Ken Bugul Research Articles

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...

Afrique: Paroles d'écrivains by Éloïse Brezault

WORLD LITERATURE IN REVIEW Then, however, the speaker turns on himself: "What ifall thispassion is out of proportion to its subject? ... / thatshe should infect your day to the very marrow, / to hate the common lightand its simple joys / .. .old man in the dimming world." Derek Walcott's carefully nuanced, balanced, and multifaceted under standing of theworld gives these poems their maturity of vision; it's his supreme craft that gives them their beauty. FredDings UniversityofSouthCarolina Miscellaneous ?lo?se Brezault. Afrique: Paroles d'?crivains. Montr?al. M?moire d'Encrier. 2010. 410 pages. Can$29.95. ISBN 978-2-923713-20-5 From 2000 to 2005, ?lo?se Brezault interviewed eighteen African writ ers. While they come from several regions ofAfrica, all but three now reside in France. Ahmadou Kourou ma, interviewed before his death in 2003, is the best-known writer of the group, but the others are among the most widely discussed franco phone African authors. Perhaps the major omission isKoffi Kwahul?, a prizewinning novelist and dramatist from C?te d'Ivoire. Each interview isprefaced by a briefbiographical comment and fol lowed by a bibliography. Brezault's questions show close reading of the texts. The best interviewees speak with passion about theirwork and theaesthetic impulses thatgovern it. Kossi Efoui discusses the difference inhis work between writing novels and plays and how theuse of stage instructions can be incorporated into fiction.Nimrod speaks of how his novels show that he is a poet. Some authors?L?onora Miano and Sami Tchack, in particular?use the interview to explain theirworks at length. Among the recurringquestions is the relationship between a native language and writing in French. Gaston-Paul Effa says thatwriting in French allows him to "leave my country to reinvent it in language." Boris Boubacar Diop, who lives in Senegal, points out that95 percent of the Senegalese population does not read French; he has recentlybegun towrite in Wolof. Should the writer be committed politically (engag?)? Kangni Alem says thewriter should rather have the more noble duty to "bearwitness to his time." For Emmanuel Don gala, Abdourahman Waberi, Kossi Efoui, and Ken Bugul, although the writer cannot ignore politics, he or she speaks from a personal perspec tive, not as a representative of the "people." Often those interviewed find a new vitality inAfrican litera ture, as the writer creates the voice of an individual voice, not thatof the community. Since many of the authors interviewed were part of the 1998 project "Rwanda: Ecrire par devoir de m?moire" (writing as a duty to remember), Brezault asks, "How can onewrite about thegenocide?" Diop admits that he misunderstood the genocide until he visited Rwanda, and thathis Le Cavalier et son ombre gives a wrong impression of the Hutu as also victims. Rwandans who escaped thegenocide were not always willing to let others write about their experience, but V?ro nique Tadjo found that she could write about Rwanda because life was coming back into the country. Several authors speak of using the perspective of a child, as does Tierno Mon?nembo in L'Aine des orphelins, one of thebest books to come out of theproject. The question "What is your reaction to the movement 'litt?ra ture-monde' (which wants to incor porate African writing into a larger global perspective)?" provokes vari ous replies (see WLT, March 2009, 54-56). For Alem, literature needs an anchor. Diop is particularly against "la litt?rature n?gro-parisi enne." Alain Mabanckou, however, writes in favor of connections across countries and continents: "Introduc ing theworld in your work avoids navel-gazing." The interplay of varied views makes this collection a valuable addition to criticism of contempo rary African literature. Adele King Paris Durs Gr?nbein. The Bars of Atlantis: Selected Essays. Michael Eskin, ed. John Crutchfield,Michael Hofmann, and Andrew Shields, tr. New York. Far rar, Straus & Giroux. 2010. xx + 323 pages. $35. isbn978-0-374-26062-0 The German poet Durs Gr?nbein knows what history is.These essays show thathe knows that thehistori cal discipline is akin to archaeology, to a geologist's core sample, even to the reconstruction of the scene of a crime.History is the past, and an uncomfortable one at...

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.

Apropos Opa by Julia Butschkow

Apropos Opa by Julia Butschkow

Emerging Perspectives on Ken Bugul: From Alternative Choices to Oppositional Practices ed. by Ada Uzoamaka Azodo and Jeanne-Sarah de Larquier (review)

Emerging Perspectives on Ken Bugul: From Alternative Choices to Oppositional Practices ed. by Ada Uzoamaka Azodo and Jeanne-Sarah de Larquier (review)

African Muslim Communities in Diaspora: The Quest for a Muslim Space in Ken Bugul'sLe baobab fou

����� ��� The essay explores the Islamic dimension of the novel Le baobab fou (The Abandoned Baobab) by the Senegalese author Ken Bugul to demonstrate that the identity crisis felt by the protagonist Ken in the novel is not only of an African but that of an African Muslim in particular and that this psychological alienation of Muslims provoked by colonialism did not end with colonialism but continues even today as seen in Ken’s experiences in Belgium in a capitalistic and neocolonial environment. The analysis explores whether Ken as an African Muslim is allowed to create a truly multicultural space where her cultural and spiritual differences are not suppressed but allowed to co-exist through negotiation and dialogue. To this end, Ken’s experiences as a postcolonial subject assume a particular dimension: that of an African Muslim fi rst alienated by false ideologies learned in the French colonial school and later by systems such as capitalism.

African Muslim Communities in Diaspora: The Quest for a Muslim Space in Ken Bugul's Le baobab fou

The essay explores the Islamic dimension of the novel Le baobab fou (The Abandoned Baobab) by the Senegalese author Ken Bugul to demonstrate that the identity crisis felt by the protagonist Ken in the novel is not only of an African but that of an African Muslim in particular and that this psychological alienation of Muslims provoked by colonialism did not end with colonialism but continues even today as seen in Ken's experiences in Belgium in a capitalistic and neocolonial environment. The analysis explores whether Ken as an African Muslim is allowed to create a truly multicultural space where her cultural and spiritual differences are not suppressed but allowed to co-exist through negotiation and dialogue. To this end, Ken's experiences as a post-colonial subject assume a particular dimension: that of an African Muslim first alienated by false ideologies learned in the French colonial school and later by systems such as capitalism.

Filling the Continental Split: Subjective Emergence in Ken Bugul's "Le baobab fou" and Sylvia Molloy's "En breve cárcel"

Filling the Continental Split: Subjective Emergence in Ken Bugul's "Le baobab fou" and Sylvia Molloy's "En breve cárcel"

Francophone Women Writing in 1998-99 and Beyond: A Literary Feast in a Violent World

From the seventies onwards, francophone African women writers have published a steady stream of novels exploring the highs and lows of the human condition. With good reason, critics have seen their texts as providing first-hand information on women's perceptions of society. In this regard, the 1998-99 crop is no different from that of previous years. New talents such as Fatou Keïta, Adjoua Flore Kouamé, Bessora, Myriam Warner Vieyra's daughter Célia Vieyra, and many others rub shoulders with household names such as Calixthe Beyala, Véronique Tadjo, Aminata Sow Fall, Mariama Ndoye, Ken Bugul, and other well-established writers. Issues traditionally associated with African women's writing in years past, such as polygamy, forced marriage, and women's limited opportunities are still there, although not as prominently as before. Conversely, new problematics born of rapidly changing sociocultural environments are finding their way into the corpus. Among them, the issue of violence and survival in hostile environments seems to gain momentum while the soothing virtue of human interaction becomes a kind of last refuge in the face of extreme economic hardship, domestic violence, the collapse of social values, and war. Needless to say, understanding what recent African women's writing is all about requires readers to go beyond the mere listing of violent acts. It requires an exploration of the way people answer the challenge of surviving in rough and often inhumane conditions, how they assess the past to better understand the future, how they devise new strategies, follow new dreams, and attempt to make do with the often limited resources at their disposal.

Countermodernism and Francophone Literary Culture: The Game of Slipknot (review)

This is an accomplished and thoroughly innovative study of six authors from the French-speaking world. While traditional approaches to the study of francophone literature are often restricted by boundaries of race and geography, Walker departs from this narrowly circumscribed field and works with writers from places as widely separated as Martinique, Haiti, French Guinea, Senegal, and Morocco. Through close reading, Walker attempts to establish the historical links between Aimé Césaire's powerful writing and the work of Léon Gotran Damas, Mariama Bâ, Tahar ben Jelloun, Ken Bugul and Gérard Etienne. Walker makes an important and fascinating contribution to both francophone literary culture and postcolonial studies in general by exploring how these six writers have been influenced by the legacy of the Négritude movement. The book is organized like a musical score in which Walker stays close to the texts he analyses while arguing throughout that "francophone literary culture, being neither modernist nor antimodernist, refuses and slips the knot of binary oppositions, thereby asserting itself as countermodernist." Walker's close readings both highlight and complicate the unique ways these texts "slip the knot" of modernism's binary oppositions.

Whose House Is This? Space and Place in Calixthe Beyala's C'est le soleil qui m'a brûlée and La Petite Fille du réverbère

Une si longue lettre (1980) contributed greatly to the female voice's entering the mainstream of francophone African fiction. Clearly announcing women's literature of revolt, the text revealed to Senegalese and foreign readers that one woman's struggle against polygamy could become the catalyst for personal growth and self-definition, and it subsequently opened the way for the second generation of francophone African women novelists. Ken Bugul, Werewere Liking, Calixthe Beyala, and others would take Ba's attack on African patriarchy a step further with texts that would prove to be more aggressive, more rebellious, and more audacious in content and form.

Francophone African Women Writers. Destroying the Emptiness of Silence (review)

Book Reviews bulent career with a rare faith in the integrity of the poetic word and its powers to liberate on the one hand, and a rare faithfulness to Césaire's entire intellectual project on the other. Readers of Césaire criticism will not learn much that is new here, and Leiner's dithyrambic aphorisms can sometimes seem a bit jejune. But no one can deny the vital role she has played in animating, in the etymological sense of that word, Césaire studies. From the invaluable reediting of Tropiques, to the international colloquia she organized in 1983, 1985 and 1993 in Padua, Paris and Fort-de-France, to the two volumes of essays on Césaire by scholars from around the world which she has edited (all of which are documented in this collection), Jacqueline Leiner has created dialogues helping Césaire achieve the recognition he deserves. This tome testifies to the scope of her dedication. Ronnie Scharfman Purchase College SUNY Irène Assiba d'Almeida. Francophone African Women Writers. Destroying the Emptiness of Silence. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. Pp. xi + 222. $34.95. Irène d'Almeida's study of Francophone African women writers is neatly and clearly written; too neatly perhaps. While there is no doubt that her scholarship is serious and extensive, that, indeed, she knows her material well and understands what African societies are all about, she tends either to repress some issues to which she alludes or to simply not ask certain questions which would seem to be unavoidable. Appropriately, in her preface, d'Almeida emphasizes, in the words of Calyxthe Beyala, how important it is for the African critic to "destroy the emptiness of silence" surrounding Francophone African women writers. This corpus represents an interesting development in Francophone African literature that is still little known and, with few exceptions, not yet translated. Recognizing in these writers a group of militants eager to use the word as a weapon, and thus assert their new roles as writers, women and Africans, d'Almeida espouses a parallel attitude as an African critic and militant African feminist at the crossroads of several cultures. D'Almeida studies two genres: autobiography and the novel. In her section on autobiography , she considers Nafissatou Diallo (Senegal), Ken Bugul (Senegal), and Andrée Blouin (a French/African métisse who grew up in the Congo, but wrote in English, with the collaboration of Jean MacKellar). At this point, she tackles autobiography as a "pure" and simple genre, as described by Philippe Lejeune in Le Pacte autobiographique (1975), in which author, narrator, and protagonist are "identical." The complexity of the reconstruction of a "self" through the narrative process of memorization is not the focus here. The author seeks rather to show how the autobiographical voice is used to denounce patriarchy and colonialism. In Chapter 2, d'Almeida analyzes works by Beyala (Cameroon), Angèle Rawiri (Gabon), and Miriama Ba (Senegal) to show how "women negotiate and redefine their role" in the context of family relationships. Beyala's Tu t'appelleras Tanga is said to describe resistance to womanhood. Rawiri's Fureurs et cris de femmes, whose female character's desire to "give" her husband a male child becomes an obsession, revolves around the leitmotif of the womb. However, the dénouement brings about the protagonist 's liberation from her husband and his family. Manama Bâ's Un chant écarlate explores the many intersections of "race, class, and culture in a meeting of Africa and Europe" (99) and enhances the importance of solidarity between women. VOL. XXXVI, NO. 2 123 L'Esprit Créateur At the opening of her third chapter, d'Almeida admits that, as it is difficult to divide autobiography from fiction, it is also problematic to isolate Werewere Liking (Cameroon), Aminata Sow Fall (Senegal), and Véronique Tadjo (Ivory Coast) as "social critics." Liking's Orphée-Dafric shows that personal change is a sine qua non for any significant change to occur in society. Fall's L Έχ-père de la nation examines the rise and decline of an African politician, the conditions necessary for real political change, and depicts how the male characters' failure to serve...

Francophone African Women Writers: Destroying the Emptiness of Silence

French-speaking African women traditionally expressed their creativity through oral storytelling. Previously silent in print, today they also speak through the written word, and their stories constitute one of the most significant recent developments in African literature. Irene Assiba d'Almeida dates this emerging phenomenon to 1969, the year Kuoh-Moukouri's Rencontres essentielles was published. A few more books by women were published in the '70s, followed by a creative explosion in the '80s that d'Almeida describes as a militant feminist appropriation of the written word. D'Almeida's book, the first single-author critical study in English of literary expression by Francophone African women, examines novels and autobiographies by nine new and established writers, all published since 1975. She finds that writing has liberated Francophone African women. They use it to critique the patriarchal order, to champion the cause of women and the community, and to preserve positive aspects of tradition. D'Almeida divides her analysis into sections on three aspects of literary production. The first deals with autobiography and begins with A Dakar Childhood, by Nafissatou Diallo, the first Francophone African woman to write her own life history. The section also examines The Abandoned Baobab, by Ken Bugul, a book that broke sexual taboos, and My Country, Africa, by Andree Blouin. In the second section the author looks at women and the family, including problems related to compulsory motherhood. She discusses Your Name Will Be Tanga, by Calixthe Beyala, Cries and Fury of Women, by Angele Rawiri (both published only in French), and Scarlet Song, by Mariama Ba. The third section, W/Riting Change:Women as Social Critics, discusses the ways female novelists link problems that affect women's lives to those affecting society at large. It examines works in French by Werewere Liking, Aminata Sow Fall, and Veronique Tadjo.