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

Chantal Kalisa's study examines violence in African and Caribbean literature by women since the sixties. While the first chapter is both an affirmation and a critique of Frantz Fanon's conceptualization of violence derived from colonialism and racism and his more specific engagement with the war of liberation of Algeria, the four chapters devoted to women's texts compare African and Caribbean narratives. The comparative element allows the author to study how violence is represented in post- and neo-colonial African texts as well as in texts from Martinique and Guadeloupe, places that have not achieved independence. The study focuses on violence affecting black women and how it is portrayed in these two different contexts.

It is always difficult and somewhat arbitrary to select which books to compare: in this study, the selection includes writers who published in the sixties (Michèle Lacrosil), the seventies (Simone Schwarz-Bart), the eighties (the first two novels by Calixthe Beyala, Nadine Bari), the nineties (Ken Bugul, Gisèle Pineau, Edwidge Danticat), and at the turn of the century (Monique Ilboudo). Some of the writers included have already been studied widely though a variety of angles, including violence, yet Kalisa adds some remarkable insights into the works of Beyala, Pineau, Danticat and Ilboudo. She also introduces the works of Franco-Guinean writer Nadine Bari, not widely known in francophone studies.

The chapters on familial, cultural and military violence are particularly compelling. Kalisa's analysis of Pineau's remarkable novel, L'Espérancemacadam, revolves around the reinterpretation of communal, domestic and intimate space, and builds on Françoise Lionnet's concept of "geographies of pain." Kalisa, through a very attentive reading of the text, unveils for the reader the dissociation (from their bodies, houses, and relationships) experienced by women in the community of Savane Mulet. The careful study of the language used by characters in Beyala's first book, C'est le soleil qui m'a brûlée, is equally powerful in its interpretation of the culture of colonial/post-colonial violence that affects women across generations and how women, in particular young girls, at once internalize and resist rape culture. Kalisa is also successful in analyzing the military and state violence in Danticat's novels, a violence which in turn crosses into the domestic sphere. Kalisa theorizes writing as a form of testimonial, something that Danticat has herself fully articulated in her book, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (Princeton 2010), published since Kalisa's book. Kalisa focuses on Danticat's The Farming of Bones, about the 1937 massacre of Haitians in the Dominican Republic. In this section, the specificity of how women are affected by such traumas from a woman's perspective would have been better defined in comparison with Jacques-Stephen Alexis's Compère Général Soleil and René Philoctète's Massacre River about the same massacres. The analysis of Nadine Bari's journey to find her husband's body in Sekou Touré's Guinea is poignant and addresses the connections between violence, affect, individual and collective memory and forgetting, and healing, through different genres (essay, autobiography and fiction).

Each text is analyzed by Kalisa as a response to Frantz Fanon's negative evocation of black women and colonized women's agency both during colonial, post-colonial, and nation-building periods, whether he is writing about power, race, and inter-racial relationships or the role of women in the Algerian war of liberation. Kalisa sees Guadeloupean Michèle Lacrosil's Cajou as a narrative that consciously engages with Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks and provides an example of gendered colonial alienation that Fanon does not quite acknowledge according to Kalisa. In her first chapter, "Frantz Fanon, Black Women, and Colonial Violence," Kalisa provides a critique of Fanon's position on women based principally on his negative reception (and misinterpretation) of Martinican writer Mayotte Capécia's Je...