Sex, Violence and the African Woman. Hope and Liberation in the Short Stories of Calixthe Beyala

Calixthe Beyala, born in Cameroon, is one of the most famous contemporary French-language novelists in sub-Saharan Africa. Her work has been translated into many languages and her success was crowned by her election to the Académie française. Nevertheless, she remains a controversial figure, reviled as a literary fraud and condemned for her lack of propriety.

Beyala is a feminist author whose writings are designed to shock. She describes in explicit detail the sexual abuse and oppression to which women, and particularly African women, are subjected in inherently violent and male-dominated cultures. Beyala’s Africa is frozen in a state of inertia, a place of poverty and squalor where men live ineffectual lives while women make conscious decisions to break free from patriarchal shackles.

Beyala seeks to re-make society and, to that end, has developed her own brand of feminism which she calls féminitude, a concept which envisions coalition between individuals, men and women, Europeans and Africans. Through explicit descriptions of oppression and violence, linguistic decadence and the exposure of taboos, Beyala’s novels offer resistance to the misery they portray. The lives of her female characters are marked by a series of breakthroughs achieved by the exercise of choice, albeit within certain social and economic constraints.

It is well known that Beyala’s works focus on feminism, social justice, identity and exile, but it has not so far been noticed that these themes are grounded in a range of biblical archetypes that are recurrent across the entire range of her novels. These archetypes presuppose a world-view that is essentially apocalyptic, beginning with the myth of a lost golden age, a time of exile in which barren women and virginal mothers are the source of future hope, and looking forward to the restoration of a new earthly paradise. This presentation will focus on these archetypes, showing how, through them, Beyala’s novels point the way, beyond apocalypse, towards the hope of a liberated future for the African woman.

Presented (in English) by Jessica Glaeser, doctoral candidate at the University of the Western Cape.

Event in partnership with the University of the Western Cape and the Consulate General of France in Cape Town.