“Thrusting the Private into the Public Sphere”: North African Women's Writing Identities in the Epistolary Form

Abstract

SummaryThis article engages North African Women's writing their unique identities in the epistolary form as depicted in the anthology, Women Writing Africa: The Northern Region. The epistolary or letter form is a unique genre. On one hand, the form of a letter is personal, and lays claim to private experiences whose content is the confidential lives of those who write them. And yet, on the other hand, the contents of an epistolary form can be thrust into the public domain where the lives on which it narrates is read by many people for the interest it can generate when the form assumes the figure of a metaphoric allegory. In the anthology, there are six letters written by women, touching on themes of slavery, sisterhood, marginality and the quest for political freedom in a patriarchal-dominated North African community. It is curious to observe that North African women who represented their experiences in the form of the letters did so against the repression of this form from the predominance of realism, song and political treatise. This article argues that the editors of Women Writing Africa: The Northern Region can be accused of bias in their selection that privileges literary forms ordinarily associated with men's preference for classical realism. Despite this literary imbalance, the epistolary form effects some form of resistance to ideological and literary enforcements. The epistolary form also attempts to manage contradictory identities revealed on the spectrum of differences in how women shape their identities. Thus, the epistolary form functions in an ambiguous way; it affirms as well as interrogates patriarchy and also critiques the writings on women by women who write for men or like men.