Calixthe Beyala Research Articles

Postcolonial Francophone autobiographies: from Africa to the Antilles

Sankara’s volume in University of Virginia Press’s wide-ranging series aims to survey francophone life writing on both the African continent and in the Caribbean, an ambitious project on which he asserts there has been “a paucity of scholarship” (1). His reading of autobiographical writing through reception theory contrasts the audiences in France and the writers’ birthplaces that such narratives address, bringing it into conversation with postcolonial studies. This is a welcome aim, as African and Euro-American receptions can differ significantly. Sankara’s understanding of autobiography as involving a first-person singular account “centered around the development of the author’s personality” (54) suggests his adherence to Lejeune’s traditional definition of 1971; notions of a fixed “self” have, however, been problematized by scholars (including Lejeune) since postmodernism. In addition, Sankara’s focus on six authors is selective rather than inclusive. In the case of Senegalese author Kesso Barry, a more prolific autobiographical writer such as Ken Bugul, Nafissatou Diallo, or Calixthe Beyala might have been chosen and could challenge his conclusion that “Caribbean writers bring more innovative elements to the autobiographical genre than their African counterparts” (163). Each chapter identifies a particular problematic. For example, Sankara reads Amadou Hampâte Bâ’s late Amkoullel as self-theorizing about the unreliability of memory and argues that Bâ’s shift in old age from ethnographic tales to memoir signals “his ambiguity in constructing his Self out of the colonial encounter” (51). Sankara effectively elucidates how “a voice that would not challenge the ‘positive’ aspects” of colonialism in Bâ’s memoir has led to its curricular canonization in France, but also to its dismissal as outdated by some African writers (50). In contrast, he insightfully discusses Valentine Mudimbe’s philosophical autobiography as the essayistic story of an exceptional being employing a Western phenomenological lens to sketch his oblique relation to colonialism. While Sankara does not pursue his intriguing suggestion to read

Sex as Synecdoche: Intimate Languages of Violence in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's <em>Half of a Yellow Sun</em> and Aminatta Forna's <em>The Memory of Love</em>

In the 1990s, women's writing about war in Africa took a new turn as Yvonne Vera and Calixthe Beyala began to publish texts interweaving explicit sexual descriptions and graphic violence. With their examination of sexual relationships in the context of the Nigerian and Sierra Leonean civil wars, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun and Aminatta Forna's The Memory of Love continue this trend. Why is it that female African writers are currently turning to sensuality as a means to explore conflict? This article argues that sex and violence are intricately interwoven and that the examination of sexual pleasure in these novels forms both a language and strategy with which to explore and contest violence against women. In doing so, it draws on theoretical insights about the sexual nature of out- sider perspectives on conflict, the political choices involved in describing gender-based violence, and the crucial role of intimacy in representing war and wounding.

Cheryl Toman. Contemporary Matriarchies in Cameroonian Francophone Literature: “On est ensemble.” Birmingham, Ala.: Summa Publications, 2008. vii + 185 pp. Bibliography. Index. $45.95. Cloth.

LANGUAGES, LITERATURE, AND THE ARTS Cheryl Toman. Contemporary Matriarchies in Cameroonian Francophone Literature: On est ensemble. Birmingham, Ala.: Summa Publications, 2008. vii + 185 pp. Bibliography. Index. $45.95. Cloth. Cheryl Toman's Contemporary Matriarchies in Cameroonian Francophone Literature: On est ensemble is a comprehensive history of Cameroonian feminist writings, which according to Therese Kuoh-Moukoury, includes ignored and marginalized Cameroonian women. It seeks to rewrite feminist theories pertaining to Africa and explores the representation of matriarchy in Cameroonian literature, a most appropriate national literature for the study of matriarchy because Cameroon, with its two hundred and fifty diverse ethnic groups and cultures and its Christian and Islamic religions, is a microcosm of Africa. Moreover, it is the birth site of African female writings, for, contrary to general assumptions, Marie Claire Matip published the novella Ngonda in 1958, before the Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo and the Nigerian Mabel Segun produced their pioneering works. Toman's study includes a forward by Therese Kuoh-Moukary; an introduction (Defining 'Matriarchy' in Cameroonian Women's Writing of French Expression [1954-2007]); five chapters analyzing, respectively, Marie-Claire Matip 's Therese Kuoh-Moukoury 's idea of a matriarcat nouveau, Werewere Liking's conception of matriarchy (which she calls ReineMere) , Calixthe Beyala on feminitude and nouveau mevengu, and Philomene Basssek's consideration of the ritual of anlu and the theme of matriarchy in La Tache de sang; and a conclusion. The introductory chapter presents a survey of a myriad theories on matriarchy, although all of them consider it a social whereby African women, claiming an invisible and nonlocalized power, assert themselves differently from Western women as fully complementary to men. This matriarchal arrangement, dismissed by Western scholars before the rise of comparative ethnographical approaches, existed historically alongside patriarchy and was, according to Cheik Anta Diop, an economic of dualism within the African matrilineal family based on solidarity and accepted by both men and women. Other observers have seen it differently, however. According to Kamen Okonji, it is a dual-sex that allows men and women to manage their affairs separately. Ifi Amadiume sees it as a checks and balances system within a matrilineal that grants women political power, although they willingly delegate it to men with the hope of reappropriating it if they are abused. Toman concludes the summary of literature on matriarchy with a discussion of the importance of ethnology in literary interpretation, a survey of contemporary Cameroonian female writings, and a consideration of the diverging ideological representations of women by male writers (who foreground their own superiority) and women writers (who seek a unified voice through complementary female and male voices). The first chapter, A Village Voice and a Nation's Women Coming of Age: Marie-Claire Matip's Ngonda, focuses on Matip's novel Rencontres essentielles (1958), an imaginative literary work that is also political in that Matip wrote at a time when African male novelists focused on the reemasculinization of African men and ignored questions of matriarchy and female empowerment. Because men and women occupied different sociopolitical spaces, men were excluded from such ritual spaces as the Koo , the anlu, and mevengu. Toman examines the autobiographical nature of Matip's preindependence literary work and the place of her narrative in male-dominated Cameroonian literary history. Her discussion highlights the oral basis of the autobiographical narrative, the Bassa matriarchal characteristics of the novella, the nature of the heroine's hybrid subjectivity, the nature of traditional female power (which is complementary to that of males and not easily defined in Western terms), and women's resistance to male domination. …

Violence in Francophone African and Caribbean Women's Literature, by Chantal Kalisa

Reviewed by: Violence in Francophone African and Caribbean Women’s Literature Cheikh Thiam Violence in Francophone African and Caribbean Women’s Literature By Chantal Kalisa Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2009. 224 pp. Chantal Kalisa’s book, Violence in Francophone African and Caribbean Women’s Literature starts from the observation that despite the centrality of physical, political, and epistemic violence in the formation of African and Caribbean identities, gendered violence is hardly studied in the historiography of francophone African and Caribbean literature. This manifestation of the traditional silencing of women, she claims, is an effect of colonial privileges accorded to men, the legacy of precolonial patriarchal systems, and, more important, the first generation of African thinkers’ patriarchal perspectives. Kalisa thus presents the study of Franz Fanon’s oeuvre as an interesting example of the ways African and Caribbean thinkers participate in silencing women through a dialectic of women’s presence and absence in the discourse on colonization and decolonization. Women are present because they undeniably participate in the decolonizing process. Yet, as Kalisa shows, their role in the decolonizing process is ignored, their voices unheard, their agency stifled, and their bodies absent from the ways Fanon and early African thinkers define and imagine the colonized and the decolonized African and Caribbean. In order to remedy this traditional representation of women, Kalisa analyzes feminist literary productions that propose a different relation to, and representation of, the experience of francophone African and Caribbean women. The reading of Ken Bugul, Sembene Ousmane, and Michele Lacrossil enables her to develop a feminist perspective on colonial brutality. Her analysis of the violence of women’s identity crisis during their physical and metaphorical exiles to Europe and their returns to traditional African and Caribbean patriarchal societies, in turn, leads the reader to consider, in a new way, the modes of functioning of colonial and postcolonial epistemological violence. The examination of these oeuvres not only challenges Fanon’s and early African and Caribbean thinkers’ patriarchal paradigm; it also leads to the representation of women as agents in the process of definition of their own subjectivities through the narration of gendered violence. Beyond this challenging and polemical paradigm, the analysis of the works of Simone Schwarz-Bart, Calixthe Beyala, Gisèe Pineau, Nadine Bari, Edwidge Danticat, and Monique Ilboudo enables Kalisa to erase the lines of demarcation between the male populated public violence and the culturally tolerated private violence perpetuated in the name of the common good and nation formation. For Kalisa, the representation of private violence into the public stage through the analysis of the violated women’s bodies in Beyala and Pineau’s texts as well as the study of women’s experiences in wars and dictatorships enables women writers to describe forms of violence that have been taboo and need to be studied in order to avoid the amnesia that surrounds violence against women, to re-write history, and to solve the trauma associated with violence against women. Kalisa’s analysis of these authors and their female characters enables her to show that women use words and herstories of their own existence to reclaim their rights to speak, deconstruct the traditional system, and question patriarchy. [End Page 181] Kalisa’s essay, the first book-length comparative analysis of women and violence in francophone African and Caribbean literatures, expands the growing field of francophone women studies. While major literary studies of women’s experiences in francophone Africa and the Caribbean–Irène Assiba D’Almeida’s Francophone African Women Writers: Destroying the Emptiness of Silence (1994), Odile Cazenave’s Rebellious Women: The New Generation of Female African Novelists (2000), Renée Larrier’s Francophone Women Writers of Africa and the Caribbean (2000), and Mildred Mortimer’s Writing from the Hearth: Public, Domestic, and Imaginative Space in Francophone Women’s Fiction of Africa and the Caribbean (2007)—either focus on one geographic area or propose surveys of women’s experiences, Kalisa offers a systematic comparative analysis of major francophone African and Caribbean women’s discourses on violence and the way they affect the different modes of representations of women in Africa and the Caribbean. Kalisa’s analysis of gendered violence is a persuasive and timely study of...

Haunted Bodies and Haunting Memories: Transference and Transcendence of "h/Histoires" in Calixthe Beyala's Tu t'appelleras Tanga

WHILE being a renowned French-African writer, Calixthe Beyala has become notorious for having plagiarized, among others, Howard Buten's Quand j'avais cinq ans, je m'ai tue and Romain Gary's La Vie devant soi in her own Le Petit Prince de Belleville. (1) She was condemned in 1996. According to Nicki Hitchcott: the one hand, she is something of a postcolonial celebrity: a prolific and successful author who is regularly invited to contribute to television talk shows. On the other, she is reviled as a literary fraud who lacks a sense of propriety (100). Despite the public attacks and official condemnations, Beyala was never blamed by her readers, publishers or other allies. In court, she first protested that the judges were being racist before switching gear and reminding her audience that many great authors had plagiarized before her. Randall writes: Having been previously convicted of breach of copyright--a decision she left uncontested --... Beyala shifts the ground of her defense from her own intentions or lack thereof and directly accuses her accusers, appealing to the guilty conscience not only of the institution but of the nation and, as well, of her natural allies, the 'left wing' whom she alienated by her lack of first-world political correctness. (186) After her public demise, Beyala became an embarrassment to the French political as well as literary sphere: she was a rebel who had pointed to France's shameful colonial history. My goal in this paper will be to prove that Beyala is not a literary fraud. I will explore Beyala's writing mechanisms to show that her admitted plagiarism stems from a history of colonial abuse that left its victims with no other choice than to entrust the white voice with their stories, at the risk of losing their own agency. In her second novel, Tu t'appelleras Tanga, it is through the body of a young African prostitute dying in prison that Beyala conveys her message. This paper will focus on the space that the black body occupies in the novel, and the various ways in which its borders are transgressed. In Tanga, the black body surrenders to its imperfect reflection, a white body, which becomes the receptacle and vehicle for its story. Using early feminist works such as Helene Cixous' and Gayatri Spivak's, but also contemporary theories such as Diane Harriford and Becky Thompson's concept of haunting, I will unveil the way in which Beyala's writing, originating from a dark minor literature cell, is successful at transcending the textual and cultural borders that were set up by French colonization. Avant, j'existais, je revais, says a young African woman, dying in a cell at the beginning of Tu t'appelleras Tanga. Looking back on her past as a child-prostitute, she continues: ne sentais rien, je n'eprouvais rien. Mon corps a mon insu s'etait peu a peu transforme en chair de pierre (15). The body, more specifically the black body, is at the center of Beyala's work. Reading her novels, one can feel her need to invent or actually recreate words and phrases in order to express the black body and its sufferings. In Tanga, the young heroine is dying in an African cell and the little life she has left in her, she will use to recount her story to another woman. This woman is Anna-Claude, a Jewish professor, who voluntarily exiled herself from France in search of an imaginary lover named Ousmane. Anna-Claude was imprisoned after having lost her mind and disrupted the locals' daily lives. She is described in the text as an element subversif et incontrolable (12). The presence of Anna-Claude, a white woman, becomes indispensable in the novel for Tanga to be able to tell her story, and testify to the world of all the abuse she has been through. In the cell, Anna-Claude is starving for communication, d'autant plus qu'elle savait que desormais seuls les mots pouvaient la nourrir (12). As the story opens, Beyala shows the necessity of having a white voice conveying the lived experiences of a black body as well as the demand for testimony that exists on the white woman's part: Je ne sais pas pourquoi je continue a te parler, dit Anna-Claude. …

<em>Rising Anthills: African and African American Writing on Female Genital Excision 1960––2000</em>, by Elisabeth Bekers

Reviewed by: Rising Anthills: African and African American Writing on Female Genital Excision 1960–2000 Charlotte Baker Rising Anthills: African and African American Writing on Female Genital Excision 1960–2000 by Elisabeth Bekers Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2010. 274 pp. ISBN 978-0-299-23493 paper. Rising Anthills is an important intervention on the subject of the controversial cultural tradition of female genital excision. Elisabeth Bekers borrows the image of the anthill from a Dogon creation story and Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah “to draw attention to the power of the literary works dealing with female genital excision” (4). In Dogon myth, the male god of creation attempts to penetrate the female Earth he has just created. When her clitoris rises in the shape of a termite hill to prevent this, he excises it, ensuring the submission of the Earth and of all women after her. Achebe uses the same image figuratively to reveal that the power of the anthill lies not only in its rebellious force, but in its remarkable memory. For Achebe, the anthill symbolizes the storyteller, appealing to generation after generation, and Bekers borrows this image to map the development of the debate on the practice in literature over the last four decades of the twentieth century. [End Page 190] The scope of Rising Anthills is impressive, discussing as it does twenty-two texts published between 1963 and 1998, including sixteen novels, three short stories, two plays, and a poem. The analysis of both familiar texts and less well-known material results in a study that emphasizes the diversity of representations of female genital excision by authors of African descent writing in English, French, and Arabic, as Bekers highlights the multiple ways in which writers have explored changing understandings of this cultural tradition. Bekers combines close readings of literary works with a sophisticated theoretical framework, adopting an interdisciplinary approach that crosses linguistic, regional, and national divisions in African literatures. The study draws on insights from literary criticism and narratology, the study of discourse, postcolonial studies, feminist and gender criticism, as well as critical work on the body, to construct a theoretical framework within which to analyse representations of female genital excision. Three substantial chapters trace an evolution in the depiction of the practice through three “generations” of writers. Chapter one reveals that writers in the 1960s, including Rebeka Njau, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Flora Nwapa, Charity Waciuma, and Muthoni Likimani, recognize the practice as a sensitive issue in the context of decolonization and therefore approach it with circumspection. Bekers finds more candid discussion of female genital excision in the less homogeneous writings of Ahmadou Kourouma, Nurrudin Farah, Nawal El Saadawi, Aminata Maïga Ka, Calixthe Beyala, and Alifa Rifaat in the 1970s and ’80s. These authors do not hesitate to critique the gender structures of their postindependent and more urbanized societies, elaborating the physical and psychological consequences of female genital excision to denounce the practice. Chapter three examines the globalization of the literary debate on female genital excision at the close of the twentieth century in the much broader, international context of the fight for women’s rights. Bekers selects six exclusively female-authored texts as representatives of their generation, including works by Aminata Maïga Keïta, Alice Walker, Evelyne Accad, Gloria Naylor, Saida Hagi-Dirie Herzi, Breena Clarke, and Glenda Dickerson to illustrate the complementarity between African American and African writing, and a shared condemnation of female genital excision. Despite the grouping of writers together in this way, the quality of Bekers’s close readings preserves the richness and diversity of the chosen texts. The result is a volume that specialists in this field will find informative, but that interested general readers and undergraduates will also find accessible, since the prose is clearly expressed and free of extraneous detail. [End Page 191] Charlotte Baker Lancaster University, UK c.baker@lancaster.ac.uk Copyright © 2011 Indiana University Press

Postcolonial Disruptions: Reading the (Feminine) Baroque in Calixthe Beyala's Tu t’appelleras Tanga

Recently, the baroque has received considerable attention, especially as it relates to contemporary society and certain “neo-baroque” characteristics used to describe the more bizarre aspects of th...

Sampling Globalization in Calixthe Beyala's <em>Le petit prince de Belleville</em>

Employing as a reading strategy the controversial notion of sampling as understood in the context of hip-hop music, this article analyzes Calixthe Beyala's multiple literary borrowings in The Little Prince of Belleville . Rather than scrutinizing Beyala's defense, it turns to the original texts of the iconic works that Betrayal samples to show how they are themselves examples of transcultural literary works, purely French neither in origin or subject matter. Demonstrating how, despite their various differences, these earlier coming-of-age novels often strike a similar range of chords in their tales of children-as outsiders, the article explores how Beyala's novel both appropriates their legacy and attempts to make it signify otherwise. Ultimately, it argues, Beyala's story of a Malian immigrant boy comically navigating multicultural Paris and his family heritage continues to defy judgment, instead repeatedly confronting us with the ideological entanglements that pervade global cultural economies.

Writing from the Hearth: Public, Domestic, and Imaginative Space in Francophone Women's Fiction of Africa and the Caribbean, by Mildred Mortimer

Reviewed by: Writing from the Hearth: Public, Domestic, and Imaginative Space in Francophone Women's Fiction of Africa and the Caribbean Julia Praud Writing from the Hearth: Public, Domestic, and Imaginative Space in Francophone Women's Fiction of Africa and the Caribbean. By Mildred Mortimer. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2007. xvi + 205 pp. ISBN 13-978-0-7391-1907-5 paper. In her book Writing from the Hearth: Public, Domestic, and Imaginative Space in Francophone Women's Fiction of Africa and the Caribbean, Mildred Mortimer incisively explores women's journeys toward empowerment and self-realization. Beginning where her 1990 work, Journeys through the Francophone African Novel, ended, she examines women's transformation of constraining, silencing, imprisoning, and confining patriarchal structures into a liberating "alternative" space, one that both "embodies the sense of change—an "altered" space—and . . . expresses choice—resistance to the status quo" (24–25). As Mortimer deftly demonstrates, the alternative space is "open, flexible, and multipurpose"; it "can function as a refuge (for meditation, memory, or dream)" or it can be "a preparatory ante-chamber for future activity, a site of resistance, a place of performance—where writing, orality, and art in varied forms convey woman's sense of self" (24–25). Throughout this work, she leads scholars on a transatlantic journey that delves into the realities of migration and diasporic space, traversing national, cultural, geographic (West Africa, the Caribbean, New York), linguistic (English, French, and Creole), temporal (1692–present), and socioeconomic ("rural and urban poor to the bourgeoisie") spaces, and linking women's experiences throughout Africa and the Caribbean (187). [End Page 238] Through close readings of nine texts, Mortimer explores the relationship "between the female subject and the space(s) she inhabits or moves through–with ease or discomfort" and the journey toward empowerment (2). In her chapter on women and public space, she shows the importance of Aoua Kéita's autobiography, Femme d'Afrique, la vie d'Aoua Kéita racontée par ellemême, and Maryse Condé's fictional autobiography, Moi Tituba sorcière . . . noire de Salem, texts that "secure women's place in history," "chart a woman's journey into public space," and detail their "struggle against patriarchal oppression" (53). In her next chapter she examines the warm, nurturing hearth as a potential locus of woman's empowerment through Mariama Bâ's Une si longue letter and Simone Schwartz-Bart's Pluie et vent sur Télumée-Miracle. Home ownership is central to the eventual empowerment of the protagonists in each novel. Indeed, "both texts conclude with a woman speaking from a domestic space she calls her home" (112). Mortimer's chapter concerning the cold hearth reminds us that "domestic space is not immune from verbal or physical violence" (118). Indeed, Calixthe Beyala's novel C'est le soleil qui m'a brûlée and her heavily autobiographical work La petite fille du réverbère, along with Marie Chauvet's novel Amour, all portray home as unsafe, a prison, oppressive, violent, and claustrophobic. Their protagonists struggle for empowerment and self-realization by "imagining the protective hearth that exists in memory, dream, and imagination" (119). Finally, her chapter on mobile homes studies Aminata Sow Fall's Douceurs du bercail, and Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory. While quite different in focus and scope, both works "affirm that when journeys are successful . . . the understanding, clarity of vision, and empowerment occurs in whatever space—or multiple spaces—individuals and communities choose to call home" (184). The breadth and depth of this work's theoretical foundation makes it a must read for scholars across a wide array of disciplines. Its importance also lies in the richness and diversity of the chosen texts and is underscored by the quality of Mortimer's close textual readings. Finally, it is her insightful and adept crossing of the boundaries that continue to divide scholars and scholarship of francophone literature today that makes it a journey worth taking. [End Page 239] Julia Praud Schaumburg, IL julia.praud@gmail.com Copyright © 2009 Indiana University Press

The Postcolonial Orphan’s Autobiography: Authoring the Self in Jamaica Kincaid’s Mr. Potter and Calixthe Beyala’s La Petite fille du réverbère

The genre of autobiography in the hands of an orphan might seem ironic: The writing of history by an individual without knowable pre-history. Yet, there is logic to the orphan’s life writing if one views autobiography as the written record of a self-made life. This paper explores the postcolonial orphan autobiography through a reading of Jamaica Kincaid’s Mr. Potter (2002) and Calixthe Beyala’s La Petite fille du réverbè (1998), exposing the coincidence of states of orphanage and states colonization. I demonstrate the manner in which orphanage dominates the postcolonial space; how it manifests itself within individuals and within the state itself. I situate the works within the context of life-writing so as to consider the theme of literacy in postcolonial literature, the agency displayed by the colonized orphan who becomes a writer and the implications for postcolonial states fully prepared to write their own histories.

Mariama Barry, Ken Bugul, Calixthe Beyala, and the Politics of Female Homoeroticisim in Sub-Saharan Francophone African Literature

The emergence of African feminism and womanism has elucidated pivotal issues that African women face in a patriarchal society that undermines their existence. However, such movements reinforce the dominant presence of heterosexual standards in denying the reality of its most marginalized subset, same-sex love interactions. This article explores the relationship between culture, society, law, gender, free will, and sexuality. I unravel the strategies of writing female homoerotic desire, displaying the ingenious literary devices, adroit techniques, and skills that allow three African women writers—Mariama Barry, Ken Bugul, and Calixthe Beyala—to cre- ate a narrative space in which female sexuality is viewed through complex lenses that alternate, combine, or contradict heterosexuality, bisexuality, and homosexuality.

Writing from the Hearth: Public, Domestic, and Imaginative Space in Francophone Women's Fiction of Africa and the Caribbean, by Mildred Mortimer

Reviewed by: Writing from the Hearth: Public, Domestic, and Imaginative Space in Francophone Women’s Fiction of Africa and the Caribbean Julia Praud Writing from the Hearth: Public, Domestic, and Imaginative Space in Francophone Women’s Fiction of Africa and the Caribbean BY Mildred Mortimer Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2007. xvi + 205 pp. ISBN 13-978-0-7391-1907-5 paper. In her book Writing from the Hearth: Public, Domestic, and Imaginative Space in Francophone Women’s Fiction of Africa and the Caribbean, Mildred Mortimer incisively explores women’s journeys toward empowerment and self-realization. Beginning where her 1990 work, Journeys through the Francophone African Novel, ended, she examines women’s transformation of constraining, silencing, imprisoning, and confining patriarchal structures into a liberating “alternative” space, one that both “embodies the sense of change—an “altered” space—and . . . expresses choice—resistance to the status quo” (24–25). As Mortimer deftly demonstrates, the alternative space is “open, flexible, and multipurpose”; it “can function as a refuge (for meditation, memory, or dream)” or it can be “a preparatory antechamber for future activity, a site of resistance, a place of performance—where writing, orality, and art in varied forms convey woman’s sense of self” (24–25). Throughout this work, she leads scholars on a transatlantic journey that delves into the realities of migration and diasporic space, traversing national, cultural, geographic (West Africa, the Caribbean, New York), linguistic (English, French, and Creole), temporal (1692–present), and socioeconomic (“rural and urban poor to the bourgeoisie”) spaces, and linking women’s experiences throughout Africa and the Caribbean (187). Through close readings of nine texts, Mortimer explores the relationship “between the female subject and the space(s) she inhabits or moves through–with [End Page 170] ease or discomfort” and the journey toward empowerment (2). In her chapter on women and public space, she shows the importance of Aoua Kéita’s autobiography, Femme d’Afrique, la vie d’Aoua Kéita racontée par elle-même, and Maryse Condé’s fictional autobiography, Moi, Tituba, sorcière . . . noire de Salem, texts that “secure women’s place in history,” “chart a woman’s journey into public space,” and detail their “struggle against patriarchal oppression” (53). In her next chapter she examines the warm, nurturing hearth as a potential locus of woman’s empowerment through Mariama Bâ’s Une si longue letter and Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée-Miracle. Home ownership is central to the eventual empowerment of the protagonists in each novel. Indeed, “both texts conclude with a woman speaking from a domestic space she calls her home” (112). Mortimer’s chapter concerning the cold hearth reminds us that “domestic space is not immune from verbal or physical violence” (118). Indeed, Calixthe Beyala’s novel C’est le soleil qui m’a brûlée and her heavily autobiographical work La petite fille du réverbère, along with Marie Chauvet’s novel Amour, all portray home as unsafe, a prison, oppressive, violent, and claustrophobic. Their protagonists struggle for empowerment and self-realization by “imagining the protective hearth that exists in memory, dream, and imagination” (119). Finally, her chapter on mobile homes studies Aminata Sow Fall’s Douceurs du bercail and Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory. While quite different in focus and scope, both works “affirm that when journeys are successful . . . the understanding, clarity of vision, and empowerment occurs in whatever space—or multiple spaces—individuals and communities choose to call home” (184). The breadth and depth of this work’s theoretical foundation makes it a must read for scholars across a wide array of disciplines. Its importance also lies in the richness and diversity of the chosen texts and is underscored by the quality of Mortimer’s close textual readings. Finally, it is her insightful and adept crossing of the boundaries that continue to divide scholars and scholarship of francophone literature today that makes it a journey worth taking. Julia Praud Schaumburg, Illinois Copyright © 2009 Indiana University Press

Calixthe Beyala: Performances of Migration

Calixthe Beyala: Performances of Migration

Global City, Megacity: Calixthe Beyala and the Limits of the Urban Imaginary

Global City, Megacity: Calixthe Beyala and the Limits of the Urban Imaginary

A Divine Madness: The Secret Language of Trauma in the Novels of Bessie Head and Calixthe Beyala

“A Divine Madness: The Secret Language of Trauma in the Novels of Bessie Head and Calixthe Beyala” examines Head's A Question of Power and The Sun Hath Looked upon Me, by Beyala. In both novels, trauma serves as a metaphor for the disruption caused by gendered and/or racialized state violence, which results in alienation not only from larger social structures but, most pervasively, from the very self. This essay posits that the struggle of female protagonists against forms of physical and mental incursion, as manifested in their madness and violent behavior, creates spaces that force the reader to renegotiate the intersection of the personal and political as they are embodied in African women's lives. Modernistic narrative strategies play a key component in recreating the subjective reality of women on the verge, or in the midst, of psychic collapse. Simultaneously, these strategies allow other processes, including the textual violence that undermines the parameters of the Western novel and its misogynistic and racist discursive traditions, to occur.

Calixthe Beyala: Performances of Migration (review)

Reviewed by: Calixthe Beyala: Performances of Migration Dominic Thomas Nicki Hitchcott . Calixthe Beyala: Performances of Migration. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006. 190 pp. The fields of French and Francophone Studies enjoy a symbiotic yet tenuous relationship. Curricular reform and programmatic reorientation have taken place over the past decade or so, such that it has now become common practice for undergraduate and graduate students to engage in interdisciplinary research projects. The work of Cameroonian writer Calixthe Beyala, popularly known as an "Afro French" or "Afro-Parisian" writer since she assumed residency in France during the 1980s, provides a working model for the exploration of the complex and complicated relationship between the Metropole and its former colonial territories. These issues are central to Calixthe Beyala: Performances of Migration, in which Nicki Hitchcott proposes a holistic examination of the "phenomenon" (3) that is Calixthe Beyala, namely the cumulative "symbolic capital" (37) she has acquired as a novelist, essayist, activist, television and radio personality, and "icon of African femininity" (34). The demands and exigencies associated with such a project can be partly located in the fact that Beyala herself is such a prolific writer and social commentator. To this end, she has received considerable critical attention in the public domain, extensive scholarly attention in the form of articles and essays, yet Hitchcott's is the first comprehensive book-length study. The originality can be located in the incorporation of various theorizations of Diaspora and migration, but perhaps more useful is the recourse to recent works of gender/performance studies (Judith Butler, Mary Ann Doane, Susan Leigh Foster) and reception studies (Graham Huggan). These prove to be fruitful in the process of unpacking Beyala's "ambivalent" (4) positionality as an African migrant woman writer that has been simultaneously embraced and rejected, consecrated by the French literary establishment (as the recipient of literary prizes), recuperated by hegemonic forces linked to francophonie, operated as an agent of "complicity in her own commodification" (8), been able to "reappropriate and then manipulate the French public's image of her" (32), while also being plagued by incontrovertible accusations of plagiarism that have served to invalidate her production and relegate her to the cultural and social periphery. But these factors also serve to draw attention to the plethora of ways in which Beyala's [End Page 283] "unlocatability" (38) calls for a sustained analysis in which the constitutive components of her multiple identities are factored. "By using the language of migration," Hitchcott convincingly illustrates how "Beyala stresses the cultural separation between the immigrant ghetto of Belleville and the surrounding majority ethnic space of France" (83) while effectively countering "the majority ethnic population's attempts to prescribe migrant identity" (112). Beyala's capacity to navigate unchartered territory, to resort to "performance and improvisation" (111), ultimately both "protect her from containment" (136) and undercut "the dominant discourse's version of normativity in postcolonial France" (136). This reversal, or at least restructuring of structures of power and control allow Beyala "to both appropriate and dismantle the dominant discourse to suit her own agenda" (65). Hitchcott makes extensive usage of the term "incorporated" to describe those mechanisms aimed at recuperating Beyala (I see this term's other meaning, namely the abbreviation used to designate an established corporation, as equally appropriate in this framework). The marketing and reception of the "exotic" has been emphasized in recent years in France by the prevalence and therefore appeal of sensationalist texts that focus on forced marriages, excision, polygamy, and honor killings. These texts, alongside various works by Beyala, target "the readers' desire for consumption of 'the Other'" (148) in its various guises. And this is where Beyala emerges as a writer engaged in a "self-conscious staging of identity in response to her positioning in the global marketplace" (4). Huggan's notion of "anthropological exotic" (15) as a category that juxtaposes and balances the "strange" (16) with the "familiar" (16) shares points of commonality with Beyala who is "located inside and outside of national culture" (16). However, as Hitchcott shows, "literary incorporation denies cultural difference and suggests a neocolonization of postcolonial writing by publishers in France" (17). Given Beyala's public position on these matters, one must signal to...

Calixthe Beyala: Performances of Migration by Nicki Hitchcott

II36 Reviews Calixthe Beyala: Performances of Migration. By NICKI HITCHCOTT. Liverpool: Li verpool University Press. 2oo6. xviii + I90 pp. ?40. ISBN 978-1-8463I-028-7. With Calixthe Beyala: Performances of Migration, Nicki Hitchcott offers an eloquent analysis of the literaryoutput of francophone Africa's most successful woman writer. In the firstbook-length study of Beyala to be published inEnglish, Hitchcott places theemphasis on Beyala the migrant writer, exploring her problematic status inFrance, where her novels have received critical acclaim but where her efforts to be taken se riously as awriter have been undermined by themedia's attempts to expose her as a fraud. Analysing the performance ofmigrant identities by both Beyala and her fictional characters and tracing the fictionalmigration of Beyala's settings between Africa and France, Hitchcott provides close critical analysis of thewriter's novels fromC'est le soleil quim'a brulee (I987) toLa Plantation (2005). Calixthe Beyala: Performances ofMigration engages with postcolonial theory as well as recent research in the fields of literarycriticism and cultural studies, adopting a pluralist approach which, the author asserts, reflectsboth the syncretic nature of postcolonial migrant subjectivities and the comparative and interdisciplinary nature of postcolonial studies. This tightly structured study is divided thematically into five chapters and opens with an exploration of the reception of Beyala's work in France and Africa. Hitchcott considers Beyala's status as an icon of black femininity inFrance and analyses her commodification as a symptom ofwhat Graham Huggan terms the 'postcolonial exotic' (The Postcolonial Exotic (London: Routledge, 200 I)). Examining Beyala's fictional negotiations of 'authenticity' and exploring theways inwhich thewriter engages with the discourse of exoticist representations ofAfrica in her novels, Hitchcott contends that in alternately rejecting and reclaiming myths and stereotypes about Africa, Beyala positions herself both inside and outside the authenticities invented by France. The central chapter 'Migrating Subjectivities' addresses issues of language and identity through close analysis of the novels thatdeal explicitly with migration from sub-Saharan Africa toFrance. The author argues thatBeyala's portrayal of her char acters' attempts to locate themselves inFrance reflects thewriter's own strugglewith locational labelling. Hitchcott suggests that this comes to a head inLettre d'une Afro franfaise a ses compatriotes (2000) inBeyala's claiming of an Afro-francaise identity thatmarks her association with the 'ambivalence ofmimicry' (Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 86), through which myths of cultural difference are at once articulated, challenged, and reformulated. Hitchcott explores theways inwhich Beyala and her characters negotiate identity through performance and improvisation by conformingwith or disrupting cultural norms, ar guing that the writer embraces theambivalent space she occupies inFrance toperform hermarginality in a strategic attempt to reappropriate exoticism toher own ends. Rigorous in its scholarship, Hitchcott's Calixthe Beyala is an invaluable and ac cessible resource forboth specialists and the reader coming toBeyala's work for the firsttime. LANCASTER UNIVERSITY CHARLOTTE BAKER Lesbian Inscriptions inFrancophone Society and Culture. Ed. by RENATE GUTNTHER and WENDY MICHALLAT. (Durham Modern Languages Series) Durham: Durham University. 2007. vi+239 pp. LI9.50. ISBN 978-09073i0-62-4. This volume comprises eleven chapters originating inpapers given at an eponymously named conference organized by theeditors at theUniversity of Sheffield in2004. The contributors are a diverse, cross-disciplinary group of commentators from France, ...

Domestic matters: representations of home in the writings of Mariama B, Calixthe Beyala and Aminata Sow Fall

Beginning with Mariama B's Une si longue lettre [So long a letter], this article examines representations of domestic space in francophone African women's fiction. In B's text, woman's subjectivity is inextricably linked to domestic space and domesticity is valued as both a refuge and a site of rebellion. The study continues with an analysis of two texts that are bolder and more aggressive in their struggle against patriarchy than B's novel: Calixthe Beyala's C'est le soleil qui m'a brle [The Sun hath looked upon me] and Aminata Sow Fall's Douceurs du bercail [Comforts of the fold]. Beyala counters B's nurturing mother figure and warm hearth with a cold house and no maternal presence. Sow Fall depicts a female protagonist who, refusing the limitations imposed upon the housewife, devotes her energies to a social project that will aid her community in Senegal. If home space functions as refuge (B), haunted house (Beyala), transitional space (Sow Fall), it is above all a subversive space where rebellion begins and often explodes. Thus, domestic space plays a crucial role in the female protagonist's empowerment.

Calixthe Beyala: Prizes, Plagiarism, and ?Authenticity?

In 1996, Calixthe was twice accused of plagiarism. One of the accusations led to her being found guilty in the High Court in Paris. Pardoxically, in that same year she was awarded the highly prestigious Grand Prix du roman de l'Academie Francaise for one of the novels in which she had allegedly plagiarized. Focusing mainly on Beyala's responses to the allegations of 1996, this essay considers the consequences of what has become known as the Beyala Affair. Beyala's situation is unique in that she is both a consecrated, best-selling authentic African author and a proven literary fake. I suggest that by playing with notions of authenticity and fakery, tests the limits of tolerance for an African woman writer in France.

Calixthe Beyala: Prizes, Plagiarism, and "Authenticity"

Calixthe Beyala: Prizes, Plagiarism, and "Authenticity"