Feasting on Words: Maryse Condé, Cannibalism, and the Caribbean Text ed. by Vera Broichhagen, Kathryn Lachman, and Nicole Simek (review)

140Women in French Studies The second "book," entirely written by the editor, considers the "imaginary." This section provides a close analysis of each of Sow Fall's eight novels in order "to fathom the African soul embedded in her literary works, enabling us to explore the deeper meanings of the symbols and images in these works, not to mention the lessons in such African genres as tale, legends, epics, allegories and myths" (162). Here, Uzoamaka Azodo labels Sow Fall's novels "sagas" or "songs" in order to "reflect the particular aspect(s) of African tradition highlighted" (160) in the work in question. The third section, an interview with Sow Fall conducted in French and translated into English by the editor, is entitled "Towards a Search for the African Soul: Writing and the Imagination in the Novels of Aminata Sow Fall." The last part is an extensive bibliography of works relevant to Sow Fall as well as to Francophone women's writing. This collection is an outstanding resource for a course of Francophonie, contemporary French language women's writing, women's studies and/or Francophone women's writing. It is particularly useful since in one book it compiles reading guides to Sow Fall's entire oeuvre, and as such, would function very well as a companion to both students reading Sow Fall's works and to the professors teaching them. Each ofthese critical essays about Sow Fall can stand on its own and be assigned separately, even in a course which is not exclusively treating Sow Fall but which concerns Francophone women's writing. This impressive collection fulfills its goals to "contribute to a better knowledge and understanding ofAminata Sow Fall and her literary works" (31). Marcelline BlockPrinceton University Broichhagen, Vera, Kathryn Lachman, and Nicole Simek, eds. Feasting on Words: Maryse Condé, Cannibalism, and the Caribbean Text (PLAS Cuadernos Series no. 8). Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Program in Latin American Studies, 2006. (Paper). This collection of essays offers the proceedings of a one-day conference held at Princeton University in 2004 around the notion ofcannibalism in Maryse Condé's work. A solid preface, an interesting interview with Condé, and a good introduction to her œuvre by Kwame Anthony Appiah precede ten essays on the topic. Overall, this is a very strong collection of essays that successfully analyzes the notion of cannibalism and its various uses in Condé's work. Four articles by Mireille Rosello, Nicole Simek, Kathryn Lachman, and Bishupal Limbu offer a very good background on traditional literary cannibalism and help distinguish Condé's unique use of the strategy from its traditional literary uses. Rosello historicizes literary cannibalism as a strategy typical of postcolonial writers but argues that Condé uses cannibalism differently by indirectly questioning the very process of naming one a cannibal as a process that instantly fictionalizes Book Reviews141 the Other. Simek analyzes cannibalism as a reading process in La Femme cannibale (2003) and sees it as a problematic consumption that robs the Other of any agency. Lachman reads Condé's use of cannibalism in the novel as a female "aesthetic of indigestion" that refuses to transform into a harmonious whole the many foreign elements that the text incorporates, thus undermining the dominant patriarchal paradigm. Limbu sees cannibalism as a cultural strategy that allows the colonized to become actively engaged in the process of cultural exchange or translation. Thus for Limbu, Condé's La Migration des cœurs should not be read as a traditional cannibalistic postcolonial rewriting ofEmily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, but as a cultural transfer from England to the Caribbean that successfully gives voice to the Caribbean people. Two essays by Karen Lindo and Dawn Fulton engage with cannibalism's metaphors in La Femme cannibale, successfully tying together two major elements of the story (South African post-apartheid reality and homosexuality) with the omnipresent notion of cannibalism in the novel. Lindo reads Fiéla, the South African woman accused of cannibalism in the novel, as symbolic of the return of a shameful past that prevents nation-building in post-apartheid South Africa. Fulton focuses on the parallels between the silenced narratives of Fiéla's cannibalism and of Stephen's homosexuality in the novel...