Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls: Seeking Subjecthood through Madness in Francophone Women's Writing of Africa and the Caribbean

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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 here closely reads the work of Aminata Sow Fall, Mariama Ba, Myrian Warner-Vieyra and Simone Schwarz-Bart, among others. In these women's novels, Orlando finds, madness is the manifestation of a rent identity; this study thus is one that interrogates the nature of that identity. Francophone women novelists of Africa and the Caribbean - though they come from countries whose unique experiences of colonialism, revolution and postcolonial regimes have shaped specific and discrete cultures - express a common search for a meaningful relationship between their experience as women to the history and destiny of their nations. Only when "woman" is understood not as an ahistorical object but as a subject whose lived body is entwined with political, cultural and economic structures, Orlando argues, will insanity finally give way to clarity of being.

Reviews

Orlando 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. -- T Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Hamilton College

Author Bio

ValZrie Orlando is Associate Professor of French, specializing in Francophone Studies, at Illinois Wesleyan University. She is the author of Nomadic Voices of Exile: Feminine Identity in Francophone Literature of the Maghreb (1999).