Violence in Francophone African and Caribbean Women's Literature

1. Exclusion as Violence: Frantz Fanon, Black Women, and Colonial Violence

1 Exclusion as Violence Frantz Fanon, Black Women, and Colonial Violence Critical studies of African and Caribbean women writing remain scarce.1 The reasons for this absence are twofold. First, at the beginning of the formation of African literary studies in the mid-twentieth century, there were relatively few women writers in Africa and the Caribbean. This was mainly due to the external violence of colonialism , which privileged the schooling of the male. It was also attributable to internal violence originating from precolonial and postcolonial patriarchal conceptions that prevented women in traditional and contemporary societies from expressing themselves or acquiring the same educational level as men. Maryse Condé writes, for example, that “comme dans un premier temps, l’école était réservée aux garçons, elle a introduit plus qu’un fossé entre ‘lettrés’ et ‘illéttrées,’ une division radicale des sexes” [Since in the beginning, (European) schools were reserved for boys, it introduced more than a gap between literate men and illiterate women, a radical division between the sexes] (La Parole 3). 20 EXCLUSION AS VIOLENCE Second, scholars who preferred to study the growing canon of African and Caribbean literatures ignored the few women writers who existed. Early anthologies of black African literature, such as Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (1948) by Léopold Sédar Senghor or Les écrivains noirs de langue française: naissance d’une littérature (1965) by Lilyan Kesteloot, hardly include any black African women writers. Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido, coeditors of Out of the Kumbla, Caribbean Women and Literature, describe the absence of women writers in Caribbean studies as “voicelessness”: “The concept of voicelessness necessarily informs any discussion of Caribbean women and literature. . . . By voicelessness, we mean the historical absence of the woman writer’s text: the absence of a specifically female position on major issues such as slavery, colonialism, decolonization, women’s rights and more direct social and cultural issues. By voicelessness we also mean silence: the inability to express the position in the language of the ‘master’ as well as the textual construction of woman as silent. Voicelessness also denotes articulation that goes unheard” (1). This same voicelessness applies even more to African women, who have been historically silenced in various discourses. It is important to point out that Caribbean women such as Mayotte Capécia, Michèle Lacrosil, Maryse Condé, Marie Vieux Chauvet, and Simone Schwarz-Bart were published earlier than Francophone African women writers, though they still did not receive the critical attention that their male counterparts enjoyed. To understand this voicelessness, I want to go back to Fanon and provide a critical analysis of this major twentieth-century authority, who contributed, perhaps more than any other thinker from Africa and the Caribbean, to the silencing of black women. Despite numerous shortcomings, Fanon best demonstrates the prevalent attitudes toward women’s position within the colonial experience. He also provides rare insight into the relationship between black women and men, black or white. Unlike writers of the same period, Fanon wrote about the black woman, but he did so selectively and EXCLUSION AS VIOLENCE 21 ambivalently. A study of his position on colonialism and black women is crucial, for he supplies us with useful tools to perceive reactions as well as questions embedded in contemporary literature by women from Africa and the Caribbean. Over the last few years, there has been an ongoing debate regarding postcolonial conditions. Discussions center around issues related to continuous colonial states in “subaltern” areas such as the third world, in its geographical and ideological senses. These issues, which influence immensely the current discourse on race relations, have dealt mainly with the formation of racial identities as a product of colonial power. However, gender continues to be a problematic question within the postcolonial discourse. The goal of this chapter is to continue the debate over the significance of gender politics by closely examining Frantz Fanons’ texts in light of the current postcolonial climate. I attempt to answer the following fundamental questions: What position does Fanon allocate the colonized woman in the decolonizing mission? How does the ambiguous nature of his analyses affect our understanding of the relationship between postcolonialism and feminism? There is no doubt that Frantz Fanon’s writings are by far the most influential sources in the production of today’s postcolonial criticism...