L'Œuvre romanesque de Calixthe Beyala: Le Renouveau de l'Ecriture feminine en Afrique francophone sub-saharienne (review)

Abstract

L'Esprit Créateur credited only with the appearance of chauvinism (de Puymège). By contrast, in the years from 1870 to 1914, the invention of tradition appears to have been a major industry, fueled by textbooks (Nora on "Lavisse, the Nation's Teacher," Jacques and Mona Ozouf on Le Tour de France par deux enfants, and Jean-Yves GuÃ-omar, "Vidal de la Blache's Geography of France") and the ingenuity of commercial entrepreneurs (Georges Vigarello, "The Tour de France"). The 1920s lived on this rich heritage, contributing only its war monuments (Prost) and Marcel Proust's classic literary treatment of the theme of memory (Antoine Compagnon). The past 60 years, which contributed mightily to the earlier volume of Realms of Memory on "conflicts and divisions," get minor billing here. At best, they saw the dying out of older traditions, such as the country's rootedness in peasant agriculture , and the rampant commercialization of others, such as the Tour de France. Despite the contributors' determination to analyze rather than celebrate, a perfume of nostalgia pervades this rich, if uneven, volume: a nostalgia not just for the particular traditions it catalogues but for the very notion of tradition itself, which seems increasingly jeopardized by an inevitable cultural pluralism on the one hand and the rising power of marketing and the mass media, on the other. Jeremy D. Popkin University of Kentucky Rangira Béatrice Gallimore. L'ÂŒuvre romanesque de Calixthe Beyala: Le renouveau de l'ecriture féminine en Afrique francophone suB-SAHARiENNE. Paris: L'Harmattan , 1997. Pp. 220. In her monograph, L'ÂŒuvre romanesque de Calixthe Beyala, Prof. Gallimore makes a notable contribution to the study of feminist writing in French-speaking Africa. Though Beyala has been treated in chapters of some critical works on Francophone African women writers (Borgomano, D'Almeida, Lee) and in some critical articles, to my knowledge Gallimore holds the distinction of publishing the first full-length monograph on this important author. The first three chapters of Gallimore's work examine in detail the subversive aspect of Beyala's writing in regard to the condition of African women and their oppression within patriarchal African societies, in particular the Camerounian society about which Beyala writes. That condition involves the dispossession of women of both their voice and (control over) their body, the marginalization and afflictions confronting women, who have been deprived of education, shamefully submitted to exactions to prove virginity, to excision and like practices that often result in psychological trauma, and, in marriage, to bride price (leading to reification) and polygamy. Chap. I argues how Beyala's work is inseparable from the socio-political world out of which it grows (primarily that of lower-class Camerounian society), how it defines itself and reacts against that world. Gallimore goes beyond most studies of Beyala that treat her "feminine side" exclusively, without exploring the social-political implications of her work, and that fail to suggest the extent to which female adolescents are prostituted and oppressed. Chap. 2 discusses the way in which African women have begun to protest against the reification of their body, against demeaning social practices—by militantly speaking out and refusing institutionalized marriage, by insisting on choice and occasionally rejecting marriage and childbearing, and even by prostitution. Gallimore shows how Beyala sets out to déstructure the mother and matrilinear tendencies—the "matrophobia" conceptualized by Adrienne Rich—that privilege the law of the father (85-86), and to de-eroticize sex. Gallimore makes us privy to Beyala's aggressivity conveyed by her (Beyala's) occasional Jl8 Spring 1998 Book Reviews recourse to crude and direct expression, which plunges us into "l'univers carcéral et scatalogique où le corps de la femme des bidonvilles est enfermé" (99). Chap. 3 continues the examination of Beyala's efforts at the linguistic liberation of women's word and the valorization of their voice. In my opinion the most engaging aspect of Gallimore's work is found in Chap. 4 ("Une écriture polymorphe"), where she locates Beyala's work in terms of the renewal of African feminist literature, not just in theme but in form. So far as the latter is concerned, Beyala creates a "double narrative" that...