Morrison, Mambéty, and missing limbs: an Afrocentric reading of Sula, Hyenas, and Dürrenmatt’s The Visit

Abstract

This essay analyzes common ground between Toni Morrison’s Sula, (1973) and the film Hyènes (Hyenas), directed in 1992 by the avant-garde Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty. Both Morrison’s and Mambéty’s works enter into an extended dialogue with the 1956 tragicomedy Der Besuch der alten Dame (The Visit), written by the Swiss-born playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990). By re-framing the sinister figure of Dürrenmatt’s Claire Zachanassian within the Africanist context of African American and Senegalese communities, Morrison and Mambéty challenge the limits of normative social roles for women—particularly mothers—while also probing the unsettling, permeable boundaries between the individual and that which lies outside the self. The essay concludes by drawing on Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject in order to chart these boundaries, and to better understand the abiding, cross-cultural fascination of the wealthy, violent, and vengeful Visitor, who returns home bearing poisoned gifts.