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  • Writing from the Hearth: Public, Domestic, and Imaginative Space in Francophone Women's Fiction of Africa and the Caribbean
  • Dawn Fulton
Mildred Mortimer . Writing from the Hearth: Public, Domestic, and Imaginative Space in Francophone Women's Fiction of Africa and the Caribbean. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2007. xvi + 207 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $75.00. Cloth. $29.95. Paper.

In Mortimer's earlier work, Journey Through the African Novel (Heinemann, 1990), a consideration of the journey motif in novels from Francophone Africa prompted a reflection on the incidence of gender in the experience of spatial displacement. Writing from the Hearth elaborates on that question, focusing on the binary divisions characterizing women's navigation of space, [End Page 205] between public and private, domestic and political, and real and imaginary spaces. Testing her hypothesis that "the female protagonist moves toward empowerment by transforming domestic space from a closed restrictive space into 'alternative' space" (24), Mortimer looks at a wide range of texts by Francophone African and Caribbean women writers, organizing the book's chapters around pairings of writers from either side of the Atlantic.

As in the author's previous work, the book follows a thematic thread through a diverse set of literary works, according attention to similarities and differences alike to avoid either wide-reaching generalizations or irreconcilable particulars. Mortimer remains true to her stated aim to be "attentive to ambiguities associated with domestic space, continually questioning whether domestic enclosures represent refuge or prison" (187). This methodological strength is also a potential weakness, however, because the vacillations between the particular and the general can at times inhibit the argumentative momentum and make the analysis seem a bit disjointed. Nonetheless, Mortimer makes a concerted effort to revisit the same novels in various chapters of the book, thus lending a sense of coherence and synthesis to her project.

The book's first chapter presents a thematic overview and establishes the primary theoretical and critical influences at work in the study. Mortimer explores postcolonial theory, feminism, geography, and anthropology, but her methodological flexibility means that no one school or discipline is dominant; instead she puts these divergent approaches to understanding space in dialogue with one another as well as with critical readings of individual literary texts in the corpus. The second chapter presents the first of the book's four author pairings, taking up two very different novels set during the colonial era—Aoua Kéita's Femme d'Afrique: La vie d'Aoua Kéita racontée par elle-même and Maryse Condé's Moi, Tituba sorcière…noire de Salem—to examine resistance to patriarchal oppression and the quest for political and historical voice in nineteenth-century French Sudan and seventeenth-century New England. The next two chapters set up an opposition between the protected and potentially productive enclosed spaces of the home and the garden in Mariama Bâ's Une si longue lettre and Simone Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, on the one hand, and what Mortimer terms the "cold hearths" presented by the more bleak narratives of Calixthe Beyala and Marie Chauvet, on the other. This chapter is particularly effective in its lengthy consideration of two of Beyala's novels, La petite fille du réverbère and C'est le soleil qui m'a brûlée, offering a more nuanced view of Beyala's oeuvre than is accorded to other authors in the corpus and setting the stage for a fruitful juxtaposition with Marie Chauvet's Amour. Finally, Mortimer turns to the topic of migration in Aminata Sow Fall's Douceurs du bercail and Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory to explore the "transient subjectivities" elaborated in each text while extending her purview to an Anglophone text from the Caribbean diaspora.

Mortimer's careful readings and theoretical openness make this book a useful introduction to postcolonial Francophone literature by women [End Page 206] and thereby an important resource for the classroom. The study as a whole lends itself beautifully to an advanced undergraduate syllabus on the topic of space and gender in Francophone literature, but since the analysis of each novel stands on its own the book will...

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