Je pars de Diary Sow et Cacophonie de Ken Bugul : entre fuite et fugue

Abstract

Ken Bugul’s and Diary Sow’s novels outline a poetics and an aesthetics of flight as a leitmotif of African women’s writing. The two Senegalese writers convey self-exploration schemes and symbolic itineraries that lead the protagonists, their own alter egos, to liberation. Whether a brilliant young woman full of future promise or a weakening elderly widow, both heroines face the problem of space –inner, Euclidean, sexual, linguistic and maternal–. A space governed by dogmatisms that prevent women from rejoicing in displacement. Cacophonie is the story of a solitude, an errantry and a deconstruction; Je pars is the one of the affirmation of an I-speaker whose utterance is finally aware of its own power.