Les romancieres du Continent noir: Anthologie (review)

This anthology uses the thematic approach to present the works of nineteen francophone and anglophone women novelists from Sub-Saharan Africa from the 1970s to 1990s. Organized in three main sections with a number of subsections, the book introduces different themes that are illustrated with excerpts from the works of the women writers. Most of the issues raised speak of the condition of African women: polygamy, motherhood, prostitution, misogyny, alienation, and others. While such an approach does provide an informative survey of the writers’ main preoccupations, its very usefulness as a pratical guide may not always do full justice to the complexities of some of the works under study. By discussing separately the themes that pertain to a particular novel, the anthology does not always convey the way in which these different issues relate to and confront each other in the work. For example, in Mariama Bâ’s Une si longue lettre, the position of the protagonist-narrator Ramatoulaye to questions such as polygamy, tradition, women’s rights and their roles is highly complex and at times contradictory. The ambiguity of her views can be fully appreciated only if they are examined together.

Among the issues that are discussed in the anthology, special focus is given to the conflict between tradition and modernity in African societies, which is said to create dissension between the sexes, generations, and rural folks and urban dwellers. Lee is certainly right in drawing our attention to the importance this theme has in the works under study. Her analysis shows that the concepts “tradition” and “modernity” are often posited in the novels as two diametrically opposed monolithic realities. Yet I think that there is a need to scrutinize the deployment of the dichotomy traditional/modern in the Third World context. Why is tradition often presented as a fixed and immutable given of the past? As a corpus of social and cultural practices of a particular community, is not tradition in fact constantly re-inventing itself through the ages? Likewise, should modernity be equated exclusively with Western ways? What does it mean to be “modern”? What are the stragetic values of promoting the modern at the expense of the traditional and vice-versa and to whose benefits? There is also a certain shiftiness in the signification of these terms according to the context in which they figure. For example, while the attribute “traditional” in a non-Western reference is often used to describe practices considered as non-scientific (read dubious) and inward-, if not backward-looking, the same word takes on a much more positive meaning in the West to connote authority and reliability.

As an anthology, this book provides a good introduction to the major issues in the works of important francophone and anglophone women writers from Sub-Saharan Africa. It is specially useful as a pedagogical tool as each excerpt is prefaced with an explanatory note that situates the passage within the work from which it is taken as well as in relation to the issue it illustrates.