Woyyi Céet: Senegalese Women’s Oral Discourses on Marriage and Womanhood

In the area of African oral literature, the voices of women continue to be muted. The image of the oral artist is often masculinized, and in the Sahel region especially, female verbal artists continue to be undermined. This essay intends to centralize the feminine voice in oral performance by exploring texts composed and performed by women for women. Its aim is to look at marriage songs in Senegal as literary sites that allow Wolof women to negotiate voice and power. Within that framework, women, such as griottes who are considered illiterate, can be seen as having theorized about gender for a long time. Yet their voices have been arbitrarily subsumed by the so-called intellectuals whose discourses are privileged because they are written.