Tracing Personal Expansion: Reading Selected Novels as Modern African Bildungsromane (review)

The critical framework for Walter P. Collins’s Tracing Personal Expansion: Reading Selected Novels as Modern African Bildungsromane is clearly stated in the introductory chapter. Collins sees a correlation between the Bildungsromane of eighteenthcentury German writers and the works of twentieth-century African writers. In the introductory chapter, he writes that

analyses of African works as Bildungsromane provide great insight into complex issues represented in a body of fiction about individuals in the process of learning about themselves, about the world, and the interrelationship between the two. Although late-eighteenth century Germany is far away in time, place, and context from twentieth century Africa, there are similar personal discoveries and processes of development taking place on both sides of the Mediterranean Sea.

(33–34)

The first chapter, then, is a survey of the development of the European Bildungsroman and how its parameters can be used to identify similar characteristics in the modem African novel. To that extent, Collins chooses three African writers— Emecheta, Dangarembga, and Beyala—and situates their texts firmly within the tradition of the European Bildungsroman.

Following the paradigm that is established in the introductory section, the analysis pursued in each chapter thereafter works to show how the characters in the works of three different African women writers fall within the traditional definition of the Bildunsromane. Thus, Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen and In the Ditch, Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, and Beyala’s Le petit prince de Belleville and Maman a un amant “recount the stories of women who, to varying degrees and by different means, find qualified escape and expand toward individuation” (124). This movement towards individuation is repeatedly emphasized in all the chapters and it lays the foundation for a discussion of the three African women writers. One of the problems of Tracing Personal Expansion is that it fails to account for the differences between the European and African Bildungsromane. While the European version does not deal with race, the modern African Bildungsroman must deal not just with incidences of gender, power, and patriarchy, but also with race. An example of this is Beyala’s examination of race in the books that Collins explores. One of the problems that Beyala treats is that of individual expansion for the African immigrant in France. And while I agree with Collins that Beyala’s “representation of the potentials of women pushes constructions of selfhood to new limits” (104), M’am nevertheless concludes that her position in Paris is no different from her position in Mali. There is no space accorded the African woman for movement and expansion in France especially in the light of France’s xenophobic reactions to its immigrant population. Thus, because of race, the African woman is limited, and to examine her within the definitions of the European Bildungsroman is to universalize the problems of women without accounting for their differences. Collins, however, has written a book that can serve as an admirable introduction for the student new to African literature.