Violence in Francophone African and Caribbean Women's Literature

3. Writing Familial Violence: Storytelling and Integrational Violence in Simone Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle and Calixthe Beyla's Tu t'appelleras Tanga

3 Writing Familial Violence Storytelling and Intergenerational Violence in Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle and Calixthe Beyala’s Tu t’appelleras Tanga In her article “Sheroes and Villains: Conceptualizing Colonial and Contemporary Violence against Women in Africa,” Amina Mama locates the source of contemporary African models of patriarchal violence in colonial states. These states not only used the famous colonial formula “Ayons les femmes et le reste suivra” [Let’s win over women and the men will follow] (“L’Algérie se dévoile” 18; “Algeria Unveiled” 37) but also adopted European concepts of womanhood such as repressive domestication. Patriarchal violence combines European models of violence against women with models of patriarchal oppression that existed both before and after colonialism. As Mama argues, colonialism “humiliated” African women not simply as “colonial subjects” but specifically as women. According to her findings, “African nationalist discourses have often proclaimed the need to recover the damaged manhood of the African man,” relegating the role of salvaging African manhood to the African woman, who was seen as the bearer and the 78 WRITING FAMILIAL VIOLENCE upholder of traditions and customs (Mama 54). I agree with Mama’s assertion that “the oppression of women within Europe had a direct bearing on the treatment of women in the colonies” and rendered “African women more vulnerable to the violence emanating from both European and African sources” (Mama 49). But as my analysis of Cajou and Le baobab fou demonstrates, a discussion of patriarchal violence requires us to look beyond imperial sources. Anticolonial movements did nothing to restore women’s dignity or to identify colonialism as a common trauma for both men and women. In this chapter, I continue gauging the specificity of women’s narratives by exploring female victimization through socially sanctioned patriarchal violence. Beyond analyzing the nature of private traumas such as domestic violence and abuse, this chapter examines the work of women writers who employ female protagonists to explore how female subjectivities survive through storytelling. Central to my analysis is the dynamics of female generational relationships, in particular how each female generation survives engendered violence. An examination of Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle (published in English as The Bridge of Beyond) and Calixthe Beyala’s Tu t’appelleras Tanga (Your Name Shall Be Tanga), reveals how women perceive violence in their lives and empower themselves through the act of storytelling.1 Both novels recount stories of pain and suffering incurred because of violent and traumatic events in the heroines’ lives. Does storytelling constitute a mechanism for healing? Does the medium serve to protect future female generations from violence? In Bugul’s Le baobab fou and Lacrosil’s Cajou, female characters are on the verge of madness and suicide. In the previous chapter, I argued that the writers’ main characters, Ken and Cajou, blame colonial violence for their plight. The heroines explicitly accuse their mothers of either abandoning them (Le baobab fou) or purposefully denying them a part of their black identity (Cajou). For Ken, her mixed feelings of hate and desire toward her mother lie in contrast to the feelings generated by the trope of “Mother Africa,” in which the African WRITING FAMILIAL VIOLENCE 79 mother embodies continuity in the face of disruptive colonization. Florence Stratton posits that the trope “is deeply entrenched in the male literary tradition” (Stratton 39), starting with Léopold Sédar Senghor. In his poem “Femme noire,” for instance, Senghor equates the mother’s body with the promised land, a safe place that guarantees continuity for Africans.2 Female protagonists have reacted differently to the recurrence of the “Mother” trope. In Le baobab fou, Ken Bugul imagines a heroine who discovers during her relentless identity quest that her mother does not fit the image suggested by Mother Africa. She is instead an absentee who does not provide her daughter with any sense of continuity. In her text, Bugul describes Ken’s trauma as the result of a lack of communication between the character and previous female generations. Bugul offers a rare examination of the effect of colonial disruption on female generations. According to Odile Cazenave, mother-daughter relationships have not been explored in African literature because “si l’on examine la littérature africaine des années 60 à 80 la mère est toujours présentée comme la mère du fils...