National Allegory as Feminist Critical Discourse: Boni, Tadjo, and Ivoirité

Novels by Tanella Boni and Véronique Tadjo during Ivory Coast's civil war and its preparation are rife with allegorical elements contributing to the conflicted definition of the nation: its outside and its inside, its potential for solidarity and its exclusionary pathology, considered on the ground and from the diaspora. Each through female characters navigating identity on shifting grounds, Boni and Tadjo reframe what it means to be Ivorian and consequently what it means to be African from a woman's perspective. Far from producing reductive readings, a study of second-order allegories of all eight of the novels they produced between 1990 and 2010 reveals an emergent hope that through reframing the nation from a feminine standpoint and through feminine strategies of resistance, the potential for the nation to achieve solidarity will win out over internal division, and the structures are laid bare, which pose as the primary obstacles to that solidarity.