Women Writers in Francophone Africa (review)

Women Writers in Francophone Africa, by Nicki Hitchcott. Oxford: Berg, 2000. 193 pp. ISBN 1085973-346-8 cloth.

The back cover of Women Writers in Francophone Africa proclaims the work to be "the first comprehensive study of women's writing in francophone sub-saharan Africa." This is only one of the many contradictory aspects of the book, for on the very first page, Nicki Hitchcott cites two important studies that precede her own, Irène D'Almeida's Francophone African Women WritersDestroying the Emptiness of Silence (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1994), and Odile Cazenave's Femmes rebellesnaissance d'un nouveau roman africain au féminin (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1996). Most contradictory, however, is Hitchcott's analysis of the function of gender in texts by Bâ, Beyala, Liking, Sow Fall, and others. While Hitchcott is sensitive to the fact that "any study of African women's writing which ignores the socio-cultural context of its production is not an activity which is ideologically acceptable" because such a study "would deservedly lead to accusations of social and literary imperialism" by producing limited readings of the texts (6), the almost exclusive use of Western feminist frameworks in this book has the very effect it purports to avoid. Indeed, even as it quotes Susan Andrade's assertion that "the cultural heterogeneity of Africa and African women must be foregrounded in any discussion of their literature" (qtd. 6), it ignores that advice and goes on to seek out a "provisional definition of African female subjectivity" using Anglo-American feminist and at times French feminist theory, while African, African-American, and so-called "Third-World" feminisms are marginalized. For example, Alice Walker's "womanism" does not even surface until page 158 in the final chapter of the work. This is ironic, given that Hitchcott also cites Mohanty's condemnation of "Western" feminism as well as Achebe's call for humility on the part of European critics when approaching African texts.

What emerges in Hitchcott's analysis is the positing of a monolithic "African woman's identity" in the fiction of the writers she analyzes. Using Clément and Cixous's categories "Activity/Passivity, Sun/Moon, Culture/Nature, Day/Night [. . .] Man/Woman" (10) Hitchcott posits a textual duality that in her view corresponds to the axis of tradition and modernity in what she loosely calls "the early texts" (10) of her corpus. While there may certainly be some truth to this duality, Hitchcott's analysis often follows this same rigid pattern, even when discussing the "multiplicity of the black woman's experience" (124) as evidenced in Liking's and Beyala's texts. In fact, Hitchcott equates textual evidence of (Western) feminism with "modernity," while ignoring the views on the subject quoted from interviews with the writers themselves. It hardly seems to occur to Hitchcott that in doing so, she has fallen into a colonialist discourse that equates tradition with backwardness, even as she acknowledges in her conclusion that there is a danger in applying what she terms "a seemingly universal phenomenon such as feminism to a culture in which feminism is explicitly rejected by writers whose texts have been identified as feminist" given that the continent "was colonized by Western powers" (158). Ironically, by choosing to read the texts in terms of a binary between modernity and tradition, "feminist" and not, they are often made to conform to Hitchcott's initial assertion that "woman's identity is contained within, and restricted by, this binary axis, and is therefore unable to express itself with any degree of autonomy" (10). This position effectively forecloses the agency of the "speaking selves" to whom Women Writers in Francophone Africa initially intended to listen.