A Study of Mariama Bâ, Marie Ndiaye and Ama Ata Aidoo Catherine Afua Kapi Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected]
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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2006 Writing as a cultural negotiation: a study of Mariama Bâ, Marie NDiaye and Ama Ata Aidoo Catherine Afua Kapi Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the French and Francophone Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Kapi, Catherine Afua, "Writing as a cultural negotiation: a study of Mariama Bâ, Marie NDiaye and Ama Ata Aidoo" (2006). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 947. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/947 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. WRITING AS A CULTURAL NEGOTIATION: A STUDY OF MARIAMA BÂ, MARIE NDIAYE AND AMA ATA AIDOO A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In The Department of French Studies By Catherine Afua Kapi BA., Université Laval, 1993 M.A., Université Laval, 1999 May 2006 To Mom and Dad, Thank you for sowing the seed. To Don, you know what we have been through. Thank you ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It is darkest before daylight. I would like to thank my dissertation committee for guiding me from the darkness into the daylight. To my dissertation director, Professor Adelaide Russo, I would like to express my profound gratitude to you for your complete dedication and for accepting to make time for me out of your busy schedule. Your words of encouragement, sound advice, and friendship made all the difference. I am indebted to you for the discrete reminders of deadlines to be met, and above all, your patience. To Dr. Denise Égéa-Kuehne, my deepest gratitude to you for being there for me through those difficult times; to Dr. Kate Jensen and Professor Femi Euba, thank you most sincerely for willingly accepting on such short notice to be part of my committee; to Professor Rebecca Crump, the Dean’s representative on my committee, it has been my honor and fortune that fate has made our paths cross. Ms. Connie Simpson, you are the lighthouse that guides the lost ships of graduate students to the academic shore. Continue the good work. To Mr. and Mrs. Palmer, your support has always meant a lot to me. And last but not least, I would like to thank all my family and friends for sticking with me through thick and thin. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION…………………………………………………………………………ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………..iii ABSTRACT …………………………………………………………………………….vi. INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………….1 CHAPTER 1. WRITING AS A CULTURAL NEGOTIATION: DEFINITIONS AND A CRITICAL OVERVIEW OF SUB-SAHARAN WOMEN WRITERS…13 1.1 Key Issues in Sub-Saharan Women’s Writing………………………………24 1.2 Translation, Hybridized Language and Cultural Transfer…………………..29 1.3 Authors and Their Works: Brief Biographical Sketches and Synopses of Their Works………………………………………………………………………...37 CHAPTER 2. HYBRIDITY: CONCEPT AND IDENTITY FORMATION……………46 2.1 Linguistic Hybridity: Proverbs, Neologisms and Translations………………48 2.2 Perils To Hybridity: Marriage, Racism and Religious Purity………………..60 CHAPTER 3. IN THE PRISON-HOUSE OF MARRIAGE: BIGAMY, POLYGAMY AND CULTURAL STATUS QUO…………………..………………….79 CHAPTER 4. MOTHERHOOD: A WOMAN’S BURDEN………….……………..... 117 4.1 A Mother as a Woman Fulfilled …………………………………..............118 4.2 Contesting Motherhood: Abusive and Abused Mothers and Their Unyielding Daughters………………………………………………………125 4.3 Motherhood: Subservience and Patriarchy Reversed ……………………...140 CHAPTER 5. UNDERSTANDING WITCHCRAFT: WITCHES, WITCH HUNTERS, HEALERS AND THE SUPERNATURAL…………………………...152 5.1 Living with Witchcraft and Its Ubiquitous Evil Eye.....................................155 5.2 Witchcraft and the Literary Imagination…………………………………...164 5.3 Reclaiming the Feminine Power: The Witchcraft Model…………………..176 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………...181 END NOTES…………………………………………………………………………..197 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………201 VITA……………………………………………………………………………………219 iv ABSTRACT Critical review of the existing literature on African women writers clearly shows that nowhere is the question of writing as a cultural negotiation posed, discussed or much less addressed. This is a lacuna that this dissertation addresses for the first time by proposing a re-reading of the selected works of Ama Ata Aidoo, Mariama Bâ and Marie NDiaye through the new prism of writing as part of cultural negotiation. In doing so, the dissertation goes beyond the paradigm of binary oppositions that undergirds the critical literature on writing by Sub-Saharan women in favor of the innovative concept of negotiation. In addressing women’s issues such as marriage and polygamy, motherhood and witchcraft, this study makes the powerful case that Mariama Bâ, Ama Ata Aidoo and Marie NDiaye have negotiated a space of creativity for themselves through writing, hitherto the preserve of men, and from which they pose, discuss and address through negotiation, those cultural issues affecting them. Chapter One, with brief biographical sketches of the writers and a summary of their texts, deals with the theoretical framework for the study by providing the critical overview of Sub-Saharan women writers and in-depth analyses of the concepts of writing, negotiation and culture in order to explain how these women writers are able to negotiate their respective cultures in their writing. In Chapter Two, hybridity and its perils are discussed specifically in relation to the colonizer/colonized binary model. Through this binary, displacement of authority is engendered by means of a series of mimetic identifications with the colonizer by the colonized in an ambivalent hybridized cultural space. We discuss interracial and inter-caste polygamy and their role in the victimization of women v in Chapter Three. Chapter Four questions the notion that motherhood is the equivalent of men’s reproductive labor and a source of oppression suggests that empowerment can be derived from surrogacy and freedom of choice. Chapter Five explores modern day beliefs in witchcraft and its cultural impact on women. From the feminist theoretical perspective, the study suggests that witchcraft, if reclaimed by women, is a powerful negotiating tool. vi INTRODUCTION From Bessie Head to Buchi Emecheta to Mariama Bâ, many African Women Writers like to declare that they are not feminists (Code, 2000); however, nothing could be more feminist than the forceful articulation in their writings of deep preoccupations for, and attempts at explaining the experiences and fates of women in patriarchal African societies. Moreover, given the conceptual framework within which African feminism operates, it is not paradoxical that African Women Writers should want to distance themselves from Western feminism. Postcolonial feminist critics, like their American women of color counterparts, have attacked in their engagement with the issue of representation, both the idea of universal “woman” as well as the reification of the so- called “Third World” difference that produces the monolithic “Third World woman,” insisting instead on the specificities of race, class, nationality, religion and sexualities that intersect with gender, and on the socio-economic hierarchies that exist among women. While postcolonial feminists have called upon their First World feminist counterparts to recognize differences, acknowledge historical specificity of women in other places and times, and to abandon their unexamined ethnocentric thought which underlines a certain attitude of easy benevolence towards Third World women as victims, First World Feminists have contended that while it is true that colonial history has taken advantage of African traditions to locate the place of women in a subservient role, it is also true that the trend has not changed even after independence. As such the transfer of power to national elites merely ensured the continuation of colonial structures benefiting the male national elite. 1 In postcolonial thought, two factors have worked hand in hand against women: religious fundamentalism and cultural nationalism. As a result, postcolonial feminists have had to contend with two obvious realities: the women’s respect for, and obedience to their communities’ traditional demands and subservience to the dictates of fundamentalist religious rules. An African woman’s commitment to community, nationalistic sentiments and fundamentalist religious rules has more complex causes than the simplistic cultural “backwardness”. The answer, as proposed by a significant body of postcolonial literary works, lies in the negotiated space between the emancipatory goals of feminism and agendas of nationalism and communalism. In these works, that means positions ranging from total rejection of feminism in favor of solidarity with collective “national” or community goals, and also a direct opposition to colonial modernity. Nowhere is this wide-ranging positioning more significant than in the Nigerian critic Chikwenye Ogunyemi’s “Womanism: The Dynamics of the Contemporary Black Female Novel in English” (1985), in which she contrasts “womanist” with “feminist” because she sees the former