Violence in Francophone African and Caribbean Women’s Literature (review)

Chantal Kalisa’s book, Violence in Francophone African and Caribbean Women’s Literature starts from the observation that despite the centrality of physical, political, and epistemic violence in the formation of African and Caribbean identities, gendered violence is hardly studied in the historiography of francophone African and Caribbean literature. This manifestation of the traditional silencing of women, she claims, is an effect of colonial privileges accorded to men, the legacy of precolonial patriarchal systems, and, more important, the first generation of African thinkers’ patriarchal perspectives. Kalisa thus presents the study of Franz Fanon’s oeuvre as an interesting example of the ways African and Caribbean thinkers participate in silencing women through a dialectic of women’s presence and absence in the discourse on colonization and decolonization. Women are present because they undeniably participate in the decolonizing process. Yet, as Kalisa shows, their role in the decolonizing process is ignored, their voices unheard, their agency stifled, and their bodies absent from the ways Fanon and early African thinkers define and imagine the colonized and the decolonized African and Caribbean.

In order to remedy this traditional representation of women, Kalisa analyzes feminist literary productions that propose a different relation to, and representation of, the experience of francophone African and Caribbean women. The reading of Ken Bugul, Sembene Ousmane, and Michele Lacrossil enables her to develop a feminist perspective on colonial brutality. Her analysis of the violence of women’s identity crisis during their physical and metaphorical exiles to Europe and their returns to traditional African and Caribbean patriarchal societies, in turn, leads the reader to consider, in a new way, the modes of functioning of colonial and postcolonial epistemological violence. The examination of these oeuvres not only challenges Fanon’s and early African and Caribbean thinkers’ patriarchal paradigm; it also leads to the representation of women as agents in the process of definition of their own subjectivities through the narration of gendered violence.

Beyond this challenging and polemical paradigm, the analysis of the works of Simone Schwarz-Bart, Calixthe Beyala, Gisèe Pineau, Nadine Bari, Edwidge Danticat, and Monique Ilboudo enables Kalisa to erase the lines of demarcation between the male populated public violence and the culturally tolerated private violence perpetuated in the name of the common good and nation formation. For Kalisa, the representation of private violence into the public stage through the analysis of the violated women’s bodies in Beyala and Pineau’s texts as well as the study of women’s experiences in wars and dictatorships enables women writers to describe forms of violence that have been taboo and need to be studied in order to avoid the amnesia that surrounds violence against women, to re-write history, and to solve the trauma associated with violence against women. Kalisa’s analysis of these authors and their female characters enables her to show that women use words and herstories of their own existence to reclaim their rights to speak, deconstruct the traditional system, and question patriarchy.

Kalisa’s essay, the first book-length comparative analysis of women and violence in francophone African and Caribbean literatures, expands the growing field of francophone women studies. While major literary studies of women’s experiences in francophone Africa and the Caribbean–Irène Assiba D’Almeida’s Francophone African Women Writers: Destroying the Emptiness of Silence (1994), Odile Cazenave’s Rebellious Women: The New Generation of Female African Novelists (2000), Renée Larrier’s Francophone Women Writers of Africa and the Caribbean (2000), and Mildred Mortimer’s Writing from the Hearth: Public, Domestic, and Imaginative Space in Francophone Women’s Fiction of Africa and the Caribbean (2007)—either focus on one geographic area or propose surveys of women’s experiences, Kalisa offers a systematic comparative analysis of major francophone African and Caribbean women’s discourses on violence and the way they affect the different modes of representations of women in Africa and the Caribbean. Kalisa’s analysis of gendered violence is a persuasive and timely study of...