the traumatic nature of her abuse at the hands of her captors. Drawing on feminist articulations of resilience theory in such works as Feminist Rhetorical Resilience by Elizabeth A. Flynn, Patricia Sotirin, and Ann Brady, our analysis follows Anne in her struggle to overcome her past and to cope with her present, emphasizing the distinctive ways in which resilience is inflected by women's experiences. Finally, not all feminists have viewed resilience theory as having entirely positive implications for women. With this in mind, the narrative will also be examined to show how such critiques of resilience play out within the context of the recovery that Amba Bongo constructs for her protagonist.