Paper 13 Bodies that Matter: Calixthe B eyala’s Fem ale Bodies and Strategies o f Hegem onic Subversion UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY UFAHAMU \ :l . A Journal of African Studies Founded by the African Activist Association Volume XL! • Number 1 * 2018 UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY U FA H A M U A JOURNAL OF AFRICAN STUDIES . James S. Coleman African Studies Center 10244 Rurache Hall Los Angeles, CA 90095-1310 U.S.A. Telephone; (310) 825-3686 • (310) 825-3686 Fax: (310) 206-2250 email: ufahamu@gmail.com 2018-19 Editorial Board Editors-in-Chief Talia Lieber Rebecca Wolff Editors-in-Chief, Vol. XLI No. 1 Janice R. Levi Madina Thiam Editors: Degenhart Brown Temesgen Gebreyesus Connor Hamm Amira Hassnaoui Nicholas Havey Connor Pruss Rebecca Temkin Ayantu Tibeso Xiuling Zhang Elaine Sullivan Contributing Editors, Vol. XLI, No. 1 Marwa Aboubaker Laura Cox Margit Bowler John Gluckman Nana Osei-Opare David B. Spielman Olufemi Taiwo Lauren Taylor Arts Editor: Joanna Szupinska-Myers Books Review Editors Lucas Avidan Alexis Coopersmith Social Media and Communications Editor: Grace Stanley Editorial Assistants and Campus Publicists Kaleha Kegode Aaliyah Murphy Copy Editor: Jessica Ruthven Layout Editor: William Morosi Cover Photo Artwork: David B. Spielman Cover Caption | The Gatekeeper (Entrance to Debre Berhan Selassie Church in Gondar, Ethiopia) UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY mailto:ufahamu@gmail.com ufahamu-n. [Swahili] understanding Ufahamu, UCLA’s multidisciplinary Africanist student journal, seeks contributions that challenge broadly accepted conceptualizations of African studies. Since 1970, Ufahamu has maintained its original vision of creating a forum for protest against the increasingly western-dominated and exclusionary African Studies establishment. The journal continues to publish the work of those marginalized by the academic press—Africans, people of African descent, students, and non-academics. Together with our readers and contributors, we reaffirm our commitment to create intellectual linkages and feature current critical views. UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY Ufahamu: A Journal o f African Studies is published by graduate students at UCLX. Views expressed in Ufahamu are not necessarily those of the Editors, the African Studies Center, or the Regents of the University of California. P lease visit h ttp://esch.olarship.org/uc/international_asc__ufahaniu fo r back issues and http://www.international.ucla.edu/africa/ufahamu/ fbr submis­ sions and updated calls-for-papers. Print copies of this issue, Volume 41: Issue 1, may be purchased through Lulu.com by clicking on the volume “Buy” link on eScholarship. Please direct inquiries regarding orders, subscriptions, submissions, and advertising information to: Ufahamu James S. Coleman African Studies Center 10244 Bunche Hall Los Angeles, CA 90095-1310 U.S.A. Telephone: (310) 825-3686; (310) 825-3686 Fax: (310) 206-2250 uf ahamu@gmail. com ISSN: 0041-5715 ISBN: 978-0-9978710-6-7 Ufahamu is funded in part by UCLA Graduate Students Association Publications Publications Cover photo: © 2018 Ufahamu: A Journal o f African Studies is a copyrighted compilation. © 2018 Ufahamu. AW Rights Reserved. Permissions requests regarding full issues should be sent to ufahamu@gmail.com. Creators of cover art and articles retain the copyright to their individual works. Permissions requests regarding individuals works should be sent to their creators. UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY http://esch.olarship.org/uc/international_asc__ufahaniu http://www.international.ucla.edu/africa/ufahamu/ mailto:ufahamu@gmail.com U FA H A M U A JOURNAL OF AFRICAN STUDIES VOLUME XLI NUMBER 1 FALL 2018 GENERAL ISSUE Editorial Janice R. Levi and Madina Th ia m ............................................................ ix Opinion Editorial Paulo M ilen o ................................................................................................xv Part I —Essays Bodies that Matter: Calixthe Beyala’s Female Bodies and Strategies of Hegemonic Subversion E yiwumi Bolutito O layinka.........................................................................1 “Healing a Hurting Heart”: FEM RITE’s Use of Narrative and Community as Catalysts for Traumatic Healing Candice Taylor Stratford...........................................................................21 Of Bosal and Kongo: Exploring the Evolution of the Vernacular in Contemporary Haiti Toni Pressley-Sa n o n ............. ...................................................................... 47 Maguzawa and Nigeria Citizenship: Reflecting on Identity Politics and National Question in Africa A kubor E mmanuel O sewe and G erald M. M usa................................ 65 The Land Grabbing Debacle: An Analysis of South Africa and Senegal G loria Sauti and Mamadou L o Thlam......................................................85 Radical Pan-Africanism and Africa’s Integration: A Retrospective Exploration and Prospective Prognosis A deniyi S. Basiru, Mashud L. A. Salawu, and A dewale A depoju . . . 103 UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY - ' 127 Part II—Creative Arts f ,Artist Portfolio | Two Generations of Artists at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka R ebecca Wo lff ............................................................ E xcerpt and Artw ork | A Rom ance with Vultures Excerpt from “A Romance with Vultures” Artwork included: On the Road to Golgotha (1998); The "ConvulturaT Conference (1994); The Trial o f UNN (1997); Letter to my Countrymen (1993); No One But Me (1998); The Drowning o f the General Oracle (1994); Professor, the Miserable Egghead (1991) . . ... Chuu K rydz Ikwuemesi................................................................................129 Overview and Artwork | Crisis and Violence in Niger Delta as a Creative Resource in Painting Artwork included: The Execution o f the Ogoni Four (2014); The Ogoni Nine (2014); The Agony o f the Niger Delta Women (2014) Walter Frederick O ghenerobor O kpogor............................................143 Exhibition Review | Meleko Mokgosi; Bread, Butter, and Power Talia L ieber........................................................................................................149 Poem | Black Soap O luwatimisin O redein ....................................................................................153 Poem | ELLE Tomma Bambara................................................................................................ 155 Poem | Faces of Shame H alima Idriss A mali........................................................................................ 159 Poet Spotlight | Thato Magano Thato M agano (with Janice R. L evi) ........................................................161 Poetry Collection! Excerpts from The Complicated Lives of Islands Poems included: “Little Boy Dying,” “Missing Pearls,” “The House of Metis,” “The End of the World is Pleasure,” “Waste,” and “Legacies of Trauma” Thato M a g a n o .................................................................................................. 163 Book Reviews Steven Pierce, Moral Economies o f Corruption: State Formation and Political Culture in Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). Pp. 282. D D mitri H urlbut...................................................................... ................... 177 Adam Mayer, Naija Marxisms: Revolutionary Thought in Nigeria (London: Pluto Press, 2016). Pp. 241. Samuel Q yewole............................................................................................ 181 UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY C ontributors Adewale Adepoju is a lecturer i'n the Department of History and Diplo­ matic Studies,Tai Solarin University of Education, Ijebu-Ode (Nigeria). Akubor Emmanuel Osewe (Ph.D.) is a lecturer at the department of His­ tory, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife (Nigeria). Dr, Halima Amali is a Senior Lecturer in African Literature at the Federal University Lafia in Nasarawa State, Nigeria. Tomma Bambara, an alumnus from the Lester B. Pearson United World College, is a poet from Burkina Faso and currently a student at the Uni­ versity of Oklahoma. Adeniyi S. Basiru is an independent researcher and doctoral student at the Department of Political Science, University of Lagos (Nigeria). Eyiwumi Bolutito Olayinka is a lecturer of Psychoanalytic Literary Stud­ ies with an emphasis on Gender Studies in the Department of European Studies, University of Ibadan (Nigeria). D. Dmitri Hurlbuf is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Boston University and the 2018-19 Graduate Research Fellow in Mormon Studies at the Tanner Humanities Center, University of Utah. Chuu Krydz Ikwuemesi is a painter and art critic. Since 1994, he has taught art at the University of Nigeria. Talia Lieber is a graduate student in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Thato Magano is a South African poet and graduate student in the Pro­ gram in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. Paulo Mileno is an actor, writer, and researcher in the Nucleus of African Philosophy at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). Fr. Gerald M. Musa (Ph.D.) is a lecturer at the Center for the Study of African Communication and Culture of the Catholic Institute of West Africa, Port Harcourt (Nigeria). Walter Frederick Oghenerobor Okpogor is a Ph.D. student in the Depart­ ment of Fine and Applied Arts, specializing in Painting, at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Oluwatomisin Qfedein is a Visiting Assistant professor of Christian theol­ ogy and ethics at Memphis Theological Seminary in Memphis, TN. UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY Bodies that Matter: Calixthe Beyala’s Female Bodies and Strategies of Hegemonic Subversion1 Eyiwumi Bolutito Olayinka Abstract Without challenging hegemony, liberal Francophone African femi­ nists unearth aspects o f patriarchal African cultural practices that objectify women. In contrast, radical Francophone African feminists call for drastic change to these practices through reappropriating the female body as a way to liberate African women from patriar­ chal oppression. They challenge the patriarchal order by opposing gender roles and stereotypes and by taking a decisive stand for total female liberation. They call for a radical reordering o f patriarchal societies through the annulment o f binary oppositions that classify women as “other.” In this article, I follow Judith Butler’s lead in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits o f Sexl and explore Calixthe Beyala’s commitment to African women’s liberation from oppression. Beyala’s approach presents auto-eroticism, homicide, infanticide, refusal o f marriage, bodily and psychical dis-eroticiza- tion, and physical transformation o f female bodies as strategies to secure women’s freedom. Key Words: Calixthe Beyala, Radical Feminism, Patriarchal Op­ pression, Female Bodies, Strategies. Awa Thiam, the Senegalese feminist, writer, activist, and author of La paroles aux negresses,2 testifies to the universality of women’s oppression, which she says occurs globally through varying shades and forms.3 Regardless of location, the oppression of women is a constant variable in societies where patriarchal beliefs project that women are inferior to men. Radical African feminists such as Calixthe Beyala have endeavored to scrutinize the manipulation of women’s bodies through their writings and criticisms. They insist that androcentric beliefs and practices must be changed drastically 1 Content Trigger Warning:‘Part of this essay may be disturbing to some readers; in it, I engage with literary descriptions of sexual assault. Ufahamu 41:1 Fall 2018UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY 2 UFAHAMU in order to fully liberate oppressed A frican women. They also suggest that dwelling on the reappropriation of the female body offers one path through which women may attain freedom from patriarchal oppression. A lluding to a.biblical passage,4 Beyala m etaphorically captures how hegem onic practices circumscribe women by relegating them to positions of servitude, deprivation, self-denial, and abnegation. Discourse of the Body: Female Agency and Strategies of Revolt The reification of the fem ale body m ainly occurs through the institutionalization of denigrating mythical cultural practices and processes that wom en them selves patronize. Taboos, m arriage, m aternity, servitude, excision, infibulations, and virginity tests are m ajor oppressive cultural m ediation tools that enforce the recreation and reform ulation of women. These practices prepare women to see themselves as objects of male possession. Through these practices, the fem ale body is thus often branded as m ale property. For instance, Pretresse-goitree, the diabolically powerful priestess who wields supernatural powers over the people of Wuel, instructs women in Seul le diable le savait (abbreviated to Diable subsequently) to submit their bodies—hook, line, and sinker—to men, who are their human gods. She orders women to offer their bodies to men for lovemaking—without feeling disgust or protest.5 She directs women to release their bodies to men, who make love to them in the open until men have their fill, become tired, and lie motionless, sweaty, and out of breath. Love-making between men and women becomes an instant public show where men, in abso­ lute possession of female bodies, loosen themselves up and subject women to the gratification of men’s sexual desires. In Beyala’s narratives, other instances of women serving as patriarchal agents of female oppression abound. Often, women are the ones who sell their daughters through marriage by demanding bride price, which is the case in the story of Megri, the protagonist of Diable, whose hand is given in marriage because of the material gains Dame maman, her mother, will derive from the transaction. In other narratives, women are the ones who engage in extramarital affairs with the husbands of their fellow women. Laetitia, a Western­ ized female character in Diable, is involved in an illicit affair with UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY OLAYINKA 3 Donga, Dame Donga’s husband. Notably, it is one of Beyala’s male characters, Donga in Diable, who articulates the idea that women are responsible for their own misfortunes and oppressions as far as gender relations are concerned.6 To this end, Jiff Mokobia, a Nige­ rian literary critic, accuses women of complicity in the oppression of women when he notes that women are victims of the situations they create for themselves —by themselves.7 Nonetheless, the complexity that surrounds the oppression of women in the Beyalian world calls for careful and objective analy­ sis. While her male characters tend to see women as responsible for their own subjugation, her female characters see their oppres­ sion as anchored in phallocentric cultural tendencies. As portrayed in C’est le soldi qui m ’a brulee (subsequently referred to as Soleil), Ateba, the protagonist, conveys women’s frustration to her fellow women through a letter in which she wonders what it is that men so require of women that patriarchal systems must employ such high levels of female othering to obtain it.8 H er m anner of inter­ rogating patriarchy reiterates the excessive and often ill-defined demands that men place on women. The questions A teba poses explain why Beyala refers to m en in Lettre d ’une Africaine a ses sceurs occidentales as a danger and a virus.9 Am bivalence sur­ rounds the real agents o f w om en’s oppression and therefore necessitates investigating factors of oppression beyond the surface level. The psychosocial, political, and economic needs and per­ spectives of both genders seem to be the cardinal points Beyala suggests audiences must consider. Resisting Maternity: A Q uest to Liberate the Female Body M aternity in Beyala’s discourse of the body is a multifaceted phe­ nomenon,-and it constitutes one of the highest points of debate in her mission to liberate women. Beyala presents m aternity as a state that devours women’s bodies, since women must have many births to prove their fertility. Exam ples of such women include MS, Tanga’s mother, and other m others in Tu t’appelleras Tanga (subsequently referred to as Tanga), who receive medals from the governor for their childbearing prolificacy.10 Beyala also depicts childbearing as an economic activity that determines the value of a woman’s bride price: while a typical bride price is one thousand francs, that number skyrockets when Bertha, the m other of Megri UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY 4 UFAHAMU in Diable, demands ten thousand francs.11 Bertha considers that amount of money a high sum that must be paid because of Megri’s proven ability to procreate and her potential for successful and repeated childbearing. Beyond the commoditization of female reproduction, Beyala also presents m aternity as undesirable. This position of undesir­ ability arises as a necessary means of preventing the female body from being overused. For example, Ada, A teb a?s aunt in Soleil, considers m aternity an undesirable;burden. The same goes for Tanga, the protagonist of Tanga, who clearly articulates her desire not to birth children after Cul-de-Jatte, her lover, asks her to give him a child.12 Many of the mothers represented in Beyala’s works dislike child-rearing, which prompts some to abandon their babies after childbirth or even to commit infanticide, such as Irene does in Soleil. B eyala also depicts w om en’s bodies as w orn-out tools because of their incessant procreation. O f particular note is the way Megri, in Diable, attributes the dilapidation that has occurred in Dame D onga’s physiognomy to incessant births and to sexual intercourse. Megri, with disgust, views D am e D onga’s body as m arked by drooping breasts and as fatigued by numerous preg­ nancies and the frequen t sexual in tercourse she has with her husband to prevent him from going to the slums to patronize other women.13 Megri judges that Dame Donga subjects herself to too many episodes of sexual intercourse with her husband, Donga, in order to satisfy the la tter’s sexual desires and to prevent him from having illicit affairs with other women. Ironically, this appears not to work: Donga later dates Laetitia in the novel. A part from the damage done by regular or incessant sexual intercourse, another m ajor factor that Beyala suggests ruins the fem ale body is incessant procreation occasioned by the need of m others to replace children they lose to diseases and plagues caused by inadequate medical care, m alnutrition, and environ­ m ental pollution. A teba’s grandm other (in Soleil), Tanga’s m other (in Tanga), and Grand-mere (in La petite fille du reverbere14) are examples pf.Beyalian women whose bodies are exhausted by suc­ cessive m aternities prom pted by child mortality. This recalls the argum ent of L auretta Ngcobo, a South A frican political activ­ ist, fem inist critic, and writer, about the im portance placed on childbearing in A frica.15 Ironically, though, childbearing in the UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY OLAYINKA 5 Beyalian sense bears no sem blance to thg im portance Ngcobo invokes. While having a large num ber of children is a means by which many Africans procure posterity (and, at times, through which wealth and success are m easured), for Beyalian m others who seek liberation from hegemonic oppression, it is the opposite. Childbirth, for Beyala, represents a denigration and exploitation of the female body; it is used as an avenue for generating income through child labor, child abuse, and child prostitution, or it is con­ sidered an outright unattractive venture. Rejecting Widowhood, Overturning Taboos W idowhood is ano ther them e th rough which B eyala revolts against patriarchy. As discussed earlier, in some African societ­ ies, a woman automatically becomes the property of her husband once her bride price is paid. A fter the man’s death, the woman is expected to rem ain his wife or to be inherited by one of his close relations. If she chooses to rem arry outside her husband’s clan, she is expected to return her bride price to her husband’s family before she remarries. Beyala ridicules this cultural practice through the exploits of Ma in Tanga, who keeps a lover after her husband’s death without reim bursing her bride price. To escape cultural injunctions, ridicule, and chastisem ent, she simply lies when she is caught returning from her lover’s residence. In similar widowhood exigencies, Bertha and Megri in Diable are restricted to the confines of their houses for a mourning period of seven days after le Pygmee’s death. During this time, they lie on the bare floor and are expected not to leave, work, or bathe. A lthough B ertha conforms, M egri revolts against these custom ­ ary injunctions of anguish and of enforced solitude. She does so by bathing, brightly decorating her face, and going out in a low-necked, yellow, high-street fashion dress and multi-colored sandals. These elements of revolt fulfill two radical feminist agendas: revalorizing the female body and reappropriating the power of gaze, both of which afford women power against patriarchal stipulations. Resisting Marriage and Reappropriating the Female Body Resisting marriage and reappropriating female bodies are mecha­ nisms through which Beyalian women are able to reclaim agency UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY 6 UFAHAMU in patriarchal systems. Thi^m underscores excision and infibu- Iations, forced m arriages, polygamy, and silencing as the m ost common and insupportable machineries of female oppression. In Thiam ’s view, some women who are conscious of their oppressed state have devised m eans of coping and/or outright rejecting oppression, while o thers have found no m eans of escape.16 In consequence, the “war of the sexes” goes beyond the realm of physical bodies and enters the psychical realm. To capture this, some authors portray women as psychologically disabled hum an beings who often become susceptible to post-traumatic stress dis­ order, hypoactive sexual desire disorder, and tendencies toward infanticide or homicide. Beyala pays particular attention to the post-traum atic stress disorders suffered by her protagonists after they experience virginity tests. A teba in Soleil, the eponymous heroine in Tanga, and Megri in Diable are all examples of female characters who m anifest psychical dam age as a result of hege­ monic demands placed on women. A practical example occurs in Diable when eighteen-year- old girls, like M egri, are m ade to go through a virginity test at the hands of Pretresse-goitree. That episode leaves Megri m arked with shame and trauma. Weighed down by cultural pressures and by men’s inadequate emotional support for women’s psychosocial needs, Beyala’s radical feminist archetypes often degenerate into : m ental disorders tha t result in infanticide and homicide. In the i final analysis, declaring a gender war seems to be the only escape \ route for women. According to Rangira B. Gallimore, a feminist ' critic, the w ar'B etw een m en and w om en is obvious in B eyala’s work: in her bid to place women on a higher pedestal, Beyala mer­ cilessly ridicules m ale power that issues from patriarchal systems.17 Therefore, her characters’ resistance to marriage and motherhood, as well as their tendencies to kill their male aggressors, form part of Beyala’s agenda to reappropriate women’s bodies. In B eyala’s debut, Soleil, as well as in her successive nar­ ratives, her fem ale characters are physically unhealthy and clad in ta tte red clothes. The description of Tanga’s m other’s physi­ cal appearance confirms the wretched state of women, who are trea ted as subalterns and as prisoners caught in a web of hege­ m onic traditions. B eyala’s fem ale characters are portrayed as people who w ear “old, dull ‘grey’ color boubou with collapsed breasts, frizzy w hitish shock of hair, the corners of their lips UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY OLAYINKA 7 sunken by flaws that accentuate their female destiny emerging from nothingness heading for emptiness.”18 Hence, Beyala bestows women’s bodies with the physical marks of suffering—a traumatic representation of im prisonm ent through patriarchal traditions. N athalie E toke, a C am eroonian author and fem inist, equally opines that suffering, pains, and subjection mark feminine identity in La Petite peule, an autobiographical novel by the Senegalese feminist writer Mariama Barry.19 For these authors, a woman only exists in a patriarchal system w hen she subjects herself to various dehumanizing processes and codes of social conduct. In a B eyalian world, w om en are viciously m olested by authorities, are forgotten, and go unrecognized by society. Prison­ ers to patriarchal injunctions, they are compelled to live under gruesom e conditions w here m en com m it adultery, rape, and im pregnate their daughters w ith impunity. It is a society where a woman is a shadow of her real self.20 The lexical apparatus with which Pa, Tanga’s father, describes M a captures how the female body is devalued by Beyala’s oppressive male characters. The kind of frustration th a t m arks the lives of B eyalian women, who are confused by the excessive dem ands that pa tri­ archal cultural practices place on them , makes it necessary for a feminist of Beyala’s rank to textualize women’s and m en’s bodies in order to enable women to assert themselves through resistance and agency. In Soleil, A teba, after being raped by an aggressor, tries to take a shower to cleanse herself of the man’s sperm. How­ ever, the m an will not let her go and instead forces his penis into her mouth, up to the summit of her throat, and says: “que D ieu a sculpte la femme a genoux aux pieds de l’homme.”21 Consequently, A teba is provoked beyond m easure and spills out the man’s sperm at his feet. In a similar m anner, Tanga vomits and flushes Cul-de- Jatte’s sperm away with w ater after sexual intercourse to signify female bodily purification from contact with males and to empty herself of sperm in order to avoid pregnancy. Second, her actions serve as a symbolic way of extricating herself from her past sexual encounters with men, an experience which she claims drums on her tem ple and aggresses h er incessantly. The actions of these female protagonists directly enable them to confront patriarchal indices of oppression. To set the record straight, Calixthe Beyala chooses to tex­ tualize female and male bodies using literary binoculars. Beyala UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY 8 UFAHAMU artistically maneuvers patriarchal social norms through her sub­ versive fem inist vision and turns the table around in favor of women, who, according to literary critic, novelist, and feminist Eva Figes, have been shaped by men.22 Beyala makes her protagonists . undertake actions that literally shut men out of their psyches by denying men access to their bodies. For instance, instead of he t­ erosexual gratification of her erotic needs, A teba chooses to caress herself and to m asturbate in her days of “innocence” to derive sexual pleasure and to break away from the hegexnonic order that suppresses her from freely auto-possessing and expressing her sexuality. She employs m asturbation as a way to break andro­ centric holds and to distance herself from men so that she will not be contam inated by them; she considers men to be the seeds of disorder. By so doing, auto-eroticism enables A teba to create for herself a kind of feminist space that assures her total separa­ tion from males. It also saves her from the need to engage with another woman via a lesbian relationship. Therefore, massaging Betty’s (A teba’s m other) body does not translate into gratifying her sexual needs; rather, it translates into purifying Betty of men’s touches and from their deposits into her body.23 Extermination of M an’s Dom ination As violent as they are, abortion, infanticide, and murder are other potent weapons Beyala offers to her protagonists. According to Frangoise Lionnet, an American literary comparatist and specialist in gender studies, violence becomes “the ultimate act of resistance and survival.”24 Every act of violence and agony, either in action or in words, is for Beyala’s protagonists a liberating means to justify their desires for freedom from patriarchal objectification. Irene’s abortion, in which A teba is the lead accomplice, is a symbolic, apocalyptic act tha t kills the seed of the m an who im pregnated her before a child is born. By suppressing procreation, she seeks to end man’s oppressive tendencies against women. Hence, Irene declares that m an will no longer take hold of her. The use of the conjugated;future tense of the verb will (no longer) take25 is affir­ mative and significant. It is the indicative mode of the French verb “prendre” (to take). W hen Irene speaks in the indicative mode, she signifies the reality of her de term ination that m en can no longer take possession of h e r—because she has emptied herself UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY OLAYINKA 9 * of the seed that a man deposited in her. Consequently, she fully possesses her body. Irene’s death has been interpreted as an act of liberation. If Beyala had allowed the character to live and to metamorphose, Irene could have demonstrated her victory over male domination. It would seem, however, that Beyala positions death by violence as the only machinery through which women can free themselves from oppression. This arises because Irene’s death makes it pos­ sible for her to reemerge in the dead body of A teba’s unnamed rapist. The synchronization of A te b a ’s lover’s death by m urder and the resurrection (albeit imaginary) of Irene is highly signifi­ cant: it is through the death of the “old oppressed woman” that the new, emancipated woman can be rediscovered and reinvented. The emancipated woman’s rediscovery, however, is linked to the death of patriarchy, which is symbolized through the death of the man that A teba murders. Com m enting on violence in Beyala’s narratives, Gallimore argues that B eyala’s heroines reappropri­ ate their bodies through violence and establish an irreversible rupture between the oppressor and the oppressed.26 For Beyala’s protagonists to achieve liberty, they deliberately use homicide and infanticide as weapons to register their disgust against female objectification. As far as B eyala’s fem inist prototypes are con­ cerned, violence begets violence a t all costs. For them , fem ale liberation is the act of rejecting and moving against every aspect of culture that objectifies the female gender. Judging by M oi’s (the om nipresent narrator in So ld i) defi­ nition of fem ale destiny, the death of an oppressed wom an is necessary in order for her to be reborn free. According to M oi’s perspective, a woman’s body, through m etaphorical death, finds redefinition, rebirth, and victory over hegemony. Therefore, the eschatological state of the female gender seems to be a promising means of em ancipation—even violence. Women, as metaphorical seeds, must fall to the ground and regerm inate as women capable of giving light and liberation in the place of darkness and oppres­ sion, which m ale figures represent. M oi therefore predicts the inevitability of the death of the woman and encourages the pro­ tagonist, A teba, to first fall in death and then to rise and shine light on darkness before winning back the legend. The irreversible rupture tha t G allim ore implies becomes a necessity in Bevala’s work: Bevala reckons that symbiosis between UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY 10 UFAHAMU * m en and women can only occur if wom en first break free of all forms of oppression. Violence in the Beyalian sense goes beyond linguistic violence and moves in to the realm of m urder and infanticide in order to stop marriages and procreation and to reap­ propriate the female body.27 A teba’s libidinal desire to commit homicide derives from her need to purify womenfolk. This desire is sublimated in A teba’s unconscious and ambivalently pervades her calculated anti-patri­ archal tendencies—until her id drive to exterm inate’patriarchal oppression is expressed at the end of the novel. A t tha t point, A teba satisfies her desire by killing her nameless one-night aggres­ sor. Following M oi’s narration, the way A teba kills her aggressor resembles the desire she expressed earlier while she massaged her mother. The massage scene is similar to the scene in which A teba finally unleashes her anger and kills the man. To physically disconnect from oppressive male characters, Beyala dis-eroticizes the female body by disconnecting the female psyche from male contact. This is another example of an act that exterm inates m an’s dom ination in order to further reduce male power. She disconnects bo th genders spatially and mentally by psychically disallowing and denying w hat is happening in the physical. Thus, m ale possession of a fem ale body is m ade psy­ chologically unreal; in this instance, an oppressed woman takes control of her body and prevents it from being possessed by a male oppressor. Consequently, Beyala’s protagonists do not derive pleasure from sexual encounters, according to Gallimore, because they refuse to participate in female-male eroticism.28 Rather, they choose to mentally exile themselves from the erotic world of men. A t A teba’s first contact with Jean Zepp, her aunt’s tenant, she pleads for the purifying potency of tears and of the lagoon to transform her body and to cleanse her of Jean Zepp’s agonizing touch. A teba is thus portrayed as mentally ill—prepared to engage in erotic affairs with men to the extent that she feels polluted at the touch of a man. A teba physically and psychologically sepa­ rates her body from that of the man’s to violate the law that orders her to submit her body to masculine emotion and to avoid contact w ith sperm , which Beyala describes as “the seed of disorder.29 Every female body felled in bed by m an resembles her own image. In essence, she sees herself as the one being torn apart. A teba con­ sequently finds it necessarv to divorce her bodv from male contact UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY OLAYINKA 11 physically, psychologically, and spatially. She castrates men gener­ ally by suspending and breaking this particular man’s feelings, and, at the same time, by maintaining distance from males in order to deprive them of the powers of generation and regeneration. She does so to exterminate the subjection of female bodies to patriar­ chal possession and oppression. Bis-eroticizing the Female Body A host of Beyalian fem ale characters often show repugnance toward sexual intercourse with men. They do not freely give them­ selves to sexual pleasure, and in their resistance, they are raped. During one such sexual assault with an unnamed man, A teba does not betray any sentim ents of enjoym ent. R ather, she violently resists the man’s advances. The lexical field Beyala chooses to describe this scene makes clear A teba’s lack of amorous desire for men. It also depicts the dis-eroticization of her body and the resis­ tance she employs as she attem pts to psychologically separate her body from that of the man. A teb a’s chosen modes of resistance against her aggressor—beating, biting, tightening her thighs, rear­ ing up against him, obstructing the movement of his hand into her vagina, turning her head, spitting on his face, moaning, scratching him, and pulling and choking his penis—are some of the weapons she employs to dis-eroticize her body.30 Similarly, A teba’s friend, Irene, describes her encounter with a man whom she calls a bloke?1 and sugar daddy.32 H e description of the sexual acts that happened betw een the two of them por­ trays that it is the man who is both psychologically and physically involved in the sexual act. H e is the major subject in the scene, while Irene is the object: Monsieur me demande de sucer son true. Je refuse__ Le true tout petit et tout rouge__ Total: il me jette sur le lit, il fonce sur moi, il se frotte, il me caresse les seins, le ventre, le clitoris. « Je veux te donner du plaisir », qu’il dit en me bavant dessus. Et moi je le regarde comme pa d’un ceil tout retourne comme si j ’etais deja partie.33 The man asks me to suck his thing. I refuse__ The thing is very small and all red__ In summary: he throws me on the bed, he rushes at me, he rubs himself against mv bodv, he caresses my UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY 12 UFAHAMU breasts, my stomach, my clitoris. “I want to give you pleasure, he says leaking me all over the body. And me, I watch him like that with an eye turned away as if I had already left. Refusing, describing the sugar daddy in injurious terms, and wit­ nessing are the only actions Irene perform s during this forced assault. These actions reveal her lack of participation and her disinterest in the man and in sexual intercourse, except for her interest in the money she received from offering her.body in an encounter that is tantam ount to prostitution. Ekassi, one of the female characters in Soleil, offers her body while preventing any psychological control or possession of her body by men. Like Irene, she offers her body because of the basic necessity for survival. She also offers her body because she wishes to obtain freedom for Gala, her lover. H er remarks on her sexual intercourse with policemen say it all when she responds that the act was nothing more than the body.34 In the same vein, Tanga’s grandmother dis-eroticizes her body by burying palm kernels into her vagina. A nother character, K hadjaba in Tanga, also under­ takes this painful act in order to register her resentment against m en and against m aternity after she is serially raped and then gives birth to Tanga’s mother. Similarly, Tanga all but transforms her flesh into a m achine—her body exists without feeling, color, and the usual bodily m ovem ents th a t connote sexual pleasure. This demonstrates her body’s denial of real presence and enjoy­ m ent, even though it is engaged in sexual acts. H er body is not totally released having been psychologically banned from that environm ent. G allim ore explains th a t B eyala’s refusal to use reflexive or reciprocal verbs emphasizes the psychological dis­ tance that separates female protagonists’ bodies from male ones. 35 The same process, divorcing the body and the psyche through dis-eroticization, occurs in Diable w hen Megri narrates how she distances her body and her m ental participation from l’E tranger’s gaze before he makes any sexual demands. She stated that without reflecting, she tightened hard her thighs one against the other to prevent her' aggressor from gaining access into her vagina. She does this to an agonizing extent thereby forbidding herself all forms of pleasure derivable from sex and becoming a m urderer herself.36 Since Megri does not actually commit suicide, her m en­ tion of it could be understood as an act of contemplating fatalistic UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY OLAYINICA 13 * • suicide, which is one of the four types of suicide identified by D avid Em ile Durkheim. H er contem plation occurs because of the excessive regulation she experiences in the hegemonic milieu, which in turn culminates in her disillusionment, disappointment, and confusion.37 H er contem plation of suicide is a byproduct of the extrem ely suppressive cultural environm ent in which she lives—one where her passion for life, her will to live, and her abili­ ties for self-realization are strangled. For Megri, fatalistic suicide constitutes a solution: it is a way to escape patriarchal oppression. Invoking a New Female Image Beyala includes the transform ation of fem ale sexuality on her agenda to transform the fem ale body. This aspect of her fem i­ nist revolt addresses modernization that has occurred as a result of contact with the W estern world. For instance, feminist critic Chioma O para indicates that clothing is one of the mechanisms through which A frican w om en are m arked and oppressed in patriarchal societies.38 Transforming the body and how it looks, including what is worn, is imperative to enact feminist change in the world. In line with B eyala’s fem inist agenda, A teba, Tanga, Megri, Betty, and M ademoiselle E toundi (a feminist archetype in Diable) are often clad in clothes fashioned after the W estern world. In their quest for liberty, Beyalian protagonists transform their bodies by dressing like W estern women and by making use of bleaching creams to liberate themselves from procrustean cul­ tural demands. A t times, they overdress by wearing tight-fitting t-shirts and mini-skirts, which by social norm s are synonymous with harlotry and cultural aberration, and are insulted by people in their societies. Through the ways she clothes her characters, Beyala thus ascribes to most of her protagonists an internal locus of control and the ability to take their destinies in their own hands. Hence, bodily transformation is one of the mechanisms Beyala’s protagonists employ to draw for themselves an image of the free woman they desire to be. In that wise, Tanga paints her eye and her lips, takes a mirror and looks into it. These actions enable her to invoke the idea of the image she wants of herself - that of a clean and desirable woman not under the bondage of hegem o­ ny.39 Tanga’s use of. a mirror to confirm that she has transformed her aDnearance into what she wants is a svmbolic act: it signifies UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY 14 UFAHAMU that the patriarchal masculine gaze is no longer imbued with the authority to ratify her looks. She becomes a subject who invokes her own im ag e as c le a n and desirable instead of an object who is completely shriveled, exhausted, frustrated, and caricatured by time. For Megri, her bodily transform ation facilitates-destroying the yoke of a traditional, patriarchal practice that imposes suf­ fering on a woman’s body while she mourns the death of a loved one. In particular, Megri directly breaks that pact with tradition. She goes out, looks into a mirror, clothes herself in colorful attire, and applies makeup to her full face. Mirrors therefore become an unavoidable trope that oppressed African women need to create their own images in the way they desire. In other words, an Afri­ can wom an m ust find a way to conduct an auto-assessm ent to ensure that she is really the free woman she wants to be. Thus, Beyala postulates that African women should realize times have changed and that the African world must allow women to assume control of their own destinies and exercise control over their bodies. She clearly articulates this point when one of the sec­ ondary female characters declared that it was after all their body and that they had the right to do with it whatever they wanted.40 This view strongly invokes a new female image—one that stands in contrast to images of the past when girls did not go out, did no t question anything but only asked for a good husband and children.”41 Thus, Beyala depicts successful resistance to women’s subjugation: her liberated female characters call the bluff of tradi­ tion through their thoughts and self-fashioning actions. Im ageries and symbols used by Beyala serve as tropes to dem onstrate how women’s bodies are trapped by patriarchy in different facets of life. These symbols are immediate; even book titles are encoded. The imagery of the sun, used in the title and prologue of Soleil, connotatively signifies the suffering to which female bodies are exposed. From the translation of the title of the novel C ’estle soleil qui.m ’a brulee (The Sun Has Beaten Me), it is clear th a t the person being beaten by the sun is female: the main verb beaten {brulee), in its past perfect form, carries the gender m arker (the last le tter “e”) for female. In this instance, the sun (soleil) is a symbolic representation of patriarchy. F urther, B eyala em ploys im ages of lice, cells, restric ted spaces, and filth to illustrate the unimaginable oppression women experience., Lice are parasitic insects th a t feed on their h o st’s UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY OLAYINKA 15 blood. In this sense, Beyala uses the imagery, of lice to depict men as parasites: they suck women’s blood, while women are made to suck crass from their own bodies under the.pretext of patriarchal culture. Blood connotes life. If lice metaphorically represent men, then the symbolic interpretation is that men suck the life out of women, while women become receptacles for the dirt that issues from men’s bodies. Lice are picked from the head of Tapoussibre’s (the protagonist of La Petite fille du reverb ere) neighbour, which is emblematic of family structure in patriarchal societies. Men are positioned as heads over women, and unfortunately these men feed fat over women, just as we see Benerafa (Saida’s father) feed­ ing fat over his wife in Les honneurs perdus42 (hereafter referred to as Honneurs), le Pygmee feeding fat over bon Blanc in Diable, and Ada’s lovers feeding fat over her in Soleil. The feminist mes­ sage is in the joy Tapoussiere derives from hearing the sound of exploding lice as she kills them with her nails. This implies that men’s domination over women must be attacked through killing and that the death of patriarchy will give joy to women. The cell and other confined spaces are procrustean structures inside which women’s bodies are constricted. Tanga gives a vivid description of rats and cockroaches freely climbing over her fam­ ily’s living conditions. This is an unpleasant situation they have come to accept as normal and inevitable because of poverty—but also because Pa (the patriarch) takes no action to change the situa­ tion. These rats and cockroaches are metaphorical representations of men who constitute a nuisance to women and of situations where women have no Choice but to live with men and their deci­ sions. In Tanga’s opinion, when men who unequivocally symbolize the patriarchy die, much like rats that cause a putrefying odor, they should be buried and any memory of them repressed so that the psyches of women are not damaged. The omnipotent narrator in Soleil summarizes the lives of women using images of overused and oxidized objects and remarks that “les vieilles dames ressemblent a de vieux bidons rouilles, les uns comme les autres ranges par la vie, momifies par l’attente de la vie.”43 The choice of the metaphors in this phrase aptly captures the life of oppressed Beyalian women. Using such words to describe the women of Quartier General (QG) in Soleil implies that, in general, women are living dead bodies that are squeezed to the left angle of life, where they are not supposed to be heard.UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY 16 UFAHAMU Rupturing Silence, Breaking the Pact: Gaining Her Voice to Save Her Body That women are compressed into corners and are accustomed to discomfort speaks to the fact that women’s bodies have been so subjected to miserable lives that women are no longer able to recognize misery. When they do, they simply cannot voice it. This same kind of abject and abnegated life is visible in Tanga, when Ma is described by Tanga as shadow of a being unaware of herself.44 Psychologically silenced by patriarchal tradition, Ma demonstrates her helplessness in the face of her husband’s mis­ conduct, which includes adultery, incest, and debauchery. She welcomes Pa’s concubines into her home and takes no action to defend Tanga when she is raped and impregnated by Pa. A similar scene occurs in Evelyne Mpoudi-Ngolle’s Sous la cendre le feu, where Djibril Mohamadou almost rapes his sister-in-law and later does rape his surrogate daughter.45 Instead of saying something when her sister is almost raped, Mina, his wife, chooses to keep quiet until she learns that he has raped her daughter. She ends up as a neurotic patient. Without psychoanalytical intervention, Mina could have died a mad woman.46 From the experiences of the oppressed women in the various texts that I have explored in this article, two potent patriarchal weapons used to perpetrate women’s oppression and to sustain hegemonic traditions in African societies appear to emerge: psy­ chological and physical silencing. Through ascription of social roles, oppression, societal expectations, and stereotyping, African women often face difficulties expressing dissent against oppres­ sion. This same trend, men silencing and brutalizing women, is found in Aminata Ka Maiga’s La Voie du salut and Philomene Bassek’s La Tache de sang,47 In these novels, women experience psychological torture from their husbands but do not voice it. Such silencing, often results in psychological disorders such as depression, psychosis, de-realisation, de-personalisation, low self­ esteem, and others. At times, such women live with these terrible experiences until they die. Rokhaya, a new bride and protagonist in La Voie du salut, carries her depression to her grave after she is trained to remain submissive to her husband all her life. Rokhaya is counselled by her uncle, Baba Galle, and her aunt to be blindly obedient to herUNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY OLAYINKA 17 husband in order to honor her family. She is also told to ensure the wellbeing of her children in order tip procure her license to paradise. Rokhaya’s marriage is symbolized by a box to which only she has the key, and this conveys the idea that marriage, as an institution, confines women and inhibits their abilities to freely express themselves. A part from the symbolical silencing of the female voice through excision and infibulations, outward expression and enjoyment of female sexuality is also suppressed through these practices. Even though Beyala’s male characters are described as unable to properly make love to a woman or to make women „ enjoy the act of love-making, the genital mutilation of Beyala’s female characters also contributes to their inability to enjoy sex. Although Beyala seems silent on the issue of cause and effect, excision and virginity tests, as explained in her novels, are pro­ cesses that can cause frigidity in females. Drawing on scientific findings, Etoke suggests that 85 percent of excised females expe­ rience frigidity and sexual frustration.48 Basing her analysis on Abasse Ndione’s Ramata, Etoke explicates how excision contrib­ utes to the eponymous heroine’s frigidity and sexual frustration.49 Given such findings, the lack of pleasure expressed by Beyala’s female characters becomes understandable. Excision and infibula- tion, as well as men’s inability to give women sexual pleasure, are key factors that prevent Beyala’s female characters from deriving pleasure from sex. Further, girls are not allowed to express pain or fear during excision. This operates as a mechanism to mentally prepare women to be stoic, to bear the pains of patriarchal oppression, and to suffer in silence until death. The stoicism of Beyala’s protago­ nists often leads to their psychological and physical deaths, since they are forbidden to speak about the deplorable conditions they experience in their marriages. Their stoicism encourages states of self-denial and suicidal acts. For instance, Mama Ida in La Tache meets her untimely death because she refuses to verbally acknowledge and to resist her husband’s oppressive tendencies.50 Gallimore, alluding to Michel Erlich, opines that the family’s honor is also tied to this sort of voice control.51 According to Gal­ limore, girls who undergo genital amputation must not betray any sign of pain; if they do, they will bring shame upon their families.UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY 18 UFAHAMU Conclusion Bey ala employs eclectic strategies to militate against the oppres­ sion of women and to reinstate female bodies. H er sensitivity to the feminine condition in Africa informs the strategies she employs to dismantle mythical creations surrounding African women’s oppression. Beyala does not appear to shy away from demystifying cultural beliefs that are implicated in the subjugation of African women. Instead, she reworks the female body to reap­ propriate it and set it free from patriarchal oppression. A major observation in Bey ala’s feminist commitment is that her narratives are some of the most radical within, twenty-first century African feminist preoccupations. Her major concern is to challenge and overthrow the existing patriarchal order in androcen­ tric societies by opposing all established gender roles, stereotypes, and oppressions of women. In her war against female oppression and her quest for total female liberation, she acts as an ombudsman to militantly call for a radical reordering of society—through the use of revolutionary acts to suppress the binary opposition that clas­ sifies women as “other” in all African societies. Through deploying themes of auto-eroticism, homicide, infanticide, refusal of marriage, bodily and psychical dis-eroticization, and the physical transforma­ tion of female bodies via fashion, Beyala shows her commitment to African feminism in the diaspora and discusses strategies, often painful and traumatic, through which women can claim freedom. Essentially, Beyala uses her female protagonists to rupture the silences imposed on them by hegemonic cultural practices in order to revalorize female bodies. The feminist writings of Beyala are preoccupied with bodily discourse. She succeeds in her enter­ prise by transgressing language in order to break cultural and traditional barriers. Notes : 'i ; i i 1 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).- . 2 Awa Thiam, Paroles auxnegresses (Paris: Editions Denoel, 1978). Translated into English in 1986 with the title Black Sisters, Speak Out: Feminism and Oppres­ sion in Black Africa. ■ 3 AwaThiam, Black Sisters, Speak Out'. Feminism and Oppression in Black Africa, trans. Dorothy S. Blair (London: Pluto Press, 1986).UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY OLAYINKA 19 4 Bible Society, “Song of Songs,” Good. News Bible (China: Collins, 2014), 663. 5 “Offrez-le aux hommes, vos dieux humains, pour qu’ils Paiment! Laissez-les se frotter a vous sans degout ni rebellion car leur dos, leur cou ont besoin de se reposer et de danser sur vous!” Calixthe Beyala, Seul le diable le savait (Paris: Le Pre aux Clercs, 1990), 60. A note on translations :.I have taken the liberty to oscil­ late between using the orignal French and English translation (all translations my own) in the body of the main text, this choice based on my perceived effective­ ness of the quote in French or English. I have Utilized footnotes to provide the alternative, when I felt necessary. 6 “La femme n’est malheureuse que parce qu’elle oublie d’etre heureuse . . .” Ibid., 217. 7 “La femme de la societe africaine contemporaine chez Calixthe Beyala.” Jiff Mokobia, Women Novelists in Francophone Black Africa: Views, Reviews, and Interviews, ed. E.E. Omonzejie (Porto-Novo: Edition Sonou dAfrique,2010), 179. R Calixthe Beyala, C’est le soleil qui m’a brdlee (Paris: Le Pre aux Clercs, 1990), 46. 9 “danger, un virus que l’on contractait. . .” Calixthe Beyala, Lettre d’une Afric­ aine a ses sceurs occidentales (Paris: Spengler, 1995), 21. 10 Calixthe Beyala, Tu t’appelleras Tanga (Paris: J’ai Lu, 1997), 85-86. 11 Beyala, Diable, 241. 12 “je ne veux pas me multiplier.” Beyala, Tanga, 166. 13 “je la detaillai, avec ddgoflt, cette grosse femme manidree, aux seins degou- linants, epuisee par les maternitds et les frequentes parties de jambes en Pair auxquelles elle se contraignait, esperant ainsi empecher son mari d’aller courir les bas-fonds.” Beyala, Diable, 200. 14 Calixthe Beyala, La petite fille du reverbere (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998). 15 Lauretta Ngcobo, “African Motherhood - Myth and Reality,” African Litera­ ture: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, ed. T. Olaniyan and A. Quayson (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2010), 533-541. 16 Thiam, Black Sisters, 113. 17 Rangira B. Gallimore, L’ceuvre romanesque de Calixthe Beyala: le renouveau de I’ecriture feminine en Afrique francophone sub-saharienne (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997). 18 “boubou gris est use a l’endroit des aisselles . . . seins ecroules . . . tignasse crdpue, blanchatre par endroits, . . . Les coins de ses levres affaissdes par lels defaites souhgnent son destin de femme surgie de neant allant vers le vide.” Beyala, Tanga, 36. 19 Nathalie Etoke, L’fcriture du corps feminin dans la litterature de VAfrique fran­ cophone au sud du Sahara. (Paris: L’Harmatt'an, 2010); Mariama Barry, La petite Peule (Paris: Mazarine, 2000). 20 Beyala, Tanga, 43., 21 “how God has created woman on her knees at the feet of man.” Beyala, Soleil, 151. 22 Eva Figes, Patriarchal Attitudes: Women in Society (London: Macmillan, 1986). 23 Beyala, Soleil, 89-90. ' 24 Cited by Gallimore in L’amvre romanesque, 95.UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY 20 UFAHAMU 25 “prend” Beyala, Soleil, 140. 26 Gallimore, L'Oeuvre romanesque. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 “le germe du desordre.” Beyala, Soleil, 22. 20 “elle le frappe . . . elle le mord, elle ne veut pas . . . elle se cabre, elle serre les cuisses pour faire obstacle a la main qui se fraye un chemin a coup d’ongles , . . elle detourne la tete . . . elle lui crache au visage . . . elle gem it. . . elle le griffe . . . D’un geste rageur elle accroche sa main.au sexe, le retire, le serre,.-..de plus en plus fort, elle Fetrangle.” Ibid., 131-132. 31 “mec” (slang). Ibid., 98. 32 “kruma.” Ibid., 98. 33 Ibid., 99. 34 .. ce n’etait rien. Rien que du corps” Ibid., 51. 35 Gallimore, Oeuvre romanesque. 36 “Sans reflechir, je serrai mes cuisses l’une contre l’autre. Je serrai fo r t.. .Toute ma nervosite, centree, la, a l’endroit du sexe. . . serrer jusqu’a l’agonie. M’interdire tout plaisir. Devenir meurtriere. De moi-meme.” Beyala, Diable, 158. 37 Emile Durkheim, Le suicide: etude de sociologie (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). 38 Chioma Opara, “Clothing as Iconography: Examples of Ba and Emecheta,” in Feminism and Black Women’s Creative Writing: Theory, Practice, Criticism, ed. A. Adebayo (Ibadan: AMD Publishers, 1996), 110-125. 39 ““.. je peignais un ceil, les levres. Je ramassais un miroir. J’invoquais l’idee de l’image que je voulais de m o i . . . Je le pomponnais. II etait propre. II etait desir­ able . . .’.’ Beyala, Tanga, 100-101. 4n “Apres tout c’est leur corps. Elies ont droit d’en faire ce qu’elles veulent.” Beyala, Soleil, 66. 41 “les filles ne sortaient pas, ne se posaient pas de questions. Elies ne deman- daient qu’un bon mari et des enfants.” Ibid., 66. 42 Calixthe Beyala, Les honneurs perdus (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996). - 43 “old women resemble old corroded cans, all of them devoured by life, mummi­ fied by expectations of life.” Beyala, Soleil, 11. 44 “ombre d’un etre qui s’ignorait.” Beyala, Tanga, 43. 45 Evelyn Mpoudi Ngolle, Sous la cendre lefeu (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1990). 46 Wumi Olayinka, “Madness and Free Association in Evelyne Mpoudi Ngolle’s Sous la cendre le feu,” Ibadan Journal of European Studies, no. 7 (April 2007). 47 Aminata Maiga Ka, La voie du salut, suivi de Le miroir de la vie (Dakar: Presence Africaine, 1.985); Philomene Bassek, La tache de sang (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1990). 48 Etoke, L’&criture. 49 Abasse Ndione, Ramata (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2000) cited by Nathalie Etoke (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010). 50 Bassek, La tache. 51 Gallimore, L’oeuvres romanesaues. UNIV ERSIT Y O F IB ADAN L IB RARY