Language and Confinement in Francophone Women Writers

Language and Confinement in Francophone Women Writers Frieda Ekotto TWO TERMS OR CONCEPTS are particularly relevant to the three narratives discussed here, confinement and das unheimliche. They recur explicitly or implicitly in Evelyne Mpoudi Ngolle's Sous la cendre le feu (1990), Myriam Warner-Vieyra's Juletane (1982) and Mariama Bâ's Une si longue lettre (1980). Confinement in all its multifarious forms relates to a traumatic paralyzing space that Freud has called das unheimliche. For the main characters of our texts it derives from a conflictual event which has fractured their life, and it is through writing that such experiences of symbolic limits and pressures are represented. These limits and pressures have different outcomes, and leave different traces on the individual characters. These marks, like an irritation within an oyster's shell, find only one possible response: where pain is inscribed, writing constitutes a kind of lamentation, and such a use of language protects the individual from the destructiveness of confinement. In this essay, I will discuss how individual characters respond to different forms of confinement and how these stories are articulated by what Françoise Lionnet has called "geographies of pain." In these contexts, writing the daily struggle becomes a process that allows sorrowful experiences to be analyzed and understood. Understanding through language may help the individual to survive an ordeal, and give hope to change a situation. The experience of confinement is never simply separable from the quest for meaning through language.' In the specific context of postcolonial writing, alienation from the linguistic economy is already intertwined with other complex problems. Writing with a colonized language which is already inscribed within the patriarchal order of discourse is to empower oneself. The women in these narratives are using the colonized language to talk back, which implies that they are appropriating the language as their own. Using language means expressing a desire.2 These women use language to write about their experiences of being silenced and confined within the structure of their sociocultural milieu. First, I will analyze these narratives as discourse in a Foucauldian sense and show what constitutes confinement in each narrative. A key question emerges from this analysis: how can one possibly communicate experience that is unknown and unknowable? In other words, how does one invent a lanVol . XXXVIII, No. 3 73 L'Esprit Créateur guage to describe this experience? The capacity to tell one's story becomes vital: language and experience fuse. In a reversal of their traditional roles, language becomes singular while experience becomes collective: a singular and ingenious linguistic invention must take place in order to tell an individual story, while experience is at the same time radically de-individuated. Second, my analysis of individual characters will show how using language helps to locate the self as an essential political gesture and how self-representation becomes a way of dealing with confined space within the symbolic order. Articulating silence in Sous la cendre le feu. "Dis, Maman... c'est vrai que tu es devenue folle?" is the opening sentence of the narrative in the novel Sous la cendre le feu by Evelyne Mpoudi Ngolle.3 This question is asked by the four-year-old daughter of Mina, the main character, who has been hospitalized for depression. Thinking of her daughter and other people, she responds: Le docteur Lobé ne m'a parlé que d'un état dépressif, qui nécessite beaucoup de calme et de repos, raison pour laquelle je dois rester hospitalisée jusqu'à ce qu'on note une amélioration certaine . (5) Mina had been silenced by her feelings of being overwhelmed, small and helpless. She finds herself in the lunatic asylum, where the doctor tells her she is depressed and needs to rest a lot. Mina is depressed because she can not reveal the terrible secret in her heart of her experience of suffering. She tells her disturbing and painful story: while a student in high school, where she is regarded by many as a role model for other girls, she is impregnated by Joël Edimo, a medical student. He denies the fact and disappears. She is left alone and does not know what to do, especially...