The Pull of Postcolonial Nationhood: Gender and Migration in Francophone African Literatures

The Pull of uniting Europe Postcolonial Nationhood

The Pull of Postcolonial Nationhood Gender and Migration in Francophone African Literatures

Ayo A. Coly

Lexington Books A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.lexingtonbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2010 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Coly, Ayo A. The pull of postcolonial nationhood : gender and migration in francophone African literatures / Ayo A. Coly. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-4511-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-4513-5 (electronic) 1. Bugul, Ken—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Beyala, Calixthe—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Diome, Fatou, 1968–—Criticism and interpretation. 4. African literature (French)—History and criticism. 5. Sex role in literature. 6. Immigrants in literature. I. Title. PQ3989.2.B78Z66 2010 843.914—dc22 2010012749

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

In reverence to the memory of my mother, Aissatou A. Coly

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Of Uprooted and Deterritorialized Africans

xi

Part I Ken Bugul: From Self-Imposed Exile to Constrained Homecoming   1  The (Non-)Place of the Daughter of the Postcolonial House: Le baobab fou and Cendres et braises   2  No Place Like the Non-Place: Striving to Come Home in Cendres et braises and Riwan ou le chemin de sable

3

21

Part II Calixthe Beyala: The Conflicted Immigrant Standpoint   3  Aborted Postnationalism?: C’est le soleil qui m’a brûlée and Tu t’appelleras Tanga

41

  4  (Un)Writing France as Home: The Belleville Novels

67

vii

viii  / Table of Contents

  5  From African Guest to Afro-French Hostess: Producing an Acceptable Immigrant Geography of Home in Amours sauvages

83

Part III Fatou Diome: The Anti-Immigrant Standpoint   6  Globalization and the Revival of the Anticolonial and Nationalist Narrative of Home: La préférence nationale and Le ventre de l’Atlantique

99

  7  Bounded Homelessness as a Strategy: La préférence nationale and Le ventre de l’Atlantique

111

Conclusion: Reinstating the Nation as an Object of Postcolonially Correct Interest

125

Bibliography

133

Index

143

About the Author

147

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the wholehearted support of many. First and foremost, I thank Professor Thomas Hale for his guidance and constructive comments. My thanks also go to my colleagues at Dartmouth College whose encouragements kept me going: Judith Byfield, Kate Conley, Susanne Freidberg, Gretchen Gerzina, Mary Jean Green, Irene Kacandes, Deborah King, John Kopper, Larry Kritzman, Celia Naylor, Antonio Tillis, Keith Walker, Michelle Warren, and Margaret Williamson. Special thanks to my friends and colleagues Moussa Sow, Nathalie Etoké, Marame Guèye, Mootacem Mhiri, Mohamed Kamara, Barrel Guèye, Moussa Diallo Bocoum, and Anoumou Amekudji. Our numerous exchanges enriched this book. My mentors in African studies have generously contributed to this book and to my professional development: Oyeronke Oyewumi, whose door metaphor kept my eyes on the prize, Aliko Songolo, Kandioura Dramé, Eileen Julien, Frieda Ekotto, Odile Cazenave, and Irele Abiola. My acknowledgments would be incomplete if I did not thank Tilo Stolz and Corey Roberts for constantly checking on the progress of this book and providing all kinds of support, for which I am forever grateful. Tameka, Mansour, Toutou, Couyenga, your love made everything possible. ix

Introduction Of Uprooted and Deterritorialized Africans

This book relates to my encounter with affirmations of home and nation in literary texts that supposedly should uphold uprootedness and deterritorialization. Contemporary cultural criticism has indeed taught us to apprehend home and nation as negative discursive currencies. Sara Ahmed is correct in arguing that home and belonging now represent “that which must be overcome” (87). Concurrently, the topos of migration signifies the refusal to be contained and accounted for by the frameworks of home and nation. Suffice it to cite here Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s renunciation of the “slavery of belonging to a nation, an identity, and a people” in favor of “nomadism and miscegenation” (8); Homi Bhabha’s trademark discomfort with sedentariness and national filiations versus his enthusiasm for migrancy and hybridity (1990, 1994); and Ian Chambers’s figuration of the migrant as a guerillero whose sabotage of borders produces a “rupturing of time” and imposes a new epistemological, political, and aesthetical order (68). The new language of Francophone African literary criticism reflects this theoretical obsolescence of the nationalist notion of home, precisely the notion of home as an irrevocable filial tie and immutable sense of belonging to a national homeland. The terms “Enfants de la postcolonie” [children of the postcolony]1 by Abdourahman Waberi, “Beurs noirs” [“Black Beurs”] by xi

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Bernard Magnier, and “migritude” by Jacques Chevrier have, since the 1990s, formed the conceptual lexicon for the study of Francophone African migrant writers. This terminology, with its emphasis on uprootedness and deterritorialization, definitely implements the theoretical overhaul that Arjun Appadurai advocates in Modernity at Large: The Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Appadurai asserts the dawning of postnationalism in the face of migration and mass media and calls for a new theoretical language to account for this development. The new lexicon of Francophone African literary criticism delineates a generation of writers who came of age after 1960, the landmark date of African political independence from European colonial rule. The lack of a direct confrontation with colonialism allegedly has emancipated this postcolonial migrant offspring from roots and national attachments in favor of multiple passports, euphoric vagrancy, and self-indulging cosmopolitanism. The most seminal studies on these writers, Bennetta JulesRosette’s Black Paris: The African Writer’s Landscape and Odile Cazenave’s Afrique sur Seine: A New Generation of African Writers in Paris, claim that this new generation departs from the nationalist narratives of home and identity authored by their migrant predecessors. One of the defining traits of the new migrant writers, Cazenave insists, is their unapologetic distance from Africa. Dominic Thomas’s Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, and Transnationalism breaks away from these attempts to transmute contemporary African migrant writers into rootless and euphoric postnationalists. Juxtaposing texts by Francophone African migrants from the colonial era with their postcolonial counterparts, Thomas teases out the ideological and political agendas of the first generations in the writings of the new migrant writers. However, Black France is not directly concerned with the question of home. Neither does its author interrogate the postnationalist frameworks applied to the new generation of migrant writers. In fact, Thomas, although very critical of Cazenave’s argument about a severed connection with Africa, nonetheless invokes Chevrier’s migritude and quotes Appadurai without unpacking and problematizing the standpoints asserted by their theories. As such, Black France stops short of

Of Uprooted and Deterritorialized Africans  /  xiii

the critical task, outlined by Pheng Cheah, Elleke Boehmer, Neil Lazarus, Benita Parry, and Simon Gikandi, of interrogating the prevailing adoption of postnationalist frameworks in postcolonial criticism. My critique of the postnationalist turn in Francophone African literary criticism joins the above-listed critics in disputing the celebratory obituary of postcolonial nationalism and the metaphorization of the postcolonial subject as an uprooted, deterritorialized, unfettered, and free-floating migrant. However, these critics of postcolonial postnationalism have mostly suggested that the metropolitan location and orientation of postcolonial studies has blinded many postcolonial scholars to the endurance of national identifications in the postcolony. My book advocates a different approach and introduces a hitherto overlooked yet important gender angle to this critique. If, as Simon Gikandi has noted, the exclusive focus on “the familiar tropes of postcolonial theory—globalization, transgression, and hybridity” has prevented literary critics from noticing “local scenes of being and belonging” in postcolonial literatures (2001: 639), the theoretical premise of my book is that the neglect of gender has considerably facilitated the outcome decried by Gikandi. I contend that gender remains the unaccounted-for parameter in postnationalist discourses of home. The Pull of Postcolonial Nationhood tells a feminist counterstory to the postnationalist interpretive narrative in Francophone African literary criticism by bringing gender to bear on the theorizations of Francophone African migrant texts. My theoretical claim is that gender-blind understandings of nationalism skew the claims of postnationalism in Francophone African migrant literatures. Feminist scholarship has established that women have traditionally been the sites for discourses and practices of nationalism.2 But critical studies of Francophone African migrant literatures have generally overlooked the gender of the examined authors. The authors are usually all male, with the routine exception of Calixthe Beyala. Additionally, there is no study that attends to the small subgroup of migrant women writers. My book innovatively uses the works of migrant women writers to question the premises about gender and postcolonial nationhood

xiv  / Introduction

that underlie the importation of postnationalist theories of home into Francophone African literary criticism. My methodology is inspired by Carole Boyce Davies’s compelling thesis in Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject that “once Black women’s experience is accounted for, assumptions about identity, community and theory have to be reconsidered” (3). By demonstrating that the geographies of home that Francophone African migrant women construct with their works are in constant negotiation with nationalist discourses of home, my book contends that home remains an emotionally, politically, and ideologically loaded matter for postcolonial subjects. My analysis of the different literary texts demonstrates how the gender-inflected histories and legacies of colonialism, anticolonial nationalism, and late imperialism shape the meaning of home. I have chosen to interrogate postnationalist discourses of home by way of three women writers who exemplify the relatively recent and sparse Francophone African female migrant literary subgroup: Ken Bugul, Calixthe Beyala, and Fatou Diome. The selection of these writers stems from the fact that their literary production addresses the experience of migration and engages the spaces of Africa and Europe. Ken Bugul is not a migrant writer in the same sense as Calixthe Beyala and Fatou Diome. While the latter authors are writing from France, Bugul wrote about her migrant experience when she returned to Senegal. She is nonetheless crucial to a project like The Pull of Postcolonial Nationhood. Her circular itinerary from migration to homecoming serves to theorize how the gender politics of anticolonial nationalism and postcolonial nationhood shape the question of home. Ken Bugul’s autobiographical trilogy will help substantiate the following hypothesis: the expressions and manifestations of postnationalism in the male-dominated Francophone African migrant corpus reflect how the gender politics of postcolonial nationhood make available different narratives of home to men and women, and possibly enable a male postnationalist narrative. It is my inference that the nationalist positioning of women as reproducers and guardians of national culture simultaneously entails gender-specific narratives of home and nation. Partha Chatterjee, in The Nation and its Fragments, has addressed the gender politics

Of Uprooted and Deterritorialized Africans  /  xv

of anticolonial nationalism in a way that specifically supports my hypothesis. Writing about the anticolonial nationalist conflation of women with the home, Chatterjee explains: The need to adjust to the new conditions outside the home had forced upon men a whole series of changes in their dress, food habits, religious observances, and social relations. Each of these capitulations now had to be compensated for by an assertion of spiritual purity on the part of women. They must not eat, drink, or smoke in the same way as men; they must continue the observance of religious rules that men were finding difficult to carry out; they must maintain the cohesiveness of family life and solidarity with the kin to which men could not now devote much attention. The new patriarchy advocated by nationalism conferred upon women the honor of a new social responsibility, and by associating the task of female emancipation with the historical goal of sovereign nationhood, bound them to a new, and yet entirely legitimate, subordination. (130)

There are strong hints here that nationalism enables a postnationalist male narrative, at no consequence to the reproduction and consolidation of the national formation, since women perform the task of safeguarding national culture. Conversely, the interpellation of the patriotic female national subject as representation of home genders home as a feminine practice of anticolonial resistance and postcolonial nationhood. It is consequently reasonable to infer that the expressions and manifestations of postnationalism identified in the heavily male-dominated Francophone African migrant corpus reflect and extend the postures and narratives of identity that nationalism makes available to men but not women. This inference is practically spelled out in some of the critical analyses of Calixthe Beyala’s novels. In response to Beyala’s harsh assessment of the decadence of the postcolonial African nation and her subsequent assertions of an Afro-French identity, Ambroise Kom writes that Beyala is the prototype of the Fanonian colonized subject, then concludes that the writer has turned her back to Africa (48). Susan Gasster calls her an “Afri-

xvi  / Introduction

can who has nothing to do with Africa” (2000: 164), while Robert Essombe Mouangue gives her an ultimatum in an article entitled “Calixthe Beyala: France ou Afrique? Il faut choisir” [“Calixthe Beyala: France or Africa? You need to make up your mind”]. Even more revealing is Odile Cazenave’s changed appreciation of Beyala. Cazenave is a pioneer and also among the most prolific scholars of Beyala’s work. But the critic’s enthusiasm for Beyala seems to have faded since the latter traded identity postures. Commenting on Beyala’s declaration that her head is in the West and her feet are in Africa, Cazenave states that this is an inappropriate description: “What should we say about the inverted description/qualification, ‘my feet are in the West’ (which would translate the reality of her geographic situation) and ‘my head is in Africa’ (which would translate her adhesion to Africa and its cultural values)?” Such a configuration, Cazenave adds, would translate the writer’s geographical location in the West and adhesion to Africa and the cultural values of the continent (1996: 146). Interestingly enough, in Afrique sur Seine Cazenave profiles a new generation of Francophone African migrant writers, most of whom are men and are said to have detached themselves from Africa. In this specific case though, Cazenave expresses no concern about these new geographies of identity by men writers. Also consider the contrived homecoming of Ken Bugul and the favorable responses to the last volume of her autobiographical trilogy. This last volume recounts her polygamous marriage and rediscovery of her African roots. In my analysis of Ken Bugul, in the first part of this book, I argue that her story of home and migration illustrates the continuing relevance of nationalist geographies of home and, in most cases, their enforcement on women. Feminist critics of African women writings have noted the double standards in the critical reception of male and female writers.3 The examples of Beyala and Bugul illustrate the nationalist gender politics that inform these double standards. Obioma Nnaemeka offers a mode of reading African women’s texts that takes into account the “nervous conditions” of the authors, the result of their “awareness of the powerful gaze of the reader/ critic (usually male).” Nnaemeka carefully reads the texts of the writers with an eye to specific narrative strategies that maneuver

Of Uprooted and Deterritorialized Africans  /  xvii

sexual politics, showing for instance that the gaze of the male critic “circumscribes [the women writers] and compels them to ‘negotiate’ the creation of their fictional characters” (1994: 142). We can comprehend that migration heightens these “nervous conditions” in light of the position of African women as battlegrounds between European and African patriarchies, starting with the colonial encounter.4 The migrant woman is thus a suspect and highly scrutinized figure who must carefully negotiate the question of home and belonging. Following the astute mode of reading African women writers developed by Nnaemeka, my book teases out the careful and nervous handling of the question of home by migrant women writers in order to press the point that questions of home, roots, and national allegiances are by no means obsolete for postcolonial African migrants. In proceeding with my analysis of the three writers’ narratives of home, I attend to the nonlinear, convoluted, and often duplicitous characteristics of these narratives. These patterns result from narrative strategies conveying that the writers remain very mindful of the ideological and political load of the question of home amid the evidence in their texts that the gender politics of postcolonial nationhood have fostered a vexed relationship between the women writers and the postcolonial nation. As a result, the geographies of home that Francophone African migrant women writers chart with their texts are both oppositional and collaborative in that the writers contest and accommodate dominant social norms about the place and role of women in nationalist discourses of home. Ultimately, these nervous conditions in the handling of the question of home testify to the strong claims of postcolonial nationhood as well as a desire of home and a fear of being unhomed. The now commonplace repudiation of home in some feminist discourses, home being said to inhibit the self-fulfillment of women, is not a desirable solution here. A brief review of this (mostly Western) feminist standpoint on home will serve to illuminate that postcolonial women have much more to lose than gain in shunning home. In Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf rejects rootedness and opts for the world as home, stating that “as a woman I have no

xviii  / Introduction

country, as a woman I want no country, as a woman my country is the whole world” (43). Jane Marcus similarly affirms that the “self conscious woman writer has no country and wants no country, opting for the whole world as her country, equating exile by gender with the internationalism usually equated with Jews” (273). I totally concur with Alice Walker’s response that Woolf’s displacement is a privilege of caste and race (7). Walker’s response reverberates decades later in Rosemary Marangoly George’s critical reading of the question of home in some Western feminist discourses. As I myself consider the question of home from the standpoint of African women, I completely share George’s reservation about the dismantling of home by Minnie Bruce Pratt, Chandra Mohanty, Biddy Martin, and Caren Kaplan.5 George objects to this project of dismantling home on the grounds that home, in the form of homelands or national sovereignty, remains an unrealized political, emancipatory, and developmental project for many women in the so-called Third World (33). Along the same lines, Sara Ahmed has underscored the location of privilege and power that enables gestures of shunning home: The subject who has chosen to be homeless, rather than is homeless due to the contingency of external circumstances, is certainly a subject who is privileged, and for whom having or not having a home does not affect its ability to occupy a given space. Is the subject who chooses homelessness and a nomadic lifestyle, or a nomadic way of thinking, one that can do so, because the world is already constituted as its home? (83)

My book perfectly drives Ahmed’s point home, as my analysis of the three migrant women’s texts demonstrates that while the gender politics of home may inhibit the self-realization of women, race or ethnicity may often determine the outcome of leaving home. Writing in the relevant context of the African American experience, bell hooks has pertinently highlighted the crucial function of home as a private space of retreat from “white racist aggression” and as a nurturing site of resistance, political solidarity, and self-empowerment. Although the task of creating and maintaining home falls exclusively on women, the

Of Uprooted and Deterritorialized Africans  /  xix

significance of home in this context eventually outweighs the sexist and patriarchal undertones of these gender arrangements (42–47). Elleke Boehmer effectively translates the dynamics highlighted by hooks to the postcolonial context of my book: Although women may be objectified by the nation, where the normative citizen is usually defined as male, there remains the extraordinary durability of the nation-concept, especially in relation to liberation politics. . . . The nation has historically not only offered important ways of recovering self and reclaiming cultural integrity after colonial occupation, but has also remained an important ground for transforming political and economic conditions, forging identity and achieving social justice. . . . [T]he nation continues to exert a hold on emergent geopolitical entities in quest of self-representation. (4)

This function of the postcolonial nation, as specified by Boehmer, is key in understanding postcolonial migrant women’s loyalty to the nation. If in the strands of Western feminist discourses correctly critiqued by Walker, George, Ahmed, and hooks women express their dissent with the gender politics of home by walking away from home, the political and affective import of home in postcolonial contexts inform the ways in which Francophone African migrant women writers chose to express their dissent with the gender politics of home. In fact, in my reading of Ken Bugul, I suggest that her autobiographical trilogy offers a cautionary tale about how not to dissent with the gender politics of home. The point I insist on making here, however, is that these women writers’ accommodation of nationalist discourses of home is by no means an indicator of a lack of agency. Neither is my methodology in this book, consisting in looking for evidence of nationalism in women’s texts, an assumption that African women are passive sites for discourses and practices of nationalism. Instead, these female conciliatory geographies of home, the result of contestations and accommodations of nationalist discourses of home, exemplify what Obioma Nnaemeka calls “negofeminism,” meaning a “feminism of negotiation” that also “stands for ‘no ego’ feminism” (2003: 377). Nnaemeka pur-

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sues that African feminism “challenges through negotiations and compromise” with patriarchy because feminism is here an “altruistic act” that remains mindful of the interests and wellbeing of the community (378). As a result, Nnaemeka concludes, “the language of feminist engagement in Africa (collaborate, negotiate, compromise) runs counter to the language of Western feminist scholarship and engagement (challenge, disrupt, deconstruct, blow apart, etc.) (380). Likewise, Carole Boyce Davies has suggested that this give-and-take approach described by Nnaemeka and substantiated by my analysis of the three women writers defines and empowers Black feminism, allowing Black feminists to clear for themselves feminist home-places within nationalist discourses. Davies states that Black feminists’ engagement with nationalism entails “interrogat[ing] a number of theorists of nationalism to locate specific positions on gender and determine how far we can ‘go down the road with them’” (50). The notion “we will go so far down the road” captures the pattern of accommodations and contestations that I identify in the texts of Francophone African migrant women. Building on Boehmer’s, Boyce Davies’s, and Nnaemeka’s arguments about Black and African women’s loyalty to the national project, I argue that the choice by Francophone African migrant women to negotiate home in national narratives that most often than not subordinate women is important for what it reveals about the political and ideological resonance of postcolonial nationhood on the one hand, and, on the other, the weak appeal of postnationalism in the postcolonial context. This evidence, in turn, informs my point that the postcolonial African migrant cannot be fitted into the postnationalist theoretical apparatus. Any discussion of the engagement of postcolonial migrant identities with the question of home needs to take into account the specific history and resonance of nationalism in the postcolonial world. We are indeed talking here about nations that are the product of anticolonial liberation movements. As such, we cannot discount the political, emotional, ideological, and affective appeal of postcolonial nationhood as a signifier and idiom of liberation. Nationhood, as both a concept and a condition, constitutes an important signifier for postcolonial imaginaries.6

Of Uprooted and Deterritorialized Africans  /  xxi

Partha Chatterjee’s work is particularly useful for this discussion as Chatterjee details how the concepts of home and nationhood came to be politically and ideologically yoked together in the early days of anticolonialism. In The Nation and its Fragments, Chatterjee describes how in the colonial societies of Africa and Asia, anticolonial nationalism originally proceeded by mobilizing the home as a “domain of sovereignty within colonial society” and a prime site of anticolonial cultural resistance (6). Chatterjee’s argument about the significance of retreating to the home in the colonial context provides a conceptual template for my interrelated arguments that postcolonial nationhood offers its subjects empowering narratives of the self and that the postcolonial nation is the place to go home for postcolonial migrants who, more often than not, are confronted with racial nationalism in the West. The embeddedness of home and anticolonial nationhood means that there is much at stake here in embracing homelessness or relocating home away from the national homeland, especially when the hostland is the former colonizing force. Having said this, the post-1970 corpus of Francophone African migrant writings, which is the focus of my book, is framed by the postcolonial debacle in Africa and the temporal remoteness of the colonial encounter for the writers. As a matter of fact, these two parameters often support postnationalist approaches to this generation of writers. It is correct that the writings by French-based Francophone African writers show that the preindependence and postindependence contexts have elicited changing responses to the migrant experience. The moment of migration accounts for these differences. The almost unwavering exilic backward gaze to Africa and the minimal narrative space devoted to France in the writings of the postindependence period reflect the historical situation of the writers in the period between the twilight of colonization and the dawn of independence in Africa. Sonia Lee has underscored the crucial location of postindependence writers at “an exciting time when colonial power was crumbling and African independence was in the making” and “when all hopes were allowed and all dreams possible.” Most of these writers, Lee pursues, were part of anticolonial resistance and looked forward to their leadership of

xxii  / Introduction

postcolonial Africa (4). In contrast, the postindependence corpus assessed by the concepts of migritude, Black Beurs, and children of the postcolony bears the marks of its production at a historical moment which, Simon Gikandi writes in his examination of postindependence writers from Anglophone Africa, lies “on the cusp between the euphoria and disenchantment that has come to define postcolonial culture in Africa” (1998: 753). While the significantly larger narrative space devoted to France and the relatively faded trope of homecoming in the new Francophone African migrant corpus attest to changed geographies of identity and home, I have strong reservations about the thesis that these new geographies jettison Africa and represent a total break from preindependence postures of identity. Joseph Mwantuali disputes “Odile’s rejection theory” in Afrique sur Seine on the same grounds (237). What the Francophone African writings that emerge from France in the 1980s translate, in my mind, is not so much a relocation of home away from the continent and the postcolonial nation as a disavowal of the postcolonial African nation-state. There is a general consensus on the shift from anticolonial nationalism to postcolonial antinationalism in the Francophone African literary tradition, with the second phase amplifying the critique of postindependence state nationalism that Frantz Fanon sketched in The Wretched of the Earth. Christopher Miller, for instance, talks about a movement from “nationalism as resistance” to “resistance to nationalism” (1998: 18). In the African context, the nation-state and the home-nation ended up being two distinct projects, with the “state overshadow[ing] the project of the nation” (M’Bokolo 1986). As such, the sense of a detachment and disengagement from the postcolonial nation in African migrant writings since the 1980s aligns with the disenchantment with the postcolonial state but does not necessarily entail a repudiation of home. Instead, I propose that this resistance to nationalism, incorrectly misinterpreted for postnationalism, stems from a commitment and sense of responsibility to the nation. In Nation-Building, Propaganda, and Literature in Francophone Africa, Dominic Thomas provides a strong illustration of this dynamic with his analysis of discourses of nation-building

Of Uprooted and Deterritorialized Africans  /  xxiii

in Congolese literature. Thomas notes that Sony Labou Tansi, Emmanuel Dongala, and Henri Lopes “subscribe to the nationbuilding process but attack the state for its failure to effectively construct such as space. Thus, the state rather than the nation comes under attack since the power mechanisms which come under its aegis determine whether or not an individual can ever have the occasion to self-realize” (2002: 5). Similarly, the images of decaying and unhomely postcolonial nations and the faded trope of homecoming in the Francophone African migrant corpus since the 1980s speak to the corruption of the project of the postcolonial nation by the state. These new literatures convey that staying home and homecoming have become scarce privileges for postcolonial Africans. My point is that postindependence Francophone African migration enacts the disappointment with and distrust of the postcolonial state but does not signify a transfer of identity allegiances and loyalties to a postnational third space, as Jacques Chevrier proposes. Chevrier eagerly fits the new corpus of Francophone African migrant writing into Salman Rushdie’s celebration of hybridity. Yet Simon Gikandi’s reading of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism establishes the fallacy of such claims as Chevrier’s with regard to postcolonial subjects. Gikandi thereby substantiates my argument that the unconstrained and unencumbered postcolonial African migrant subject posited by the new Francophone African literary criticism is a political, ideological, and affective implausibility. Gikandi demonstrates that Rushdie’s desire to relocate the postimperial migrant subject into a postnational time-space ends up being upstaged by “the weight of imperial history and its institutions, including the idea of the nation itself” (196). Gikandi’s contention, and also the crux of my argument against postnationalist theories of home, is that responses to questions of home and belonging “depend not so much on where one chooses to go but where one comes from.” Adds Gikandi: “To choose to transcend nation and patriotism, à la Rushdie is to claim some choice in the staging of one’s identity” (199). This is also the gist of the responses to Achille Mbembe’s critique of the nationalist and “nativist” paradigm in

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Africanist thinking. Respondents to Mbembe have argued the epistemological inevitability and pertinence of this paradigm. They have thereby substantiated the epistemological speculativeness of postnationalist theories of home in light of the persisting colonialist mode of constructing and consuming Africa (Adesanmi 2004b; Quayson 2002), the material and political realities that are specific to postcolonial African nations (Murunga 2004), and the evidence that the thematic of anti-imperialism cannot be passé yet (Gilroy 2002). Gilroy’s point about the ongoing reality of late imperialism is particularly important in assessing the function of the postcolonial African nation and the resonance of postcolonial African nationhood for Africans in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As a matter of fact, Pheng Cheah (1998) documents a revival of postcolonial nationalism and postcolonial national culture, and Manthia Diawara writes about a resurgence of African nationalism in response to the imperialistic processes of globalization. These developments speak volume about the stakes of postnationalism for postcolonial subjects. Cheah is particularly right that the enduring allegiance of postcolonial subjects to the national idea is a “historically unavoidable and ethically imperative” response to “neocolonial globalization” (1998: 300).7 In other words, the national formation provides populations of the postcolonial South with a modality of resistance against neocolonial globalization. Cheah’s argument resonates with Chatterjee’s point about the significance and function of home in the colonial context. This resonance suggests the parallel between colonialism and neocolonial globalization and reinforces my argument about the current significance and relevance of postcolonial nationhood on the one hand, and on the other, the theoretical implausibility of the uprooted and deterritorialized postcolonial migrant posited by Francophone African literary criticism. Furthermore, any scenario of postcolonial migrant identities needs to pursue the implications of Gilroy’s observation in After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? that “the imperial and colonial past continues to shape political life in the overdeveloped-but-no-longer imperial countries” (2) and “the crudest expressions of racial antipathy are still redolent of imperial and

Of Uprooted and Deterritorialized Africans  /  xxv

colonial domination” (156). This means that we also extend Dominic Thomas’s oblique insights in Black France about the “transcolonial” confrontation of Africans in France with French racial and cultural arrogance. The continuity highlighted by Thomas calls for a consideration of the “transcolonial” relevance of roots and national homelands for the successive generations of African migrants in France, including the so-called postnationalist generation. Roots are often made to matter ideologically, emotionally, and politically when histories of racial and ethnic oppression have contributed to their racialization and ethnicization by the two parties involved in these encounters. Stuart Hall speaks to this point when he argues the therapeutic function of diasporic imaginative rediscoveries of roots and homelands (1990). Avtar Brah has also observed that experiences of racism in the hostland may elicit a strong identification with the homeland (193). The rejection of roots as regressive is an ideological, emotional, and political response that history and contemporary geopolitics, including the racial fixing of bodies and access to space, have made unavailable to postcolonial African migrants. While my book delineates a category of Francophone African migrant women writers, I have also attempted to avoid the pitfalls of monolithicism that often weaken projects of categorization. To this effect, I have chosen to organize my book by author in order to attend to the distinct and specific ways in which each writer engages the question of home. In the first part of this book, I use the autobiographical trilogy of Ken Bugul to address why and how the question of home poses itself to postcolonial African women. Her trajectory from migration to homecoming serves to substantiate the following arguments. First is my proposition that the gender politics of anticolonial nationalism and postcolonial nationhood shape the question of home in a way that only enables a male postnationalist narrative of home. The second argument pertains to the function of the postcolonial nation as a site of redemption. In part II, the novels of Calixthe Beyala serve to investigate the extent to which the mid-1980s and 1990s postcolonial African disillusionment with the nation-state and mass resettlement of Africans in France recast the question of home significantly enough to

xxvi  / Introduction

allow for uninhibited female narratives of home and migration. In comparison to Ken Bugul and Fatou Diome, Beyala’s bold critique of the gender politics of the postcolonial nation and her immigrant standpoint lay out a relatively unconstrained geography of home. However, the writer’s practice of narrative ambiguity and the discursive tensions in her characterization of female immigrant protagonists shows that this geography of home nonetheless negotiates nationalist discourses of home. In part III, I show how the neocolonial processes and effects of globalization displace the moment of postcolonial disenchantment and disable the relatively uninhibited narrative of home and migration exemplified by Beyala. The nonimmigrant standpoint that Fatou Diome strives to assert in La préférence nationale and Le ventre de l’Atlantique represents a geography of home that bears witness to both the restraining hold of a reinvigorated African consciousness and the resurgence of postcolonial nationhood as an idiom of liberation.

Notes   1.  All translations are mine, unless otherwise noted.   2.  See Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias, eds. Women-NationState. (London: Macmillan, 1989); Nira Yuval-Davis. Gender and Nation. (London: Sage, 1997); Anne McClintock. “No Longer in a Future Heaven: Nationalism, Gender and Race.” Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. (London: Routledge, 1995), 352–390.   3.  This pattern is significant enough that most introductions to studies of African women writers have addressed it. See for instance Irène D’Almeida. Francophone African Women Writers: Destroying the Emptiness of Silence. (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1994); Odile Cazenave. Femmes rebelles: naissance d’un nouveau roman africain au féminin. (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996); Juliana Nfah-Abbenyi. Gender in African Women’s Writing: Identity, Sexuality, and Difference. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Pierrette Herzberger-Fofana. Littérature féminine francophone d’Afrique noire. (Paris: L’Harmattan: 2000); and Nicki Hitchcott. Women Writers in Francophone Africa. (New York: Berg, 2000).

Of Uprooted and Deterritorialized Africans  /  xxvii   4.  See for instance Frantz Fanon. “Algeria Unveiled.” A Dying Colonialism. (New York: Grove Press, 1965); and Cynthia Enloe. “Nationalism and Masculinity.” Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 42–64.   5.  See Biddy Martin and Chandra Mohanty. “Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do with It?” Feminist Studies/Critical Studies. Ed. Theresa de Lauretis. (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1986), 191–212; Caren Kaplan. “Deterritorializations: The Rewriting of Home and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse.” Cultural Critique 6 (Spring 1987): 187–198; and Minnie Bruce Pratt. “Identity: Skin Blood Heart.” Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism. Eds. Minnie Bruce Pratt, Ellie Bulkin, and Barbara Smith. (New York: Long Haul Press, 1984).   6.  In response to the dismissive repudiation of nationalisms, many studies have stressed the necessity of considering the difference between imperial and anti-imperial nationalisms. See for instance Timothy Brennan. At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Benita Parry. “Resistance Theory/ Theorizing Resistance or Two Cheers for Nativism.” Colonial Discourse/ Postcolonial Theory. Eds. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iverson. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 172–196; E. San Juan. Beyond Postcolonial Theory. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); Neil Lazarus. Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).   7.  Cheah reiterates this point in Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003) and Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). See also Tim Brennan. “Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism.” New Left Review 7 (2001): 75–84.

I Ken Bugul From Self-Imposed Exile to Constrained Homecoming

1 The (Non-)Place of the Daughter of the Postcolonial House Le baobab fou and Cendres et braises

In Le baobab fou, the narrator is set on a dizzying geographical itinerary. At a very early age, she is moved away from home and sent to live with various relatives, in different places and houses. Colonial education fills the void created by the absence of a nurturing and socializing family structure and launches the young Ken Bugul on a quest for home that takes her to Belgium. In the course of her quest, she is mentally and psychologically broken and is forced back to her native land. Cendres et braises is a narrative of failed homecoming. The narrator is a sociocultural misfit when she returns from Belgium. The same experience of isolation and homelessness at home that drove her out of Senegal in Le baobab fou informs her departure to France in the company of a Frenchman she has barely met. After five years of physical and mental abuse by her French lover, Ken Bugul is once again forced back to Senegal, in a state of advanced mental and psychological dissolution. Ken Bugul’s transient occupation of places manifests a lack of access to place, which eventually converts into homelessness. The distinction Marc Augé draws between place and non-place elucidates the signification of the narrator’s various emplacements in the two texts. If a place is a relational and historical space of identity, writes Augé, a non-place has none of these attributes since it is an impersonal and ahistorical passageway. 3

4  /  Chapter 1

The non-place is a space of transit, en route to a place. Bugul’s inability to inscribe herself into a place converts the successive places she inhabits in Senegal and Europe into non-places. As these locations turn out to be uncomfortable and ill-fitting spaces of identity that she cannot settle into, they become passageways to other places. The non-place is a place of negated subjectivity and unbelonging, which schematizes Elleke Boehmer’s argument that the “daughter of the postcolonial house” is “the non-subject within the national family romance” (106). This chapter analyzes Ken Bugul’s vexed relationship with home in relation to the gender politics of anticolonial and postcolonial nationhood. I argue that her continuous experience of place as non-place emblematizes the fate of homelessness of the daughter of/in the postcolonial house, the result of her subordination by a nationalist project that attends to the colonially induced neurosis and aspirations of the men of the nation. I propose that Ken Bugul’s desperate and self-destructive efforts to belong to Europe show how the gender politics of the postcolonial nation shape a gendered sense of attachment and commitment to the nation. Finally, I examine the implications of her self-destructive encounter with race in Europe. Her European experience both illustrates the limitations of her mode of dissenting with the gender politics of home and reaffirms the postcolonial nation as the place to be and go home. The pseudonym Ken Bugul, originally chosen by the writer to avert social stigmatization, conveys her tenuous relationship to place and her troubled relation to home. This name also marks her as a travelling body. In the Wolof language, Ken Bugul means something or somebody nobody wants.1 The name therefore underscores the fact that a lack of a place of belonging drives the geographical wanderings of the narrator. This lack of place also surfaces in her experiences of being constantly pushed out of places and not fitting properly into her successive families. The opening of Le baobab fou lays out the fate outlined by the name. At age two, Ken Bugul is neglectfully left by her mother outside the family house. The baby pushes an abandoned amber bead deep into her ear and injures herself. The abandonment of the baby outside of the family house translates the exile and

The (Non-)Place of the Daughter  /  5

rejection from place and community symbolized by the pseudonym and reflected in the inability of the narrator to integrate a place and family in Senegal. As a little and adolescent girl in Le baobab fou and a mature woman in Cendres et braises, Ken Bugul’s life in Senegal is characterized by a transient occupation of places. This forced mobility manifests her lack of a proper and grounding place in her home country. In Le baobab fou, Ken Bugul is sent, from an early age, to live with various relatives and family friends. She is shipped from one house to the next as her successive adoptive families cannot keep her, some of them throwing her out unceremoniously. By prefacing the narration of that part of her life with the declaration that “chez moi cela m’avait manqué toute la vie” (Le baobab 79) [“‘Home’ was what I had missed all my life” (64)], the author expresses that the denial of the experience of dwelling in place translates into a denial of the experience of home. Her different residences are impersonal places where she confronts indifference and loneliness. Cendres et braises chronicles a similar predicament with place when the narrator, now a young woman, returns to Senegal after her years in Belgium. The young woman lacks a place of her own, and her various accommodations include her brother’s house, a girlfriend’s bedroom, and a hotel room. The latter locale dramatizes her lack of a place of belonging in her home country. Home, writes Rosemary Marangoly George, “is not equally available to all” (9). Ken Bugul’s spatial predicament conjoins with the symbolic abandonment of the baby girl outside of the family house, in Le baobab fou, to suggest that gender determines the availability of home. The neglectful treatment of the baby girl by her mother is to be contrasted with an earlier scene in the opening of the text where another mother, presumably an ancestral mother, is a caring and protective presence for her son. In that scene, the little boy is disoriented because the family has just moved to a new and deserted location. The description of that place by the narrator evokes a void, but the strong presence of the mother provides a sense of place to the disoriented son, conferring to this non-place the attributes of a place. In the narrator’s description, the maternal lap becomes a nurturing refuge

6  /  Chapter 1

for the son. Home and place are mediated through the body of the mother here, and the gendered access to the maternal body informs gendered relations to place and home. The close and intimate proximity of the son to the mother and the devotion of the mother to the son allow him to occupy a relational place of identity and belonging. This situation contrasts with the nonrelational, anonymous, and solitary location of the neglected daughter. Her abandonment in the peripheral place of the courtyard, an image which Fatou Diome repeats in Le ventre de l’Atlantique, represents the marginalization and outsider status of the female daughter of the nation. The negligence of the mother and the family also signifies that the existence of the baby girl is easily forgotten about. This schema dramatizes her status as the nonsubject of the national family and concords with Boehmer’s point about the invisibility of the national daughter and her “overshadowed position” in relation to the “pre-eminent status of national sons” (106). Ken Bugul’s experience of places as non-places stems from such a negation of her subjectivity by her different families. She constantly recounts in Le baobab fou that her outstanding achievements in school are totally ignored by her families and that she feels invisible. In her different residences, Ken Bugul has no existence outside of her assigned place and role as a housemaid. At her brothers’, she is not informed of important events and nobody ever solicits her input on family matters. Even such important information as the death of a brother is not communicated to her. This marginalization preempts the development of emotional and affective ties. The young girl feels detached from her family, as shown by her inability to grieve with her family when her brother dies. Her point that she cannot sympathize with her family because she never felt connected to it schematizes the daughter of the nation’s weak affective and emotional investment in the nation. This point is buttressed in Cendres et braises when the French-based narrator does not miss her family back in Senegal because, she writes, “Je n’en avais pas les moyens affectifs” (Cendres 91) [“I lacked the emotional resources to do so”]. This relational pattern brings home Boehmer’s point that “where

The (Non-)Place of the Daughter  /  7

male nationalists have claimed, won and ruled the motherland . . . this same motherland may not signify ‘home’ or ‘source’ to women, or does so in significantly different ways“ (90). The dismissal of the sister by her indifferent brothers reproduces the displacement and background positioning of the female subject of the nation by the male frontrunner. Calixthe Beyala, in C’est le soleil qui m’a brûlée, also uses the image of disharmonious relationships between brothers and sisters to allegorize the gender politics of postcolonial Cameroon. The non-place that Ken Bugul occupies in her family reflects the gender-inflected identity politics of the newly formed postcolonial nation. The narrator describes the function and passive positioning of African women at that moment in the history of the nation, specifying their roles as “symbole de continuité” (Le baobab 146) [“symbol of continuity” (127)]. Scholars of gender and nationalism have observed that this positioning of women as reproducers and guardians of the boundaries of the nation has been for the benefit of male nationalists. The male perception of colonial domination as an emasculating encounter lead to the construction of the nation as a site to reverse the emasculation of the colonial encounter and soothe the wounded male ego.2 The narrator’s place as a housemaid and housekeeper in her families, more symbolically her housework for her brothers, highlights the invisibility and desubjectification of the national daughter through her subordination to a nationalist agenda that attends to the anxieties, frustrations, and neurosis of the men of the nation. As the narrator of Le baobab fou reminisces about her successive families, the recurrent images of female submission to the male heads of household assess home as a social location of masculine power and privilege from which women are excluded. Partha Chatterjee’s work on the implication of the domestic sphere in the fight against colonial domination details the enforcement on women of the overlapping constructions of home as in ‘domestic sphere’ and home as in ‘homeland.’ Chatterjee explains that colonial domination invested a new meaning to the traditional gendered division of social space that characterized patriarchal colonized societies. The (feminine) domestic sphere became a locus of anticolonial nationalism because it was the

8  /  Chapter 1

sole place where the colonized could assert their cultural values and sovereignty; the outside (masculine) world being a place where they had to submit to the West. The traditional social place of women in the home and as the home now became a signifier of national culture and sovereignty (120–121). These gender arrangements strongly indicate that anticolonial nationalism shapes the question of home in a way that can only enable a male postnationalist narrative of home. As a matter of fact, the male postnationalist narrative has no consequence for the reproduction of the nation as long as women perform their roles as representations of home and national culture. On a symbolic level then, the female submission documented by Ken Bugul in Le baobab fou safeguards the home/family and constitutes an act of allegiance to the nation. The “apprentissage de la femme et de l’obéïssance“ (Le baobab 156) [“apprenticeship in womanhood and in obedience“ (136)] that she often mentions produces the female subject of the nation. The existence of the female subject of the nation is contingent on her occupation of that social place of identity. But in the case of the narrator, “l’apprentissage de l’Occidentale que je voulais et souhaitais être“ (Le baobab 142) [“my apprenticeship to the West, the one I wanted and wished to be” (123)] competes with and eventually truncates her apprenticeship to womanhood. Her gradual estrangement from the social place of the national daughter culminates in her relocation to Belgium. In Cendres et braises, she also recounts her inability to reintegrate that place when she comes back from Belgium “remplie de toutes les formules, de toutes les perceptions de l’ailleurs” (Cendres 44) [“filled with the formulas and perceptions of another place”]. In Le baobab fou, the location of the non-place signifies the marginalization of the national daughter. In Cendres et braises however, the inability of the narrator to negotiate that marginal location, when she comes back from Belgium, positions her in the non-place. In this text, she is a social and cultural misfit because her identity no longer coincides with and cannot be accommodated by the existing social place of identity. The nationalist symbolic placement of women as housekeepers and homemakers circumscribes the national daughter’s geography

The (Non-)Place of the Daughter  /  9

of home and offers an interpretative frame for the narrator’s failed homecoming. Her involuntary celibacy symbolizes her lack of the adequate sociocultural and identity qualifications to be part of a home and a family. Her male generational and intellectual peers chose their wives from young women with limited exposure to Western education and no abroad experience. The narrator’s celibacy in Cendres et braises points to the nationalist perceptions of the male and female migrant body. While the homecoming migrant male body is almost welcomed as a warrior body, its female counterpart is marked as a soiled and useless body; hence the celibacy of the narrator. In this masculinist nationalist scheme of things, the married woman is the woman of the nation. She is the “new woman” who, according to Chatterjee, represents the effort of anticolonial nationalism to reconcile the imperative of modernization with the anticolonial cultural agenda of safeguarding the home. Thus, the “new woman” that the narrator’s African male contemporaries desired had to be different from both the Western woman and the “common” native woman. She had to “acquire the cultural refinements afforded by modern education without jeopardizing her place at home” (Chatterjee 128). Marriage, the entrustment of a home, accordingly validates female national identity and grants access to national belonging. The narrator’s celibacy signifies that she does not meet the criteria for national belonging. The illegitimate status of mistress, whose place is significantly outside of the home, conveys her ineligibility as national subject and justifies her ensuing exclusion from the “national family script,” to use Boehmer’s terminology (107). As a mistress, she is a loose and disaffiliated body, without a proper place. The displacement of the narrator cannot be read independently of her exposure to the colonial curriculum. Her relocation to Europe extends the obsessive fixation of the schooled colonized on the West, as analyzed by Fanon and extensively documented by the Francophone African literary tradition.3 However, I would like to argue that it is her status as a nonsubject of the nation that catalyzes the colonial depersonalization and the rejection of home described in the two texts. The narrator’s cooptation by the institutions of colonialism uncovers the gendered modali-

10  /  Chapter 1

ties of colonial interpellation. Chatterjee’s analysis of anticolonial resistance suggests, between the lines, that the hegemonic position of colonized men in the home and their subordination in the colonial world versus the marginalization of women in the home may have generated gender-specific responses to colonial interpellation. In Le baobab fou, the abandonment of the baby girl outside of the family house and her self-inflicted injury with the amber bead, a foreign element, illustrates how the marginal positioning of the daughter of the house becomes a vulnerable subject positioning that mitigates resistance to colonial interpellation. The medical condition of disequilibrium, the result of the perforation of the eardrum by a foreign element, prefigures the destabilizing effect the colonial encounter has on the narrator: she cannot develop a sense of place and home in the wake of her exposure to the colonial curriculum. Explaining that “je cherchais le refuge depuis la perle d’ambre dans l’oreille” (Le baobab 102) [“I was looking for refuge since the amber bead in my ear” (85)], the narrator is an unsheltered body whose eagerness to find a home constitutes a liability and shapes her response to colonial education. The neglected girl becomes an easy recruit for colonial education. Her tight embrace of the institution of colonialism in Le baobab fou is on par with her isolation and estrangement at home. She throws herself completely into the world of her Western textbooks to the point of closing off her senses to her environment. Her internal self-exile anticipates her geographical relocation away from this environment. The colonial curriculum becomes her sole interlocutor, and this situation fosters a mental and emotional disengagement from her African surroundings. Africa is turned into a non-place, whereas Europe becomes her relational and historical place of identity. The outstanding scholarly achievements of the narrator are symptomatic of her desire to integrate Europe. Her academic accomplishments accordingly culminate in her relocation to Belgium. In Cendres et braises, the narrator is similarly rendered vulnerable to foreign cooptation when she returns home from Belgium. Simon Gikandi has observed that “in the grand narratives of national identity and reconstruction, the colonized subject’s

The (Non-)Place of the Daughter  /  11

return home is lyricalized as a gesture of self-affirmation and absolute identification with the national landscape” (1996: 215). However, Cendres et braises uncovers the gendered modalities of homecoming. As shown by her involuntary celibacy, the narrator is denied the opportunity to be (at) home because she has strayed from the national daughter’s geography of home. The impossibility of homecoming informs her new involvement with the West. Her intense investment in European culture during that period of failed homecoming assuages her loneliness and sociocultural isolation. Very much like her easy cooptation by colonial education in Le baobab fou, her easy seduction by a French businessman in Cendres et braises is a logical development. When she eventually leaves for France with that French companion she has barely met, it is clear that he represents her way into a home/nation. It appears that he nation has failed the narrator again by not fulfilling her desire for home and by consequently forcing her on another colonial trail. There is a marked contrast between the angst of leaving Senegal in Cendres et braises and her euphoric departure for Belgium in Le baobab fou. This difference highlights her changed engagement with the place of the national daughter, the result of a new conceptualization of home. Taking off for Belgium in Le baobab fou, the narrator presents her departure as the end of an exilic odyssey in Senegal and a homecoming to Europe. Terms of flight and escape therefore recur in the scene that depicts her leave-taking, and her emotional state is that of an exile on the verge of being reunited with home. The reversal of the signification of Europe and Africa in Cendres et braises causes a reluctant departure for France, in conformity with nationalist geographies of home and identity. Home, in line with the nationalist conceptualization, is relocated to Senegal, and her departure represents a painful exile to Europe. These different locations of home, as reflected in the distinct departures in Le baobab fou and Cendres et braises, are responses to the place of the national daughter. Walking away from the national family in Le baobab fou, the narrator acts out both her refusal to inhabit the place of the national daughter and her difference from the women of the nation. This difference crys-

12  /  Chapter 1

tallized during her socialization into proper Senegalese womanhood. While living in a multifamily concession in Le baobab fou, she observes the daily routines of the housewives and comes to the conclusion that she does not want to emulate this model of womanhood. In Cendres et braises, the wish of the narrator to resemble these very women expresses a desire to recover her place as a national daughter and reintegrate the national family. Whereas some Senegalese women appear to envy the luxurious life she enjoys as the mistress of a European man, the narrator confesses to her desire “de rentrer à la maison, de vivre les réalités profondes de mon pays, de vivre le même sort qu’elles?” (Cendres 69) [“to return home, to live the profound realities of my country, to share their destiny?”]. This development results from the reverse signification of Europe and Africa during the European sojourns of the narrator. Europe changes from destination to passageway while Africa, no longer a passageway to Europe, becomes a destination. Ken Bugul does not view her journeys to Europe as temporary or cyclical movements, along the lines of an immigration, exile, or expatriation. Her relocations are meant to be permanent settlements. Her assertion of a new genealogy, her Gaul ancestors in Le baobab fou, and her union with a French man in Cendres et braises indicate her rebirth into a new family and nation. In Le baobab fou, her arrival as a blank slate in Belgium symbolizes that this place is her final destination. Without the cultural luggage that immigrants carry to their new places and that tentatively fosters the birth of transcultural and transnational selves, the narrator is ready to be molded by her new environment into an authentic daughter of Europe. The symbolism of the tabula rasa recurs in Cendres et braises as she acquiesces to being molded into proper French womanhood by her French companion. Y. chooses her clothing and hairstyles and insists that she keep a slender body, in accordance with European standards of beauty. Race ultimately determines the outcome of the narrator’s project of walking away from home. A Black African woman in Europe, her desire to belong is frustrated by racism and the coterminous productions of Whiteness and Europeanness. In replica to her occupation of place in Senegal, her transient

The (Non-)Place of the Daughter  /  13

habitations in Belgium and France translate her lack of place in Europe. In Le baobab fou, her attempts to blend in Europe take her from the dorm for international students to various living arrangements and houses that gradually estrange her from the African community in Belgium but fail to achieve her objective of assimilation. Her race usually singles her out and symbolically evicts her from these places. In one instance, her neighbors refer to her as “une étrangère, une Noire” (Le baobab 180) [“foreign, a Black girl” (157)], thereby pointing out her illegitimate occupation of European space. In Cendres et braises, she is perceived similarly by her neighbors in her all-White, Parisian, upper-class neighborhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. She is “la Noire qui vit avec lui” (Cendres 135) [“the black woman who lives with him”]. Additionally, she has no place of her own. Her French lover is anxious to hide his affair from his wife. He first rents an apartment for her, then has her live with his mother, and finally moves her to the vacation home of the couple. All these locations in Cendres et braises reflect a clandestine occupation of European space. Her physical abuse by her lover leads her to seek shelter from these various locations. In one highly symbolic incident, her lover violently beats her up and then calls the police to evict her from the apartment. This event prompts the realization that race and gender disqualify her from a legitimate occupation of space in France: J’étais une femme si fragile, au statut de putain; une femme noire, une étrangère, plus fragile encore. Les étrangers qui venaient dans leur pays manger leur pain et leur fromage. (Cendres 143) [I was such a fragile woman whose status was that of a whore; a black woman, a foreigner, even more fragile. The foreigners who came to their country to eat their bread and their cheese.]

The psychiatric ward of Saint-Anne where the police take her, for lack of an alternative place, signifies her unsuitability as a French national subject and her lack of entitlement to a place and home in France. The ward is also a powerful metaphor for

14  /  Chapter 1

the perils of negotiating home outside of the postcolonial nation. As an outcome of her movement away from home, her internment corroborates Sara Ahmed’s point that walking away from home is not a response equally available to all (83), bell hooks’s suggestion that, for black women, this gesture cannot translate into self-empowerment and self-fulfillment (42–47), and Elleke Boehmer’s argument that the non-place of the national daughter nonetheless offers transformative possibilities (4). Many critics of Le baobab fou have understandably argued that the narrator’s confrontation with racism results in her reconciliation with Africa.4 Yet I argue that Ken Bugul’s response to her rejection by Europe highlights the depth of the rift between the national daughter and the postcolonial nation. Her response takes two simultaneous and contradictory forms of longing for Senegal and still striving to be accepted by Europe. This pattern, particularly manifest in Le baobab fou, speaks to her ambivalent relationship with Africa. The above-mentioned readings of the text have documented Ken Bugul’s embrace of Africa as she faces rejection, particularly her reappraisal of European culture through lenses tinted with African cultural arrogance and superiority. However, I contend that the exilic “here and there” and “there and then” that permeate these moments don’t convey the traditional exilic nostalgia for the abandoned homeland. These nostalgic moments don’t add up with the narrator’s own life of solitude in Senegal, and she never longs for that previous life. She randomly muses about impersonal cultural experiences and imagined ways of life in Senegal but is unable to project her previous life into those abstractions. At the end of Le baobab fou, she returns to her point of departure and reunites with the mythical baobab tree that symbolizes her roots and identity. But as Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi points out, the narrator’s homecoming to a dead tree highlights her mythical vision of Africa while in exile (209). Building on Mudimbe-Boyi’s interpretation, I will argue that the dead baobab, by exposing and shattering the delusional version of Africa that sustains the narrator’s homecoming, shows that she has not found her way home at the end of Le baobab fou. Ken Bugul’s simultaneous increased efforts in that text to be part of Europe contradict these suggested reconnections with

The (Non-)Place of the Daughter  /  15

Africa. She tries on different masks in her attempts to fit. She exclusively dates white males and distances herself from the African communities in Europe. Her increasingly self-destructive efforts to attain her objective of belonging to Europe reveal a rift with Africa too severe to accommodate the types of reconnections à la Albert Memmi that critics of Le baobab fou have identified. According to Albert Memmi, the rejection from the coveted category of Europeanness leads the colonized to vigorously reclaim their denigrated identities and scrub away all traces of their cultural encounter with Europe. As the narrator fails in her endeavor, she has recourse to alternative pathways into European daughterhood. She develops an addiction to LSD and heroin, joins hippy groups, and explores a gay lifestyle because she seizes these relatively porous communities as ways into European belonging. Bugul’s forced departure from Europe in Le baobab fou offers another evidence of her tenuous reconciliation with Africa. The advanced stage of mental dissolution that prompts her return to Africa further weakens the reconciliation thesis. In fact, most readings of the text have overlooked that she goes back to Senegal upon the insistence of her alarmed Belgium friends. Ken Bugul does not choose to return to Africa, nor does she choose Africa as home. She is instead assigned Africa as home by Europe. The dual movements in the text of the narrator positioning herself as European and being repositioned as African by her European entourage demonstrate how she is evicted from Europe and pushed back to Africa. Confronted with the European craving for otherness, she is forced out of “le jeu de l’Occident” (Le baobab 71) [“the Western game” (57)] into “le jeu de la couleur noire” (Le baobab 98) [“the game of the color black” (82)] because, she writes: “‘Nous avons une amie noire, une Africaine’ était la phrase la plus ‘in’ dans ces milieux” (Le baobab 101) [“‘We have a Black friend, an African woman’ was the most fashionable sentence in those circles” (85)]. She thus finds herself forced to claim Africa as home in order to be accepted by Europe. With gender and race colliding to delineate for her a place as an exotic sexual curio, she gains acceptance into various places and homes in Belgium.

16  /  Chapter 1

Ien Ang calls this form of hospitality extended to selected non-Western immigrant populations, and which the Belleville female protagonists of Calixthe Beyala also negotiate, “inclusion by virtue of othering”(139). The narrator of Le baobab fou is accepted because she is an exotic Black African woman who satisfies the European craving for otherness. This means that she is reassigned into the very categories of race, ethnicity, and nation that she sought to transcend by leaving home. In this sense postnationalism is not available to the Black African subject. Indeed we need to factor in what Edward Soja calls “the geopolitics of the body,” meaning that race, gender, and ethnicity often firmly attach some bodies to certain narratives. This is dramatized in a highly symbolic episode in Le baobab fou where the emotionally distraught narrator attempts to tear her skin away from her body. Ken Bugul becomes accomplice to the process of “inclusion by othering” since she trades her self and personality in exchange for hospitality. Julia Watson astutely talks about the narrator’s “collaboration as a willing accomplice in European exploitation of her symbolic value” (155). Her prostitution, in Le baobab fou, extends her desperate need to make a home for herself in Europe.5 When a client asks her how much she charges, she almost confesses that she only wants to be accepted by White people. The narrator’s determination to gain acceptance and her clinging to Europe out of despair project Africa as a nonoption for her. Her return to Africa as a last resort challenges the thesis that she may have found her way home through her experiences of rejection and racism in Europe. In fact, her statement that “Je n’avais pas trouvé mes ancêtres les Gaulois et rien à la place” (Le baobab 88) [“I hadn’t find my ‘ancestors,’ the Gauls, or anything to replace them” (74)] shows that the void created by her unfulfilled quest was not filled. Thus Africa does not replace Europe as the locus of identification, as many studies of Le baobab fou have concluded. I have already established that the narrator’s failed homecoming related in Cendres et braises is the result of her unsuitability for the national project. However, the contrast between her passive acceptance of this exclusion from the Senegalese

The (Non-)Place of the Daughter  /  17

national project and her active determination to be incorporated into a European national project reveals that her emotional and affective allegiances are exclusively with Europe, not with Africa. Because of her emotional and affective rift with Africa, she can only entertain a pragmatic if not coerced relationship with Africa. Upon the narrator’s return to Senegal in Cendres et braises, the ease and desperation with which she falls in love with the first European man she comes across and her apparent relief for securing this liaison attest that her assigned home of Senegal is not her home of choice. Her association with Y. functions to rescue her from Africa and allows her to resume her project of belonging to Europe. Her rapport with Y. is a site where she lives out her exclusive affiliation to Europe. If belonging to a place often involves compromises and concessions, the concessions and compromises she makes in the course of her relationship with Y. show that France is the recipient of a leniency that she denies Senegal. Once in France, she discovers that Y. is married. In the hope of becoming his wife, she consents to the unsatisfying and unfulfilling place of mistress that she rejected in Senegal. This perseverance stands in opposition to her impatience with that same place in Senegal and manifests a compromising and indulgent attitude to her host nation. With her days and lifestyle structured around Y.’s needs and desires, the narrator slips into the role of devoted and submissive housewife. In Le baobab fou, she was introduced to that role during her socialization into proper Senegalese womanhood, but she vehemently rejected it. The inability of the narrator of Cendres et braises to quit her physically and emotionally abusive lover sustains her pattern of clinging to Europe out of despair. Y. humiliates her in public, makes racist comments, throws her out, pushes her into committing suicide, and has her interned in a psychiatric ward. By hanging on to that destructive and depersonalizing relationship she replicates her destructive efforts in Le baobab fou to fit in Europe. This uncovers once again that Africa is out of the loop for her, hence her final return to Africa in Cendres et braises is also a last resort. The mentally distraught narrator is forced to flee back to Africa. The continent once again becomes a pragmatic choice

18  /  Chapter 1

and not an emotional and affective choice: “Ce n’était pas ici que je voulais venir, mais je ne savais plus où aller” (Cendres 106) [“This was not where I wanted to come, but I no longer knew where to go”]. In the end, the narrator’s failed attempt to walk away from home and her forced return illustrates the limitations of her mode of dissenting with the gender politics of the postcolonial nation. Her experience and circular itinerary also reaffirms the postcolonial nation as the place to be and go home. In the wake of this inconclusive migration to Europe, self-recovery and selfrealization become contingent on reintegrating the non-place of the national daughter. Cendres et braises and Riwan ou le chemin de sable are accounts of that reverse project.

Notes   1.  In her 1985 interview with Bernard Magnier, Ken Bugul discusses the cultural signification of her name and reveals that her editors suggested that she takes a pseudonym because they were concerned about the impact of her potentially scandalous disclosures. See Bernard Magnier. “Ken Bugul ou l’écriture thérapeutique.” Notre Librairie 81 (1985): 151–155. For a detailed analysis of that pseudonym, see Mildred Mortimer. Journeys through the French African Novel. (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1990), 166; and Irène D’Almeida. Francophone African Women Writers, 44–45.   2.  For a discussion of the biological, symbolic and cultural reproduction of the nation by women, see Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias, eds. Women-Nation-State; and Nira Yuval-Davis. Gender and Nation. For an analysis of the hypermasculinism of anticolonial nationalisms, see Cynthia Enloe. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Sense of International Politics. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).   3.  Frantz Fanon. Black Skin, White Masks. (New York: Grove Press, 1967). For a discussion of the theme of the colonial curriculum in Francophone African literatures, see Samba Gadjigo. Ecole blanche, Afrique noire: l’école coloniale dans le roman d’Afrique noire francophone. (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1990).   4.  See Mildred Mortimer. Journeys through the French African Novel; Irène D’Almeida. Francophone Women Writers; Elisabeth MudimbeBoyi. “The Poetics of Exile and Errancy in Le baobab fou by Ken Bugul

The (Non-)Place of the Daughter  /  19 and Ti Jean L’Horizon by Simone Schwartz-Bart.” Yale French Studies 83 (1994): 196–212; Julia Watson. “Exile in the Promised Land: Self-Decolonization and Bodily Re-Membering in Ken Bugul’s The Abandoned Baobab.” Writing New Identities: Gender, Nation and Immigration in Contemporary Europe. Eds. Gisela Brinker-Gabler and Sidonie Smith. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); and Keith Walker. The Game of Slipknot: Countermodernism and the Francophone Literary Culture. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).   5.  Odile Cazenave similarly argues that Ken Bugul is a “self-prostitute.” See Femmes rebelles, 65.

2 No Place Like the Non-Place Striving to Come Home in Cendres et braises and Riwan ou le chemin de sable

In Le baobab fou, the narrator is identified as Ken Bugul. This name displaces her birth name of Mariètou M’Baye, aka Marie Ndiaga, and dramatizes her conflicted relationship to her place of birth. Ken Bugul’s reversion to Marie Ndiaga, her original name, in Cendres et braises and Riwan ou le chemin de sable suggests a new relationship to her native land by the time she was working on the second volume of her autobiographical trilogy. Indeed, Cendres et braises is recounted from the maternal village, recurrently identified as “le lieu” [“the place”] in that text. The narrator describes at length the awakening of her senses and sensuality by this place and her consequential awareness that “le lieu existait” (Cendres 17) [“the place existed”], which translates her epiphanic location of home in this place. In this chapter, I will analyze the gendered modalities of the narrator’s successful homecoming, as projected in Cendres et braises and Riwan ou le chemin de sable. I seek to demonstrate that her determination to reintegrate the non-place of the national daughter speaks to the desirability of home and the fear of being unhomed that mediate Francophone African migrant women’s narratives of home and migration. In the last segment of this chapter, I analyze how this desire for home informs the narrative strategies the autobiographer deploys to reframe her drift away from the nation. 21

22  /  Chapter 2

The awakening scene described at the beginning of this chapter testifies to the eagerness of the narrator of Cendres et braises to anchor herself by working herself and her senses into a favorable disposition toward her new locale. The overemphatic exclamatory “ah!” that pepper her description of the place are accordingly theatrical and simulate a bonding with the place. Adaptation to her new environment is a necessity, explains the narrator. Her recurrent acknowledgments that homelessness is a fate that she cannot psychologically sustain strongly suggest that she is simulating her reconnection with her homeland. For instance, her emphatic description of a rediscovery of and bonding with the mother is eventually contradicted but also explained by her statement that “Je n’arrivais pas à m’adapter à la Mère. Et je le devais pour survivre, sinon j’étais perdue pour toujours” (Cendres 109) [“I could not adapt to the Mother. And I had to in order to survive, otherwise I was lost forever”]. The narrator pursues that not being at home in this environment is no longer an option. She has to make this home: “Je n’avais pas de préférences au point où j’en étais. J’étais revenue chez moi, j’étais revenue me réadapter, j’étais revenue me désaliéner. J’étais revenue me purifier. Je voulais retourner dans la cour” (Cendres 109) [“I had no preferences at this point. I had come back home, I had come back to readapt, I had come back to end my alienation. I had come back to purify myself. I wanted to return to the courtyard”]. The return to the courtyard means a reattachment to the social body. Articulation to the social body is manifested through participation in genderspecific activities, for instance. The exclusion of the narrator from these activities is consequently meaningful. Her unorthodox lifestyle of geographical restlessness and celibacy constitutes a sociocultural handicap that thwarts her reincorporation into the community. In Cendres et braises, she narrates her European experience to Anta Sèye, a local young woman whom she befriends. Her interlocutors have changed, from her Gaul ancestors in Le baobab fou to a Senegalese audience. She is reopening the lines of communication in an attempt to be part of the community. But the inability of Anta Sèye to understand her, labeling her crazy and lost, means that she is symbolically inaudible to this community because of her anomalous lifestyle.

No Place Like the Non-Place  /  23

The pathologization of the narrator’s unconventional lifestyle exemplifies the use of the discourse of madness as a form of control and punishment for women who transgress patriarchal laws. She is viewed as mentally unbalanced by the villagers, with her celibacy often documented as evidence. The courtyard of her mother is often animated since neighbors and relatives continually stop by to socialize. The narrator remains cloistered in her bedroom all day long because she can’t join in the conversation. She longs to return to the courtyard but is kept in a state of exile because she lacks the requisite criteria to be reattached to the social body. As an alien body in this community, she is a loose and unattached body. Keith Walker has argued, in his analysis of Le baobab fou, that Ken Bugul’s obsession with “vegetation, flowering, and roots” translates her yearning to “anchor” and “fix” her “alienated, exiled, shipwrecked, uprooted” body (175). A similar obsession with these natural elements pervades Cendres et braises: from the sturdy and blossoming trees in her mother’s courtyard, the plants and flowers she uses to concoct her daily regiment of incense in order to purify herself, to the plants that form the fence of the courtyard and that she uses to relieve her itching body. These images speak to a desire to reattach her loose body to the social body and also to the necessity of disalienating her foreign body in order to become a member of the social body. There is a preoccupation in Cendres et braises with producing a body fit for this new place by unscribing the traces of elsewhere on her soiled body. The narrator stresses that she bathes under the rain in order to clean her body of the accumulated foreign impurities. The dark bedroom where she confines herself with the windows shut and incense is an antechamber to the courtyard because the room symbolizes the process of purification and rebirth that she undertakes before she can rejoin the courtyard. Her immobility and occupation of space reverses her years of geographical restlessness and grounds her. This new posture trains her body into the docility and compliance that she displays in the last sentences of the text when she learns that she has become the twenty-ninth wife of the Marabout, the

24  /  Chapter 2

religious leader of the community: “Ma mère vient d’apprendre par la Mauresque et sa voisine que le Marabout m’avait épousée. Mille Gloires Au Créateur des Harmonies Eternelles” (Cendres 190) [“My mother has just been informed by the Mauresque and her neighbor that the Marabout had married me. One Thousand Glories to the Creator of Eternal Harmonies”]. Nicole Meyer has questioned the happiness that the author projects in these last two sentences of the text because the passive constructions through which this event is recounted and her involvement in a polygamous union contradict her “feminist outlook” (226). Meyer certainly has a point, but the narrator’s agenda of reintegration invites an alternative reading of this ending. Coming at the very end of the text and in the wake of her above analyzed struggle to adapt to her community, her reaction to this polygamous marriage manifests her successful self-training into compliance with her new community. Her response also dramatizes the acute desire for home that conditions her psyche. Furthermore, the narrative progression invites us not to dwell on this marriage as an end in itself. The progression gears us toward another reading of the narrator’s disconcerting polygamous union. Marriage here, which gives her access to the courtyard occupied by the wives of the Marabout, realizes her desire of reattachment to the social body by unmarking her as a foreign body. Riwan ou le chemin de sable, the last volume of Ken Bugul’s autobiographical trilogy, corroborates the interrelated fates of celibacy and homelessness that Cendres et braises outlines. The narrator’s homecoming is by way of her marriage to a respected religious authority. He is referred to as the “Marabout” in Cendres et braises and the “Serigne” in Riwan ou le chemin de sable. This marriage is the ultimate seal of approval that rehabilitates her into society. Furthermore, the polygamous nature of this marriage facilitates her reintegration. As a member of the courtyard of the Serigne, she joins a community of women whose company offers a nurturing and restorative environment. Through her blissful and restorative experience of sharing a man with twenty-eight women, the narrator is lead to reevaluate the signification of marriage, love, intimacy, and companionship.

No Place Like the Non-Place  /  25

She concludes that her Western education, which prepared her for monogamous relationships, did not serve her right. Against this rosy picture of a harmonious reunion with her homeland, I would like to argue in the reminder of this chapter that the polygamous marriage of the narrator of Riwan ou le chemin de sable epitomizes her successful but nonetheless forced homecoming. The return to a lifestyle and society she has vigorously sought to escape shows the impossibility of negotiating home outside of the non-place of the national daughter. The acceptance of polygamy signifies that she is condemned to make a home of this non-place. A consideration of the different sociocultural considerations and disciplinary discourses that frame her acceptance of this polygamous marriage will support my argument. The practice of the “Ndigueul,” an expression of faith through total submission of the self to a religious and spiritual mentor, constructs the narrator as a pedagogic subject to be molded into proper national daughterhood when she entrusts herself to the Serigne. The narrator’s compliance with the decision of the Serigne to marry her, in obedience to the Ndigueul, enacts her successful reformation and training into a proper subject of her community. However, the cautionary stories of Rama and Riwan, both of which speak to the significance of the Ndigueul, expose the disciplinary discourses that guide this marriage and homecoming. Riwan’s original name is Massamba. His state of dementia is such that he is chained like an animal and brought to the Serigne for treatment. The narrator witnesses the arrival of the Riwan at the Serigne’s and is left with the image of a wounded wild animal. The metaphorical convergence between the rebellious body and the animal body evokes the narrator’s fate of being symbolically banished from the courtyard. Her rebellious body, a result of her refusal to conform to the laws of her community, is affixed with the stigma of madness. Like Massamba, the narrator represents a body unfit for membership in the community. Both endure a fate of social disenfranchisement. The narrator observes Massamba’s rehumanization and reincorporation into the group as he follows the Ndigueul of the Marabout and is reborn as Riwan. The narrator is being concurrently reformed by the Serigne, and Riwan comes to materialize her aspired end destination.

26  /  Chapter 2

Parallel to the story of Riwan is that of Rama, a young wife of the Serigne. Rama rebels against her arranged marriage by committing adultery and fleeing back to her family. As soon as she arrives, the family house mysteriously catches fire and the whole family is decimated. As if to underscore the sociocultural parameters that guide the new life of the narrator, Riwan ou le chemin de sable is framed by the story of Rama. The first and last chapters recount the demise of Rama and her family. The last line of the last chapter and of the book is, however, devoted to Riwan: “Au milieu du grand chemin de sable, j’aperçus Riwan, silencieux, qui marchait vers la concession du Serigne” (Riwan 230) [“In the middle of the main sand path, I saw Riwan walk silently towards the concession of the Serigne”]. The narrator’s refocus on Riwan conforms with the total obliteration of the memory of Rama by the community because of her disobedience. She stresses that the name of Rama was never uttered again in this community. The refocus on Riwan, in conformity with the perspective of the community, shows the mental and psychological grip that society has on the narrator. She is receptive to the morality and cautionary tale that the story of Rama embodies. The tale achieves the intended effect of keeping the narrator on the right path. This path is the way home and is delineated by the location of Riwan in the “chemin de sable” [“sand path”], in contrast to Rama who strays away from that same place. This final location of Riwan in the sand path further reinforces the metaphorical association between Riwan and the sand path in the title of the text. The sand path is an important space for the narrator. As the path that she obediently takes everyday to go to the compound of the Serigne, the sand path symbolizes her remission from rebellion, her journey toward the rehabilitation and rebirth represented by Riwan, and her new geography of home. As exemplified by the death of Rama, who strays away from the sand path, and the rebirth of Riwan, who faithfully stays on the path, the notions of death and life correlate with that of rebellion and submission to highlight the constraining considerations that keep the narrator on the sand path and at home. Making a home of this village constitutes a matter of death and life for the narrator because she returns to the village in a state of near death, following her self-destructive

No Place Like the Non-Place  /  27

attempts to assimilate into Europe. In line with the predicaments of Riwan and Rama, which illuminate the limited options of the narrator, the village is the place “où il y avait un choix: vivre ou mourir” (Riwan 166) [“where there was a choice: to live or to die”] and “où j’étais revenue pour mourir ou renaître” (Riwan 167) [“where I had returned to die or be born again”]. Her assiduous treading of the linear and narrow sand path, always with downcast eyes, shows her commitment to keep at bay distracting influences. These influences could potentially lure her from the sand path, transform her into a rebellious body, and expose her to the fate of Rama. The narrator’s limited alternatives to belonging to her community force her to settle for her community as home. These revelations also explain her polygamous marriage. The imperative to make home of the village dictates her marriage to the Serigne. She insightfully opens up about her predicament: Je n’avais plus le choix. J’étais là parce que je ne savais plus où aller. La disponibilité que j’avais pour recommencer, pour apprendre, pour être, pour vivre, m’avait aussi permis d’accepter que tout à coup on m’annonçat que j’étais mariée à un homme à mon insu. (Riwan 148) [I no longer had a choice. I was here because I no longer knew where to go. The availability that I had to start again, to learn, to be, to live, had also allowed me to accept that suddenly I was informed that I was married to a man without my knowledge.]

The narrator’s recourse to the Ndigueul, which prepares her to comply with that marriage, further stresses her quandary. Through the Ndigueul, the narrator hopes to come to terms with her limited options by suppressing her questioning self and numbing her intellect and senses like Riwan. Her wish to resemble the almost robotic Riwan in order to desensitize herself and accept her new community uncovers her ambivalence toward her new environment and her constrained homecoming. By deferring the responsibility of her actions to somebody else, the Ndigueul allows the narrator to avert the ideological repercussions and implications of her choices. This exposes her

28  /  Chapter 2

uneasiness with her new home because her homecoming entails that she embrace a lifestyle and occupy a place she is not ideologically comfortable with. The narrator’s ideological discomfort surfaces in her various attempts to come to terms with her polygamous lifestyle. The tensions between the need to use the Ndigueul to come to terms with her polygamous marriage and the lack of agency that her compliance to the Ndigueul implies lead her to rearticulate the Ndigueul to accommodate agency. This rearticulation is manifest in a passage significantly located at the moment in the text where the Serigne demands that she join him for their first conjugal night: Car accepter le Ndigueul était un choix. . . . Le disciple lui même choisissait son Serigne indépendamment de son père ou de sa mère. Ensuite, il prenait son temps pour se preparer à l’idée de soumettre à ce choix, de se convaincre de son propre et libre choix. . . . Appartenir à son propre choix. (Riwan 153) [Because accepting the Ndigueul was a choice. . . . The disciple himself/herself chose his/her Serigne independently of his/her father or mother. Then, he/she took the time to prepare to the idea, to subject to this choice, to be convinced of his/her proper and free choice. . . . To belong to your own choice.]

The emphatic notion of choice in this passage is part of a thread of terms conveying agency and initiative. This thread forms a defensive pattern that discloses the narrator’s uneasiness with her new subject position. When she learns of her marriage to “un époux que je n’avais ni choisi ni recherché” (Riwan 149) [“a husband I had neither chosen nor sought”], she is understandably distressed. But she then follows up: “On ne refusait rien au Serigne. Je ne pouvais pas me refuser au Serigne. Je voulais le Serigne” (Riwan 156) [“Nobody would refuse anything to the Serigne. I could not refuse myself to the Serigne. I wanted the Serigne”]. This response outlines her rearticulation of this desubjectifying situation to appease her discomfort. Her assertion that “Je voulais le Serigne” neutralizes the lack of agency that the first two sentences convey. She revokes her initial acknowledgement of a nonconsensual marriage with the suggestion that she

No Place Like the Non-Place  /  29

initiated this polygamous marriage by hinting to the Serigne that he had the traits of her ideal man. Of course that logic is improbable because we know that she related to the Serigne as a spiritual mentor. Likewise, in a similar attempt to reclaim some form of agency, she finds it necessary to distinguish herself from her co-wives. In her eyes, these women are objectified because they were offered to the Serigne. She thus insists on making the clarification that “Je n’avais pas été donnée, ni remise en signe d’allégeance. Il m’avait voulue, il m’avait prise” (Riwan 167) [“I was neither given to the Serigne, nor offered to him as a mark of allegiance. He wanted me, he took me”]. This self-deluding logic, as in either case there is objectification because the wishes of the woman are dismissed, is the result of a mind tormented and conflicted by the tensions between the imperative of being at home and the repressive self-reinvention that this necessity entails. The delayed and decentered narration of her polygamous marriage offers another manifestation of the narrator’s ideological discomfort with her new location. She only gets to her marriage in the last third of the text, devoting most of the text to Rama, Riwan, and various stories. Her delayed narration of the event parallels her nervousness about rejoining the Serigne for their nuptial night. When she is summoned to the nuptial room, she creates unnecessary chores to delay rejoining her new husband. Her conduct at that decisive moment mirrors her constant redundant digressions in the text. The narrator often embarks on lengthy descriptions of some local customs in addition to acknowledging the works of various African stylists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers. She also denounces the political situations in different parts of the world and makes many redundant statements. The text becomes too chatty as a result. This chattiness also reflects Ken Bugul’s uneasiness with the laudatory narrative of polygamy that she is crafting as she relates various stories of harmonious polygamous marriages and credits polygamy with multiple virtues. Immaculada Díaz Narbona has argued that the writer’s embrace of polygamy betrays the fight that African women writers and African women’s associations have been waging against polygamy (127). I will add that Bugul is torn between her dependence on polygamy as

30  /  Chapter 2

a badge of identity and the disavowal of her feminist ideals that polygamy entails. The narrator places her polygamous union under the sign of the successful homecoming that Riwan ou le chemin de sable strives to flaunt. Her Manichean discourse of tradition versus modernity puts on display her new cultural allegiances by often ridiculing modern woman and praising the virtues of traditional womanhood. While such statements throughout the text express her repentance, polygamy materializes that repentance. As a public display of her adoption of a lifestyle totally at odds with her Western(ized) training and her former practices of identity, her polygamous marriage bears witness to her rehabilitation and rebirth as a competent daughter of the nation. Her statement that “On m’avait appris, là-bas, à rêver d’une cour différente, une cour où je serais seule” (Riwan 36–37) [“Over there, I was taught to dream of a different courtyard, a courtyard where I would be alone”] illuminates how her acceptance of polygamy and integration of the courtyard of the Serigne map her new, nationalist geography of home. Polygamy thus has a performative function here. Yet as her only way out of homelessness, polygamy is almost a modality of repentance. Her subjection to this procedure is then a sentence, which supports once again the argument that nationalism allows men and women different geographies of home. At the same time, her self-submission to such an extreme as polygamy magnifies her acute desire to come home and the function of the postcolonial nation as a site of redemption despite its gender politics. Ken Bugul’s determination to be home, as shown by her acceptance of polygamy, bears on her autobiographical practice. The narrative strategies she deploys to reframe her drift away from the nation in Le baobab fou and Cendres et braises reflect her embeddedness in a nationalist geography of home by the time she was writing her autobiography.

Narrative Duplicity in the Writing of Home The therapeutic function of the autobiographical writings of Ken Bugul confers an aura of credibility to her texts. For Irène

No Place Like the Non-Place  /  31

D’Almeida, the taboo and explosive disclosures in Le baobab fou demonstrate that the need to heal leads Ken Bugul to observe the “autobiographical pact” that, according to Philippe Lejeune, commits the author “to the sincere effort to come to terms with and to understand his or her own life” (54). However, Homi Bhabha’s insistence on the “discursive embeddedness of the subject, its cultural positionality, its reference to a present time and specific space” (1994: 36) calls for some measure of critical vigilance with regard to the journeys back into the past of those subjects situated in the ideologically and emotionally charged moments of postcolonial nationhood. The ideological and identitary gap between the narrating and the narrated self is further intensified by the sexual politics that, according to Obioma Nnaemeka, subject African women writers to a “nervous condition” because they produce their work under an intense and crippling awareness of the gaze of (male) critics (1994: 4). These parameters affect Ken Bugul’s autobiographical practice, making her resort to narrative duplicity in order to negotiate the ideological implications of her unorthodox geography of home and identity. In Le baobab fou, Ken Bugul’s impersonation of negritude and Fanonian voices to narrate her story of self-exile from home sketches out the anticolonial nationalist and probably masculinist audience that is built into her text. The Fanonian and the negritude voices work in tandem to reframe and amend the unconventional identity postures that Ken Bugul has to uncover in order to heal. The negritude voice often breaks into the narration with romantic and idyllic evocations of a pristine and nurturing Africa. Her first night in Belgium provides one such instance, with the narrator missing the warmth of home: “Oh comme les chambres étaient chaudes, vivantes, rassurantes, humaines en Afrique!” (Le baobab 41) [“Oh, how warm, alive, reassuring the rooms were in Africa, how human!” (31)]. This nostalgic outburst, the first of many, occurs in the first chapter, where she recounts her euphoric departure for Belgium. Her longing for Senegal amends the previous scenes, in the same chapter, where she admits to enthusiastically tearing herself away from her homeland in order to rejoin her true home of Europe. In Le baobab fou, nostalgic passages often follow and edit out disclosures that evidence Ken

32  /  Chapter 2

Bugul’s relocation of home to Europe. This pattern of narrative overlay serves to deflect her rejection of her homeland by staging the traditional and ideologically correct conflict between hostland and homeland characteristic of some immigrant writings. The previously discussed favorable critical interpretation of the narrator’s nostalgia shows the function of this narrative overlay in constructing the reader of her autobiography. The idyllic African vignettes in Le baobab fou appear to be staged nostalgia because, as I have argued earlier, these evocations don’t reflect the solitude and lack of nurture that characterized Ken Bugul’s life in Senegal. Additionally, the flagrant disjunction between some of these nostalgic moments and the emotions, feelings, and state of mind projected by her disclosures about her life in Belgium questions the credibility of this nostalgia. The narrator becomes the concubine of a homosexual man and she enjoys the gay lifestyle, acknowledging repeatedly her fondness for that milieu. With the addition of a new gay boyfriend, their couple becomes a ménage-à-trois and she confesses being happy with this arrangement. When two paragraphs later she lapses into a distinct negritude mode of lamenting her state of exile and alienation, the confusion she is trying to project accordingly appears far-fetched: “Mais ma nouvelle vie avec ces deux hommes était différente. . . . Ah! que n’avais-je connu les douces réalités de ma race et de mon peuple!” (Le baobab 77) [“But my new life with these two men was different. . . . Ah! Had I only known the sweet realities of my race and my people!” (62)]. The thought sequence in this passage outlines her deployment of these nostalgic moments both in anticipation of the critical and societal gaze and in order to gear another reading of her actions. The narrator’s self-construction as a victim of alienation in the passage cited above is sustained by the Fanonian voice in the text. That voice serves to explain and justify her actions by constructing her as a pathological case of colonial depersonalization, a prototypical Fanonian patient of sort whose actions and decisions invite indulgence. The Fanon-like utterances interspersed throughout her story construct a built-in interpretive grid: “le colonialisme qui avait crée la distorsion des esprits pour engendrer la race des sans repères” (Le baobab 85) [“colonial-

No Place Like the Non-Place  /  33

ism has created the distortion of the spirit necessary to enslave a race of people, leaving them no frame of reference” (71)] or “le déchet que le colon avait fait du Noir” (Le baobab 150) [“The wreckage that the colonizer had made of the Black man” (130)]. The Fanonian voice is also a rhetorical strategy that allows Ken Bugul to short-circuit the harsh critiques and condemnations she anticipates from her readers. Through self-criticism and selfchastisement, she positions herself on the side of her postcolonial readership. She thus detaches herself from the problematic persona in her autobiography. Ken Bugul’s writing of her mother into the plot of her unconventional geography of home and identity represents the most acute manifestation of her nervous condition. At age five, the narrator is temporarily separated from her mother when her parents divorce. While the trauma of the abandoned little girl is undeniable, the narrator gets quite some mileage out of this event.1 The maternal departure is a leitmotif in the text because the narrator strives to establish that her unconventional life reflects the destabilizing effect of that departure. Ken Bugul is able to set up her mother and hence control the reading of her geography of home by tapping into the nation’s cultural construction of motherhood. When she recounts her prostitution, she skillfully invokes the Senegalese concept of the “ligeey u ndey,” which literally translates as “mother’s work,” meaning that the good or bad fortune of children is contingent on their mother’s good or bad performance of her wifely duties. With the maternal figure thus being held responsible for the destiny of her children, Ken Bugul is able to find within her own cultural context the very tools that allow her to tell her ideologically incorrect story of home and exile. Ken Bugul invokes that cultural narrative about motherhood and interpolates the reader of her autobiography when she traces her genealogy in the first part of the text, entitled “Pré-Histoire de Ken” [“Ken’s Prehistory”]. When relating the relocation of her ancestral family to their new home, she emphatically lingers on the mother while introducing the family. She then sustains her emphasis on the nurturing role of the maternal figure by describing the interaction between the mother and one of the chil-

34  /  Chapter 2

dren who seeks nurture and shelter in the mother’s lap. The next scene where the unattended baby Ken Bugul pushes an amber bead into her ear is made to contrast with this previous scene. The neglectful treatment of the baby girl later combines with the departure of the mother to impress in the mind of the reader the image of an unfit mother. In line with nationalist discourses of home and motherhood, these early passages in the text establish the centrality of the mother and put into place an acceptable justification for Ken Bugul’s life. The difference between the two mothers channels the critical gaze toward Ken Bugul’s unfit mother and constructs a reader sympathetic to the impact of the mother on the daughter’s itinerary. The narrator’s anxiety to control the reception of her unconventional geography of home leads her, in the rest of the text, to almost hound the reader into holding the mother responsible for the actions and choices of her daughter. The anxious narrator never allows the reader to lose sight of the responsibility of the mother, for she seizes every opportunity to keep on working that point in the text. The popping sound of a bottle of champagne and later the death of her father are said to make her relive the departure of her mother and the way it troubled her life, starting with her tight embrace of colonial education and her estrangement from Africa. As the text progresses, Ken Bugul’s endeavor to guide the reading of her narrative of home becomes almost frenetic, and the connection between the mother and home is made very forcefully. Her smoking of marijuana, for instance, is a quest for a shelter, not unlike her similar quest when her mother left. The persistent reinforcement of the connection between the mother’s departure and the destiny of her daughter dovetails with the strategic narrative placements of the episode about the mother’s departure and the periodic references to that event in the text. The story of the mother’s departure follows the description in chapter four of the narrator’s gay lifestyle and experimentation with drugs. The narrator concludes her series of bold disclosures with the explicatory statement that “‘Chez moi’, cela m’avait manqué toute la vie” (Le baobab 79) [“‘Home’ was what I had missed all my life” (64)]. The next and last segment of the chapter relates, in an emotion-filled voice, the traumatic

No Place Like the Non-Place  /  35

departure of her mother and provides an interpretive frame for the destructive lifestyle she has just uncovered. After the mother left, she writes, the family house “n’était plus familiale” (Le baobab 82) [“was no longer the family home” (66)]. Home, then, left with the maternal figure, leaving Ken Bugul unsheltered and vulnerable to various influences and also forced to seek home and acceptance in different places and through different means. Ken Bugul repeatedly reinforces this point by always concluding her narration of potentially scandalous episodes with a reference to her mother’s departure, which manifests her attempt to rally the reader to her side and to shift the responsibility for her actions and choices to her mother. When she opens up about her first prostitution activity and the luxury coat she receives in compensation, she concludes the chapter with a flashback to her mother’s departure. The warmth of the coat allegedly brings to mind a maternal caress, which prompts the narrator to revisit her life story from the moment her mother left. The comparison between the luxury coat and the mother equates prostitution to a quest for the maternal. She repeats the same narrative strategy when relating the second prostitution scene in the text. Here the narration of the scene is interrupted four times. These interruptions distract the reader’s attention from the scandalous scene taking place and shift the critical gaze away from Ken Bugul to the mother. She laments: “Pourquoi la mère était elle partie? Pourquoi m’avoir laissée sous le baobab toute seule?” (Le baobab 175) [“Why had the mother gone? Why had I been left alone under the baobab tree?” (152)]. She resumes one paragraph later: “Il ne faut jamais laisser l’enfant seul sous le baobab. La mère ne devait jamais partir. Pourquoi était-elle partie?” (Le baobab 175) [“A child should never be left alone under the baobab tree. The mother was never supposed to leave. Why had she gone?” (153)], then “Il ne fallait pas arracher l’enfant du ventre de la mère. Il ne fallait pas que la mère parte” (Le baobab 179) [“The child ought not to be pulled out of the mother’s belly. The mother ought not to leave” (156)], and finally “Qu’avait fait la mère?” (Le baobab 179) [“What had the mother done?” (157)]. These passages are in italics in the text, which further emphasize their deployment to grab the attention of the reader.

36  /  Chapter 2

The insistent image of the stray sheep in the early pages of the text, as Ken Bugul is about to leave Senegal, serves a similar function of guiding the reader’s interpretation of her itinerary. The stray sheep introduces in the text the tropes of abandonment and homelessness that position the narrator as the victim of a careless and absentee mother. When her plane is announced, the narrator is startled by the bleating of a lost sheep. As she takes leave of her family and friends, the sound gains in intensity. The sound resumes upon landing in Europe. She evokes the stranded sheep again in the midst of the story of her abortion. Probably because her disclosures in Cendres et braises are not on par with those in Le baobab fou, the writer’s mediation of the reading of her second autobiographical volume is less intense and invasive. The narrative organization of the text nonetheless conveys the narrator’s uneasiness about her pursuit of home in France. Ken Bugul appears to quarantine that part of her life by narrating her French years in between the brackets of her postimmigration return to the maternal village and reconciliation with her origins. The first chapters of the text detail the narrator’s readjustment to the village as she opens herself up emotionally and affectively to her society and wills herself to be at home in this place. Her polygamous union with a local leader in the last chapter of the text represents her successful reintegration. The redeeming narrative of her successful homecoming neutralizes the narrative of her quest for home in France. The frequent interruptions of the narration of her French sojourn to resume her account of her reintegration show the way the first narrative maintains a tight hold on the second in order to diffuse its problematic substance. The narrator explains cultural practices and elaborates on family genealogies in the village and past quarrels and alliances. She weaves in the text Wolof words and translated colloquial Wolof expressions. Her exhibition of her knowledge of her culture establishes her as a legitimate and credible member of the community, while her regained intimacy with the point of origin atones for her temporary relocation of home to France. I have analyzed Ken Bugul’s circular itinerary from the early 1960s to the early 1980s in relation to the gender politics

No Place Like the Non-Place  /  37

of the early period of postcolonial nation-building within which her quest for home unfolds. The urgent task of nation-building in the immediate aftermaths of colonialism and anticolonial resistance was a charged political and ideological moment that could only accommodate geographies of identity and home in conformity with the gender-specific subject positions that construct the concurrently postcolonial and patriarchal nation. In the mid 1990s, the so-called decline of the nation-state as the primary vector of affiliation, the increased migratory flows, and the relatively distant memory of colonialism appeared to have removed the stigma attached to non-nationalist geographies of home and identity. The proliferation of such labels as “les enfants de la postcolonie” [“children of the postcolony”], “migritude,” “Afro-parisianisme,” or even the more recent notion of a “littérature monde,” in reference to the postnegritude generation of Francophone African writers in France, joins the bandwagon of postmodern discourses about postnationalist identities, deterritorialized identities, and other creative scenarios of identity. Amidst these endless scenarios of home and belonging, the development in the reception of Ken Bugul’s texts confirms that the subject of these postnationalist geographies of home is often male. Julia Watson has documented the unfavorable reception of Le baobab fou in Senegal. The publication of the book in 1982, “in a cultural context that officially demands a high moral standard for women,” prompted such responses as critic Cheikh Aliou Ndao’s comment that Ken Bugul’s trajectory was “unworthy of a woman” (145). Upon the publication of Riwan ou le chemin de sable in 1999, Ken Bugul significantly received the Grand Prix de l’Afrique Noire for this third volume of her autobiography. The review in 2001 by Guy Ossito Midiohouan of Riwan ou le chemin de sable is telling in that regard: Riwan ou le chemin de sable . . . est le roman de la fidélité aux origines retrouvées, le roman de l’identité claire. . . . Comme pour faire amende honorable, Ken Bugul fait son deuil de la fascination de la culture occidentale et du féminisme à la Beyala. . . . L’oeuvre . . . tire sa vigueur et sa beauté de la culture africaine désormais revendiquée sans complexe. (28)

38  /  Chapter 2 [Riwan ou le chemin de sable . . . is the novel of loyalty to recovered origins, the novel of a clear identity. . . . As if to make honorable amend, Ken Bugul gives up her fascination with Western culture and feminism à-la-Beyala. . . . Her work . . . draws its strength and its beauty from the African culture that she now asserts without complex.]

The two responses by Ndao and Ossito Midiohouan, while articulated at two different periods, converge in their construction of a sedentary female subject of the nation. This continuity in the construction of the female national subject highlights the relevance of Ken Bugul’s circular itinerary in contextualizing the way the literary texts of Calixthe Beyala and Fatou Diome construct home. Ken Bugul’s itinerary can be read as a cautionary tale about how not to dissent with the gender politics of the nation. Like the stories of Riwan and Rama in Riwan ou le chemin de sable that frame the steps on the narrator, Bugul’s story offers a theoretical frame for my examination of Beyala’s and Diome’s alternative modes of dissenting with the gender politics of the nation. The narrative strategies chosen by these two writers align with the anxiety of the narrator of Cendres et braises and Riwan ou le chemin de sable not to stray away from the sand path despite her vexed relation with the gender politics of home.

Notes   1.  About Ken Bugul’s exaggeration of the impact of her mother, see also Pierrette Herzberger-Fofana. Littérature féminine francophone d’Afrique noire, 132–33; and Mildred Mortimer. Journeys through the French African Novel, 171.

II Calixthe Beyala The Conflicted Immigrant Standpoint

3 Aborted Postnationalism? C’est le soleil qui m’a brûlée and Tu t’appelleras Tanga

As the setting for Calixthe Beyala’s first two novels, the decaying postcolonial urban slum is a metaphor for the postcolonial African debacle, firmly anchoring the writer within the Francophone African literary tradition of postcolonial disillusion.1 Starting in the 1970s, Francophone African writers started denouncing the mismanagement of the postcolonial African nation and the betrayal of anticolonial nationalism by corrupted postindependence state leaders. This literature of postcolonial disenchantment peaked in the 1980s with Calixthe Beyala’s generation of writers. The writers deployed strong images of death and decay to portray the postcolonial African debacle. The bold critique of the postcolonial nation authorized by the moment of postcolonial disillusion also cleared a discursive space for an unprecedented denunciation of the gender politics of the postcolonial nation. This explains why Beyala’s acerbic critique of home stands out against the comparatively restrained narratives of Ken Bugul and Fatou Diome. Scholars of nationalism have demonstrated that domestic and familial metaphors are instrumental to the nationalist objectives of naturalizing the nation and constructing loyal and patriotic subjects of the nation.2 The reproduction of the nation is contingent on the integrity of the family as a heterosexual reproductive unit with defined gender arrangements and identities. 41

42  /  Chapter 3

As a result, motherhood and heterosexuality become privileged sites for the articulation and performance of the symbolical lexicon of pedagogical nationalism. The antinationalist metaphors of lesbian desire in C’est le soleil qui m’a brûlée and the unmothering mother in Tu t’appelleras Tanga are consequently a case in point for the type of discursive space cleared by the moment of postcolonial disenchantment. In this chapter, I analyze the ways in which these metaphors tentatively feed a feminist postnationalist narrative of home. I argue that the tentativeness of this narrative testifies to the writer’s sensitivity to the ideological and political inflections of home.

Lesbian Desire as Homing Desire in C’est le soleil qui m’a brûlée Ateba, the female protagonist of C’est le soleil qui m’a brûlée, has an exclusive emotional and affective investment in women. Throughout the novel, she enacts this exclusion of men from her mental and emotional world by writing love letters to imaginary women, developing an aversion for the male body and heterosexual relations, and yearning for intimacy and physical contact with women. Her hostility toward the male presence culminates in her violent murder of a man at the end of the novel. My analysis of the novel seeks to demonstrate that Ateba’s lesbian desire is a commentary on the gender politics of the postcolonial nation and a statement about the inability of women to find homes in national formations. I argue that Ateba’s lesbian yearning, like Ken Bugul’s yearning for Europe, represents what Avtar Brah calls a “homing desire,” which Brah specifies is a desire not for a homeland but for a place where the self is at home (197). Accordingly, the pervasive oppression and marginalization of women in the novel is a thematic foil for lesbian desire. I further demonstrate that Ateba’s longing for the male absence and her deep emotional and erotic investment in women—a longing for a time-space of nurture and self-fulfillment—responds to the troubled gender relations that have been fostered by the vertical gender relations of power embedded in the ideological

Aborted Postnationalism?  /  43

architecture of postcolonial nationhood. In that respect, Beyala’s metaphorical deployment of lesbian desire feeds into Adrienne Rich’s “lesbian continuum” (1982).3 The novel envisions home as a “female symbolic space” of nurture, self-realization, and political and emotional coalition against patriarchy (Rich 1982). The novel thereby locates home in a postnational time-space. The homophobic discourses embedded in postcolonial African narratives of identity and modes of self-writing have informed the reception of the lesbian subtext in C’est le soleil qui m’a brûlée, exposing Calixthe Beyala to charges of “pornographic” and “unafrican” writing.4 The core of these responses reflects how Beyala’s lesbian narrative becomes a sexual dissidence that reverberates into a national dissidence. As Tamar Meyer has noted, discourses of nationhood and sexuality are often interwoven: The nation is comprised of sexed subjects whose “performativity” constructs not only their own gender identity but the identity of the entire nation as well. Through repetition of accepted norms and behaviors—control over reproduction, militarism and heroism, and heterosexuality—members help to construct the privileged nation; equally the repetitive performance of these acts in the name of the nation helps to construct gender and sexuality. (5)

In the specific context of anticolonial nationalism, sexuality becomes a site for the performance of gender identities and roles that reverse the trauma of colonial emasculation. In this masculinist schema, the discourses of nationalism, home, and heterosexuality are thoroughly intertwined. The coterminous construction of masculinity, virility, and nationhood entails a control of the female body and sexuality by and for the men of the nation. Additionally, the “nativism”5 of anticolonial nationalism has contributed to the notion that homosexuality is “unafrican,” which further locks the discourses of home and heterosexuality into one another. Thus, home becomes a practice of heterosexuality and heterosexuality also constitutes a practice of home. C’est le soleil qui m’a brûlée concerns itself with the way the conjoined construction of home and heterosexuality functions as an

44  /  Chapter 3

ideological mechanism that reproduces patriarchy. The notions of pedagogy and performance in the first scene of the novel lay out the construction and functioning of that ideological mechanism: Et, tous les jours . . . Ateba recevait sa dose d’ordres thérapeutiques qu’Ada sa tante lui administrait. . . . Ateba se tenait immobile, les bras croisés, le regard couché ailleurs, elle l’écoutait ou feignait de l’écouter. Elle marchait raide. Ada en était fière. . . . elle répétait: “j’ai réussi à lui programmer la même destinée que moi, que ma mère, qu’avant elle la mère de ma mère. La chaîne n’est pas rompue, la chaîne n’a jamais été rompue.” (C’est le soleil 6) [And everyday . . . Ateba would receive her dose of therapeutic orders which her aunt, Ada, used to deal out to her. . . . Ateba used to stand motionless; her arms crossed, her gaze elsewhere; she’d listen to her or pretend to listen to her. She walked tall. Ada was proud of that. . . . she’d repeat: “I’ve succeeded in putting together the same destiny for her as myself, just like my mother’s and my mother’s mother before her. The chain has not been broken, the chain has never been broken.” (1)]

The pedagogical relation between Ateba and her aunt/ guardian Ada sarcastically allegorizes the production of the female subject of the nation. Through the key notions of “therapeutic orders” and “programming,” the writer indicates that Ateba’s socialization into the sociocultural habitus of the nation indoctrinates her into a patriarchal heterosexual economy. The discourse of normalcy embedded in the notion of therapy underscores the disciplinary discourse that regulates the performance of gendered and sexed national identities. This situation evokes the madness of Ken Bugul when she steps away from the place of the national daughter in Le baobab fou and Cendres et braises and her normalcy when she rejoins that place in Riwan ou le chemin de sable. The pathologization of resistance to the patriarchal heterosexual economy of the nation participates in the heteronormativization of the national subject. His/her acquiescence functions to enforce and perpetuate the heteropatriarchal order. Ada is such a subject, a product and vehicle of heteropatriarchal nationalist

Aborted Postnationalism?  /  45

pedagogy. Her socialization of Ateba constitutes a performance of the assignment of women to the roles of cultural reproducers and transmitters of the values of the nation. This performance also produces her as a national subject and patriotic citizen. That Ada takes pride in her excellent execution of that assignment demonstrates how patriarchy inflects the performative modalities of female nationalist subjecthood and patriotic citizenry. The reward of belonging to the nation and being homed is a disciplinary practice that produces the docile body of the woman of the nation. Yet the stiff posture of Ateba suggests that home is an uncomfortable space of identity and prefigures her lesbian yearnings. Her subdued resistance to her aunt’s pedagogy in this opening scene manifests her refusal to collaborate with the national heteropatriarchal project and heralds her lesbian dissent from that project. The imagining of home as a lesbian continuum is a covert expression of Ateba’s dissent. Despite occasional and reluctant sexual interactions with men, her emotional and erotic allegiances are exclusively to women. Addressing paper-boat letters to imaginary women in the nation, but never to men, she acts out this exclusive identification with women. The paper boat is a means of communication that conveys the isolation and alienation of the sender. Ateba’s loneliness supports Charlotte Bunch’s point that “heterosexuality separates women from each other” because “it makes women define themselves through men; it forces women to compete against each other for men and the privilege which comes through men and their social standing” (8–9). Ada’s training of Ateba typifies the way women in the novel collaborate with patriarchy by becoming active participants in the oppression of other women and perpetuating the conditions of women’s subservience. Augustine Asaah has correctly proposed that Ateba’s letters target this situation because, very much like the whole novel, her letters “are premised on consciousness-raising, on naming and on assertive training as means of engendering total development” (2003: 530). Through the regularity and uniformity of her letters, Ateba attempts to undo the training of pedagogical nationalism and to sketch a horizontal home community of female critical readers and dissidents of the heteropatriarchal nation.

46  /  Chapter 3

As a homing desire, Ateba’s lesbian desire crystallizes the exilic condition of women in the postcolonial nation. The title and epigraph of the novel bears out the writer’s intention to utilize lesbianism as a metaphor for this exilic condition. Beyala borrows the title and epigraph of the novel from the fifth and sixth verses of The Song of Songs: “Je suis noire et pourtant belle, filles de Jérusalem. . . . Ne prenez pas garde à mon teint basané: c’est le soleil qui m’a brûlée. Les fils de ma mère se sont emportés contre moi, ils m’ont mise à garder les vignes. Ma vigne à moi, je ne l’avais pas gardée” (C’est le soleil 4) [“I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem. . . . Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me: my mother’s children were angry with me; they made me the keeper of the vineyards; but my own vineyard have I not kept” (ix)]. The subjugation of the sister by her brothers evokes Ken Bugul’s disharmonious and subordinate relation with her brothers in Le baobab fou. Beyala recuperates the sentiment of exile and homelessness that pervades the biblical verse in order to frame her depiction of the place of women in the postcolonial nation and to gear her readers for a metaphoric appreciation of lesbianism. The body of the woman in the biblical passage bears the marks of her exilic location. Her unsheltered and subjugated body is an unhomed body. The harsh effects of the sun on her body and her coerced presence in her brothers’ vineyards project patriarchy as a place of exile for the woman, away from the protective and nurturing qualities of home represented by her own vineyard. The woman’s alienation from her vineyard is of further relevance to Beyala’s project of showing women’s bondage to the patriarchal heterosexual economy of the postcolonial nation. The resonance between the biblical verse and the myth that guides Ateba’s quest for home indicates that Ateba’s lesbian yearning is a homing desire, a longing for her vineyard. According to that myth, woman was a shining star in the sky. When man was propelled on earth and reduced to a miserable life, woman came down to his rescue. She ended up being held prisoner by man who then forced her to slave for him. Ateba’s narration of the myth, very much like her letters, participates in her imagining of a home for women of the nation through a

Aborted Postnationalism?  /  47

counterpedagogy of sexual dissidence. The theme of betrayal in the myth resonates with the postindependence disillusion of women. As many gender scholars have noted, the forces of anticolonial nationalism eventually coalesced into a national patriarchal formation. This hegemonic formation demoted the contributions of women to anticolonial nationalism and refused to acknowledge women as equal partners and comrades in the nation-building project. The female-gendered unhomely that pervades the novel feeds into the themes of postindependence male betrayal and female disillusion by describing home as a male-gendered sociocultural location of privilege secured through the labor of women. Ateba’s experience in the house allegorizes this gendered access to home. Her intensive housework turns the house into a home for the successive male companions of her aunt. Yet the house is a site of heterosexual violence for Beyala’s female protagonist. Ateba is sexually harassed by her aunt’s male tenants and, as part of her training into proper womanhood, she is subjected to physical and emotional abuse by her aunt. Through the insistent and detailed descriptions of the spells of anguish and anxiety that Ateba routinely experiences in the house, the writer firmly inscribes the unhomely in the house. She thereby produces an atmosphere that translates the characterization by Homi Bhabha of the unhomely as a feeling that creeps upon the self. The portrayal of the house as a disorienting labyrinth and the symbolism of the destructive fire signal a fragmentation of the self. This troubles the dichotomies of the public and the private and the world and the home that have traditionally informed the conceptualizations of home as a protective hearth. Bhabha describes the unhomely as a paradigmatic colonial and postcolonial condition, but Beyala rearticulates it as the condition of women within the patriarchal national house. The unhomely ambiance in this novel and in Beyala’s subsequent African-based texts captures the gendered experience of the postcolonial nation as (not) home. The haunted house symbolizes the oppressive patriarchal surveillance women are subjected to, with the ghosts representing the omnipresent and beleaguering forces of patriarchy. As a matter of fact, Ateba’s malaises are provoked by the

48  /  Chapter 3

intrusion of men—her aunt’s tenants and lovers—into the house she occupies with her aunt. In the absence of men, the house turns into home, becoming the Bachelardian “felicitous space.”6 Des plages . . . d’heures et de jours, étendus à l’infini, sans homme. Jour prodigieux: Ateba n’a rien à faire sinon se perdre en des visions de bonheur et de félicité poétique. Jour lumineux, crépuscule sans homme! (C’est le soleil 105) [Endless stretches . . . of hours and days, extending into infinity, without a man. Oh, splendid day: Ateba has nothing else to do but to lose herself in visions of happiness and poetic bliss. Luminous day—a dusk without a man! (80)]

In the previously documented myth that guides most of Ateba’s actions in the novel, light was a female possession. Its confiscation by man prevented woman from returning home and caused her exile on earth. The return of light in the above-cited passage significantly parallels the absence of man and ushers in a moment of home for Ateba. This conceptualization of home in relation to the male absence accentuates the lesbian subtext and links that subtext to the writer’s exposition of the subservient and precarious location of women within heterosexual relations. The male betrayal of heterosexual love in the myth refers to the institutionalization of heterosexuality, namely the recuperation of heterosexuality in order to legitimize, naturalize, and reproduce the patriarchal order of the nation. Therefore, the writer systematically reenacts the subordination of women during Ateba’s sexual encounters with men. From their first meeting, her relationships with Jean Zepp, her aunt’s tenant, are violent. Jean always attempts to subjugate the rebellious body of the young woman by forcing her down on her knees. The subsequent two sexual encounters of Ateba reinforce the convergence between heterosexuality and patriarchy. Her partner forces her to kneel down, pushes himself into her, comes in her mouth and decrees that “Dieu a sculpté la femme à genoux aux pieds de l’homme” (C’est le soleil 151) [“God has sculpted woman on her knees at the feet of man” (118)]. The correlation between the sexual submission of women and their social subordination shows that hetero-

Aborted Postnationalism?  /  49

sexuality both functions as a patriarchal sociocultural institution and feeds on discourses that participate in the naturalization of the heteropatriarchal order of the nation. The writer’s repeated pattern in the novel of coupling the physical positioning of Ateba on her knees with her verbal subjugation presents heterosexuality as a performative ritual that aligns subject positions with the gender politics of the nation. The vertical axis along which Ateba and her male partners are positioned, through Ateba’s kneeling position, interrogates the Andersonian horizontal schema of the nation. In line with the hegemony of the brothers in the biblical epigraph of the novel, the postcolonial nation emerges here as a horizontal comradeship/brotherhood. Throughout the novel, heterosexuality is produced, channeled, and monitored for the purpose of reproducing patriarchal structures of power. The customary test of virginity Ada inflicts on Ateba serves a double function. The ritual concomitantly inscribes heterosexuality as a normative structure of desire on the body and marks it as patriarchal property. As a recurrent trope in the novel, the sexual submission and submissiveness of the female body dramatizes the subservient place of women within the heterosexual order. The narrator appraises the deployment of the female body, as reflected by the women who socialize Ateba into womanhood and put their bodies at the exclusive disposal of men. Many critics have noted the omnipresence of the female prostitute in the novel.7 The docile and compliant body of the prostitute is an allegoric embodiment of the dutiful female national subject typified by Ada. By having the prostitutes double as dutiful housewives, the writer highlights the use of heterosexual desire to script gender identities and roles that sustain the patriarchal character of the nation. The housewives, among with Ada, put their laboring and homemaking skills at the service of men and structure their lives and identities around the masculine presence. These gender roles and identities foreground the persistence within the postcolonial nation of the gender politics that Chatterjee traces back to anticolonial nationalism, namely the symbolic roles of women as housekeepers and homemakers. The male-oriented and driven agenda of the postcolonial nation can accordingly not accommodate the voices of women.

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Rangira Béatrice Gallimore perceptively writes that the stuffing of male genitalia in Ateba’s mouth during these sexual encounters symbolizes the patriarchal silencing of women (93). The muting also forecloses any dialogue between the two parties. As such, this symbolic gesture signifies the exclusion of women from the national comradeship and their reductive consignment to the roles of sexual mates. In fact, the consistent reduction of African men to their sexual parts in Beyala’s novels8 conveys that sexual relations are the only form of exchange between men and women. In the novel, there is no other form of relation between men and women outside of sexual interactions. The function of women as performative sites of heterosexual postcolonial masculinities precludes the cultivation of emotional and affective bonds between men and women. This subsequently shapes the female protagonists’ perception of men, heterosexual relations, and the national formation. In fact, Ateba’s letters to women reveal that her lesbian desire is a desire for intimacy and comradeship. The turn toward woman, hence away from the nation, participates in the imagining of home as a lesbian continuum. It is important to bear in mind that this counterimagining of home comes as a result of Ateba’s uneasy relationship with patriarchy. Only then can we appreciate that her lesbian yearnings express her homing desire and resistance to patriarchal indoctrination. Ateba’s erotic penchants for women and her practice of masturbation are counter-hegemonic practices of sexuality that symbolize her refusal to settle in and for the unsatisfactory homes the nation provides its women. Her deployment of masturbation magnifies this sexual dissent. She states her refusal to achieve orgasm from a man. This routine of pleasuring herself, very much like her rejection of men and attraction to women, serves to channel her emotional and mental drive away from men. Her deliberate nurturing of lesbian desire reflects Ateba’s discontent with the sexual and gender politics of the nation and provides immunity against what she meaningfully terms the “germe du désordre” (C’est le soleil 22) [“germ of disorder” (13)]. This formulation captures the depersonalization and subjectification of women by the institution of heterosexuality, with the notion of a germ signifying the infection of heterosexuality

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by the ideologies of patriarchy. In this context of institutionalized heterosexuality, the nation becomes a locus of infection for women. Settlement exposes the female self to contamination, as evidenced by the submissiveness of Ada and her fellow women homemakers. Ateba’s lesbian desire constitutes then a flight from the nation. In defiance of Ada’s pedagogy and therapy, she refuses to take her place in the nationalist heterosexual procession of proper women. Her escape from her destiny, to borrow Ada’s terminology, acts out Monique Wittig’s definition that “lesbians are runaways, fugitive slaves” (45). The abundant imagery of flight and escape and the verbs of movement in the text support the motifs of the runaway slave and desire for a home. In a highly symbolic scene that takes place in the middle of the night, Ateba rejects Jean Zepp, her suitor and aunt’s tenant to whom she is originally attracted. She subsequently awaits impatiently, then run toward daylight. The superimposition of darkness and light with heterosexuality and lesbianism substantiates the idea that the convergence between lesbian desire and homing desire in the novel stems from the collusion between heterosexuality and patriarchy. Ateba’s proactive movement toward light shows her disenchantment with the nation. The image of delayed light projects the nation as a place indefinitely engulfed in darkness. Ateba’s flight toward light is a run for freedom and a quest for home. She identifies the recovery of woman as her final destination, inscribing on paper and in capital letters that agenda. The symbolism of Ateba’s breakup with Jean in the dark and her movement toward the woman in the sunlight denotes that lesbian desire is a resistance to her interpellation by patriarchy. The merger between the longing for Woman and the longing for home—a reversal of her equation of the male presence with the unhomely—indicates that the nation is a place of self-alienation for women. Ateba’s lesbian repudiation of man for Woman symbolizes the unlearning of patriarchal womanhood. Patriarchal womanhood depersonalizes women, putting them at the service of men. Lesbian desire accordingly expresses a yearning to focus on the self and a longing for a space of self-fulfillment and selfdevelopment.

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Ateba’s murder of a man at the end of the novel is a logical development that represents the culmination of her resistance against the obstructive and destructive presence of patriarchy. Although the action occurs in reaction to her rape and could thus be read as a defensive gesture, the narrative progression of the novel establishes that this final action is a space-clearing gesture.9 The tight space Ada corners Ateba into and her stiff body posture in the opening of the novel give way to spaciousness, luminosity, and mobility in the last scene of the novel. The writer steadily gears the reader toward that final moment through the increased intensity and explicitness of Ateba’s resistance to patriarchy. Her subdued resistance to her aunt’s pedagogy in the opening scene gradually gives way to a scene that explicitly foreshadows and provides a rationale for the final one. While she is being sexually molested by Jean, Ateba contemplates the idea of “arrêt[er] le cours de l’histoire en arrachant son sexe d’un coup de dents” (C’est le soleil 36) [“stop the flow of history by tearing his sex organ off with her teeth” (24)]. She simultaneously comes to an epiphanic awareness that a revolution is needed because “dans l’état actuel de l’histoire, quoi qu’elle fasse, quoi qu’elle dise, elle aura toujours tort. L’homme c’est lui” (C’est le soleil 36) [“historically, as things stand today, whatever she might do, whatever she might say, she will always be wrong. This is man” (24–25)]. In Ateba’s diagnosis, the time of the nation is a masculine moment of home from which women are necessarily alienated. The murder of man is consequently a revolutionary act that interrupts history and ushers in a postnational moment. Frantz Fanon’s thesis in The Wretched of the Earth about revolutionary violence is the intertext for Ateba’s murderous act. The correspondence between Ateba and Fanon’s revolted colonized brings to light the revolutionary character and liberationist imperative of Ateba’s lesbian uprising. The proceeding of the murder obeys a Fanonian logistics of revolution whereby violence marks the final and decisive blow to the colonial order and the advent of decolonization. Ateba spits out her lover’s sperm at his feet then assaults him with a heavy copper ashtray. Fanon’s idea that the colonized disrupts colonial time and introduces decolonization when he “vomit[s] . . . up” the values of the white

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man (43) contextualizes the historical break outlined by Ateba’s gesture of spitting out sperm before she assaults the man. The narrator’s identification of Ateba as “la femme” [“the woman”] from this moment on completes the transfiguration of Ateba into Fanon’s revolted colonized. The latter’s rejection of the debilitating colonial values in favor of native values and his “decisive and murderous struggle” (37) with the colonizer parallels Ateba’s reevaluation of womanhood and demise of man. The correspondence between decolonization and lesbianism participates in Beyala’s writing of lesbianism as a quest for home. As Ateba assaults her lover, the narrator’s prediction that this violence will generate an “apocalypse” (C’est le soleil 152) resonates with Fanon’s thesis that decolonization is “obviously a program of complete disorder” because it “sets out to change the world” (36). That Fanonian intertext serves to frame Ateba’s extreme violence toward man and precludes sensationalist readings of the graphic violence in the murder scene: Elle s’est accroupie, a saisi la tête de l’homme et la cogne à deux mains sur le dallage. Le sang jaillit, éclabousse, souille, elle frappe, elle rythme ses coups, elle scande “Irène, Irène” et, comme elle perçoit encore la vie sous ses mains, elle ramasse un canif, et, envahie de joie, elle se met à frapper, à frapper de toutes ses forces. Enfin, le dernier spasme. Ses reins cèdent, la pisse innonde le cadavre sous elle. Les yeux hagards, le souffle court, elle s’affale sur lui. (C’est le soleil 152) [She has crouched down, grabbed the man’s head and with two hands she is beating it against the stone floor. The blood gushes out, splatters, sullies. She strikes, she gives a beat to her blows, scanning “Irene, Irene” and as she still notices signs of life under her hands, she picks up a knife and, overcome with joy, she begins to strike, to strike with all her might. At last the final spasm. Her kidneys give way, piss floods the corpse beneath her. With haggard eyes, she slumps on top of him, out of breath. (118–119)]

Ateba’s cathartic transformation aligns with Fanon’s theory that violence is a “cleansing force” through which the colonized is reborn (94). The libidinal inflection of Ateba’s violence feeds

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on Fanon’s argument that the condition of the colonized is one of “muscular tension,” “accumulated libido,” and “hampered aggressivity” (57) and necessitates violence as an outlet. The intensity of Ateba’s violence is in proportion to the intensity of her lesbian/ homing desire and her dissatisfaction with the national formation. The invocation of Irène, her deceased prostitute friend who used to be the object of her lesbian desire, inscribes Irène/Woman as the object of her quest—the crowning of her murderous struggle with man—and concomitantly sustains the writer’s thematization of home as a lesbian continuum and a postnational community. The orgasmic outcome of her murderous act then symbolizes her reunion with Woman and her ascent into the postnational. Despite these obvious worked-out Fanonian resonances and the militant deployment of lesbianism throughout the novel, the ambiguous ending of the novel is bent on destabilizing this interpretation.10 Ateba passionately kisses the cadaver and calls it Irène because she confuses it with her dead friend. She then walks away, repeating mechanically that “L’héroïne encombre une fois sa mission terminée” (C’est le soleil 152) [“The heroine is in the way once her mission has been accomplished” (119)]. The novel closes with Ateba walking toward a bright light, which, the narrator tells us, prefigures the advent of a new breed of woman. These disjointed developments suggest that Ateba is hallucinating. Her state of mind casts a shadow of irrationality and madness on her revolutionary statements and actions throughout the novel. Her critique of the postcolonial nation then loses legitimacy and credibility. I argue that this last development functions as a second conclusion to the novel and deliberately maintains the ambiguity that, Augustine Asaah writes, is “sustained throughout the novel by hallucinating poetry, open-ended imagery, irony and multifaceted action” and creates a “hallucinating novel with no determinate meaning” (2003: 26, 35). Beyala’s cultivation of ambiguity is a narrative shield that anticipates the critical backlash against her irreverent metaphors and, accordingly, reveals her sensitivity to the ideological inflections of the writing of home. Her apprehension illustrates Obioma Nnaemeka’s thesis about the “nervous condition” of African women writers as a result of their awareness

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of the critical gaze of (male) readers and critics (4). In this specific case, the gaze of the postcolonial African readership mediates her apprehensive writing of home. The writer’s nervousness about the lesbian subtext she weaves into her critique of home bears on her ambiguous characterization of Ateba. Ateba is often chastised for being Westernized, and the writer herself appears to casually maneuver that interpretation. For instance, when Jean refers to Ada as Ateba’s mother, Ateba sharply retorts that Ada is her aunt. In light of the specificities of the African kinship system, most African readers probably side with Jean’s response that Ateba thinks like a Westerner. The inscription of “unafricanness” and madness on Ateba opens another reading of her lesbian desire. Lesbian desire comes to alternatively signify Ateba’s cultural and mental alienation. Not surprisingly, Beyala has chastised those Western “perverts” who identify lesbianism in her novel.11

Deconstructing Motherhood and Reconceptualizing Home: Tu t’appelleras Tanga Tanga, the female protagonist of Beyala’s second novel, is locked with Anna-Claude, a white French woman, in the prison of an imaginary postcolonial African nation. A dying Tanga tells her life story to her cellmate and exposes the dire state of an exploited and uncared-for postcolonial African youth. The story of a barely teenage Tanga who is forced into prostitution by her greedy mother is against the grain of the symbolic utilization of the maternal figure in nationalist discourses. Benedict Anderson has written about the use of the vocabulary of kinship in order to denote a natural tie to the nation (131). The maternal figure certainly lends itself to this utilization by nationalist projects for, as Elleke Boehmer explains, “the image of the mother invites connotations of origins—birth, hearth, home, roots, the umbilical cord” (27). As such, the maternal figure serves to fix national subjects as legitimate and loyal children of the nation. Whereas current scholarship on home has been theorizing the mobility of home and its divorce from the homeland, the nationalist vocabulary of kinship implies that the

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tie to the homeland is irrevocable and exclusive. This means that home cannot be relocated because it is perpetually attached to the native land. In light of this signification of the figure of the mother as the ground on which national allegiances and filiations are articulated, Calixthe Beyala’s idiosyncratic treatment of motherhood in Tu t’appelleras Tanga indicates a conflicted relation with the nation. In what follows, I examine the way the writer inscribes her alternative, postnationalist conceptualization of home in the trope of the mother. Irène d’Almeida has noted that “nowhere in Francophone African fiction has the mother-daughter relationship been explored so deeply, in such tormented, sorrowful manner as in Tu t’appelleras Tanga” (81). The different studies of the novel have similarly stressed that Beyala’s writing of motherhood departs considerably from the trope of the nurturing and self-sacrificing mother in the Francophone African literary tradition.12 Starting with C’est le soleil qui m’a brûlée, her first novel, the image of the unbecoming mother has been the trademark of the writer. Her mothers are physically or emotionally unavailable; they are often prostitutes and coerce their daughters into prostitution. In Tu t’appelleras Tanga, Beyala conducts her most elaborate engagement with this unconventional figure by portraying the troubled relationships between Tanga and her mother. Tanga is a teenage girl, but she refers to herself as a “femmefillette” [“woman-girlchild”]. This formulation translates her truncated and unsheltered childhood and her brutal ushering into adulthood. As Nfah-Abbenyi argues, the formulation “femme-fillette” also expresses a desire for the lost world of childhood (102). This lost world signifies innocence, nurture, protection, hence home, and is contingent on a mothering mother. In one scene of the novel, Tanga licks breast milk that her mother has symbolically dripped on the floor. This gesture represents a desire for childhood and intimacy with the mother. The gesture also communicates the homing desire provoked by the unmothering mother. That homing desire is subsequently embedded in the formulation “femme-fillette.” Tanga’s family sells her into prostitution and assigns her to an existence of “pute-enfant” (Tu t’appelleras 98) [“whore-child”

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(69)]. The themes of precocious sexuality/womanhood and child labor epitomize the novel’s exposition of the condition of postcolonial childhood as one in which children “naissent adultes” (Tu t’appelleras 68) [“are born adult” (47)] and are “veufs de leur enfance” (Tu t’appelleras 69) [“widowers of their childhood” (47)]. This forced eviction from the protective space of childhood is tantamount to an eviction from home, as shown by the pervasive images of exploited, mutilated, abused, and unsheltered children in the novel: “la fille de Mouélé, prostituée” (Tu t’appelleras 67) [“Mouélé’s daughter sold into prostitution” (46)], “[le] fils de Dakassi, vendeur de cacahuètes” (Tu t’appelleras 67) [“Dakassi’s son, who sells peanuts” (46)], “[le] fils de Tchoumbi, l’enfant aux mains fendillées jusqu’aux poignets” (Tu t’appelleras 67) [“Tchoumbi’s son, the child whose hands are cracked open all the way to the wrists” (46)], “[le] fils de Yaya, le mendiant aveugle” (Tu t’appelleras 67) [“Yaya’s son, the blind beggar” (46)], and “Mala, le fils de personne” (Tu t’appelleras 69) [“Mala, nobody’s son” (47)], whose legs have been devoured by maggots. The countering of the mythology of a happy African childhood challenges the discourse of the protective mother hearth and destabilizes the maternal trope. Tanga’s mother coerces her daughters into prostitution, often pawning them to old, rich men. When Tanga resists, her mother subjects her to emotional bribery by feigning sickness and calling her an ungrateful daughter. The mother also does not protect her daughter when her father rapes her then kills the product of that incestuous rape. Beyala exposes the troubled relationship between mother and daughter through Tanga’s constant noncommittal references to her mother as “la vieille la mère” [“mother old one”] and “la femme ma mère” [“the woman my mother”]. Tanga’s extensive wanderings are symptomatic of the displacement and emotional void created by her emotionally unavailable mother. The tensed relationships between mother and daughter mean that the latter cannot come home. Tanga explains: “dans sa mission de mère, elle a eloigné l’oiseau du nid” (Tu t’appelleras 53) [“in her mission as a mother, she removed the bird from its nest” (35)]. The unmothering maternal figure allegorizes the corrosion of the structures of feeling and attachment by the class-inflected

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environment Calixthe Beyala describes. Economic distress and necessity organize the world of the postcolonial urban slum and, according to Tanga, provide a rationale for the actions of her mother. The mercantile relationship between mother and daughter, captured in Tanga’s self-description as “l’enfant–parent de ses parents” (Tu t’appelleras 31) [“child–parent to her parents” (18)], reflects the anomie that postcolonial socioeconomic inequalities impose on certain segments of the national population. Eloise Brière analyses the “inverted mother/child roles” in the novel likewise and writes that the children are “devoured” by mothers who themselves are “victims of postcolonial rapacity” (15). While the nation leans on the nurturing qualities ascribed to the maternal figure, it ends up paradoxically participating in the unbecoming transformation of the mother. Indeed, the nation also leans on and commodifies the reproductive capacities of its women. Tanga exposes the incentives for having children: A Iningué, la femme a oublié l’enfant, le geste qui donne l’amour; pour devenir une pondeuse. Elle dit: L’enfant c’est la sécurité vieillesse. D’ailleurs le gouverneur en personne médaille les bonnes pondeuses. Service rendu à la patrie. (Tu t’appelleras 82) [In Iningué, the woman has forgotten the child, the gesture that brings love—she’s just an egg-laying hen. She says: ‘A child is the security of old age’. Besides, the governor himself hands out medals to women who have large families. For service rendered to the fatherland. (57)]

Scholars of gender and nationalism have dealt with the equation between motherhood and citizenship that the writer addresses in this passage. Anne McClintock and Nira Yuval-Davis, among other scholars, have commented on the construction of motherhood as a civic duty, with women having to express their civic obligations through motherhood. Beyala goes further by exploring the travesty of motherhood that this ideology of motherhood underpins. The irreverent reference to the maternal figure as an “egglaying hen” points to the double commodification of motherhood and children by, Nfah-Abbenyi writes, “a public space of surplus-

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value . . . that recognizes and rewards biological mothers with a social status that is directly linked not only to the womb as agent of reproduction but one that also controls the numbers produced, and the socio-political functions/benefits ascribed to the womb” (104). The image of the “egg-laying hen” denounces the travesty of motherhood by this surplus-value driven system. The writer also uses the image to disable motherhood’s metaphorical load of meaning, namely the association of motherhood with nurture, unconditional love, selflessness, and, therefore, home. If the naturalization of the connection to places in terms of the maternal symbolic produces home as a fixed and singular place of belonging, Beyala works against the naturalizing metaphor by using the trope of the unmothering mother to symbolically write the mother out of home and to formulate an alternative conceptualization of home. Tanga locates home away from her mother, whom she compares to “milliers de sangsues” (Tu t’appelleras 180) [“thousands of leeches” (131)]. Self-fulfillment and self-realization then necessitate running away from the mother. Tanga’s separation with her mother does not cause homelessness because Tanga works out an alternative conceptualization of home that disassociates home from origins: Je déstructure ma mère! C’est un acte de naissance. Folie de croire à l’indestructibilité du lien du sang! Bêtise de croire que l’acte d’exister dans le clan implique une garantie d’appellation contrôlée! Doutons du Poteau auquel nous amarrons notre bateau! Nous ne brisons rien puisque rien n’existe, puisqu’il nous appartient d’inventer le circuit sans fin. (Tu t’appelleras 59) [I’m deconstructing my mother! It’s an act of birth. It’s madness to believe that the blood bond is indestructible! Foolishness to think that the act of existing within a clan implies guaranteed quality! Let’s question the post to which we moor our boat! We’re breaking nothing since nothing exists; since it is ours endlessly to invent the circuit. (39)]

Tanga’s symbolic severance of the maternal bond mirrors Beyala’s work against the naturalizing metaphor of the mother. The mise-en-abîme brings to the forefront the counterdiscourse

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of home that the novel articulates. The metonymic slide from the maternal figure to the homeland in this passage is a deconstructive parody of the nationalist mythology of home. In Tanga’s view, liberation from biological and natural ties emancipates the self from the ideological and political pressures of the mythology of home. Home thus becomes affiliation rather than filiation since it is no longer tied to the point of origin. This alternative conceptualization has implications for the location of home, emancipating as it is home from homeland. The thematic of adoption sustains this imagining of home against the grain of the naturalizing maternal metaphor. Tanga rejects biological motherhood and chooses instead to adopt Mala, a disabled and abandoned child. In prison, she develops a relationship of mutual mothering with Anna-Claude, her French Jewish cellmate. If the nationalist production of home as an immutable place of belonging relies on a narrow biological definition of motherhood, adoption thwarts the vocabulary of blood and kinship that enables such a conceptualization of home. The juxtaposition of unmothering birth motherhood, represented by the mothers of Tanga and Mala, with mothering adoptive motherhood also destabilizes the nationalist discourse of home by trivializing the primacy of the biological bond. The potency of the maternal metaphor in nationalist discourses, namely the loving and protective mother/motherland, rests on the conflation between motherhood and mothering deconstructed by Adrienne Rich (1976). Calixthe Beyala inscribes her subversion of biological kinship in Tanga’s mothering relationship with Anna-Claude. Gallimore correctly observes that the relationship between the two women is along the lines of what Marianne Hirsch calls a “feminist family romance” (129). In that alternative model of family, daughters separate from their mothers and bond with coalition sisters in a relationship of mutual surrogate motherhood. But Gallimore stops short of exploring the way the parameters of race and ethnicity add another layer of complexity to Beyala’s feminist family romance. With the relationship between AnnaClaude and Tanga, Beyala goes beyond the demythologization of birth motherhood. The transcultural, transnational, and transracial feminist family romance that she stages discards the fil-

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ters of race and ethnicity central to narratives of identity, home, and nation. The clash between Beyala’s family model and the imagined genealogy and identity of her native national community enacts a nonbelonging to the nation and maps an imagined home community that transcends the nation. The reciprocal mothering relationship between the two women also fits into the mold of transnational adoption. Toby Volkman has argued that transnational adoption “challenge[s] the strength of the symbolic blood tie” (103) by creating “new geographies of kinship” in the form of new conceptions of the family and new scripts of identity “that may not coincide easily with notions of the nation” (2). Transnational adoption, especially when it overlaps with transracial adoption, as is the case in Tu t’appelleras Tanga, tampers with the racialized boundaries of the national family and contests the national narrative of common biological parentage. Tanga’s mothering practices are then postnationalist. Her intrusion of a white daughter into the racially homogeneous community is a hybridization of the nation. This counterperformance of nationalist pedagogy symbolizes her transcendence of national time-space. When Tanga dies, she resurrects into Anna-Claude. The fusion of identity between the two women foregrounds once again a postnational hybrid subject who exceeds the boundaries of the nation. As a daughter to Anna-Claude, Tanga also renegotiates her relationship to the nation. The adoption of Anna-Claude as a surrogate mother underscores the relocation of home from the native land because the choice of a new mother potentially signifies the choice of a new national family. As Barbara Yngvesson writes, transnational adoption means that the child is being “connected to a new family, a new name, a new nation. The child is given a new identity. It now belongs in a new place” (25). But Beyala preempts what would have been a problematic ideological conclusion for her African readers. Because Anna-Claude is a national outcast who has renounced her French native land, Tanga’s alignment with Anna-Claude cannot be read as a repudiation of Mother Africa for Mother France. Instead, it appears to be a renunciation of the nation for a feminine third space of sisterhood and belonging.

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This projected feminist transnationalism is nonetheless troubled by the power dynamics that Beyala inscribes in that space and the colonialist rhetoric on which that postnational home hinges. Most critics of the novel have argued that the experience of womanhood unites Anna-Claude and Tanga in a transnational and horizontal relationship of sisterhood.13 While the novel skillfully invites this safe and ideologically acceptable reading, it is important to note that Tanga is the one who is a victim of gender oppression, and not Anna-Claude. Anna-Claude is supposedly persecuted in France for her Jewishness, and even so the novel only mentions banal childhood incidents and indicates no sign of a pervasive anti-Semitism in France. Anna-Claude encounters gender oppression only when she steps away from France into Africa. The sorority between the two women is not, as some critics have suggested, a transnational alliance against global patriarchy and the global oppression of women. Anna-Claude and Tanga are specifically and exclusively united against a genderoppressive Africa. In the transnational encounter between the two women then, France is left unscathed as the land of freedom, human rights, and gender equalitarianism. This dynamics reifies the colonialist divide between a sexist Africa and a gender equalitarian Europe and places Anna-Claude in the missionary position of rescuing and speaking for African women. Transnationalism, as laid out by the novel, becomes premised on what Spivak has called the colonialist rhetoric of “White (wo)men . . . saving Brown Women from Brown men” (92). The differential subject positions assigned to the subordinated, muted Black African woman and the liberated, vocal White European woman outline an asymmetrical relation of power that calls Beyala’s imagined postnational home into question.14 Calixthe Beyala reiterates in this novel the same practice of ambiguity that I identified in my analysis of C’est le soleil qui m’a brûlée. Beyala skillfully deploys the discourse of transnationalism to repudiate Africa as home in an ideologically correct manner. The discourse of transnationalism allows her to remain on neutral, hence relatively safe, ground, because she does not repudiate the postcolonial nation for Europe. However, a close reading of Beyala’s transnational home reveals that the novel implicitly or/

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and unconsciously projects France as home. As a matter of fact, the positioning of the African woman as an object of humanitarian intervention legitimizes the African woman’s right to asylum in France as an escapee of African men and traditions. Beyala’s later novels set in France pursue this thread, thus validating my point that the transnationalism she displays in Tu t’appelleras Tanga is meant to leave her location of home strategically ambiguous. Once again, this practice of narrative ambiguity evidences her negotiations of nationalist discourses of home and belonging. The persistent recurrence of the verbs “flee,” “sleep,” and “forget,” the frequency of the future tense, and the abundance of verbs of movement in the two novels resonate with the female protagonists’ constant references to and fixation on “ailleurs” [“elsewhere”]. The elsewhereness of home, which locates home out of Africa in this case, aliments a linear, one-way trajectory of irrevocable departure from the homeland. Tanga in Tu t’appelleras Tanga is adamant that “Pour survivre, il faut enjamber le gouffre de l’oubli. TRANCHER. Couper” (Tu t’appelleras 103). Ateba, in C’est le soleil qui m’a brûlée, is determined to “échapper à cette larve vorace . . . Partir” (C’est le soleil 70) [“to escape from the voracious larva . . . To leave” (52)]. The infinitives add to the intensity of the departure as their brutality conveys irrevocability. The capitalization of “trancher” reverberates the multiple forms of severance from the homeland that the novel presents. The verb also calls attention to the novel as a narrative of disaffiliation. Even more illuminating here is the verb “partir” [“to leave’], which compounds with the many images of leave-taking in her texts to characterize the narrative of irrevocable departure from Africa that her first two novels represent. Ambroise Têko-Agbo has taken issue with the fates of the protagonists of the two novels, reading their demises as evidence that Beyala cannot credit her female protagonists with emancipating themselves. Têko-Agbo goes on to applaud Beyala’s Les honneurs perdus, set in France, for illustrating a successful African female struggle for self-realization (50–55). Yet an attention to the parameter of geographical location would have nuanced Têko-Agbo’s analysis. The destinies of these characters unfold in different geographical contexts. As I will argue in the next

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chapter, the success story of the protagonist of Les honneurs perdus cannot be read independently of her relocation from Cameroon to France. The fates that the writer charts for Ateba and Tanga don’t speak to their lack of a combative spirit or visionary agenda. The demise of Beyala’s African-based protagonists is instead a commentary on the impossibility of home in Africa for her female protagonists. The writer’s France-set novels, written in the wake of this first cycle of African-based novels, appear to validate this hermeneutic grid.

Notes   1.  For studies that situate Beyala’s novels in this literary tradition, see Richard Bjornson. The African Quest for Freedom and Identity: Cameroonian Writing and the National Experience. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 411–420; Christopher Miller. Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 145; Nicki Hitchcott. Calixthe Beyala: Performances of Migration. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006), 51. On Beyala’s novels as responses to the postcolonial debacle, see Rangira Béatrice Gallimore. L’oeuvre Romanesque de Calixthe Beyala. (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997), 35–58; Eloise Brière. “Le retour des mères dévorantes.” Notre Librairie 117 (1994): 66–71; Ayo A. Coly. “Neither Here nor There: Calixthe Beyala’s Collapsing Homes.” Research in African Literatures 33.2 (2002): 34–45.   2.  See Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. (London: Verso, 1991), 131; Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias, eds. Women-Nation-State; Nira YuvalDavis. Gender and Nation; and Anne McClintock “No Longer in a Future Heaven: Nationalism, Gender and Race.”   3.  Juliana Nfah-Abbenyi also argues that the quest for feminine spaces of nurture and solidarity in Beyala’s first two novels evokes Rich’s lesbian continuum and Alice Walker’s womanism. See Gender in African Women’s Writing, 90–95.   4.  For an overview of these responses, see Nicki Hitchcott. Calixthe Beyala: Performances of Migration, 27. Juliana Nfah-Abbenyi has also documented that a presentation on lesbianism in Beyala’s work at the African Literature Association received hostile responses from the Africans in the audience. See Gender in African Women’s Writing, 29.

Aborted Postnationalism?  /  65   5.  See Kwame Anthony Appiah. In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 47–72.   6.  See Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics of Space. (New York: Orion, 1964). Bachelard writes that home is a “felicitous space.” Of course, this masculinist conceptualization overlooks the female labor that turns the house into a home.   7.  See Odile Cazenave. Femmes rebelles, 80–92; Rangira B. Gallimore. L’oeuvre Romanesque de Calixthe Beyala, 88–92; and Nicki Hitchcott. Women Writers in Francophone Africa. (New York: Berg, 2000).   8.  For a discussion of this pattern in Beyala’s novels, see Rangira B. Gallimore. L’oeuvre Romanesque de Calixthe Beyala, 93; Odile Cazenave. Femmes rebelles, 210; Pierrette Herzberger-Fofana. Littérature féminine francophone d’Afrique noire, 309; and Augustine Asaah. “Gender Concerns in Calixthe Beyala’s The Sun Hath Looked Upon Me.” Matatu 27 (2003): 530–533; Pius Adesanmi. “Of Postcolonial Entanglement and Durée.” 227–242.   9.  Augustine Asaah similarly argues that the “revenge-killing is more than just homicide,” as “the goal of the narrative project in the novel is the murder of man in order to liberate woman.” See “Gender Concerns in Calixthe Beyala’s The Sun Hath Looked Upon Me.” 532. 10.  Nicki Hitchcott has also highlighted the “ambiguous dénouement” of the novel. Hitchcott notes that the ending could either signify that women’s liberation is contingent on violence against men or that women will only escape patriarchal oppression in another time-space. See Calixthe Beyala: Performances of Migration, 48. 11.  See her interview with Eloise Brière and Rangira B. Gallimore in L’oeuvre Romanesque de Calixthe Beyala, 199. 12.  See Eloise Brière. “Le retour des mères dévorantes” and Rangira B. Gallimore. L’oeuvre Romanesque de Calixthe Beyala, 81–87. 13.  See Rangira B. Gallimore. L’oeuvre Romanesque de Calixthe Beyala, 123–142; Juliana Nfah-Abbenyi. Gender in African Women’s Writing, 84–96; Susan Arndt. “Boundless Whiteness? Feminism and White Women in the Mirror of African Feminist Writing.” Matatu 29–30 (2005): 157–172; Martine Fernandes. Les écrivaines francophones en liberté. (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007); and Valérie Orlando. Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls: Seeking Subjecthood through Madness in Francophone Women’s Writing of Africa and the Caribbean. (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003). 14.  Cilas Kemedjio has also expressed uneasiness with the relationship between Anna-Claude and Tanga. See “Réinvention de Perpétue dans Tanga: De Mongo Béti à Calixthe Beyala ou les tracées d’une tradition littéraire camerounaise.” Présence Francophone 53 (1999): 126.

4 (Un)Writing France as Home The Belleville Novels

Starting with Le petit prince de Belleville, her fourth novel, Calixthe Beyala shifts from her exclusive focus on Africa in order to write novels that concentrate partly or entirely on the French landscape. Beyala’s immigrant novels, known as her Belleville novels because they are set in the Parisian immigrant neighborhood of Belleville, explore the black African woman’s quest for home in France. Most of her female protagonists appear to experience and embrace France as home. This pattern reverses both the fates of the heroines of her African novels and the pervasive representation of France as a hostile place in the Francophone African migrant literary tradition. This chapter probes this assimilationist narrative to uncover that Beyala plugs her Belleville novels into different grids of interpretation. Beneath the linear progression that projects France as home for the African woman lies a subtext that revokes that same image and shows, in my mind, the ideological turmoil of the writer. In Le petit prince de Belleville and its sequel Maman a un amant, the African female body is a site of unresolved tensions between Africa and Europe. In Assèze l’Africaine and Les honneurs perdus, the writer leans on the motif of the double to maneuver through these tensions.

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The Belleville Novels as Narratives of Emplacement M’am, the female protagonist in Le petit prince de Belleville and its sequel Maman a un amant, declares, in response to anti-immigrant rhetoric, “nous sommes ici chez nous” (Maman 1) [“we belong here”]. Eve-Marie in Amours sauvages describes herself as “un exemple parfait d’intégration” (Amours 36) [“a perfect example of integration”]. These open affirmations of belonging to France, which echo Beyala’s own location of home in France in her Lettre d’une Afro-Française à ses compatriotes, indicate that the Belleville novels are narratives of emplacement in France. In Maman a un amant, the journey into rural France accents the theme of emplacement. M’am takes her family on vacation to rural France. This journey is doubly symbolical. First, it reverses the traditional and much-anticipated episodic journey back to the homeland that punctuates the experience of immigrants. Second, the journey from the cosmopolitan city of Paris to rural France shows an intimate disposition toward the host country. The metamorphosis of M’am during the sojourn heightens the symbolism of this excursion into rural France. Her shift from African to French clothing, her sensual awakening, and her affair with a French man signal her rebirth into a French woman. She appears to shed her old African self. In Assèze l’Africaine and Les honneurs perdus, emplacement occurs through a disposal of the past. By the end of the novels, France displaces Africa as a locus of identification for the two protagonists. In the very last pages of the two novels, death imagery gives way to images of rebirth and renewal. In Assèze l’Africaine, Assèze describes her “lente gangrène” (Assèze 318) [“slow gangrene”] and pursues that she “représente un continent dont la survie est bien compromise” (Assèze 318) [“represents a continent with a very uncertain future”]. But at the end of the novel, she writes that “Je me retrouve” (Assèze 318) [“I’m finding myself again”], which signals a rebirth. The birth of a new self results from the discarding of previous narratives and geographies of identity rooted in the (African) past: “Je sais qu’on rira encore longtemps car, peu à peu, j’oublierai l’histoire, ce ne sera pas seulement l’histoire, mais son odeur. Le reste ne sera plus que

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temps qui passe, temps qu’il fait. Et on rira” (Assèze 319) [“I know that we will be laughing for a while since I will gradually forget about history; not only history but also its odor. The rest will only concern the unfolding time, the present time. And we will be laughing”]. These are significantly the very last lines of the novel. The total absence of the past tense in this passage reflects a refusal to gaze backward and emphasizes the protagonist’s liberation from the past. The future tense manifests a forward-looking self. The rejection of the past here is to the point of historical amnesia, as shown by her nonrecognition of smells. This disables all affective and emotional ties with the point of origin and enables an exclusive allegiance to the place of arrival. In Les honneurs perdus, Saïda, a fifty-year-old virgin, arrives in France with a prized certificate of virginity. Throughout the novel, Saïda hangs on to her certificate as a badge of identity. The certificate clearly becomes, in the context of immigration, a metaphor of cultural integrity and faithfulness to her roots and past. The loss of her virginity to a French man at the end of the novel signifies her disposal of the luggage of historical and cultural memory: La triste Saïda s’en allait. Comme chaque Africain, j’avais en moi une frange du continent à oublier. Terminé l’esclavage! Abolies les colonisations! Finies les néocolonisations ! Hontes et misères étaient à pendre et à perdre exprès dans un vestiaire comme un manteau! L’histoire s’achevait. (Les honneurs 341) [The sad Saïda was retiring. Like every African, I had to dispose of a part of the continent. Forget about slavery! No more colonisations! No more neocolonisations! Like a coat in a closet, humiliations and miseries needed to be purposefully hanged and forgotten. History was coming to an end.]

The emancipation from the past ushers in a “femme neuve” (Les honneurs 341) [“new woman”], a “nouveau, moi” (Les honneurs 341) [“new me”] and paves the way for a forward-looking Saïda, who decides that “mon bonheur était devant moi” (Les honneurs 341) [“happiness was ahead of me”] and emplaces herself in France. Beyala’s writing of France, especially when juxtaposed with her novels about Africa, has problematic ideological implications.

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As a counterpoint to her African novels, her immigration texts end up colluding with colonialist narratives by reifying the colonialist divide between a sexist Third World and a gender equalitarian First World. The evolution of Beyala’s female protagonists in the spaces of Africa and Europe feeds into the colonialist marking and hierarchical ordering of space that Inderpal Grewal has analyzed. According to Grewal, colonialist discourses conceptualize the notions of freedom and equality in spatial terms, with their availability spatially restricted to the West. The narrative progression of Les honneurs perdus and Assèze l’Africaine reifies that spatial dichotomy. In Les honneurs perdus and Assèze l’Africaine, the writer evenly distributes the space of the novels between Cameroon and France, but this distribution of space eventually aliments a colonialist narrative of space. The linear movement of the protagonists from Cameroon to France maps an ascent from backwardness to progress. The Cameroonian segment of the novels reiterates the images of gender oppression that Beyala’s first two novels introduced. Saïda and Assèze, the main protagonists, are in a state of mental and emotional dissatisfaction in Africa. The second part of the novels is set in France and reverses the experiences of the protagonists in Cameroon. France is the place where self-realization is achieved, albeit some challenges in the way. The savior figure of the white French male in Beyala’s immigrant novels participates in the reinforcement of the colonialist binary. The motif of the loving, dependable, and supportive white male, in stark opposition with the callous African men in Beyala’s novels, follows a colonialist paradigm. In Les honneurs perdus, the character of Marcel Marcel, Saïda’s husband, is in sharp contrast with her previous entourage of manipulative, brutal, and deceptive African men. M’am, in Maman a un amant, leaves her husband for her French lover but returns home under the pressure of the African immigrant community. She henceforth writes in her diary that she is now “amarrée dans ce port empuanti” (Maman 241) [“ashore on this stinking harbor”], away from the “champs irisés de lumière” [“light-filled fields”] (Maman 241) that she inhabited with her French lover. Uma Narayan argues that “discussions of problematic practices affecting [non-Western] women often become hostages to

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a discursive background of muscle-flexing about the relative moral superiority of Western culture and the culture of particular colonies” (18). We can then see how the itinerary of Beyala’s female protagonists from Africa to France would read as an ascent from backwardness to progress. The immigrant novels of the writer have accordingly been fitted into colonialist narratives of Africa.1 Many reviews of her novels by the French press foreground then applaud the successful journey of her female protagonists out of Africa. Reviewing Les honneurs perdus for the French daily L’Humanité, Tirthankar Chandar writes that the novel depicts “la descente aux enfers d’une Afrique mysogyne et à bout de souffle” [“the descent into hell of a misogynist and collapsing Africa”] where a “dictature phallique” [“phallic dictatorship”] terrorizes women. When Chandar concludes by congratulating Beyala for showing that happiness was possible for African women, he is definitely congratulating France for providing a space of self-fulfillment for African women. While the different Belleville novels lend themselves to these readings, I also identify, in these same texts, a counternarrative that shows a different engagement of the question of belonging and reveals Beyala’s conflicted writing of home. The immigrant female body as a counternarrative in Le petit prince de Belleville and Maman a un amant Le petit prince de Belleville and its sequel Maman a un amant stage an immigrant family from Mali: Abdou Traoré, his two wives, and three children. Loukoum, Traoré’s ten-year-old son, narrates the two novels, with Abdou and his first wife M’am respectively serving as conarrator in Le petit prince de Belleville and Maman a un amant. The two novels relate the different adjustments of the two spouses to their host nation and link the location of home to the renegotiation of gender relations and identities.2 Abdou’s feelings of emasculation as a black African man in France and his inability to negotiate the new gender roles of his host country trigger a sense of displacement and homelessness that culminates in an emotional breakdown. Abdou’s affective detachment from France emerges in the recurrence of the word exile in his

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narratives and his obsessive fixation on Mali. His wife takes advantage of more fluid gender arrangements in France and appears to be set on a trajectory of success and integration into her host nation. She gets an education, gains financial autonomy, and even reverses the gender roles in her household when she becomes the breadwinner and her unemployed husband inherits the household chores. It thus comes as no surprise that M’am calls France home. Yet while Beyala projects France as home for M’am, she also inscribes her ambivalence about that idea on the body of her protagonist. Clothing is an important element in drawing up the immigrant female protagonists of Beyala. The writer provides detailed descriptions of her female characters’ clothing. In the two novels, the semiotics of clothing marks the body of the immigrant woman as a conflicted body and a site where are negotiated the tensions between homeland and hostland. The dress of the immigrant woman is a multilayered text whose connotative meaning shifts in relation to different interpretive communities. It also communicates multiple identity statements, for the clothed body expresses its affiliation to a place and community. Throughout most of Le petit prince de Belleville, M’am and her co-wife Soumana dress in the traditional West African boubou. In their narratives, Abdou and his son Loukoum usually refer to M’am and Soumana as “les femmes” [the women]. The attires of the co-wives reinforce this lack of individuation since the boubou almost functions, in this specific case, as a uniform.3 The boubou produces the two housewives as maternal and subjugated bodies that are rooted in their husband’s imagined place and time of Mali. In the words of Abdou, the boubou symbolizes the immunity of his wives from the corrosive influences of France: “Voilées, protégées de l’extérieur, repliées et agenouillées sur elles-mêmes, je les ai libérées du mal des hommes. . . . Une sorte d’immunité” (Le petit prince 195) [“Veiled, protected from the outside world, withdrawn and on their knees, I freed them from the evil of men. . . . A kind of immunity” (130)]. The immune bodies of his wives contrast with the sexual, rebellious, and inappropriately dressed bodies of French women:

(Un)Writing France as Home  /  73 Quelquefois je rencontre ton épouse, petite lune aux jambes nues, murmure d’amour qui court de ville en ville éveiller la tendresse. . . . Que fait la lune dans les champs d’homme, loin du foyer? Que fait-elle dans cette jupe qui la dévoile? (Le petit prince 177) [Sometimes I encounter your wife, little moon with naked legs, a murmur of love that runs from city to city evoking tenderness. . . . What is the moon doing in the field of men, far away from home? What is she doing inside that skirt that unveils her? (117)]

The dichotomy between the boubou and the skirt reflects Abdou’s polarization of Africa and Europe. Africa stands for core traditional values and cultural and moral integrity, whereas Europe is a morally and culturally bankrupt place that leaves imprints on the female body, transforming it into a loose body. Aminata, Loukoum’s estranged mother, is such a body. The barely-there outfits of Aminata mark her body as a loose body that has strayed away from roots. The barely clothed body of Aminata, which parallels barelythere manners, comes to signify deculturation, lack, absence, and void. By undressing herself of African clothing, Aminata casts aside some of her African identity markers. Yet she does not simultaneously inhabit a French body-space because she is improperly dressed, in a way that betrays a lack of mastery of the cultural and symbolic codes of French society. Jennifer Craik has argued that since codes of dress establish a relationship between the body and its environment, “clothes construct a personal habitus” and “fashion is a technology of civility, that is, sanctioned codes of conduct in the practices of self-formation and self-presentation” (5). As if to point to Aminata’s sociocultural deficiency in this regard, M’am changes into the attire of a “vraie femme blanche” (Le petit prince 129) [“a real white woman” (86)] when Aminata comes for a visit. M’am dons what she perceives to be the proper French womanhood clothing article: “une robe amidonnée et repassée et un mouchoir blanc” (Le petit prince 129) [“a starched and ironed dress, and a white handkerchief” (86)]. While Emma Tarlo writes that the notion of “re-dress,” the abandon of a particular style of clothing for another, often implies

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“the choosing of alternative images [and] the rediscovery of self” (1), in the case of Aminata “re-dress” magnifies a loss of self. She is stranded because she has left one world but is unable to set foot in the other. Hers is an unhomed and unhoused traveling body. In Maman a un amant, the sequel to Le petit prince de Belleville, M’am appears to be following in the footsteps of Aminata by gradually opening up to her hostland. In her letters to an imaginary French woman, she states that her Malian roots are strangleholds. She adopts a developmental and progressoriented framework of relocating from oppressive roots to liberating and fulfilling routes, targeting French womanhood as her destination. “J’ai voulu te ressembler” (Maman 151) [“I wanted to resemble you”], she writes in one of her letters. Her adoption of Western clothing points to the birth of a new self and is part of her self-fashioning into her image of a liberated French woman. The transformation of M’am from a maternal to a sexual body has a destabilizing effect on Loukoum who, in his assessment of the new M’am, ventriloquizes the male immigrant community: M’am est au fourneau. Elle porte un pyjama en diamant à grosses rayures rouges d’où émergent des brassières violettes retenant une espèce de filet brillant. J’ai failli m’étouffer en la voyant vêtue comme une vieille pute. (Maman 143–144) [M’am is cooking. She is wearing diamond-colored pajamas with wide red stripes. Violet brassieres holding some type of bright net emerge from her outfit. When I saw her dressed like an old whore, I almost choked.]

Loukoum’s whore analogy conveys that the transformed body of M’am is out of place in this domestic and familial setting. As a whore, M’am’s is a public and impersonal body lacking a proper place. Her body is caught between different spaces and trajectories, hence the schizophrenic ambiance that characterizes this scene and her new life. The “old whore” does not belong to the domestic space of the kitchen. The different identity postures that emerge from this scene portray a schizophrenic self and life. The performance of a sexually liberated French woman discords with her identitary positionings as an African, a housewife, and

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a mother. These identities are performed in the domestic task of cooking African food for her family. Furthermore, the grotesque body is here an eccentric body whose location at the site of tension between homeland and hostland exposes it to multiple interpellations. Roots and routes collide on the body of the immigrant woman. As a result, M’am becomes incoherently and disharmoniously multilayered, both literally and symbolically. Loukoum’s application of the same terminology formerly used for Aminata to his mother means that the latter is stranding. M’am becomes “une fille de rien du tout” (Maman 187) [“a girl worth nothing at all”], then “une fille de trois-fois-rien” (Maman 210) [“a girl worth three times nothing”]. The symbolic exclusion of M’am from the African immigrant community designates her new space of belonging. M’am, like Aminata, has strayed too far away from her roots. She thus becomes invisible and meets a fate of symbolic death: Les Nègres font comme s’ils ne la voyaient pas, elle est devenue invisible. Pourtant, elle est assise, les jambes croisées bien haut et on voit même sa brassière blanche qui dépasse sur les cuisses. Les danseurs la bousculent, certains lui marchent sur les pieds, mais les yeux, leurs yeux, ils les jettent en brousse. (Maman 224) [The Niggers pretend they don’t see her. She has become invisible. Yet she is sitting down, with her legs crossed high. We can even see her white brassiere sticking out on her thighs. The dancers knock into her, some of them walk on her feet. But the eyes, their eyes look away from her.]

The excessively visible body becomes an invisible body, a no-body. M’am’s high visibility in Western clothes obliterates her African persona. High visibility also manifests a lack of sheltering and protective barrier. The overexposed body is an unsheltered body that lacks a protective place of belonging in the form of a house and a home, for instance. Ultimately, M’am’s failure to reconcile roots and routes stems from her inability to exist outside patriarchal constructions of womanhood. Her changed clothing maps her movement from one patriarchal regime to another, from the bed of the black man

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to the bed of the white man, so to speak. M’am functions within a constraining roots and routes polarity and does not venture away from this polarity. She eventually finds the world of her lover too limiting and restrictive because the latter denigrates her cultural background, fixes her within a racialized and sexualized regime of representation, and wants her to choose between him and her children. M’am returns to Abdou and the familiarity of roots. She meaningfully writes afterwards that she is again “amarrée dans ce port empuanti, ce havre rassurant mais plat” (Maman 240) [“anchored in this stinking harbor, this reassuring but flat haven”]. The homecoming of M’am concludes the novel. Beyala portrays M’am elegantly dressed in an African boubou. The writer thus deactivates the suggestions threaded throughout the novels that France is home for the African immigrant woman. She gears the reader toward an alternative reading of M’am’s circular itinerary when the latter suggests that her excursion out of her community was a vacation and an experiment: “Dans les bras de mon amour, j’ai rencontré des champs irisés de lumière, où s’entrelacent des âmes pures. J’y ai appris à lire le Blanc. J’ai enivré mes jours si frêles d’amour, de plaisir et de subtils parfums” (Maman 240) [“In the arms of my lover, I have encountered fields iridescent with light, where pure souls interlace. I have learned to read white folks. I have intoxicated my frail days with love, pleasure and subtle perfumes”]. The suggestion that this was a break, almost a tourist experiment, reinstates M’am’s African community as home. Significantly enough, Alpha Noel Malonga, in an article on Beyala’s Belleville women, congratulates M’am/Beyala for choosing Africa over France as home: M’ammaryam . . . ne se laisse pas éblouir par le mirage de l’Occident et décide de regagner le toit conjugal afin d’y réinsuffler la lumière vitale. Elle avait pourtant une alternative: devenir l’épouse de Monsieur Tichit, son amant français. . . . Celui-ci lui aurait garanti davantage d’émancipation. Mais le choix de M’am est dicté par l’amour qu’elle porte à ses enfants et à son époux auxquels elle se doit d’assurer une bonne existence. (172) [M’ammaryam . . . refuses to be bedazzled by the mirage of the West and decides to go back to her household in order to

(Un)Writing France as Home  /  77 reinstate its vital light. Yet she had another alternative: becoming the wife of Monsieur Tichit, her French lover. . . . The latter would have provided more freedom. But M’am’s choice is guided by her love for her children and husband to whom she must secure a good existence.]

The double as a protective shield: Assèze l’Africaine and Les honneurs perdus In Assèze l’Africaine and Les honneurs perdus, the novels subsequent to Maman a un amant, Calixthe Beyala utilizes the device of character pairing to maneuver around the tensions between homeland and hostland. Freud has commented on the “tendency of modern writers to split up their ego by self-observation into many component-egos, and in this way to personify the conflicting trends in their own mental life in many heroes” (180). This scission of the self may be further intensified in situations where the writer has to negotiate a transcontinental and transcultural location. The device of character pairing in the novels crystallizes these tensions and provides insights into the psychic topography of the postcolonial migrant woman writer. Assèze, the protagonist of Assèze l’Africaine, first journeys from rural to urban Cameroon in order to live with her uncle and her Westernized cousin Sorraya, a prototype of the Fanonian colonized. Assèze develops a hostile relationship with Sorraya while she subsequently longs to become and take the place of her cousin. Following the death of Sorraya’s father, Sorraya moves to Paris, marries a wealthy French man, and becomes a celebrated performer. Assèze later follows in the footsteps of her cousin. She finds herself in Paris as a clandestine immigrant, and after years in the capital, she unexpectedly runs into her cousin. Sorraya rescues Assèze from homelessness, but the reunion is short-lived as Sorraya commits suicide and Assèze marries the husband of her deceased cousin. Saïda, in Les honneurs perdus, follows a similar itinerary, from rural Cameroon to Paris. Ngarembga, a middle-class African woman, rescues Saïda from the Parisian streets and offers her a shelter in exchange for housework. Their love-hate relationship culminates in Ngarembga’s suicide.

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In the two novels, one half of the pair meets a fate of death while the other half, subsequently liberated, thrives, blossoms, and assumes narrative control. This pattern of feuding and conflict resolution through death has Freudian overtones of the id and superego dichotomy. This tension is exacerbated here by the relocation of the postcolonial subject and the attendant shedding of one set of values for another in the process of adaptation and assimilation to the new locale. Assèze and Saïda, the protagonists who recently journeyed from Africa, assume the function of the superego. Ngarembga and Sorraya, on the other hand, are intensely aware of and made uncomfortable by the moralizing gaze and presence of Assèze and Saïda. In Les honneurs perdus, the writer uses sexuality to articulate the conflicts between the two sides. The virginity of Saïda contrasts with the sexual prowess of Ngarembga. Virginity stands for cultural integrity here. In contrast, Ngarembga’s sexual experiences, especially with a French partner, symbolize a corruption of identity as a result of her promiscuous relation with France. In the novel, Saïda yields higher moral ground and deploys discourses of identity to chastise Ngarembga for her “unafrican” behaviors and mannerisms, among which is her relationship with a white man. Ngarembga eventually breaks down, lamenting that “[Saïda] passe son temps à me faire comprendre que ma vie ne vaut pas un clou” (Les honneurs 248) [“Saïda is always conveying to me that my life is useless”]. In Assèze l’Africaine, Assèze was originally brought from the village to “africanize” Sorraya. When the two cousins reunite in France after a long separation, Assèze represents the return of the repressed for Sorraya. Assèze brings back to the surface Sorraya’s painful hybridity as neither African nor French. She precipitates her nervous breakdown when Sorraya realizes that she is “une hybride. Un non-sens! . . . Je ne sais même plus où je suis” (Assèze 311–312) [“I am a hybrid, a nonsense! . . . I don’t even know where I am”]. Nicki Hitchcott has observed that Ngarembga performs Africanness through her self-identifications as an African woman, her gatherings of African intellectuals at her place to save Africa, and her role as scribe for the African immigrants (2000: 143). Yet Ngarembga’s version of Africanness reveals her severance from

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the continent. She is Africanized out of guilt, and Saïda enhances that guilt. Ngarembga’s efforts to save the continent are efforts to give meaning to her life and save herself from drifting. Sorraya and Ngarembga end up committing suicide as a result of their identitary malaise. The fact that Saïda and Assèze act as catalysts to their suicide testifies to the psychic hold that roots have on the postcolonial migrant subject. The suicide of the two protagonists who have strayed too far away from roots aligns with Judith Butler’s political interpretation of the suicide-inducing Freudian superego: If the watching agency described by Freud is figured as a watching judge, a judge who embodies a set of ideals, and if those ideals are to some large degree socially instituted and maintained, then this watching agency is the means by which social norms sear the psyche and expose it to a condemnation that can lead to suicide. Indeed Freud remarked that the superego, if left unrestrained, will fully deprive the ego of its desire, a deprivation that is psychic death and that Freud claims lead to suicide. If we rethink Freud’s “superego” as the psychic force of social regulations in terms that include vectors of power such as gender and race, then it should be possible to articulate the psyche politically in ways that have consequences for social survival. (279)

Butler’s thesis converges with Nnaemeka’s theory about the “nervous conditions” of African women writers. This convergence provides insights into the narrative choice of the writer to eliminate one-half of her paired protagonists in the two novels. Nnaemeka identifies in the work of African women writers a pattern of marginalizing strong, nonconforming female characters and foregrounding those who remain attached to so-called traditional African values (1994: 142–152). At stakes for the postcolonial migrant woman writer is her social survival as both an African and an African literary voice. Sorraya and Ngarembga are narratively muted through death, whereas Saïda and Assèze survive to tell the story. The storyteller/writer in this context is a survivor. She is the one who has escaped social death and is speaking/writing from a place where her voice can be recognized, heard, and understood.

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Assèze and Saïda survive because of their flexibility and creative self-transformation in the course of their cohabitation with Ngarembga and Sorraya. This is particularly pronounced in the case of Saïda, who decides to get an education, becomes more independent, and loses her virginity to a white man. This loss of virginity means a new practice of identity and a refusal of the tyranny of roots. Unlike Ngarembga who cannot let go of the luggage of history, Saïda refuses to be defined by the past. It is meaningful that Saïda’s loss of virginity and birth as a woman occur almost simultaneously with Ngarembga’s suicide. As Saïda is losing her virginity, Ngarembga is committing suicide. There is a suggestion here of a merger between the two, resulting in a more coherent and harmonious postcolonial migrant self. The sexually active Ngarembga is reborn in a now more complex Saïda. Similarly, Assèze appears to have incorporated the dead Sorraya. She marries the husband of her late cousin. The husband fuses the two women when he declares “toi ou elle, quelle différence?” (Assèze 317) [“you or her, what’s the difference?”]. The end of the two novels feature the protagonists serene and at home with themselves. Assèze appears to have transcended the polarity of roots and routes: Aujourd’hui, je me retrouve. Et ce que je retrouve pourrait s’appeler Dieu. Ce Dieu est parfait. Du moins, c’est son sens. Ce Dieu n’est ni blanc, ni noir, ni Afrique ni Occident. Il est oiseaux, arbres, même fourmis et prétend à la magnificence universelle. Il m’a dit: Aime. (Assèze 318–319) [Today, I am finding myself. And what I am finding may be called God. That God is perfect. At least, that’s how he makes sense to me. That God is neither white nor black, neither Africa nor West. He is birds, trees, even ants. He aims at universal magnificence. He told me: Love.]

Throughout Les honneurs perdus, Saïda, like most of Beyala’s protagonists, has no control over her geography. Being spatially disempowered by race and gender, she is constantly forced in and out of places. The very final scene of the novel features

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Saïda in bed with her French fiancé. In the middle of the night, she gets up and moves out of the apartment and sits on one of the steps of the building’s stairwell. This self-positioning revokes the different ways she has been positioned throughout the text. Stuart Hall’s elaboration on Derrida’s difference encourages reading Saïda’s self-positioning as a moment of meaning and self-understanding, namely a coming home to the self. Hall starts with Derrida’s notion that “signification depends upon the endless repositioning of its differential terms” and moves on to propose that for meaning to occur, there needs to be “a contingent and arbitrary stop—a necessary and temporary break in the infinite semiosis of language” (1990: 225). Hall calls this necessary temporary and arbitrary full stop in the Derridean sentence a “cut of identity or a positioning” (1990: 225), which says “just now, this is what I mean, this is who I am” (1996: 117). This is the sentence we can almost overhear Saïda saying as she sits on the stairs, smiling and glowing in the dark. There is every indication that she has reached a place of inner peace and harmony. She has reached home. Home becomes a moment, an epiphany. The image of the stairwell further strengthens the above reading. As theorized by Homi Bhabha (1994), the stairwell is a liminal space, in between the designation of identity. The temporal movement and passage that it allows prevent identities at either end of it from settling into primordial polarities. Bhabha calls it an interstitial passage that opens up the possibility of cultural hybridity. In that sense identities and meanings are provisional here. In the two novels, home is not a place but a moment in time and a condition. This dissociation of home from place strategically allows the writer to maneuver around the tensions between homeland and hostland. Beyala manages to leave her readers uncertain about her location of home for her female immigrant protagonists. Susan Gasster writes, for instance, that the ending of Les honneurs perdus involves Saïda’s identity as an African and a woman, but the meaning of the development that takes place “is left vague” (358–359). I argue that the writer intentionally and strategically leaves this meaning vague.

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Notes   1.  For a discussion of Beyala’s colonialist narrative of Africa, see Ayo A. Coly. “Court Poet and Wild Child: Two Readings of Calixthe Beyala’s Les honneurs perdus.” Nottingham French Studies 43.3 (2004): 15–27.   2.  See Ayo A. Coly. “Male Wives, Female Husbands: Immigration, Gender and Home in Calixthe Beyala’s Le petit prince de Belleville and Maman a un amant.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 32.3–4 (2005): 325–342.   3.  For a discussion of the symbolism of uniforms, see Joseph Nathan. Uniforms and Nonuniforms: Communication through Clothing. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986.

5 From African Guest to Afro-French Hostess Producing an Acceptable Immigrant Geography of Home in Amours sauvages

Amours sauvages represents a new development in Calixthe Beyala’s literary engagement with the question of home. In this novel, the writer is more assertive in affirming that France is home for her female immigrant protagonist. However, an examination of the circumstances and conditions under which France qualifies as home for Eve-Marie, the protagonist of Amours sauvages, reveals a narrative that counters the assimilationist implications—in the form of cultural, political, and social allegiance—embedded in the endorsement of a society as home. About hospitality, Jacques Derrida writes that “To dare say welcome is perhaps to insinuate that one is at home here, that one knows what it means to be at home, and that at home one receives, invites, or offers hospitality, thus appropriating a space for oneself” (15–16). Taking my cue from Derrida’s reading of spatial politics into hospitality, I approach Eve-Marie’s relocation of home as an appropriation of a space for herself in France. I also lean on Michel de Certeau’s work on practices of space in order to argue that this appropriation of space entails a transformation and reconfiguration of French space. This counterhegemonic appropriation of space calls for a more nuanced reading of the ideological implications of Beyala’s affirmation of France as home. Eve-Marie, the narrator and main protagonist of Amours sauvages, is a voluptuous prostitute turned writer. Like most of 83

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Calixthe Beyala’s immigrant women, she is married to a French man. Her French husband is her way out of prostitution and into a French home. The African women who populate the immigrant milieu of Beyala are prostitutes, performers, domestic workers, and mistresses and partners of white French men. Of course, these different activities and roles that Beyala defines for black women in France capitalize on the racialized and sexualized economy of representation which has been inscribed upon the African female body since the nineteenth century in colonial literature, photography, and ethnographic narratives.1 In the novels of Beyala, these roles often constitute points of insertion into the heart of the metropolitan center. The alleged tameness and exotic/erotic currency of the African female body and the hospitality subsequently extended to it allows the female protagonists of Beyala to move away from the peripheral, well-contained, and policed immigrant milieu in order to position themselves within nonimmigrant French space, households, and homes. In Amours sauvages, Eve-Marie preys on the desires of French men for the exotic African female body: “Je vendais mon immense derrière de négresse à prix modérés” (Amours 9) [“I auctioned away my enormous negress behind”]. Pléthore, Eve-Marie’s French husband, exhibits a fetishist obsession with the black female body. He insists on his wife keeping a plump body, and she overeats to the point of obesity. While drawing a portrait of Eve-Marie, Pléthore inscribes his fantasies for Sarah Baartman on his wife’s body: Il agita le dessin sous mon nez: “C’est toi, ma chérie! T’es magnifique!” J’étais perplexe. Cette femme aurait put être moi ou n’importe quelle Venus hottentote, mais Pléthore disait qu’elle me ressemblait et c’était moi. . . . Il était si naïvement imbécile qu’un peu plus, je lui aurais acheté un Trivial Pursuit ou une voiture en plastique. (Amours 123) [He waved the drawing under my nose: “That’s you, darling! You are gorgeous!” I was puzzled. This woman could have been me, or any Hottentot Venus. Pléthore insisted that she looked like me and was my portrait. . . . He was such a naïve imbecile that I almost bought him a Trivial Pursuit or a plastic car toy.]

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Beyala’s narrative material for this scene is from the archives of the history of the black female body in France. Eve-Marie is a composite of Sarah Baartman and Josephine Baker. Paul Colin, who had an affair with Josephine Baker and created famous poster drawings of Baker, resuscitates in Eve-Marie’s husband. The gap between Eve-Marie’s self-perception and her husband’s perception of Eve-Marie is illuminating. Eve-Marie’s diagnosis of her husband’s imbecility, unbeknownst to him, reverses the gaze and shows her to be an agent and not a victim. She is a producer, stage manager, and actress in her own spectacle of otherness. The sophistication displayed by Eve-Marie informs my reading of the symbolism of prostitution in the novel. Of interest to me here is the link between prostitution and space. Prostitution is a spatial practice that emplaces the body in public space and makes it available to public gazes. At the same time, the prostitute’s relation to space is fluid. She is a streetwalker who enjoys geographical mobility and has access to different socioeconomic spaces because her clientele spans diverse backgrounds. For the prostitutes of Beyala, social boundaries are porous since these women have access to different strata of the population. They are often able to relocate to higher social classes, exchanging prostitution for middle-class or upper-class status and lifestyle. Eve-Marie, through her marriage to Pléthore, leaves prostitution for a new social status and realizes her ambition of respectability. Beyala herself, in an interview, states that Eve-Marie’s itinerary as a prostitute is irrelevant. What matters, instead, is that she has reached her final destination, meaning her successful integration to French society: I have created Eve-Marie as an homage to those black women who leave Africa without luggage and who succeed in making the best out of that situation with very meager resources. Eve-Marie . . . symbolizes the majority of those black women. They don’t all become prostitutes. Some of them do, but this is not their ultimate goal in life. They ambition to integrate a new civilization and secure a future for themselves. (Brochand)

Calixthe Beyala’s prostitute is more than a sex worker exchanging sex for money. Her prostitute is a practitioner of

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Michel De Certeau’s “art of the weak.” This is a “tactic” which allows disenfranchised people to “reappropriate the space organized by techniques of sociocultural production” through a variety of practices undetectable by the dominant group (37). We know that such practices of identities as Eve-Marie, whom Beyala later declares in the interview to be as French as any French, defy French articulations of national identity. Hence, such integrations can only be achieved tactically, in the form of clandestine, subversive activities. The metaphor of prostitution is quite fitting then, since prostitution is a clandestine activity. The metaphor of the maquis enhances Beyala’s skillful recuperation of the exotic black female body and sustains her positioning of Eve-Marie as a tactician who clandestinely lets herself in dominant space, then transforms this locale to accommodate her as home. In Francophone Africa, maquis are clandestine or nonregulated informal restaurants that people sometimes open in their houses. Eve-Marie opens a maquis in the apartment she occupies with her French husband. Her next-door neighbors are French xenophobes. The definition of the term maquis in the Dictionary of Word Origins provides further insights into EveMarie’s tactic: The French word maquis literally means “undergrowth, scrub,” and its use for the resistance fighters who opposed German occupation during World War II is an allusion to their hide-outs in scrubby country. It is a borrowing, via Corsica, of Italian machia. This originally meant “spot” (it came from Latin macula “spot, stain,” . . . , but was transferred metaphorically to a “bush or thicket seen from the distance as a spot on the hillside.” (337)

That Eve-Marie the prostitute converges with Eve-Marie the “maquisarde” is therefore a logical development. The maquis, which uses guerilla tactics, is an “art of the weak” that entails a clandestine and subversive practice of space. As a spot on the landscape, the maquis stains the visual uniformity of the landscape and is a signifier of contamination and impurity. As such, the maquis allegorizes the transformation of the French ethnoracial landscape by cartographies of resistance. These resistant

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cartographies come in the form of the housed and homed black female bodies that sabotage the hegemonic monochromatic production and perpetuation of France and Frenchness. The maquis of Eve-Marie is a nurturing and diasporic space of resistance and is part of her homemaking project. A gathering place for African immigrants, the maquis offers a respite from French space and provides a moment of home. By recreating Africa in her maquis and transporting her guests and herself to a place and time away from their immigrant present, EveMarie clears a counterspace for the performance of home. She also shelters in her place Ocean, an illegal African immigrant. Such gestures of hospitality by African immigrant women are commonplace in the novels of Beyala. In Les honneurs perdus, Ngarembga saves Saïda from homelessness when the latter is left wandering the streets of Paris. Sorraya in Assèze l’Africaine also rescues Assèze from the streets of Paris. It is not incidental that all of these hostesses are married to French men. Marriage is an emplacement. The relocation to a French domestic space is a means to set up home in France and to move from the position of guest to that of hostess. As will be apparent in my analysis of foodways and hybridized cultural practices, the position of hostess becomes a strategic and legitimate vantage point from which to transform the French house into an African home. Eve-Marie serves African cuisine in her maquis. The transposition of the smells, sounds, and tastes of her homeland to her new place infuses that locale with new meaning. Food serves here as vehicle of identity and cultural resistance. The foodways of the immigrants need to be read against French assimilationist agendas. The diatribe of Jacques Chirac against immigrants who reject French ways and indispose French natives with their “smells and noises” was an injunction for assimilation and abandonment of cultural and ethnic markers.2 Through foodways, Eve-Marie recreates her abandoned home and also transforms the natives of her new society. Her maquis where French natives mingle with African immigrants, and by extension the Belleville neighborhood whose streets “pu[ent] le couscous au mouton” (Amours 11) [“stink of couscous with mutton” (11)], typify the postcolonial metropolitan contact zone that creates a “significant

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interruption in the preceding sense of our own [First world] lives, cultures and futures” (Chambers 2). The use of foodways to transform the host society into a contact zone is a recurrent theme in the Belleville novels of Beyala. In Assèze l’Africaine, Sorraya, a successful African performer married to an upper-class French man, hosts a big party with an all-African menu. The African party is a performance of identity and a positioning of her native French guests on her own cultural territory. Like Eve-Marie, Sorraya uses food to relocate from a guest to a hostess status. In addition to serving African food, she insists on the food being consumed “the African way,” which further deterritorializes her French guests. As the dinner progresses, a carnivalesque atmosphere of transformed identities takes over. The guests loosen up, and new body languages and vocabularies emerge as Africa and Europe merge. Food is deployed here to produce intercultural penetration and foster the emergence of miscegenated selves. In Amours sauvages, the maquis is also a place of miscegenation. This is where the “negrification” of Docteur Sans-Soucis, a French gynecologist who employs Eve-Marie as a cleaning lady, takes place when he is initiated to African cuisine. Emotion overcomes him because he experiences rebirth while savoring the food. Ocean, an African homosexual sheltered by Eve-Marie, meets in the maquis Flora-Flore, Eve-Marie’s French next-door neighbor. The xenophobia of Flora-Flore’s husband adds drama to this interracial affair. The product of the subversive and illicit encounter, a mixed-race child, fits into the agenda of Mlle Babylisse, an African prostitute: “peupl[er] la France de bâtards [parce que] ça rajeunit une race, le métissage” (Amours 37) [“populating France with bastards because metissage is a source of racial rejuvenation”]. The counterhegemonic practices of miscegenation and bastardization that the maquis hosts project the maquis as a symbol of the contact zone that France is slowly but steadily becoming. Like the oxymoronic French black body, the miscegenated selves that emerge from the postcolonial metropolitan contact zone destabilize hegemonic self-constructions and perpetuations. The notion of miscegenation is also applicable to Eve-Marie’s reinvention and transformation of the French and elitist cultural

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practice of the Salon Littéraire. Beyala has noted in an interview that her protagonist’s adoption of that cultural practice makes her “even more French than the French themselves” (Brochand). Eve-Marie’s knowledge of the Salon Littéraire is part of her texture as a perfect hostess with the cultural competence to expose her guests to the traditions of her home/nation. At the same time, her status as hostess is a vantage point to transform the institution of the Salon Littéraire by infusing it with her African heritage. Eve-Marie bastardizes the literary institution. Her Salon is a fusion between the African “veillées”3 and the French Salon Littéraire, between orality and literacy. The fusion of orality and literacy characterizes the novel that Eve-Marie is writing and reflects Beyala’s own literary style. As the storyteller of the community, Eve-Marie is a guardian of its memory. She becomes a collective voice, as shown by her fellow Africans taking interest in her novel, calling it their novel and constantly asking for readings of the text in progress. By nurturing the memory of another place in the new place she calls home, Eve-Marie counters the assimilationist implications of her affirmation of France as home. The body of the African immigrant woman is another narrative device that Beyala uses to stress that housing and homing the black female body in France does not entail assimilation into France and a renunciation of Africa. As a way of portraying the black female body as cartography of resistance, the black female bodies that populate Beyala’s immigrant universes are often grotesque ones. Eve-Marie inscribes on the French landscape her large and dark body that she dresses in loud colors and patterns. Beyala recuperates the colonial imagery of the grotesque African body and marks it as a resistant body. In her novels, the black and white female bodies occupy space differently. In opposition to the emaciated, almost invisible figures, of white French women, the large black female body is forcibly a voracious consumer of space, and its imposing and noticeable presence entails a redistribution of space at the expense of white bodies. Beyala’s images of the expanding African female body evoke the semiotics of the imposing body in some African cultures. For instance, layering of clothes and big boubous produce imposing and char-

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ismatic bodies whose occupation of space mark them as important bodies. In the writer’s novels, an expanding cartography of blackness and Africanness parallels a shrinking cartography of whiteness and Frenchness. Where previous French-based African writers hardly incorporated French space in their writings, Calixthe Beyala is part of the new wave of writers who set their writings in France. Still Beyala stands out among her contemporaries, among whom Fatou Diome, because of the intimacy of her thematization of Paris and its streets. This intimacy is a measure of her strong and patriotic relationship with and mastery of her place of settlement. Her thorough knowledge of the place further consolidates her status as a hostess with the necessary competence and passion to take her readers/guests on a tour of her homeplace. Beyala features female protagonists who are streetwalkers. They have an interactive and dialogic relation to the city that the (male) protagonists of her contemporaries and even the protagonists of Fatou Diome lack. Eve-Marie in Amours sauvages, Assèze in Assèze l’Africaine, and Saïda in Les honneurs perdus are “flâneuses” through whom the readers discover the topography of the city, its smells, sounds, and colors. I lean on De Certeau’s theorization of space as a “practiced place” (117) to make the following proposition: homemaking being tied to spacemaking, walking in the city is then a form of homemaking. De Certeau’s equation of walking with the speech act is relevant here. Beyala’s unconventional use of the French language in her novels, her spatial and visual disruption of the space of Paris through her carnivalesque descriptions, and her exercise of her narrative right to Paris and the French nation through her writing/walking of places into spaces work well with De Certeau’s “walking rhetorics.” The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered. At the most elementary level, it has a triple “enunciative” function: it is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian (just as the speaker appropriates and takes on the language); it is a spatial acting-out of the place (just as the speech act is an acoustic acting-out of language); and it implies relations among differentiated positions, that is,

From African Guest to Afro-French Hostess  /  91 among pragmatic “contracts” in the form of movements (just as verbal enunciation is an “allocution,” “posits another opposite” the speaker and puts contracts between interlocutors into action). It thus seems possible to give a preliminary definition of walking as a space of enunciation. (97–98)

Through Eve-Marie, the reader gets a guided tour of the city and gets to know its cartography through the specific streets and places that the migrant female pedestrian chooses to walk: Quand il n’y avait pas de clients, je déambulais le long des rues du Faubourg Saint-Honoré . . . et je me remémorais mon village d’Afrique environné de grandes collines derrière lesquelles le soleil disparaissait; . . . Je me promenais au parc Monceau où on décorait les arbres de Noël . . . A petits pas je retournais à Belleville où les rues étaient sales, étroites et laides. L’odeur des marrons et du maïs grillé que vendaient les nègres envahissait l’air. (Amours 9–10) [When there were no customers, I strolled along the streets of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré . . . and I recalled my African village surrounded by big hills behind which the sun disappeared; . . . I wandered in the Park Monceau where Christmas trees were being decorated . . . I slowly walked back to Belleville where the streets were dirty, ugly and narrow. The smell of the chestnut and roasted corn that the Niggers sold filled the air.]

The words “déambulais,” “promenais,” and “à petit pas” are part of a register of signifiers that recur in the novel to describe Eve-Marie’s movements and to clearly mark her as a flâneuse who appropriates the topographical system. Her attention and sensitivity to the specific sounds, smells, and colors of each place she traverses invest that place with meaning and constitute a spatial acting-out of the place. Eve-Marie’s “walking rhetorics” is a production of space in the sense that her chosen itinerary silences, animates, and resuscitates different places, thus producing an alternative map of the city. The new map challenges the official map of the city and symbolizes Calixthe Beyala’s disruptive intervention into the mapping of the city and the French nation. In an effort to pro-

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duce a version of the city in sync with the nation’s official selfprojection, official narratives of Paris often erase those places Beyala chooses to animate and disclose through the “walking rhetorics” of her protagonists. As De Certeau explains: [I]f it is true that a spatial order organizes and ensemble of possibilities (e.g., by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g., by a wall that prevents one from going further), then the walker actualizes some of these possibilities. In that way, he makes them exist as well as emerge. But he also moves them about and he invents others, since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform of abandon spatial elements. . . . [T]he walker transforms each spatial signifier into something else. And if on the one hand he actualizes only a few possibilities fixed by the constructed order (he goes only here and not there), on the other he increases the number of possibilities (for example, by creating shortcuts and detours) and prohibitions (for example, he forbids himself to take paths generally considered accessible or even obligatory). He thus makes a selection. . . . He thus creates a discreteness, whether by making choices among the signifiers of the spatial “language” or by disappearance and composes with other spatial “turns of phrase” that are “rare,” “accidental” or illegitimate. (98–99)

In Eve-Marie’s map, Belleville and its noisy and stinking streets take center stage while the central Faubourg Saint Honoré, with its dignified monuments, is displaced and designified. Henri Lefèbvre has analyzed the visual discourse that such monuments articulate: The arrogant verticality of skyscrapers, and especially of public and state buildings, introduces a phallic or more precisely a phallocratic element into the visual realm; the purpose of this display, of this need to impress, is to convey an impression of authority to each spectator. Verticality and great height have ever been the spatial expression of potentially violent power. (98)

By refusing to engage with the verticality of the Faubourg Saint Honoré, Eve-Marie deactualizes and deauthorizes it as a

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privileged master signifier that orders and regulates space. She visually displaces the Faubourg with the rural and horizontal spaces of her native Cameroon. The intrusion of the vivid Cameroonian landscape demotes the Faubourg from space to place. While Eve-Marie’s tactics of infiltration, her reconfiguration of dominant space, and her practices of identity work to nuance the assimilationist implications embedded in her affirmation of France as home, her trickster identity concurrently preempts any definitive conclusions about the function of this antiassimilationist thread. In trickster fashion, Eve-Marie performs herself into both the immigrant and French communities. Some of her practices of identity are meant to secure a place for herself in the community of African immigrants who occasionally question her identity allegiances. Eve-Marie then plays (to) a double and polarized audience. This situation reflects Beyala’s own negotiation of a double audience and, in my view, needs to mediate our reading of her engagement with the question of home. Calixthe Beyala’s recurrent representations of the plight of African womanhood as one of victimization and servitude implicitly explain her own departure from the continent. These two factors have added up to contribute to her popularity in France. The literary excellence of Beyala is undeniable. Yet the enthusiasm of the most prestigious French publishing houses for her fiction and her popularity among Western audiences need also to be framed within the colonialist discursive construction of the non-Western woman as a poor, illiterate, and helpless object of Western (feminist) rescue and mentoring. The novels of Beyala represent Africa as a place to run away from, but the continent also becomes narrative material that converts into literary success and incorporation into the global literary circuit for the writer. Graham Huggan has rightly suggested that any consideration of the way some Western-celebrated postcolonial authors choose to write about their homelands should foreground the following questions: “What are the laws of supply and demand that govern the global cultural marketplace? Could it be that Third World texts are tailored to please their (mostly) First World audience, or that the Third World is marketable insofar as it can be translated?” (25).

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These questions certainly inform Beyala’s handling of the question of home. But my reading of her different novels has also identified a countertext that nuances the colonialist narrative her novels appear to reify. This double discourse generates the “indeterminacy of interpretation” that, according to Henry Louis Gates, the Yoruba trickster Eshu skillfully creates when he sports a hat that is white on one side and black on the other. Eshu’s bicolor cap creates a conflict between two farmers working on adjacent fields as each insists that the cap is one color (35). Likewise Beyala’s novels (purposefully) invite competing readings and misreadings of her writing of home. This indeterminacy of interpretation evidences an attempt to accommodate the ideological inflections of home and the demands of the global cultural marketplace. Any consideration of Beyala’s writing of home, then, needs to consider the way she handles home in trickster fashion, strategically negotiating the metropolitan recuperation of her novels and also trying to cater to African readerships.4 This generates texts with conflicting layers of meaning and that are both collaborative and oppositional. Opening up her polyvocal texts to multiple interpretations and ambiguities, Calixthe Beyala is the trickster par excellence. As a matter of fact, the neighborhood of Belleville where the writer and her characters live is a cultural crossroad between Africa and France. Accordingly, she is able to claim both sides of the divide and deactivate identities and affiliations as the situation demands: African, Afro-French, and French.

Notes   1.  For an analysis of Beyala in relation to the history of the black female body in France, see Ayo A. Coly. “Housing and Homing the Black Female Body in France: Calixthe Beyala and the Legacy of Sarah Baartman and Josephine Baker.” Black Womanhood: Icons, Images and Ideologies of the African Body. Ed. Barbara Thompson. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 259–278.   2.  During a 1991 political rally, Jacques Chirac, then the mayor of Paris, expressed his understanding of the ordinary French citizen’s

From African Guest to Afro-French Hostess  /  95 exasperation when faced with “the noise and the smells” of immigrant neighbors.   3.  Storytelling gatherings held in the evenings.   4.  Nicki Hitchcott adopts this approach in Calixthe Beyala: Performances of Migration. For a discussion of Beyala’s trickster strategies, see Ayo A. Coly. “Court Poet and Wild Child,” and “Housing and Homing the Black Female Body in France.”

III Fatou Diome The Anti-Immigrant Standpoint

6 Globalization and the Revival of the Anticolonial and Nationalist Narrative of Home La préférence nationale and Le ventre de l’Atlantique By the time Fatou Diome wrote La préférence nationale and Le ventre de l’Atlantique, the causes of the postcolonial debacle had been reassessed, with the focus shifting to the impact of globalization on the continent. Starting in the late 1990s, African capitals became stages for mass demonstrations against structural adjustments programs,1 and an expanding group of African thinkers set themselves to exposing the neocolonial processes of globalization.2 These African responses also indicate that globalization has reaffirmed the structural indispensability of the postcolonial nation for populations of the postcolonial South. The postcolonial nation offers political representation and agency in the current world order. In this chapter, I analyze how the implication of Fatou Diome’s texts in this antiglobalization narrative feeds an anticolonial and nationalist narrative of home and migration. The collection of short stories La préférence nationale and the novel Le ventre de l’Atlantique feature the same protagonist-narrator, although she remains nameless in the first text. The short stories chronicle her life in Senegal and France. The cover of the book, a mop and a floor cloth, captures the marginal and vulnerable location of the protagonist in the two places. In Le ventre de l’Altantique, Salie, the protagonist-narrator, also lacks a sense of place in Senegal and France. The novel enlarges to address post99

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colonial African migration to Europe as it pertains to the uneven flows of globalization. The novel thus offers a frame for Diome’s anti-immigrant standpoint. The island of Niodior, the birth place of Salie, grounds the writer’s exposition of the neocolonial processes and effects of globalization, of which postcolonial African migration is a manifestation. Niodior is an economically distressed island, and the description of its inhabitants underlines their precarious status in a nation itself at the bottom of the global economic order: “Accrochés à la gencive de l’Atlantique, tels des résidus de repas, ils attendent, résignés que la prochaine vague les emporte ou leur laisse la vie sauve” (Le ventre 13) [“Stuck to the gum of the Atlantic like bits of leftover food, they wait resignedly for the next big wave that will carry them off or leave them their lives” (2)]. The writer routinely repeats this carefully chosen imagery in order to emphasize the loss of dignity incurred by the islanders who don’t leave home. These desperate and often unsuccessful struggles to remain home refute the celebratory theorizations of movement in contemporary cultural criticism. These discourses of mobility often overlook the important distinction between choosing movement and being chosen by movement. As Avtar Brah remarks, “The question is not simply about who travels, but when, how, and under what circumstances?” (182). If movement is a privilege, so is staying at home; hence the question of who can move needs to be supplemented by that of who can stay at home (Ahmed 2003: 7). The migrant might be on the road against his/ her will. Being a migrant may well be a condition imposed by his/her disempowerment. Perhaps one of the most compelling statements to this effect is globalization critic Zygmunt Bauman’s typology of migrants, differentiating vagabonds from tourists: The tourists travel because they want to; the vagabonds because they have no other bearable choice. The vagabonds are, one may say, involuntary tourists; but the notion of an “involuntary tourist” is a contradiction in terms. (92–93)

Bauman’s vagabond is Diome’s postcolonial African migrant, which confirms Diome’s reading of migration against the grain of contemporary cultural criticism. The last verse of the anti-

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globalization hymn composed by Salie introduces the reality that frames Diome’s perspective on migration: “Génération africaine de la mondialisation/Attirée, puis filtrée, parquée, rejetée, désolée/Nous sommes les Malgré-nous du voyage” (Le ventre 250) [“African globalization, generation/Enticed, then sifted, dumped, ejected, wounded/We the unwitting travelers” (154)]. As presented by Diome, postcolonial African migration signifies the impossibility of staying put and calls to attention the predicament of Africa under globalization. The recurrent statement in Le ventre de l’Atlantique that “chaque miette de vie doit servir à conquérir la dignité” [“every scrap of life must serve to win dignity”] is invoked by the islanders as a rationale to migrate. This refrain constantly reminds the reader of the degrading character of Africans’ encounter with globalization and implicitly invites a comparison between colonialism and globalization. Diome’s approach to postcolonial migration resonates with the perspective of many African critics of globalization, among whom Aminata Traoré, the prominent and leading voice of antiglobalization in Africa.3 Traoré’s book Ceuta et Mellila: mais pourquoi partent-ils? [Ceuta and Mellila: why are they leaving?] addresses the tragic attempts of young Africans to enter Europe clandestinely. Traoré is adamant that this endemic phenomenon needs to be linked to “la destruction des économies des pays d’origine, soumis au rouleau compresseur de la mondialisation néolibérale” (12) [“the destruction of local economies by the globalization road roller”].4 Similarly, Fatou Diome endeavors to show in Le ventre de l’Atlantique that postcolonial African migration obeys the asymmetrical flows of global capital. The writer often stresses this asymmetry so that her readers are constantly reminded of the signification of postcolonial African migration. For instance, describing how the island’s kids crave the ice cream they see on a French television advertisement, she notes that the ice cream makes Europe synonymous with good fortune.5 The economically depressed island of Niodior, with its population set on migrating, then represents the way Africa is prey to the processes of globalization. Diome’s migrant does not herald the virtues of globalization. Instead, her postcolonial African migrant is a poster child for the fate of African bodies under globalization. This fate establishes

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the structural indispensability of the postcolonial nation. In his seminal analysis of Le ventre de l’Atlantique, Dominic Thomas identifies a slavery topos which, he writes, is a metaphor for the disposable commodity that the African body represents in the global market (2007: 196). As a pungent characterization of Africa’s encounter with globalization, the metaphor magnifies the enforced movement of Africans from their homelands and the parallel depopulation of the continent for the benefit of First World economies. Migration emerges here as both a symptom and a cause of underdevelopment. This vicious circle shows how the postcolonial African nation is held hostage to globalization. The loss of human capital as a result of forced migration impedes national development, which in turn intensifies the unevenness of globalization and expands migrant flows. The vulnerability of African bodies under globalization is perhaps better demonstrated by Diome’s examination of the industry of tourism in Senegal. The writer endeavors to stress the point that the postcolonial state is made to service neoliberal globalization at the expense of postcolonial populations. Foreign investors convert the best sites in Senegal into tourist resorts. The construction of these exclusive resorts involves the forced eviction of local populations from their lands and homes. Diome’s application of the slave metaphor to Third World bodies is to be read in juxtaposition to her description of First World bodies very much at home on the resort beaches of Senegal. While vacationing in Senegal, Salie herself is allowed in one of the hotels only after she shows her French identity papers. Salie’s acceptance into this place shows the paradoxical role of postcolonial African emigration in securing the privilege to be and remain home. The writer uses the trajectories of different characters to press the point that postcolonial African migration is not a project of hybridity, world citizenship, or reverse colonization of the metropolis.6 Besides Monsieur Ndétare, the village schoolteacher whose syndicalism got him exiled on the island by the government, the narrator documents only three adult men: l’homme de Barbès, Wagane Yaltigué and Moussa. L’homme de Barbès and Wagane Yaltigué secured the privilege to stay home through their emigration to France. The financial ease of these for-

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mer migrants converts into dignity and authority on the island. They are able to accumulate the cultural symbols of manhood in the form of multiple wives, material possessions, and authoritative and dignitary positions in the community. After years of a demeaning existence and debasing jobs in France, l’homme de Barbès is able to return and stay home as a respected figure in the community. Even more dramatic is low-caste Wagane Yaltigué’s social ascension. He overturns the fated social marginalization that comes with his low-caste origins and is able to carve out a central social place for himself. His social upgrade shows the role of this postcolonial African migration in enabling insertion into the social body and buying oneself into home. As a counterpoint to these success stories, the story of Moussa substantiates the economic dimension of social belonging, home, and migration. Moussa goes to France in order to cash in on his soccer talent and gain the privilege to stay home. The young man is not up to the standards of the grueling soccer recruiting competition in France. His eventual settlement for a clandestine status is almost a desperate gesture of clinging to France. His preference of a dehumanizing existence in France over a return to his homeland dramatizes the predicament of postcolonial African migrants. They are economic hostages. Moussa is ultimately deported, which means that he has to be forced out of France and back to Senegal. After his deportation Moussa endures the contempt of the islanders. While Wagane Saltigué is able to trade up his low-caste lineage, Moussa becomes an outcast despite his noble lineage. It is significant that his sole interlocutor on the island is Monsieur Ndétare, the exiled schoolteacher whom the community refuses to integrate. The companionship of the two men thus signifies Moussa’s eviction from home and prefigures his suicide. Moussa drowns himself in the Atlantic Ocean. Dominic Thomas has demonstrated that Le ventre de l’Atlantique aligns Diome with African migrant writers of the colonial era who applied themselves to demystifying the image of France in the African imagination (2007: 185–205). The coincidence between the agendas of these writers supports the analogy between colonialism and globalization. Writers of the

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colonial era tackled the colonially induced alienation of African imaginaries and mental energies from the continent, hence from the project of African political sovereignty. Diome concerns herself with the way the economic debacle of African nations under globalization impresses in the minds of Africans that the postcolonial African nation has come to a dead end and that their only way out is migration. For instance, Moussa leaves for France because “l’avenir lui apparaissait comme une ravine, l’emportant vers un trou noir” (Le ventre 109) [“the future had seemed to him a ravine leading to a black hole” (63)]. Other islanders seek to migrate because “ils voulaient sauver leur avenir que le sable de l’île menaçait d’engloutir” (135) [“they wanted to save their future, which the island’s sand threatened to swallow up” (80)]. Throughout Le ventre de l’Atlantique, Diome appears concerned with the ways in which this globalization-induced perception of the postcolonial nation diverts African physical, mental, and political energies from the continent. It is mostly the determination of the young generation to leave the island that grounds the writer’s concern for the future of the continent. The fact that all the island’s teenagers, including Salie’s young brother Madické, are candidates for emigration certainly has dire implications for the future and the development of the postcolonial nation. In fact, the popularity of soccer on the island stems from the teenagers’ ambition to be recruited by French teams. With soccer identified as the route to France, education is totally neglected and the human capital of the island is unproductively channeled into developing soccer skills. Furthermore, the teenagers’ energies are exclusively invested in finding a way out of the island, and the development of the island is not part of their projects. While the need of the youngsters to secure a future for themselves and provide for their families is understandable, the notion that migration is the only solution to these needs shows a resigned acceptance of the fate of African nations in the global economy. This resignation forestalls any initiative to work toward the economic independence of the nation. Following Zygmunt Bauman’s point about globalization’s “vested interest

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in weak states” (68), this abandonment of the nation-building project serves the current world order, leaving Africa and its populations up for grab by neocolonial globalization. In Le ventre de l’Atlantique, Diome is concerned that this resignation also perpetuates the colonial hold on African imaginaries, leading young Africans to associate good fortune with France. Having established the embattled sovereignty of the postcolonial African nation and the ensuing vulnerability of African bodies under globalization, the resulting situatedness of Fatou Diome in an anticolonial and nationalist narrative of home is a political and ideological inexorability. The unfinished business of decolonization and nation-building that Diome uncovers in Le ventre de l’Atlantique brings up the function and responsibility of today’s postcolonial African writer. While theories of migritude affirm that the new generation of Francophone African migrant writers has rejected notions of commitment, Diome refuses to shy away from this social responsibility. Appropriately, Salie, in Le ventre de l’Atlantique, lectures the young islanders at the party to celebrate her return to the island. Diome accentuates the symbolic import of Salie’s role by having Ndétare, Salie’s former teacher and also a generational peer of anticolonial African writers, urge the young woman to pursue her lecture against emigration. The young audience of Salie has already been molded by the fraudulent tales of l’homme de Barbès about his grand life in France7 and the overrated success stories of the Senegalese star soccer players in France. But Salie applies herself to deconstructing this glossy image of France, suggesting to the teenagers that the postcolonial nation is their only conduit for their ambitions. The endeavor of Salie to challenge the mythical narratives of France with her less glamorous version of France coincides with what Dominic Thomas correctly pinpoints as Diome’s “literary project” of decentering France and “reconditioning” postcolonial African mentalities (2007: 253, 256). Later in the novel, the narrator calls on her fellow migrants, and especially the idolized Senegalese soccer players in France, to join in her anti-immigration crusade. The agenda of social responsibility that Diome sets for herself and her fellow postcolonial African migrant writers distinctly resonates through the voice of her narrator.

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Diome clearly sets the situation of the idolized Senegalese soccer players in analogy to that of Francophone African migrant writers. Kandioura Dramé has remarked that Paris is “the literary capital of Francophone Africa” as generations of writers have been writing from Paris (97). As a matter of fact, the most visible Francophone African writers today, among whom, Fatou Diome, Calixthe Beyala, and Alain Mabanckou, are based and published in France. Diome suggests that her peers indirectly buttress the mythical image of France by virtue of their residence in that country. As such, they have a responsibility to offset that image in their works. Fatou Diome accomplishes this agenda by delving into Salie’s confrontation with French racism, the misfortunes of Moussa, and the undisclosed grim life of l’homme de Barbès in France. Diome thus writes a rebuttal to the glossy narratives of France. For the migrant author, writing otherwise about France would signify her collaboration with the neocolonial processes of globalization. In line with Diome’s anticolonial/antiglobalization consciousness, the ending of Le ventre de l’Atlantique expresses the writer’s “faith in local solutions” (Thomas 2007: 203). Salie’s young brother Madické relinquishes his lifelong dream of migrating to France and, with the help of Salie, he starts a booming business on the island. Salie’s successful guidance of the teenager into rearticulating his projects illustrates Fatou Diome’s literary project. This project consists in reinstating the postcolonial nation as a crucial mechanism of self-representation, sovereignty, and development. Dominic Thomas has astutely remarked that the promising political developments in Senegal at the time Diome was writing the novel may have given a boost to the writer’s faith in the local. Thomas explains: “To a certain extent, this conclusion coincides with political transitions in Senegal itself since 2000, when Abdoulaye Wade’s Front pour l’alternance (FAL) replaced Abdou Diouf in power, triggering various socioeconomic restructuring initiatives” (2007: 204). In that sense, Fatou Diome lends her literary voice to that nation-building agenda. This factor also helps appreciate the difference between Diome and Calixthe Beyala. Diome’s novel annihilates the narrative of postcolonial disenchantment which sustained Beyala’s writings.

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Diome’s choice to only foreground the negative aspects of France, as opposed to her multidimensional representation of Senegal, is another manifestation of her allegiance to the postcolonial nation. In both La préférence nationale and Le ventre de l’Atlantique, there is a conscious effort and determination by the author to balance out her Beyala-like representations of a sexist and materialistic Senegalese society. The writer applies herself to inserting a ray of humanity in her representations. This is a characteristic which is direly absent in Beyala’s Cameroonian urban slums where the protagonists are preyed upon constantly. For instance, in Diome’s short story “La mendiante et l’écolière” [“the beggar and the schoolgirl”], a little girl is forced to leave her hometown in order to go to school in the city. The story relates her traumatic life in the city with an unwelcoming and greedy host family of very modest means in a cramped house. Food is so scarce that her meals consist of a piece of bread and a handful of peanuts she buys with her savings from her summer job as a housemaid. She is sexually abused by her host father, who also confiscates her money. She feels isolated in her urban environment. Her rural and humble origins expose her to the mockery and scorn of her urbanized and socially privileged classmates. This harsh representation of Senegalese urban social realities is counterbalanced by the caring relationship between the little girl and a beggar woman. The beggar woman befriends the little girl and uses her meager resources to provide for her lunches. A similar humanity characterizes the caring grandmother of Salie in Le ventre de l’Atlantique. Salie is an illegitimate child raised by her maternal grandmother. Her grandmother stands up against her community by refusing to sacrifice to the tradition of physically eliminating illegitimate babies. The resistance of the grandmother and her support for Salie’s education nuance the images of female submission in the novel. The story of Sankèle who refuses her arranged marriage has the same purpose. Diome’s concern about the image of the continent projected by her texts also informs her meticulous descriptions of the beautiful landscapes of her homeland versus her vague representations of its depressed environments. This reverses the image of the urban slum that defines Calixthe Beyala’s Africa.

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Yet the itineraries of Diome’s female protagonists don’t back up Diome’s faith in the local and her rehabilitative narrative of the postcolonial nation. In her two texts, the female protagonist is not an economic migrant. Salie and the protagonist of La préférence nationale moved to France after marrying French men. The marriages don’t survive, but the protagonists choose nonetheless to remain in France. Their choice of migration over homecoming both contradicts Salie’s successful guidance of Madické into staying home and upholds a counternarrative of the postcolonial nation and France. The counternarrative embodied by Salie consequently undermines her lecture on the perils of immigration. In fact, her young audience is quick to sarcastically bring that counternarrative to her attention. Her attempts to rehabilitate the postcolonial nation in the eyes of her brother face the same challenges. By the end of the novel, the positions are reversed as the young brother now lectures his migrant sister about coming home. As the conversation between the siblings unfolds, Salie suggests that homecoming is not available to her: Je ne parle pas de vacances, mais de revenir pour de bon, ici, chez toi: tes racines doivent chanter en toi. J’apprécie les chants, mais j’ai peur des loups. Mais tu débloques ou quoi? Quels loups? Il n’y a plus de loup dans ce village depuis belle lurette. (Le ventre 293–294) [I’m not talking about holidays, but about coming back here for good, to your home: your roots must be singing inside you. I like singing, but I’m afraid of wolves. Are you crazy or what? What wolves? We haven’t had wolves in the village for ages. (181–182)]

Salie’s fear of wolves is an allusion to postcolonial gender politics. This allusion, clearly missed by Madické, brings gender to bear on Diome’s narrative of home and migration. As a result, Diome finds herself aligned with Calixthe Beyala in their portrayals of African women who leave the postcolonial nation for France and don’t envision a homecoming. In the next chapter I

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will examine how the geography of home that Diome charts for her female protagonists negotiates the narrative of home and migration dictated by her antiglobalization agenda.

Notes   1.  Throughout the mid 1980s and the 1990s, Nigeria was the scene of mass demonstrations against structural adjustment programs. From March to May 1990, a nationwide movement of students and faculty fought the World Bank–imposed decision to suppress many academic departments and programs. Other examples of demonstrations in Africa include the 1987 riots in Zambia against the increase in food price induced by structural adjustment programs; the 1987 mass protests against currency devaluation in Sudan; the October 1988 demonstrations against jobs cuts in Algeria during which 200 protesters were killed. In February 1990, police in Niamey (Niger) killed fourteen students and wounded hundreds more during a march against the reduction in educational funding imposed by structural adjustment programs.   2.  See for instance the works of Malian social scientist and activist Aminata Traoré. L’Etau: L’Afrique dans un monde sans frontières. (Paris: Actes Sud, 1999); Le viol de l’imaginaire. (Paris: Actes Sud, 2002); Ceuta et Mellila: mais pourquoi partent-ils. (Paris: Les Perséides, 2008); L’Afrique humiliée. (Paris: Fayard, 2008). See also Makhtar Diouf. L’Afrique dans la mondialisation. (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), and L’endettement puis l’ajustement: l’Afrique des institutions de Bretton-Woods. (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002); Bolya. Afrique, le maillon faible. (Paris: Le Serpent à Plumes, 2002); Joseph Ki-Zerbo. “Mondialisateur et mondialisés.” A quand l’Afrique: Entretien avec René Holenstein. (Paris: Editions d’en bas, 2003). Also, Abderrahmane Sissako’s film Bamako (New York: New Yorker Films, 2006). In the film, the World Bank and the International Monetary fund are being tried by African civil society for impoverishing Africa.   3.  See for instance, Boubacar Boris Diop. “Les nouveaux damnés de la terre.” L’Afrique au-delà du mirroir. (Paris: Philippe Rey, 2007). Diop refutes the widespread thesis that African migration is fueled by civil wars and political repression in postcolonial nations. Citing the example of Senegal and Mali, two stable democracies with the highest flows of migrants to France, Diop contends that economic factors are the cause of African migration (144).

110  /  Chapter 6   4.  Traoré reiterates this argument in L’Afrique humiliée.   5.  This also shows how the same technology that was supposed to reduce the global divide eventually highlights it. Boubacar Boris Diop has similarly pointed to the role of television, writing that “La terre promise, entrevue chaque soir à la télévision, leur a toujours fait sentir la médiocrité de leur quotidien” [“The promised land, viewed on television every evening, has always made them aware of their mediocre lives”], in “Les nouveaux damnés de la terre,” 144.   6.  For the hybridity, global citizenship-seeking migrant, see for example Homi Bhabha. Nation and Narration. (New York: Routledge, 1990) and The Location of Culture. (New York: Routledge, 1994); Iain Chambers. Migrancy, Identity, Culture. (New York: Routledge, 1994). For critiques, see for instance Pheng Cheah. Cosmopolitics. Cheah takes Bhabha to task for theorizing that postcolonial migrants are “following on the heels of their former colonizers, to torment them and enact moral retribution by subverting their cultural identity” (301). See also Simon Gikandi. “Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality.” In August 1998, the dead bodies of two Guinean boys were found on a cargo plane in Brussels. The boys were trying to enter Europe clandestinely, and they left behind a letter explaining their motivations. Gikandi analyzes the letter in order to establish that “the globalization that they had in mind when they became stowaways on the European plane was different from that espoused by postcolonial theorists. The boys were neither seeking cultural hybridity nor ontological difference” (630).   7.  For an analysis of l’homme de Barbès’ narrative of France, see Dominic Thomas. Black France, 185–205.

7 Bounded Homelessness as a Strategy La préférence nationale and Le ventre de l’Atlantique

While Diome’s antiglobalization agenda disables the immigrant geography of home exemplified by Calixthe Beyala, gender revises the narrative of home dictated by this antiglobalization agenda. In this chapter, I analyze Diome’s negotiation of a politically and ideologically appropriate geography of home. By this, I mean a geography that responds to the gender politics of the postcolonial nation but remains cognizant of the task of rehabilitating the postcolonial nation. In Le ventre de l’Atlantique, Salie’s own successful emigration outwardly aligns her with l’homme de Barbès and Wagane Yaltigué. Salie, like Diome, is a writer. Her appearance on French television, after the publication of her first novel, has understandably inflated the islanders’ estimation of her capital worth. In the previous chapter, I have explained that economic factors determine the ability to stay and return home. But Salie’s prolonged emigration, as opposed to the two men’s homecoming, suggests that gender also decides who can stay and return home. Bourdieu has explained that: one’s relationship to the social world and to one’s proper place in it is never more clearly expressed than in the space and time one feels entitled to take from others; more precisely, in the space one claims with one’s body in physical space, through a 111

112  /  Chapter 7 bearing of gestures that are self-assured or reserved, expansive or constricted (“presence” or “insignificance”). (474)

The marked contrast between the uneasy movements of Salie during her home visit and the unrestrained and assured movements of the two men demonstrates how their emigration translate into different allocations and occupations of space, hence different insertions into the community. The local cultural norms about masculinity and femininity shape the receptions of the male and female emigrant bodies. Through emigration, the two men have accumulated cultural symbols of masculinity that clear for them a social location of privilege. Although Salie comes back to the island with loads of gifts from France and finances a costly and copious meal for the whole island, her economic capital does not convert into social capital. A divorced woman with no child, Salie is a social and cultural failure. Gender trumps her economic clout, and she is chastised and stigmatized by the islanders. Diome’s description of gender identities and arrangements in Niodior often foregrounds the place of women in society. The writer reiterates the trope of the homeless daughter in the postcolonial house found in Bugul and Diome. The multiple images of gender oppression in the novel define the place that Salie refuses to occupy. A man, for instance, accepts a bride selected for him by his parents because “elle était de bonne famille et dressée pour être une épouse soumise” (Le ventre 36) [“she was from a good family and had all the makings of a submissive wife” (17)]. The writer also addresses the silencing of women: “Sur ce coin de la Terre, sur chaque bouche de femme est posée une main d’homme” (Le ventre 150) [“In this corner of the earth, a man’s hand is placed over every woman’s mouth” (89)]. The story of Sankèle who rebels her arranged marriage and is forced into exile by her father offers a symbolic frame for Salie’s emigration. In replica to Sankèle’s eviction from home, Salie is ostracized by the islanders because she does not conform to the dictates of her patriarchal society. Like Ken Bugul in Cendres et braises, Salie’s isolation by the community of women during her home visit illuminates her gender-specific social and cultural deficien-

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cies. These deficiencies, the result of her education, life abroad, and celibacy, subsequently hinder her reattachment to the social body. But, unlike Ken Bugul in Cendres et braises and Riwan ou le chemin de sable, Salie does not strive to be reincorporated. She is resolute that “On ne se jette pas dans des bras croisés: leur dédain me dispensait de toute formalité. Même assoiffé d’affection, on n’embrasse pas les oursins” (Le ventre 195–196) [“You don’t hurl yourself into folded arms: their disdain exempted me from all formality. Even if you’re starved of affection, you don’t go kissing sea urchins”(119–120)]. In a society with a strict gendered division of social space and roles, Salie’s inability to integrate the community of women leaves her without a place. The imagery of folded arms and sea urchins magnifies the process of rejection that maintains her in exile. Salie is emotionally pushed away from her homeland and towards her hostland. While in Senegal, she finds herself missing France and picturing welcoming and smiling French faces, in sharp contrast with the hostile attitudes of the islanders. The significance of the two places is thereby reversed. The hostland takes on the attributes of a homeland and vice versa. Salie discovers that her return does not translate into a homecoming. Like Moussa, Salie’s only interlocutor on the island is Ndétare. With gender neutralizing her economic clout, the fate of Salie parallels Moussa’s. Salie highlights that shared destiny with her statement that “l’exil c’est mon suicide géographique” (Le ventre 262) [“Exile is my geographical suicide” (161)], which translates her forced self-eviction from home. Significantly enough, Salie cannot stay on the island for the duration of her vacation. She takes a break from the island and goes to a hotel in the town of M’Bour, a popular tourist destination. The hotel is a location that marks Salie as the foreigner that she has become in her homeland, and the hotel staff treats her as such. Salie’s movement away from her family to the hotel represents her nonoccupation of the place of the national daughter. This also evokes Ken Bugul’s inability to find a homeplace in Senegal when she comes back from Belgium in Cendres et braises. Having stepped outside of the recognized and legitimate place of Senegalese daughterhood, meaning the place that constructs

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her as a Senegalese subject, Salie is a foreign body. Her status as an illegitimate child has a metaphorical value in this context. Illegitimacy, the disentitlement from proper belonging, represents the use of foreignness to mark out bodies that are at odds with the social order. Salie’s nonconformity with local gender roles constructs her as a foreign and therefore illegitimate body. Salie’s ostracism by the islanders during her home visit repeats her childhood ordeal of growing up in a society where illegitimate children are drowned in the Atlantic. Salie escapes her fated elimination because her maternal grandmother refuses to sacrifice to that tradition. But when Salie’s mother marries, her husband routinely throws the baby out of the house. This gesture, a symbolic counterpart of the young woman’s isolation by the community of women during her home visit, inscribes foreignness on a body that clashes with the social order. The stepfather’s plan to physically eliminate Salie shows the inability of society to make room for the nonconformist practices that her existence bears witness to. The daughter of a father who is not a native of the island, Salie bears a last name that exposes her illegitimacy and marks her body as some “chairs maudites” (Le ventre 260) [“cursed flesh” (161)] that threaten the integrity of the social body. Growing up, her schoolmates sneer when the teacher calls her last name and they bully her on the playground. She also endures the verbal and physical abuse of the islanders. These attempts to contain her harmful presence impress in the mind of the little girl that she is not entitled to a permanent place on the island and that “partir serait le corollaire de mon existence” (Le ventre 260) [“leaving would be the corollary to my existence” (160)]. Young Salie’s cautious and guarded occupation of space responds to the efforts to quarantine her body. Salie recalls trying to make herself invisible and being apologetic for her unwanted presence on the island. This occupation of space culminates in her physical departure from her homeland. While the inability of the female protagonists of Fatou Diome to stay home in Africa and their subsequent relocation to Europe evoke the destinies of Calixthe Beyala’s heroines and the narrators of Le baobab fou and Cendres et braises, Diome’s projection of Europe differs to uncover the three writers’ different

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perspectives on the question of home. The French experiences of Salie and the protagonist of La préférence nationale echo their life in Senegal to chart a horizontal movement that opposes the ascending linear trajectory on which Calixthe Beyala sets her Belleville women. With the horizontal movement of her protagonists, Diome writes a rebuttal to the glossy narratives of France and, implicitly, to Calixthe Beyala’s African woman-friendly version of France. The metaphor of illegitimacy, which feeds from the circumstances of the protagonists of the two texts in Senegal, stretches to encompass the insertion challenges that they confront in France. The short story “Le visage de l’emploi” [“the face of the job”] skillfully addresses the conjoined production of race and legitimacy in France through the narrator’s embodied experiences. She arrives in France in winter, a season where “les gens n’étaient plus que boules de laines et couleurs industrielles. Les races étaient masquées” (La préférence 62) [“people were covered by piles of wool and industrial colors. Races were disguised”]. The end of winter uncovers the narrator’s identity and exposes her imposture. She recalls: “Chacun se vit affublé de sa carte d’identité organique. On ne traîna plus de manteaux, d’écharpes, de gants et de bottes, mais la totalité de ses origines, sa peau. Certains portèrent la leur comme un trophée, d’autres comme une croix” (La préférence 62–63) [“Everybody was tagged with their organic identification card. People no longer trailed their coats, scarves, gloves and boots but the totality of their origins, their skin. Some carried it like a trophy, others like a cross”]. Elizabeth Grosz has noted that “inscriptions of the corporeal differences between bodies can be seen to produce body-subjects as living significations, social texts capable of being read or interpreted” (62–63). Race physically inscribes illegitimacy on the narrator’s body. Like Salie on the island, the narrator does not feel entitled to occupy space in France. In a Foucauldian mode, the “inspecting” gazes that harass the narrator and question the legitimacy of her presence in France restrict her movements and affect her bodily praxis: “j’eus envie d’être invisible. Je me demandais pourquoi ces regards insistants qui semblaient tout à la fois me bousculer et m’interroger. ‘Mais où donc se cacher,’ me

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disais-je, en hâtant le pas” (La préférence 63) [“I wanted to be invisible. I wondered the reason for these insisting gazes that seemed to be both pushing me around and interrogating me”]. What emerges is a racialization of illegitimacy, the effect of which is a criminalization of black bodies that occupy French space. In Le ventre de l’Atlantique these gazes transmute into a clinical gaze to emphasize the construction of Salie’s body as a corporeal threat to the French national body. The body of Salie is the site of her encounter with French naturalization services. In conformity with French immigration procedures, she is submitted to a thorough health exam upon her arrival in France. After the prying x-ray proves her to be disease free, she is granted a medical certificate stating that she meets the required health conditions to reside in France. Keeping with Grosz’s insights, the reinscription of Salie’s body by the medical document erases the colonially inflected markings of disease and dirt that would have delegitimized the presence of the African woman in France. Yet the body inscribed in this new manner still exists within a colonial regime of signification. Aligning her now sanitized body not with French bodies but with previous African bodies in France, Salie maps out a transcolonial corporeal textuality. This seamless textuality reflects the application of the same interpretive grid to the successive waves of black bodies in France, from the bodies of enslaved Africans onward. She recalls that only healthy slaves were brought to France. The treatment of Salie’s body by French immigration and naturalization services has the effect of clearing on that body a corporeal locus for the memory of slavery. This development pertains to Salie’s status as an illegitimate French national. Although her medical clearance severs her from the diseased African body, her membership is with the slave body and not the French national body. The slave metaphor exposes the persisting technologies of colonial classification and control of bodies that concurrently legitimize the presence in France of African bodies but delegitimize their attachment to the national body. As a matter of fact, the slave body is forever locked in the status of an illegitimate body in order to justify and perpetuate its enslavement. It is also quarantined from the national body through its

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marginalization and disenfranchisement. It is this ambiguous place of the slave body that Salie inhabits in France. The cover of La préférence nationale, a broom and a mop, captures this status of Diome’s protagonists as laboring and subservient bodies in France. The short stories chronicle the unsuccessful attempts of the university-educated protagonist to find a job other than housekeeping and babysitting. These two jobs that let her in French houses highlight the criteria that authorize her presence in France. In the short story, “Le visage de l’emploi” [“The face of the job”], her employer explains her exclusive predilection for African maids: “Ma copine Anita en a une comme ça et elle obéit au doigt et à l’oeil, elle fait tout dans la maison” (La préférence 70) [“My friend Anita has one like that and she obeys every order, she does everything in the house”]. The formulation “une comme ça” means that the African maid is an impersonal body. Diome reinforces that status by not giving a name to the protagonist of the short stories in La préférence nationale. Her employers don’t bother to inquire about her name, calling her “ça” [“that”] in “Le visage de l’emploi” [“the face of the job”] and “Cunégonde” in “Cunégonde à la bibliothèque” [“Cunégonde at the library”]. Although her mastery of French surpasses her employers’, they speak to her in broken French. The African migrant woman is reduced to a laboring and subservient body. Keeping with the metaphor of the slave body, the labor of the protagonist is exploited by her employers and she is a sexual prey for her male employers. In Le ventre de l’Atlantique, Salie’s interview with the immigration officials turns out to be about the servility of her body. The interrogation takes place after her medical examination and is meant to determine her qualifications for French citizenship: “Ils m’avaient vu porter la négritude de Senghor sur mon visage et ignoraient quel personage je pouvais bien incarner parmi Les Misérables de Victor Hugo” (Le ventre 249) [“They’d seen me wearing Senghor’s Negritude on my face and were unsure which role I could play in Les Misérables”(153)]. The theater analogy echoes Grosz’s remark that the body, as a text, is “fictionalised and positioned within those myths that form a culture’s social narratives and self-representations. Social narratives create their

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‘characters’ and ‘plots’ through the tracing of the body’s biological contours and organic outlines by writing tools” (66). In a parody of French nationalist and anti-immigration discourses about the impossible assimilation of African immigrants, Salie rehearses the criteria that would get her casted for the plot of the French nation. The criteria range from a smell test to a humiliating inspection of her most intimate parts. The docile body of Salie calls attention to the technologies of power that both tame the African presence in France and attempt to safeguard the integrity of the French nation. Like the female protagonists of Beyala, Salie endeavors to perform herself into the French nation. But these performances target different and coexisting scripts of the African body. Beyala and her female protagonists capitalize on the exotic currency of the African female body, and their docile performances ultimately become strategic transformations and appropriations of French space. In contrast, Salie’s performance is meant to produce an undifferentiated body whose presence, unlike the unruly and insurgent bodies of Beyala’s Belleville women, would not alter the aesthetic, social, and cultural fabric of the French nation. At the same time the veiled reference to Sarah Baartman, when mentioning the inspection of intimate body parts, shows Salie’s tension between the two scripts. Since the interview concludes with Salie abandoning her original script and stepping into the character of Baartman, there is no doubt about the winning script. Through the image of Salie becoming a visual spectacle, Diome suggests that the migrant African woman has to cast herself in this humiliating historical role in order to figure in the plot of the French nation. Although Salie and the protagonist of La préférence nationale strive to remain in France, they are not invested in appropriating and marking French space with their presence. Hence these two characters remain understated bodies with respect to their occupation of French space. The difference between these bodies and the insurgent and unruly bodies of Beyala’s Belleville women emphasizes the two writers’ distinct postures of identity and standpoints on home and migration. The understated bodies of Diome’s protagonists fit within her representation of France as a

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place of exile and not the final destination or tentative home that the Belleville novels of Beyala project. The exilic voice that pervades Le ventre de l’Atlantique participates in this representation of France. The words exile and nostalgia recur in the novel to characterize Salie’s relation to France. Salie’s self-introduction in the first pages of the novel aligns Diome with the nostalgia-filled voice of the early generation of Francophone writers in France.1 In these introductory pages, an implicit Manichean discourse of here and there, there and then locates home in Senegal and constructs France as a place of exile. Salie’s precision that her feet have already been molded by Africa constructs an impermeable shield against acculturation into her host land.2 The backward exilic gaze that, Salie says, shapes her exilic writings complements her minimal and restrained relation with France. Salie’s explication of her writings applies to the exilic character of Diome’s literature. Salie’s narrative focus on Africa replicates the insignificant narrative space that Diome allocates to France in her texts. The continent is the main setting in the literary production of Diome, with the exception of La préférence nationale, where four out of the six short stories are set in France. Even in this case, the writer does not engage French space. There are no descriptions of the physical environment, and France remains an inanimate space in the texts of the writer. The exilic posture of Diome, as opposed to the immigrant standpoint of Beyala, accommodates the anticolonial nationalist geography of home that her antiglobalization agenda dictates. However, there is evidence, in Le ventre de l’Atlantique, that the writer is ambivalent about that geography of home. In Le ventre de l’Atlantique, Salie often finds herself criticizing and subsequently defending the social values and cultural practices of her community. During her visit, Salie is annoyed by the financial burden her community places on her. Everyone tries to get money out of her, and she is forced to finance a big meal to celebrate her return. Salie writes about her exasperation, yet she immediately dares the reader to call the islanders opportunists. She adds that the reader’s outrage should be directed at the West which is starving these people to the point where they are reduced to trade dignity for subsistence. The defensive pro-

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tagonist of Diome stems from the writer’s apprehension that her social criticism may produce an unflattering image of the continent. This image would certainly be at odds with her agenda to rehabilitate the continent against the mythical appeal of Europe. Furthermore, Salie’s acknowledgement that she comply with the demands of her community for fear of being ostracized gives away the contrived character of her above-cited contention. The contradictory viewpoints of Salie offer insights into the “nervous conditions” that bear on Diome’s writing of home. The inconsistencies in Diome’s characterization of Salie are the foremost manifestation of these “nervous conditions.” The protagonist feeds two jarringly conflicting narrative lines that correspond to distinct discourses of identity and home. The first narrative line establishes Salie’s estrangement from her homeland and stops short of suggesting that she has found a substitute home. As already mentioned, Salie is homesick for France while in Senegal. She also acknowledges the opportunities for self-realization and self-fulfillment that France offers. While the illegitimate status of Salie and the gender-related challenges she faces in Senegal effectively underpin this first narrative line, the second narrative line distinctly strives to construct Salie as the prototypical exilic figure longing for her homeland. In addition to Salie’s circumstances as a woman and an illegitimate child in Senegal, her manifest discomfort with identity politics undercuts that second narrative line. At times in the novel, Salie almost suggests her constrained relation with her homeland. Her uneasy rapport with her society and the evidence that she can no longer relate to her homeland trigger the confession that she wishes she could choose her place of belonging without being called whitewashed. Salie’s contrived relation with her homeland is again revealed when she feels compelled to repress her homesickness for France and compares her secret attachment to France to a shameful, illegitimate pregnancy. The inconsistencies in Diome’s characterization of Salie disclose the writer’s own ambivalence about some of the discourses of home and identity that her protagonist embodies. There is evidence from the two narrative lines that Diome juggles that she may have felt compelled to exhibit a strong allegiance to the

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continent in order to remain within the compass of nationalist discourses of identity and home. The writer attempts to model her protagonist in conformity with these discourses. Hence the second narrative line is meant to water down what appears to be an uncomfortable conclusion for the postcolonial migrant writer: the conclusion that France has displaced Senegal as a locus of identification for Salie. Throughout the novel, Diome instantly cancels out the expressions of Salie’s attachment to France by introducing a sequence of thought that revokes these expressions. For instance, Salie immediately follows up her confession of her homesickness for France with a statement that repositions her on a terrain that is ideologically safe. Salie attempts to reintroduce Senegal in the picture when she declares to be at home in some undefined utopia where Senegal and France would merge. The different nuances of the verb “partir” [“to leave”] in the novel are another manifestation of a tension between different subject positions and ideological standpoints. In one instance, the verb is used in a manner similar to Tanga’s definitive and irrevocable “partir” in Beyala’s Tu t’appelleras Tanga. As Salie explains that “Partir, c’est avoir tous les courages pour aller accoucher de soi-même” (Le ventre 262) [“Leaving means having the courage necessary to go and give birth to oneself” (162)], she affirms that her departure for France is a fresh start. The next paragraph retracts that signification by adding another layer of meaning to the verb: “Partir, c’est devenir un tombeau rempli d’ombres” (Le ventre 262) [“To leave is to become a walking tomb filled with shadows” (162)]. In this last instance, Salie is now sustained by the point of departure and is safely repositioned as the quintessential exilic figure. In contemporary literary and scholarly discourse, hybridity has become the consecrated successful denouement for contemporary identities, among which are immigrant identities, transnational identities, or postcolonial identities, to name but a few.3 As shown by her Belleville women, hybridity is Beyala’s response to the different demands that Africa and Europe place on her identity. The inconsistent protagonist of Fatou Diome, on the other hand, manifests a more reserved, if not suspicious, attitude toward hybridity as a viable discourse of home and

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identity. From Diome’s description of the ideologically polarized places of identity of her protagonists, hybridity remains a utopian solution because neither place can accommodate a hybrid identity. Hybridity, from Diome’s standpoint, is not as accessible a solution as the literary world of Beyala makes it to be. Salie consequently embraces nomadic homelessness at the end of the novel. As she sets up home in the Atlantic and answers the Ocean’s “ode aux enfants tombés du bastingage” [“ode to the children fallen overboard”], she rejoices about the opportunity to “Partir, vivre libre et mourir comme une algue de l’Atlantique” (Le ventre 296) [“Leave, live freely and die, like seaweed in the Atlantic”(183)]. Diome’s transmutation of her protagonist into a permanent traveler represents a way out of the ideological impasse embedded in her characterization of Salie. By definition, the traveler has not reached his/her destination or home. S/he stops being a traveler at the very moment s/he arrives. Salie’s decision to remain a traveler is a deferment of emplacement and an evasion of discourses of home and identity. As the final image of the novel, the noncommittal and neutral space of the ocean both signifies Diome’s retreat from these discourses and disassociates her from the immigrant and exilic subject position. Instead, the final location of Diome’s protagonist evokes a diasporic standpoint. The Atlantic Ocean, which gives its title to the novel, is a signifier of both homelessness and a quest for home. Salie’s retreat to the Atlantic epitomizes the fates of the various bodies in the novel that can’t stay home and are cast away in the Ocean. Sédar and Soutoura, a couple unable to conceive, drown themselves in the ocean to end their social ostracism. The illegitimate babies thrown in the ocean and Moussa who commits suicide after his French misadventure add to the list. As a site for outcast bodies, the ocean also takes on nurturing attributes, as shown by the maternal metaphor of the belly. The metaphor constructs the experience of homelessness as a new genealogy for bodies that are filiated by their common belonging to the ocean. Home thus emerges here as an imagined community of outcast bodies. Diome gestures toward the Middle Passage with her metaphorical deployment of the Atlantic Ocean and the motif of

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the journey. The reference to the “children fallen overboard” definitely reintroduces the slave metaphor discussed earlier. The experience of the Middle Passage is one of leaving one shore and never really making it into the other one, as the history of Africans in the Western hemisphere illustrates. Out of this communal experience of displacement comes a new genealogy and a new home community. Salie’s final location attaches her to the slave body and positions her in diasporic space where new forms of identification override the hegemony of national identifications. At the same time, this black diasporic affiliation works to contain and frame her nomadic homelessness within the ideologically and politically acceptable bounds of Afro-conscious geographies of home and identity.

Notes   1.  For a discussion of the characteristics of the first waves of Francophone African writers in France, see Odile Cazenave. Afrique sur Seine; Bennetta Jules-Rosette. Black Paris; Dominic Thomas. Black France; and Jacques Chevrier. “Autour de la notion de ‘migritude.’”   2.  Lydie Moudileno notes that the foot is an important metonymic element in Francophone African literatures of the preindependence era. It is often used to gauge the protagonist’s adhesion to the cultural values of the continent (56). See Lydie Moudileno. Littératures africaines francophones des années 1980 et 1990. (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2003). Diome’s recourse to this element reinforces her connection with that generation of a writer.   3.  For an exhaustive discussion of the concept and its limitations, see Arif Dirlik. ”Bringing History Back In: Of Diasporas, Hybridities, Places, and Histories.” The Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies 21.2 (1999): 95–131.

Conclusion Reinstating the Nation as an Object of Postcolonially Correct Interest

I wrote The Pull of Postcolonial Nationhood with the intention of affirming the persistence of the postcolonial nation as an important locus of identification; the continuing political, ideological, and emotional appeal of postcolonial nationhood; and the continuing relevance of nationalist discourses of home for the critical assessment of Francophone African migrant literatures. My reliance on women’s texts to support my claim has appositely reiterated the importance of gender in the elaboration of critical frameworks for Francophone African literatures. It has been over two decades since Carole Boyce Davies and Anne Adams Graves, Irène d’Almeida and Odile Cazenave, to name a few feminist critics of African literatures, integrated gender into African literary criticism. As such, the “gender-challenged” postnationalist framework in Francophone African literary criticism calls for sustained feminist theoretical vigilance in the field. The counterstory formed by the narratives of Francophone African migrant women most directly engages the postnationalist interpretive narrative that currently prevails in Francophone African literary criticism. However, my book reaches beyond the field of Francophone African literary criticism. The arguments upheld in this book explicitly go against the grain of the unfolding postnationalist turn in postcolonial criticism, namely what Elleke Boehmer aptly calls a demotion of “the nation as an object 125

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of postcolonially correct interest” (Boehmer 10). Using the overlooked texts of Francophone African migrant women writers, I have sought to reassert the nation as a crucial and even politically imperative category of analysis for postcolonial criticism. In the nineties, critics have rightly asserted that the national paradigm has obscured experiences of transnationalism, multiple homes, and (af)filiations and deterritorialized identities. However, the subsequent pervasiveness of the postnational and its overlap with the postcolonial now warrant asking whether the postnational is not due for interruption. In The Pull of Postcolonial Nationhood, I have argued that it is timely to ask whether the postnational paradigm is not obscuring enduring allegiances to the national idea. The historical, ideological, and political spectrum covered by my book has served my argument by tracing the uninterrupted endurance of the categories of home and nation. The three writers examined in my study represent three distinct political and ideological moments that traverse postcolonial nationhood: the immediate aftermath of colonialism and the years of decolonization for Ken Bugul; the postcolonial African disillusionment with the nation state and the mass resettlement of Africans to France for Calixthe Beyala; the denunciation of the neocolonial processes of globalization and the rejection of Afro-pessimism for Fatou Diome. Although these three moments inform distinct geographies of home, these geographies share a common pattern of being cognizant of the emotional, ideological, and political charge of home in the postcolonial context. The wide spectrum covered by my book, from Ken Bugul’s encounter with racism in Europe in the 1970s to similar experiences in the texts of Beyala and Diome three decades later, shows the continuing importance of race in enabling and disabling gestures of shunning home and roots. Once again, Alice Walker’s contention that Woolf’s displacement is a privilege of caste and race (7) rings true. The fact is that today’s migrant African writers, like their predecessors, occupy a terrain delineated by globalization (aka neocolonial globalization or late imperialism) and an uneasy relationship with French racial nationalism. How do we then infer that the question of home would pose itself in a dramatically different manner to the new generation of

Reinstating the Nation  /  127

writers? Precisely, how do the theories of Francophone African postnationalism account for this deterritorialized and uprooted postcolonial migrant subject so fundamentally incongruous with the ideological, political, and affective habitus shaped by the ongoing reality of late imperialism and French racial nationalism? As I have argued in this book, the omission of gender largely accounts for the postnationalist interpretive narrative of home in Francophone African literary criticism. Another way to approach the pervasive postnationalism in postcolonial criticism has been by referencing the role of contemporary cultural studies in imposing theoretical frameworks that privilege mobility, disaffiliation, and displacement. Elleke Boehmer writes about a “predominantly metropolitan, postcolonial disaffection about the nation,” with Homi Bhabha’s influential scholarship on migration, subversion, and postnational third spaces of identity exemplifying this disaffection (10). Benita Parry and Neil Lazarus have also taken to task postcolonial metropolitan scholars, among whom Bhabha, for having sociopolitically out-of-touch and elitist scholarly agendas oriented toward denigrating anticolonial nationalisms and national identifications. Bhabha’s tendentious interpretation of Frantz Fanon, trying to recuperate Fanon’s critique of bourgeois nationalism in order to construct an antinationalist and poststructuralist Fanon, is referenced by Lazarus and Parry as evidence of a determination to shift critical interests from national to migrant space.1 Of course, I will also argue here that the discourses of mobility and postnationalism in cultural criticism lean on the theoretical elision of gender. But the otherwise insightful suggestion by the above-referenced critics is that this line of postcolonial apolitical scholarship refuses to engage with national space since this engagement implies the deconstruction of the scholars’ own social location of privilege and the confrontation of their complicity with the forces of neocolonial globalization.2 I am insisting on this point because I am concerned that by eluding the postcolonial African nation, postnationalist discourses of home also (strategically) dodge the political (and maybe not so creatively thrilling and glamorous) task of confronting the urgency of local realities and the continuing fact of empire.3 This, then, becomes a matter of ethical accountability.

128  /  Conclusion

I read a similar call for ethical accountability and a rejection of postnationalism in Alain Patrice Nganang’s 2007 Manifeste d’une nouvelle littérature Africaine: Pour une écriture préemptive, a study that was published the same year the much-debated Manifeste pour une littérature monde en français [Manifesto for a World Literature in French] was issued. This manifesto, by a group of French and Francophone writers, advocates new grids of interpretation that would forego the traditional distinction between the French and Francophone literary traditions. Interestingly enough and in support of my argument about the implausibility of a postnationalist migrant African writer, Nganang could be said to be part of the new generation of Francophone African writers. The writer was born in postindependent Cameroon and has been living in Europe and the United States of America. Yet Nganang’s book stresses, for his generation of African writers, the allegedly outmoded notions of responsibility and commitment. He calls for an “écriture préemptive” [“preemptive writing”], by which he means an African literary practice that preempts the repetition of the different tragedies that have befallen the continent. Fortunately enough, Nganang’s manifesto does not represent an isolated and marginal voice. By the time I was completing this manuscript, recent additions to the corpus of Francophone African migrant literatures corroborated my thesis that home, nation, roots, and origins are not passé questions for the so-called postnationalist generation of Francophone African migrant writers. The three novels by newcomer Léonora Miano, a young woman from Cameroon living in France, grapple with questions of nation building. L’intérieur de la nuit [Dark Heart of the Night] is set in an unnamed African nation. Ayané, the young female protagonist, is back from France for a visit and is confronted with a society on a path of self-destruction and regression; hence the title of the novel. Ayané’s choice to stay and not return to France reflects her sense of responsibility to the nation-building project. The title of Miano’s second novel, Contours du jour qui vient [First Signs of Daylight] foregrounds this faith in the national project. The novel is set in an unnamed African nation torn apart by a civil war. Children are thrown away from home because they have become burdens for their

Reinstating the Nation  /  129

families. This is the fate of Musango, the female protagonist of the novel. Her wanderings and sexual exploitation, as she is left to herself, evoke Calixthe Beyala’s representation of postcolonial childhood in Tu t’appelleras Tanga. With Musango’s determination to reunite with and forgive the mother that evicted her from home, Miano constructs a compelling narrative of homecoming that resists the alignment of postcolonial subjectivities with the postnational order. Tels des astres éteints, Miano’s latest novel, is set in the diasporic space of Paris. The novel features African and Caribbean protagonists tormented with issues of identity, racial consciousness, filiations, and home. The writer reinstalls Africa and the postcolonial African nation within the diasporic and postcolonial African migrant imaginary. Nathalie Etoké, also from Cameroon and living in the United States after many years in France, offers yet another example of the prevailing currency of home and postcolonial nationhood. Etoké’s Je vois du soleil dans tes yeux echoes Diome’s Le ventre de l’Atlantique in describing an agonizing postcolonial nation losing its offspring to the West. In Etoké’s novel women are on the lookout for a European husband so that they can leave the country. Weli, the female protagonist, achieves her dream of marrying an old French man she met online. In the meantime, she meets a young Rastafarian named Ruben who awakens her political consciousness. After she joins her French husband in France, Weli decides to give up her life in France in order to return home and participate in the rehabilitation of the continent. Through the trajectory of her protagonist, Etoké leaves no doubt about her allegiance to postcolonial nationhood. Weli’s trajectory marks the postcolonial nation as a place to come home to and not a place to run away from. Etoké’s revival of the militant figures of Ruben um Nyobe and Cheikh Anta Diop, like Diome’s self-alignment with African writers of the colonial era, testify to the enduring relevance of anticolonial and nationalist agendas. By portraying a postcolonial youth committed to rebuilding the postcolonial nation, Miano and Etoké join Nganang in stressing the accountability of Africans for the fate of the continent. In that sense, their novels are antipostnationalist manifestos. Their refusal to celebrate the figure of the migrant participates in this

130  /  Conclusion

rehabilitation of the nationalist hero. I am reminded here of Atilio Boron’s critique of Hardt and Negri for stating in Empire that the migrants are “the real heroes of the liberation of the Third World” because these “postcolonial hero[es] subvert racial boundaries and hegemonic arrangements of space” (362–363). Boron contends: This is an enigmatic statement because it obliquely induces us to think, first, that the Third World has already achieved its liberation; second, that the multitudes of the Third World have also succeeded in their attempt to liberate themselves (an amazing revelation for four-fifths of the world population); third that the hero of such great deed is the migrant who abandons his native land to enter Europe or the United States, in most cases illegally, in search of a better life. The alchemy of theory has converted emigration to revolution. (97)

Boron’s response resonates clearly though the novels of Miano and Etoké. The novels of these young writers demote the postcolonial postnationalist migrant as an object of postcolonially correct interest. Nganang’s manifesto, the geographies of home of Francophone African migrant women writers studied in this book, and the novels of Miano and Etoké are various examples that call for a reassessment of our critical tools in Francophone African literary criticism. Nganang himself has made a similar observation in his book. He criticizes the hastiness of critics of African literatures to shove African texts into “les flux mondialisants” [“globalizing flows”] (10–11). These critical practices appear to be calling for studies that assess the field of Francophone African literary criticism. One of my goals in writing The Pull of Postcolonial Nationhood has been to get such a conversation started.

Notes   1.  A number of scholars have also highlighted that postcolonial theory does not concern itself with the national experience in former colonies or with people remaining in national space; instead the subjects of postcolonial theory are the colonial past and the figure of the

Reinstating the Nation  /  131 metropolitan migrant. See Pheng Cheah. “Given Culture: Rethinking Cosmopolitical Freedom in Transnationalism.” Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Eds. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 290–328; and Spectral Nationality. According to Cheah, reading postcolonial theory, one is left with the impression that “postcoloniality is the hybridity of the metropolitan migrancy” and that “there are no postcolonials left in decolonized space.” Cosmopolitics 301. Simon Gikandi has also made the point that postcolonial theory “present[s] itself as cosmopolitan in character and ambition, and transcendental of the nation and the national narrative” in “Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Nationalism.” CLIO 36.1 (2006): 69. See also Aijaz Ahmad. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. (London: Verso, 1992); Revathi Krishnaswamy. “Mythologies of Migrancy.” Ariel 26.1 (1995): 125–146; and Arif Dirlik. The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997).   2.  Perhaps one of the most vocal and comprehensive assessments of the location of privilege that metropolitan postcolonial critics have secured for themselves comes from Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura, 52–83.   3.  This is an argument that has also been made with regards to the focus of postcolonial criticism. See for example Ella Shohat. “Notes on the Post-Colonial.” Social Text 31/32 (1992): 99–113; Ahmad, In Theory; Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura; San Juan, Beyond Postcolonial Theory; and Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, and Antoinette Burton, eds. Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). See also Simon Gikandi. “Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100.3 (2001): 627–658. In this very important article, Gikandi remarks that investigating why the local is neglected by postcolonial theorists is ultimately less important than the fact that very urgent issues of structural poverty and global inequalities are rendered invisible by this approach. For Gikandi, the proliferating stories of Africans who risk their lives to enter Europe are by no means evidence of a desire for hybridity or metissage. Gikandi thus makes the important distinction that the hybridity-seeking migrant is most likely a postcolonial elite émigré because the majority of postcolonial migrants are pursuing economic and material gains. This evidence definitely calls for a focus on the local, namely a consideration of the ways in which flows of population from the South to the North underscore global inequities and the operations of global neocolonialism. Hence, the divorce between postcolonial criticism and the local carries over into the reductive theorization of migrancy.

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Index

Adesanmi, Pius, xxiv, 65n8 Africanness/unafricanness, 55, 78, 90 African women writers, xvi–xvii, xxvin3, 29, 31, 54, 79 Ahmed, Sara, xi, xiii, xix, 14, 100 allegiance, xvii, xxiii, xxiv, 8, 17, 29, 30, 45, 56, 69, 83, 93, 107, 120, 126, 129 ambivalence, 27, 72, 120 Anderson, Benedict, 49, 55 Ang, Ien, 16 Appadurai, Arjun, xii Asaah, Augustine, 45, 54, 65n8, 65n9 assimilation/assimilationist, 13, 67, 78, 83, 87, 89, 93, 118 Augé, Marc, 3 Baartman, Sarah, 84, 85, 118 Bachelard, Gaston, 48, 65n6 Baker, Josephine, 85 Bauman, Zygmunt, 100, 104 Beurs noirs / Black Beurs, xi, xxii

Bhabha, Homi, xi, 31, 47, 81, 110n6, 127 Biddy, Martin, 18 Boehmer, Elleke, xiii, xix, xx, 4, 6, 9, 14, 55, 125–126, 127 Boron, Atilio, 130 Bourdieu, Pierre, 11 Brière, Eloise, 58, 64n1, 65n11 Bunch, Charlotte, 45 Butler, Judith, 79 Cazenave, Odile, xii, xvi, xxvin3, 19n5, 65n7, 65n8, 123n1, 125 Chambers, Ian, xi, 88, 110n6 Chandar, Tirthankar, 71 Chatterjee, Partha, xiv–xv, xxi, xxiv, 7, 9, 10, 49 Cheah, Pheng, xiii, xxiv, xxviin7, 110n6, 131n1 Chevrier, Jacques, xii, xxiii, 123n1 Chirac, Jacques, 87, 94n2 colonial/colonialism, xii, xiv, xvii, xxi, xxiv, 3, 4, 7, 9–11, 32, 34, 37, 43, 47, 52–53, 84, 89,101, 103, 104, 105, 116, 126, 129 143

144  / Index colonialist discourses/narratives, 62, 70–71, 93, 94 Coly, Ayo A., 64n1, 81n1, 82n2, 94n1, 95n4 D’Almeida, Irène, xxvin3, 18n1, 18n4, 30–31, 56, 125 Davies, Carole Boyce, xiv, xx, 125 De Certeau, Michel, 83, 86, 90, 92 Derrida, Jacques, 81, 83 deterritorialization/deterritorialized, xi, xii, xiii, xxiv, 37, 88, 126, 127 diasporic, xxv, 87, 122, 123, 129 Diawara, Manthia, xxiv Díaz, Naborna, 29 Dramé, Kandioura, 106 enfants de la postcolonie / children of the postcolony, xi, 37 Enloe, Cynthia, xxviin4, 18n2 Etoké, Nathalie, 129, 130 Europeanness, 12, 15 exile/exilic, xxi, 4, 10, 11, 12, 14, 23, 31, 32, 33, 46, 48, 71, 113, 119–122 family, 3, 4, 5–12, 41, 60, 61, 113 Fanon, Frantz, xv, xxii, xxviin4, 9, 31, 32, 33, 52–54, 77, 127 feminism/feminist, xiii, xvi, xvii, 24, 29, 42, 60, 62, 125; African, xix–xx; Black, xx; and home, xvii; Western, xviii, xix, 93 Francophone African literary criticism, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xxiii, xxiv, 125, 127, 130 Frenchness, 87, 90 Freud, Sigmund, 77, 78, 79 Gallimore, Rangira, 50, 60, 64n1, 65n7, 65n8

Gasster, Susan, xv, 81 Gates, Henri, 94 George, Rosemary, xviii, xix, 5 Gikandi, Simon, xiii, xxii, xxiii, 10, 110n6, 131n1, 131n3 Gilroy, Paul, xxiv globalization/anti-globalization, xxiv, xxvi, 99–109, 126, 127 Grewal, Inderpal, 70 Grosz, Elizabeth, 115, 116, 117 Hall, Stuart, xxv, 81 Hardt, Michael, xi, 130 Hirsch, Marianne, 60 Hitchcott, Nicki, 65n10, 78, 95n4 home: in cultural criticism, xi–xii; and feminism (see feminism/ feminist: and home); geographies/geography of, xiv, xvi, xvii, xix, xxii, xxvi, 8–9, 11, 26, 30, 31, 33, 34, 37, 108, 111, 119, 123, 126, 130; and homecoming, xiv, xvi, xxii, xxiii, 3, 9, 11, 14, 16, 21, 24, 25, 27, 30, 36, 76, 108, 111, 113, 129; and homelessness, xviii, xxi, 3, 4, 22, 24, 30, 36, 46, 59, 71, 87, 112, 122, 123; and house, 4–8, 10, 13, 47, 48, 84, 87, 112, 117; and nation/nationalism, xiv–xv, xx–xxi, 7–9; unhomely, xxiii, 47, 51; women as representations of, xiv–xv, xvi, 7–9 hooks, bell, xviii, xix, 14 Huggan, Graham, 93 hybridity, xi, xxiii, 61, 78, 81, 102, 110n6, 121, 122, 123n3 Jules-Rosette, Bennetta, xii, 123n1 Kaplan, Caren, xviii

Index  /  145 Kom, Ambroise, xv Lazarus, Neil, xiii, xxviin6, 127 Lee, Sonia, xxi Lefèbvre, Henri, 92 Mabanckou, Alain, 106 madness, 23, 25, 44, 54, 55 Magnier, Bernard, xii, 18n1 Malonga, Alpha, 76 Marcus, Jane, xviii Martin, Biddy, xviii Mbembe, Achille, xxiii M’Bokolo, Elika, xxii Memmi, Albert, 15 Meyer, Nicole, 24 Meyer, Tamar, 43 Miano, Léonora, 128–129, 130 Midiohouan, Guy, 37, 38 migrant/migration: in cultural criticism, xi–xiii; and globalization, 101–105 migritude, xii, xxii, 37, 105 Miller, Christopher, xxii, 64n1 Mohanty, Chandra, xviii Mortimer, Mildred, 18n1, 18n4, 38n1 Mouangue, Essombe, xvi Moudileno, Lydie, 123n2 Mudimbe-Boyi, Elizabeth, 14 Murunga, Godwin, xxiv Mwantuali, Joseph, xxii Narayan, Uma, 70 Ndao, Cheikh Aliou, 37, 38 Negri, Antonio, xi, 130 Nfah-Abbenyi, Juliana, xxvin3, 56, 58, 64n3, 64n4, 65n13 Nganang, Alain, 128, 129, 130 Nnaemeka, Obioma, xvi, xvii, xix–xx, 31, 54, 79

nomadism/nomadic, xi, 122, 123 non-place, 3–8, 10, 14, 18, 21, 25 Parry, Benita, xiii, 127 Pratt, Minnie, xviii postnationalism: critiques of, xii–xiii, xxiii–xxiv, 125–130; discourses/theories of, xii, xxi, xxii; as freedom from patriarchy, 42, 43, 52, 54, 56, 61, 62; as a male narrative, xiv, xv, 8, 37; and race, 16 Quayson, Ato, xxiv race, xviii, 4, 12, 13, 15, 16, 32, 60–61, 80, 88, 115, 126 Rich, Adrienne, 43, 60 roots, xii, xvi, xvii, xxv, 14, 23, 55, 69, 73, 74, 75, 76, 79, 80, 108, 126, 128 routes, 74, 75, 76, 80 Rushdie, Salman, xxiii Soja, Edward, 16 Spivak, Gayatri, 62 Tarlo, Emma, 73 Têko-Agbo, Ambroise, 63 third space, xxiii, 61, 127 Thomas, Dominic, xii, xxii, xxiii, xxv, 93, 102, 103, 105, 106, 110n7, 123n1 transnationalism, 60–63, 126 Traoré, Aminata, 101, 109n4 uprootedness, xi, xii, xiii, xxiv, 127 Volkman, Toby, 61

146  / Index Waberi, Abdourahman, xi Walker, Alice, xviii, xix Walker, Keith, 19n4, 23 Watson, Julia, 16, 19n4, 37 Wittig, Monique, 51

Woolf, Virginia, xvii, xviii, 126 Yngvesson, Barbara, 61 Yuval-Davis, Nira, xxvin2, 18n2, 58, 64n2

About the Author

Ayo Abiétou Coly is assistant professor of comparative literature, African studies, and gender studies at Dartmouth College. She has published articles on the topics of migration, female circumcision, and the black female body. She is the guest editor, with Ivy Wilson, for Callaloo 30.2: “The Cultures and Letters of the Black Diaspora 30.2” (2007).

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