Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls: Seeking Subjecthood through Madness in Francophone Women's

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Author: ValZrie Orlando

ISBN-10: 0739105620

ISBN-13: 9780739105627

Category: African Literature Anthologies

Female characters who suffer madness and insanity are strikingly prominent in novels by women writers of Africa and the Caribbean. To find out why there are so many "suffocated hearts and tortured souls" in this literature, Valerie Orlando, who has long studied Francophone text and culture, here closely reads the work of Aminata Sow Fall, Mariama Bâ, Myrian Warner-Vieyra, and Simone Schwarz-Bart, among others. In these women's novels, Orlando finds, madness is the manifestation of a split...

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A striking number of hysterical or insane female characters populate Francophone women's writing. To discover why, Orlando reads novels from a variety of cultures, teasing out key elements of Francophone identity struggles.

PrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Writing New H(er)stories for Francophone Women of Africa and the Caribbean11The Politics of Race and Patriarchy in Suzanne Lacascade's Claire-Solange, ame africaine372Home Is Where I Eat My Bread: Multiculturality and Becoming Multiple in Leila Hoauri's Zeida de nulle part513Self-Loathing, Self-Sacrifice: Michele Lacrosil's Cajou and Myriam Warner-Vieyria's Juletane734Out(in)side the Confinement of Cultures: Marie Chauvet's Amour, Colere, et Folie and Mariama Ba's Un Chant ecarlate975Rooms and Prisons, Sex and Sin: Places of Sequestration in Nina Bouraoui's La Voyeuse Interdite and Calixthe Beyala's Tu t'appelleras Tanga1256War, Revolution, and Family Matters: Yamina Mechakra's La Grotte eclatee and Hajer Djilani's Et Pourtant le ciel etait bleu1477Feminine Voices and H(er)stories: Simone Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et Vent sur Telumee Miracle and Aminata Sow Fall's Douceurs du bercail165Epilogue: Transgressing Boundaries, Reconstructing Stories181Bibliography187Index193

\ T Denean Sharpley-WhitingOrlando has brought together a number of sublimely heartwrenching texts by Francophone women writers with thematic aplomb, if you will. The theme of madness and alienation stretch across what would appear to be dissimiliar works, particular in their own cultural milieus yet united in their "Frenchness"—a source of the women writers' psychological angst.\ \