Rethinking Marriage in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures (review)

Offering a detailed and well organized literary analysis of marriage practices in African and Caribbean literatures, Cecile Accilien provides us with a timely and highly informative work on an understudied topic in francophone literatures and film. The relevance of this book only points to the presence of a plethora of topics in francophone literatures still in of need urgent critical and scholarly attention, and for choosing a hitherto ignored subject, Accilien’s contribution deserves to be read. Accilien aptly traverses a wide spiritual and sociopolitical cross-section of African and Caribbean cultures—traditional, colonial, Islamic, Vodou Christian, syncretic, as well as class-based and postcolonial influences shaping marriage. Pertinently presenting marriage and the cornerstone of “intense identity formation” (2), Accilien aptly describes it as “one of the most enduring social and religious rituals in people’s cultures.” Throughout the book, numerous close readings judiciously dwell on a wide range of useful concepts, indispensable to the study of marriage in African and Caribbean societies, such as “plaçage”—“where two people live together without the approval or blessings of the church and without being legally bound to one another” (4) as well as the crucial difference between polygamy—“the practice of a man or a woman having more than one wife or husband at one time—and polygyny, “often mistakenly referred to as polygamy . . . a practice by which a male has more than one female sexual partner; it is the most common form of polygamy” (67). In scrutinizing such crucial differences in the comprehension of African and Caribbean cultures, Accilien employs an extensive and relevant selection of literary genres—novels, short stories, essays, documentaries, and films—to appraise the historical and cultural import of marriage in formerly colonized cultures.

Organized into seven short but highly readable chapters, Accilien discusses the intertwining of various aspects of marriage—gender politics, sexuality and the body, motherhood, religion, AIDS, métissage, and identity, along with the often polemical but highly relevant topic of national identity—to successfully demonstrate that African and Caribbean societies are indeed a complex interaction and intersection of a multitude of factors shaping the dynamic of conjugal relations. Ultimately, as Accilien notes in her introduction, the works analyzed all challenge the traditional, colonial versions of marriage with the aim of positing the subversion of marriage by women to express their equality, freedom, and voice. However, Accilien seems to assume and project marriage as a literary and cinematic trope that is mostly oppressive and stifling to women only. Despite this rather theoretically limited objective coupled with a few recurrent typographical errors, this study will be of immense value to scholars and students of African and Caribbean literatures and cultures.