Calixthe Beyalais Manifesto and Fictional Theory

Tanga, a girlchild-woman in Calixthe Beyala's Your Name Shall Be Tanga, like the manchild in Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born or the manchild Oskar in Nurrudin Farah's Maps, is one of those significant fictional characters that can be called "widowers of their childhood" (Beyala 47). The protagonist, Tanga, as a girlchild-woman is challenged to live as a girl-child without a beginning known as childhood, though much of the world readily accepts childhood as a universal experience. In that the referent girlchild-woman appears a minimum of thirty times throughout the text, the classifications of girl and woman as well as child and adult are blurred. By categorizing Tanga as neither a child nor a woman during the entire novel, Beyala suggests at the very least an ambivalence towards such categories and at the most a view that "child" and "woman" are theoretically inadequate terms by which to classify Tanga.

Your Name Shall Be Tanga is not a developmental novel about a girl-child becoming a woman. The text does not follow the physical, psychological, and/or social trajectory of a young individual moving towards maturity despite numerous complex obstacles as in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions. Neither is Your Name Shall Be Tanga a depiction of an age of innocence as in Camara Laye's Dark Child. Beyala cannot be criticized for her so-called glorification of African childhood and/or precolonial Africa. Neither is Your Name Shall Be Tanga a story about conflicts to be resolved, as with the young heroine overcoming a series of trials in Flora Nwapa's Efuru. Beyala does not present the reader with a young figure who endures countless tribulations and still succeeds in overturning established tradition. Finally, Your Name Shall Be Tanga is not a novel filled with stories about admiration, assimilation, or rejection of a colonizer. Her story cannot be neatly labeled a Bildungsroman as does Nedal Al-Mousa for six Arabic novels in "The Arabic Bildungsroman: A Generic Appraisal," wherein he argues that the art of living is replaced with heroes who reconcile two cultures.

Instead, Your Name Shall Be Tanga is in part a manifesto. On one level, it is a political manifesto drawing attention to the civil rights of children. On another level, it is a political manifesto for the rights of women: socially and economically. A significant part of the argument lies in a fight against free market capitalism, which determines the value of girl-children and women through the demand for their bodies. The novel is a social critique like Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina.Your Name Shall Be Tanga strongly contests illegitimacy: it focuses attention on a young female child's right to have others acknowledge her birth, a female child's right to have others value her existence, and a female child's right to control her body. In a real sense, Your Name Shall Be Tanga is an ideological war being fought against psychological, political, social, and economic determinism. A similar war is fought in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Armah's critique of corrupt and greedy Ghanaians and their tyrannical rulers bears a heavy resemblance to Beyala's novel in its narrative struggle against similar forces. However, neither Armah's protagonist, Allison's Bone, nor Beyala's Tanga should be remembered simply as victims of determinism. Doing so would reduce these novels to being articulate examples of nihilistic literature. Tanga does not name herself a victim and deny her own agency. If this were the case, then readers would see Tanga only in terms of their own potential victimization, and they could easily succumb to feelings of hopelessness. Rather, readers are implored to gather themselves up as does bell hooks in "Refusing to Be a Victim" and to argue along with Nada Elia that women such as Fusena in Ama Ata Adoo's Changes embody...