Toward a Victim-Survivor Narrative: Rape and Form in Yvonne Vera’s Under the Tongue and Calixthe Beyala’s Tu t’appelleras Tanga

This essay examines the representation of rape in Yvonne Vera’s Under the Tongue and Calixthe Beyala’s Tu t’appelleras Tanga, arguing for the term “victim-survivor” as a conceptual frame for analyzing the experience of violated protagonists. By positing the “victim-survivor narrative” as a form that grapples with the multiple responses to and experiences with rape, as well as the different ways they figure on cultural production, this essay moves beyond the extant analyses in rape cultural criticism and trauma studies. My discussion critiques the ways in which models from trauma studies and rape crisis intervention fall short in accounting for the complexity of African experiences with sexual violence. To do so, I challenge the dominance of the rape survivor model, offer victim-survivor in its stead, and subsequently demonstrate its efficacy as a way to analyze rape that accounts for the female protagonists’ multiple locations and subjectivities in Beyala’s and Vera’s novels.