Francophone African Women Writers. Destroying the Emptiness of Silence (review)

Book Reviews bulent career with a rare faith in the integrity of the poetic word and its powers to liberate on the one hand, and a rare faithfulness to Césaire's entire intellectual project on the other. Readers of Césaire criticism will not learn much that is new here, and Leiner's dithyrambic aphorisms can sometimes seem a bit jejune. But no one can deny the vital role she has played in animating, in the etymological sense of that word, Césaire studies. From the invaluable reediting of Tropiques, to the international colloquia she organized in 1983, 1985 and 1993 in Padua, Paris and Fort-de-France, to the two volumes of essays on Césaire by scholars from around the world which she has edited (all of which are documented in this collection), Jacqueline Leiner has created dialogues helping Césaire achieve the recognition he deserves. This tome testifies to the scope of her dedication. Ronnie Scharfman Purchase College SUNY Irène Assiba d'Almeida. Francophone African Women Writers. Destroying the Emptiness of Silence. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. Pp. xi + 222. $34.95. Irène d'Almeida's study of Francophone African women writers is neatly and clearly written; too neatly perhaps. While there is no doubt that her scholarship is serious and extensive, that, indeed, she knows her material well and understands what African societies are all about, she tends either to repress some issues to which she alludes or to simply not ask certain questions which would seem to be unavoidable. Appropriately, in her preface, d'Almeida emphasizes, in the words of Calyxthe Beyala, how important it is for the African critic to "destroy the emptiness of silence" surrounding Francophone African women writers. This corpus represents an interesting development in Francophone African literature that is still little known and, with few exceptions, not yet translated. Recognizing in these writers a group of militants eager to use the word as a weapon, and thus assert their new roles as writers, women and Africans, d'Almeida espouses a parallel attitude as an African critic and militant African feminist at the crossroads of several cultures. D'Almeida studies two genres: autobiography and the novel. In her section on autobiography , she considers Nafissatou Diallo (Senegal), Ken Bugul (Senegal), and Andrée Blouin (a French/African métisse who grew up in the Congo, but wrote in English, with the collaboration of Jean MacKellar). At this point, she tackles autobiography as a "pure" and simple genre, as described by Philippe Lejeune in Le Pacte autobiographique (1975), in which author, narrator, and protagonist are "identical." The complexity of the reconstruction of a "self" through the narrative process of memorization is not the focus here. The author seeks rather to show how the autobiographical voice is used to denounce patriarchy and colonialism. In Chapter 2, d'Almeida analyzes works by Beyala (Cameroon), Angèle Rawiri (Gabon), and Miriama Ba (Senegal) to show how "women negotiate and redefine their role" in the context of family relationships. Beyala's Tu t'appelleras Tanga is said to describe resistance to womanhood. Rawiri's Fureurs et cris de femmes, whose female character's desire to "give" her husband a male child becomes an obsession, revolves around the leitmotif of the womb. However, the dénouement brings about the protagonist 's liberation from her husband and his family. Manama Bâ's Un chant écarlate explores the many intersections of "race, class, and culture in a meeting of Africa and Europe" (99) and enhances the importance of solidarity between women. VOL. XXXVI, NO. 2 123 L'Esprit Créateur At the opening of her third chapter, d'Almeida admits that, as it is difficult to divide autobiography from fiction, it is also problematic to isolate Werewere Liking (Cameroon), Aminata Sow Fall (Senegal), and Véronique Tadjo (Ivory Coast) as "social critics." Liking's Orphée-Dafric shows that personal change is a sine qua non for any significant change to occur in society. Fall's L Έχ-père de la nation examines the rise and decline of an African politician, the conditions necessary for real political change, and depicts how the male characters' failure to serve...