Un Examen de L’Identité « Africaine »

Abstract

From the faculty nominator, Florence Martin: Nancy is a budding intellectual in her second year at Goucher College and about to embark on two adventures: one that will take her to Paris for a semester, and a second one in Dakar. Her mind, like her, is adventurous. For this assignment in a 300 level class on Francophone African Literature (a comparative essay on the topic: one is not born African, one becomes African), she took interesting sideways to approach the topic and ended up on a new, exciting path. Hence, in her study of ‘African’ identity in three contemporary texts by African authors, Nancy focused on the dynamics of identity rather than on its labeling process. Her comparison of the various roles played by language, for instance, in which she clearly articulates its bridging and separating functions, serves as a springing board for novelists to construct representations of African subjects in becoming. In her reading of such diverse texts as Cameroonian Ferdinand Oyono’s Une Vie de boy (1956), Algerian Malika Mokeddem’s Les Hommes qui marchent (1990), and Franco-Senegalese Alain Gomis’ L’Afrance (2001), she successfully brings together notions of sociology and literary criticism. Her sociological approach to the text contextualizes her argument, yet she deftly avoids the pitfall of reading a novel as a sociological document. Instead, she crafts a nuanced reading of political works of narrative imagination in which each author has re-imagined the roles of language, education, and the image and function of woman.