Emerging Perspectives on Ken Bugul: From Alternative Choices to Oppositional Practices (review)

Twenty-six years ago, Ken Bugul published her seminal work, Le baobab fou. She is now one of the most important figures in African sub-Saharan literature written in French. Aware of her tremendous contribution, Ada Uzoamaka Azodo and Jeanne-Sarah de Larquier compiled thirteen articles that focus on Bugul's work: Le baobab fou, Cendres et braises, Riwan ou le chemin de sable, De l'autre côté du regard, La folie et la mort, Rue Félix Faure, and La pièce d'or. Emerging Perspectives on Ken Bugul: From Alternative Choices to Oppositional Practices examines the narrative patterns that made Bugul's a trademark of African female writing: alienation, identity crisis, authenticity, mother-daughter relationships, self-discovery, healing, the interconnectedness of postcolonial uneasiness and female subjectivity, the search for better tomorrows. By offering several readings of the same texts, Azodo and Larquier's ambitious project could have turned into a repetitive and monotonous effort. Yet, most of the articles managed to avoid this trap. Anchored in a theoretical framework inspired by Raymond Williams's discourse on alternative and oppositional practices in literature, the methodology of this collection of essays is conducive to original approaches that reflect Bugul's literary progression. Emerging Perspectives on Ken Bugul unravels the Bugul's transition from writing about the self to writing about issues impacting postcolonial African societies, from mainly (auto)biographic works to more imaginative stories that rely less on her personal experience.

The centrality of identity in Bugul's Le baobab fou is at the core of four articles. Although few essays fall prey to the topoï of a critic that subsumes socio-anthropological concerns to literary analysis, one must acknowledge those that shed a very unique light on Bugul's first novel. Cecilia W. Francis's semiotic examination of identity strives "to analyze various phases of identity dissolution and reconstruction targeting structural consistencies and socio-cultural factors, which infiltrate Bugul's autobiographical act of enunciation" (28). By viewing Bugul's identity crisis through the lenses of "disabilities studies," Julie Nack C Nack Ngue reveals the implications of healing and survival in her (auto)biographic novel. In her implementation of a methodology that derives from psychic health concerns, the critic explain how: " for a postcolonial female subject, her somatic and psychic crises are not only contingent upon the material realities of history, but are also subject to myriad socio-cultural constructions" (55). The two approaches previously mentioned display new theoretical perspectives that assert the depth of Bugul's work while finding a perfect balance between what the literary text articulates and how it articulates it; that is, finding a balance between thematizing and problematizing narrative devices.

The nine other essays are devoted to the novels that follow Le baobab fou. They either focus on a specific novel, compare two novels by Bugul, or analyze her work in conjunction to other writers or filmmakers. In establishing a dialogue between Bugul, Calixthe Beyala, and Mongo Beti, Jacqueline Couti gives birth to a polysemic reflection on the specificity of literary portrayal of seduction in African literature. Jeanne Garane's study on the cinematic intertext discloses the commonalities between Bugul's and Mambety's works in which postcolonial realities are portrayed, challenged, and reversed through the art of storytelling that seeks to achieve the ultimate truth. Rangira Bea Gallimore's "Dismantling or Reconstructing the Universality Principle in Riwan ou le chemin de sable" problematizes the disjunction between the success of literary decentering and the failure of ontological decentering. In a very thorough analysis, Gallimore shows how the centrality of African orality in Bugul's novel enables her to free herself from Western literary norms. She also argues that the freedom acquired on a formal level does not translate on an ontological level. In her detailed examination of female characters, she pins down the pitfalls of a novel that reproduces "the oppositional categories of...