from Research in African Literatures Volume 33, Number 2Neither Here nor There: Calixthe Beyala's Collapsing Homes
Ayo Abiétou Coly
Permission to CopyYou may download, save, or print for your personal use without permission. If you wish to disseminate the electronic article, or to produce multiple copies for classroom or educational use, please request permission from:
Copyright Clearance CenterFor other permissions, use our online reprint request form.
Professional Relations Department
222 Rosewood Drive
Danvers MA 01923 FAX: 978-750-4470/4744
Web address: www.copyright.com
A voluntary exile from Cameroon, her native land, Calixthe Beyala has chosen France as her space of enunciation. This movement from former colony to former colonial power, an apparent repudiation of Africa for Europe, raises the question of the identity of home for Beyala. Where is home, for starters? On the one hand, can the country that has colonized your native land and is still refusing to acknowledge your existence be called home? On the other, can the homeland that failed to perform its nurturing function and that you have left in search of more hospitable places still be called home? The author's displacement has resulted in an ambiguity and ambivalence towards the idea of home that she has expressed directly or indirectly in her interviews, essays, and above all in her fiction.
This paper offers preliminary responses to the question of home for Beyala by examining her representation of Africa and Europe in C'est le soleil qui m'a brûlée, Tu t'appelleras Tanga, Le petit prince de Belleville, and Maman a un amant. Beyala's fiction fits Andrew Gurr's description of the pattern of writings in exile. According to Gurr, writers in exile spend their first years reconstructing their homes in their works. This certainly seems to be the case for Beyala. Her first four novels can be broken down into two movements. Whereas the first two are set in postcolonial Africa and offer a backward glance, the last two are set in France. By considering each movement separately, I hope to demonstrate that each movement shows a reformulation of Beyala's idea of home.
In The Poetics of Space, French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard defines home as the crucial site of one's intimate life and a refuge. Bachelard uses the term espace heureux (felicitous space) to designate home. According to Bachelard, home is the anchor without which men and women become fragmented individuals. In the following I will demonstrate that the image of the continent that emerges out of Beyala's backward glance contrasts with Bachelard's description of home as a felicitous space. Instead, the continent is a collapsing home that cannot shelter or anchor its sons and daughters.
Through Beyala's backward glance, we encounter the image of an agonizing continent. The characters in her first two novels are evolving in an Africa struck by poverty and corruption, a collapsing continent. In both, Beyala offers elaborate descriptions of the physical setting. Thus in C'est le soleil qui m'a brûlée, the inhabitants of the Quartier Général, a slum, are portrayed in the following manner:
[Ils] croupissent dans des maisons infestées de bestioles [. . .]. Ils ne rentreront plus chez eux, ils attendront là, crevant la dalle avec des accès de fièvre nostalgiques et des diarrhées progressistes, se liquéfiant dans la crasse comme un morceau de chocolat au soleil. (96)
[They] stagnate in houses infested with vermin [. . .]. They will wait here puncturing the pavement with attacks of nostalgic fever and progressive diarrhea, becoming liquid in the filth like a piece of chocolate in the sun. (73)
Tu t'appelleras Tanga is also set in a similar environment:
Partout des odeurs de poisson fumé, de bière, de cacahouètes et de rats morts, mélangés, brassés dans l'écúurement. Je chemine en méditant sur ces effluves de bouffe et de crasse. (98)
Everywhere there are smells of smoked fish, beer, peanuts and dead rats, all mixed together, churned up in nausea. I am strolling along, meditating over these emanations of grub and filth. (63)
In this text as in C'est le soleil qui m'a brûlée, the abundance of images of decay, detritus, and nauseating smells is an indication of the disastrous condition of the continent. Beyala's detailed descriptions are enough evidence that the continent is falling apart.
Another indication of the condition of the continent is conveyed through the death imagery. In both novels, there is a recurrence of the words "sans vie" 'lifeless,' "mort" 'dead,' and "inanimé" 'unanimated.' The very first lines of C'est le soleil qui m'a brûlée announce what seems like an entrance into the kingdom of death:
Ici, il y a le creux, il y a le vide, il y a le drame. Il est extérieur à nous, il court vers des dimensions qui nous échappent. Il est comme le souffle de la mort. (5)
Here, there is the hollow, there is emptiness, there is tragedy. It lies outside us, it runs towards dimensions we cannot grasp. It is like the breath of death. (1)
Death pervades the world of both novels. Ateba in C'est le soleil qui m'a brûlée is obsessed with death and has the narrator wondering: "Comment peut-elle si jeune penser à la mort?" (28)/"How can somebody so young think about death?" (37). Ateba is unable to save her friend Irène from death and she ends up killing her own lover. In Tu t'appelleras Tanga, Tanga is dying in jail under the eyes of Marie-Claude who cannot save her. In her past life, Tanga adopted Mala, who dies in her arms. Far from being the refuge that home is supposed to be, the continent is a place where survival is a challenge.
The image of youth in the novel shows that the continent cannot be called a refuge and does not have the characteristics of home. Throughout the two novels, children are abused both physically and emotionally. Tanga thus laments:
[T]ous ces enfants qui naissent adultes et qui ne sauront jamais mesurer la sévérité de leur destin, ces enfants veufs de leur enfance, eux à qui même le temps ne promet plus rien. (76)
[A]ll these children who are born adult and will never know how to measure the harshness of their destiny; these children who are widowers of their childhood, to whom even time no longer makes any promises. (47)
The children of Beyala's world are born into a society where childhood is a luxury they are forced to skip. The protagonists of the two novels are young girls under seventeen obliged to sell their bodies. Tanga refers to herself as a "girlchild-woman" but this appellation applies to Ateba and all the other young girls in the two novels who are sold into prostitution. Of the two novels, Tu t'appelleras Tanga offers the bleakest image of a persecuted youth. All the children are exploited and are stripped of their rights: "Enfant, tu n'existes pas. Enfant tu nais pour être l'esclave de tes parents" (75)/"Child, you do not exist. Child you are born to be a slave to your parents" (48). The novel projects the image of mutilated and abused youth: "la fille de Mouélé, prostituée" (74)/"Mouélé's daughter sold into prostitution" (46), "le fils de Dakassi, vendeur de cacahouètes" (74)/"Dakassi's son, who sells peanuts" (46), "le fils de Tchoumbi, l'enfant aux mains fendillées jusqu'aux poignets" (74)/"Tchoumbi's son, the child whose hands are cracked open all the way to the wrists" (46), "le fils de Yaya, le mendiant aveugle" (75/"Yaya's son, the blind beggar" (46), and finally "Mala, le fils de personne" (76)/"Mala, nobody's son" (47) whose legs have been devoured by maggots.
Rangira Béatrice Gallimore argues persuasively that this mutilated and persecuted youth is symptomatic of a dying society:
Une société qui ne se soucie pas du bien-être de ses enfants est une société sans avenir. Une société qui "dévore" ses enfants est donc une société en voie de destruction car elle rompt le cycle de la vie. Elle détruit une étape importante de l'existence humaine, celle de la regénérescence.
A society that does not care about the well-being of its children is a society without a future. A society that "devours" its children is on its way to destruction because it is breaking the life cycle. (55)
Beyala herself corroborates this view in her 1996 interview with Emmanuel Matateyou. Asked why youth is persecuted in her novels, Beyala responds:
Je ne la persécute pas. C'est la réalité africaine qui tue sa jeunesse. [. . . ] La jeunesse en Afrique vit de quoi? Est-ce qu'il y a une jeunesse en Afrique aujourd'hui? [. . .] Une jeunesse qui vit de quelques espoirs, qui rêve beaucoup, qui s'inquiète beaucoup et qui mourra de plus en plus si on ne trouve pas de solution à son problème.
I do not persecute youth in my novels. [. . .] The African reality is killing African youths. [. . .] What is African youth living on today? Is there a youth in Africa today? [. . .] A youth which lives on some hope, which dreams a lot, which worries a lot, and which will increasingly die if we do not find a solution to its problem. (613)
In both novels, parents abuse their children and mothers are not nurturing. Beyala's mothers contrast sharply with the loving and protective African mothers popularized by authors such as Camara Laye, Mariama Bâ, or Nafissatou Diallo. Tanga is raped by her father under the eyes of her mother who then pushes her and her younger sister into prostitution. Not only do daughters lack protection from their mothers, but also the daughters end up providing emotional and financial support to the mothers. In her article "Le retour des mères dévorantes," Eloïse Brière explains:
Les rôles inversés mère/enfant sont l'image d'une Afrique incapable de se donner des lendemains. [. . .] Si les enfants sont pour ainsi dire dévorés par leurs mères, celles ci sont elles mêmes victimes de la rapacité africaine post-coloniale.
The inverted mother/child roles are the image of an Africa incapable of providing a future. [. . .]If the children are, so to say, devoured by their mothers, the latter are also victims of postcolonial African rapacity. (15)
Thus, Tanga's cry against her voracious mother whose body she says "is growing all around me, forming a hedge to imprison me inside her garden of brambles" is the scream of the millions of Africans who are being devoured by a continent that has only death, insanity, and physical violence to offer. There is no hope of a better future, hence Ateba's conviction that abortion is the solution:
Ateba la regarde de biais et lui suggère évasivement d'avorter. Après tout qu'importe la vie d'un gosse dans un pays o˜ tout est constamment à l'état embryonnaire? Les gosses seront toujours maigres et n'auront jamais le temps de devenir vigoureux. (115)
Ateba gives her a sidelong glance and vaguely suggests an abortion. After all what does one kid's life matter in a country where everything is constantly in an embryonic state? The kids will always be skinny and never have an opportunity to grow sturdy. (89)
C'est le soleil qui m'a brûlée and Tu t'appelleras Tanga offer a variety of evidence that Africa is a voracious monster and a dying continent. According to Gallimore, life is impossible in that continent which has only death to offer:
Les héroïnes de Beyala sont toutes des enfants de l'Afrique post-coloniale, d'une Afrique qui a tué le développement à son stade embryonnaire, d'une Afrique qui s'est déconstruite au moment où elle posait la première pierre de sa fondation. Dans ce monde qui se "liquéfie" et se "faisande" graduellement, l'Africain n'est plus un "sous-développé" de l'époque pré-coloniale, ni le prétendu être "en voie de développement" que devaient produire les "soleils des indépendances" mais un être en voie de décomposition et de disparition. C'est cet être en ruine que mettent en scène les oeuvres de Beyala.
The protagonists of Beyala's novels are the children of a continent that has killed development at its embryonic stage, an Africa that self-destructed just when it laid the cornerstones of its foundation. In that continent which is gradually falling apart, the African is neither an "under developed person" of the precolonial era, nor the so-called "developing individual" that the "suns of independences" were supposed to bring. He/she is an individual who is disappearing and disintegrating. It is this collapsing individual that the works of Beyala describe. (40)
Whereas home, in Bachelard's description, is a place where men and women find comfort and nurture, Beyala's protagonists are not at ease in their African environment. They are not at home. Tanga captures very well the malaise of the protagonists:
Comment vivre dans un pays qui marche la tête en bas? Se tourner vers le ciel? Il se tait, obstinément. Les hommes se soûlent au jojoba et s'évertuent à blasphémer contre un dieu oublieux. Prisonnières dans les barbelés des traditions, les femmes rÙdent par les rues boueuses, suivant toujours et encore des sexes qui les éartèlent. Quand aux gosses, ils laissent la mort les prendre, vieux d'avoir pilé trop de kwem pour nourrir les parents. (135)
How do you live in a country that goes along upside down? Turn towards the sky? It remains obstinately silent. The men get drunk on jojoba and do their utmost blasphemes against a forgetful god. Prisoners, caught within the barbed wire of tradition, the women roam around the muck-filled streets, forever and always following the sex organs that tear them to pieces. As for the children, they let death take them away, grown old from having pounded too many manioc leaves to feed their parents. (90)
Both Tanga and Ateba are driven to the brink of insanity by their environments. Ateba seeks refuge in writing letters to imaginary women. The protagonists are caught in a society that appears as a trap and they are trying desperately to escape. The recurrent words "échapper" 'to escape,' "oublier" 'to forget,' "mémoire" 'memory,' "rêve" 'dream,' "partir" 'to go away,' "s'évader" 'to flee,' and "dormir" 'to sleep' indicate that imagination plays an important role in the survival of the protagonists. The frequent use of the future tense in both novels suggests an attempt to escape the sordid present and to get out of the continent. Beyala reinforces that pessimistic perspective when she states in an interview that in African slums, people are always speaking about tomorrow:
In African bidonvilles, everyone has a clear vision of the future. They always speak about tomorrow. For these people, the past and the present do not exist. That's crazy. Everything is conjugated in the future tense. "I'll buy a house." "I'll buy a refrigerator." [. . .] Never "I've bought," always "I'll buy." And this language reflects a moment of loss. [. . .] Life in the bidonvilles denies the present because one lives on hope. Everyone think that they are in transit to a better tomorrow. [. . .] No one stays there out of sheer pleasure. So you conjugate verbs in the future. (Jules-Rosette 204)
Beyala's backward glance does not picture the continent as a felicitous place. Because the continent is a collapsing home, it is bound to lose its children to more hospitable places. The continent fails to be the anchoring place that Bachelard describes as home. All the characters are trying to get out of the collapsing home. The road to salvation is north and the destination is Europe. Europe is not represented spatially in the two novels but it is nonetheless present. Europe is associated with hope, freedom, and well-being. In both novels, Europe is projected as a refuge that has the characteristics of the Bachelardian home.
With the first two novels having projected the continent as a collapsing home and Europe as a tentative home, it is no surprise that the second movement, conveyed in the next two novels, would be set in France. Le petit prince de Belleville and Maman a un amant take us into the immigrant community in France. All these immigrants came to France in search of a better future. The two novels introduce us to the world of Abdou Traoré, an immigrant from Mali who lives with his two wives and children in Belleville, an immigrant community in Paris. Loukoum, Traoré's ten-year-old son, narrates both novels with Abdou and Mam respectively as co-narrator in Le petit prince de Belleville and Maman a un amant. The two novels describe the struggles of the Traoré family to adjust to their new environment and to feel at home in France. As Mam, Abdou's first wife, states vigorously in Le petit prince de Belleville, "Nous sommes ici chez nous" (13)/ "we are at home here " (6), thereby indicating that France is to fill the functions of a home for these immigrants. There is no returning back to Africa, as Abdou explains:
La fortune a ouvert ses ailes, l'exil a commencé. Je suis venu dans ce pays tenu par le gain, expulsé du mien par le besoin. Je suis venu, nous sommes venus dans ce pays pour sauver notre peau, acheter le futur de nos enfants. Je suis arrivé, nous sommes arrivés par ballots avec, enfouie au fond des cúurs, une espérance grosse comme la mémoire. (20)
Fortune has opened its wings, exile has begun. I came to this country in the grip of material gain, expelled from my own land by need. I came, we came to this country to save our skin, to buy our children a future. I arrived, we arrived in bundles with a hope as enormous as memory itself, hidden deep in our hearts. (11)
These hopes of making France their new home are shattered as we see the characters in the two novels struggling to make a decent living and to fit into their new community. Belleville is symbolic of the shattered dreams of these immigrants. An immigrant ghetto in the suburbs of Paris, Belleville shows the marginalization of the immigrants. Cornered there, the immigrants are undesirable in other areas of the city. Their space is restricted to Belleville. Commenting on the lack of freedom of movement, Abdou observes:
Mes pas dans la rue font monter les murailles et renforcent les pierres de l'indifférence. [. . .] Plus loin, aux quartiers des maisons de pierre où l'on ne veut pas entendre des cris de souffrance, quelques chiens et chats égarés se lancent à mes trousses. (77)
My steps in the streets raise the barrier walls higher and reinforce the stones of indifference. Further along in the parts of the city where the houses are made of stone and where they don't want to hear the cries of suffering, a few roaming dogs and cats fling themselves at my heels. (51)
The restriction of immigrant space is further emphasized by Abdou's frequent references to his house as a coffin: "Dans cette pièce aussi vaste qu'un cerceuil MA MAISON" (77)/"In this room as wide as a coffin, MY HOUSE" (51). The coffin image also indicates that this house, the French home, is not the felicitous space that Bachelard affirms home to be. The living conditions of these immigrants are not a major improvement over their living conditions in Africa as described in Beyala's other novels. Abdou Traoré shares a two-bedroom apartment in a building without an elevator with his two wives and four children. They lack basic necessities such as gas. Belleville is so different from the rest of Paris that getting out of Belleville, Loukoum exclaims: "ça commence à faire typiquement français"/ 'This looks like France now' (Maman a un amant 158).
Throughout the two texts the numerous references to racism and Le Pen are a constant reminder of the xenophobia in France and of the fact that France cannot be home to these immigrants. The Africans are called "niggers" and other names and they are constantly assaulted with phrases like "Nous ne sommes pas à Ouagadougou ici" 'You are not in Ouagadougou.' They are tolerated because in the words of Loukoum, they have been especially imported to clean the streets of Paris (Maman a un Amant 147).
In this hostile environment, Abdou deeply feels his exile. Hence the recurrence of the word exile in his speech, thereby signifying that he is not at home but in exile: "Moi l'immigré, l'étoile exilée, j'avance la tête renversée" (Belleville 77)/"I am the immigrant, the exiled star, and I go forward with my head turned back" (51). Unable to feel at home in his new environment, Abdou longs for the home he has left in Africa. Faced with the collapse of both his former home and his dream of making a home in France, Abdou takes refuge in women:
Je voyage sur leurs corps qui s'ouvrent à mes tendresses et je m'endors, dans les bras ouverts du ciel. L'exil s'éloigne. (118)
I travel over their bodies which open up to my tenderness and I fall asleep, inside the open arms of heaven. Exile moves away. (78)
Abdou's narration reveals broken dreams and a profound nostalgia for Mali. He is nostalgic for the strong patriarchal system in which he lived and which assured him unlimited authority over women. Reflecting on his journey from Mali to France, he realizes that he has moved from the center to the margins. In France, he is "transparent" (81) and invisible. He is insignificant, as he himself acknowledges:
Qui suis-je? Un immigré. Une bouche encombrante. Un courant d'air qui passe. Je n'ai plus de repère. Je claudique dans mon infirmité avec l'insolence d'un corps défait. (162)
Who am I? An immigrant. A burdensome mouth. An airstream passing through. I have no landmark anymore. I limp in my infirmity with the shamelessness of a ravaged body. (111)
Also, he cannot adjust to the changes in gender relations and roles that relocation has caused:
Oh l'ami, la catastrophe a sonné à ma porte. Les femmes se sont vidées, à mon insu. Elles ont ôté leurs pagnes et revêtu leurs corps de mousseline. Elles ont ôté les poils sous les aisselles et rasé l'angle du pubis. Plus rien n'est nommé. Je ne reconnais plus la géographie du pays dessiné dans MA MAISON. [. . .] Et elles prennent l'initiative. Elle me font l'amour et j'ai honte. [. . .] Depuis quand, l'ami, dans quel pays gouvernent les femmes? [. . .] La nostalgie m'épuise et m'effiloche. [. . .] Moi, je me perds. (133)
Oh my friend, disaster has rung my doorbell. The women have gutted themselves behind my back. They've taken off their pagnes and dressed themselves anew in muslin. Nothing is called by its name anymore. I no longer recognize the geography of the land drawn in MY OWN HOUSE. [. . .] And they take the initiative. They make love to me and I'm ashamed. Since when friend, and in what country do women govern? [. . .] Nostalgia exhausts me and tears me apart. [. . .] Me, I am lost. (91)
Writing about the painful condition of the exiled writer who finds himself insignificant in his new society, Joseph Brodsky notes that:
[H]e finds himself unable to play any meaningful role in his new society. The democracy into which he has arrived provides him with physical safety but renders him socially insignificant. And the lack of significance is what no writer, exile or not, can take. (16)
Although Abdou Traoré is not a writer, he fits Brodsky's description of the condition of the exiled writer. Confronted with his social insignificance in France, Abdou suffers a psychological breakdown. In Le petit prince de Belleville, he frequently mentions feelings of loss and mental breakdown: "Je suis perdu [. . .]. Je suis envahi, l'ami, je me perds" (197-98)/"I am lost [. . .]. I have been invaded, friend, I am losing myself" (137-38) and "Je crois que je deviens fou" (207)/"I believe I'm going mad" (144), and finally "Je suis devenu fou" (236)/"I've gone mad" (160). This lack of social significance is worsened by the change in gender roles that exile causes:
Mon destin bascule. Je ne te dis rien du reste. Les jours qui égrénent leur monotonies. Tristes. Plats. Sans surprise. Je métonne toujours d'être si peu. Même pas un sexe depuis que les femmes pèsent sur mes épaules et chient sur ma tête. Je m'enfonce un peu plus chaque jour dans l'ombre à la recherche d'une flamme. D'un lambeau de compréhension. (150)
My destiny is toppling. I'm not telling you anything else. Days that mark their dreariness. Sad. Flat. Without surprise. I'm always astonished at how small I am. Not even any sex since the women weigh down upon my shoulders and shit on my head. Every day I dig a little more deeply into the shadow in search of a flame. Of a scrap of understanding. (102)
Abdou even feels insecure about his masculinity, as he asks with anguish: "Je suis un champ viril, n'est-ce pas, l'ami? Il n'y a pas de doute sur l'apparence des choses, c'est-à-dire sur mon sexe, hein, dis, l'ami?" (133)/"I am a fertile field, am I not, friend? There's no doubt about the appearance of things, that is to say, my sexual organs, is there now, friend?" (91). As Mam decides to get an education and becomes more vocal, Abdou feels emasculated. A progressive reversal of gender roles occurs. Having lost his job, Abdou is confined to the domestic sphere and inherits the role of housekeeper, whereas Mam is getting an education. Trapped in the domestic sphere, Abdou becomes feminized and suffers from boulimia:
Il [Abdou] s'est transformé en maîtresse de maison [. . . ]. Il lave la vaiselle, il torche les mômes. Il fait la cuisine [. . .]. Et puis il n'arrête plus de manger. Il se lève, il mange, il cuisine, il mange, il trouve toujours quelque chose à grignoter [. . .]. Il ne fait que s'empiffrer.
He has become a housekeeper [. . .]. He does the dishes and he cleans the kids. He cooks [. . .]. And he cannot refrain from eating. He gets up, eats, cooks, eats, he always finds something to nibble on [. . .].All he does is pig out. (225)
Odile Cazenave writes that the condition of exile reveals the fragility of the African man. The image of the strong man collapses as the man adopts the discourse of the victim, which is traditionally woman's (242).
Whereas Abdou's backward glance to the continent he has left reveals a profound nostalgia, Mam's backward glance is less nostalgic. As a matter of fact, she has nothing to be nostalgic for because her journey is one from margins to margins, from the margins of the African continent to the margins of Europe. When Mam looks back to the continent, she evokes the same depressing images of Africa that Beyala offers in her other novels, especially in her depiction of women. Mam seems to be obsessed with the statement "La femme est née à genoux aux pieds de l'homme" 'Woman was born on her knees at the feet of man' (Maman a un amant 27) with which, she suggests, all Malian women were indoctrinated, and the reality in which they have to live. Women back home have a pitiful lot:
La bas dans mon pays, j'ai baissé les yeux devant mon père, comme ma mère avant moi, comme avant elle ma grand-mère. Les hommes ordonnaient: prends-donne-fais. Les femmes obéïssaient. Ainsi allait la vie, ainsi continuait-elle.
La bas, dans mon pays, les femmes ont les yeux si tristes que toutes les sources du Mali paraissent y venir mourir, hors d'espérance.
In my country, I have lowered my eyes in the presence of my father, just like my mother and my grandmother did. The men would order: take-give-do. The women would obey. That was life. In my country, the eyes of women are so sad that it seems that all the streams of Mali come to die there, bereft of hope. (47)
Mam is quick to generalize the situation of Malian women to the whole African continent. She furthermore suggests that not only is the lot of African women pitiful, it is worse than that of all other women:
Pourtant nous sommes réputées. Femmes africaines réputées parce que révolues, assurées de rester sans équivalentes contemporaines. Femmes noires en grilles. Des grilles aux portes, des grilles aux fenêtres, des grilles dans nos corps, dans nos âmes. Nous nous affairions à des travaux où la colline et le roc surgiraient des mains. Prisonnières, esclaves des croyances. Et qui s'évaderait?
And yet we are famous. We African women are famous because we have the firm assurance of remaining without a match. Black women behind grills. Grills at doors, grills at windows, grills in our bodies, in our souls. We were doing chores that would make the hill and the rock come out of our hands. Prisoners, slaves of beliefs. And who would escape? (48)
Africa in Mam's account is a prison house for African women, whereas France is the promised land. France is home: "Et pourtant, enfant, je pressentais que nulle prison n'existe qui ne soit un temple donnant sur une prairie" 'However, I knew, when I was a child, that all jailhouses open on a garden' (148). This sets France as a felicitous space, and a refuge.
Although Mam seems manifestly better off in France than in Africa, more at home in France than in Africa, there is still a degree of ambivalence towards her new home. She enjoys the many possibilities that France offers her; however, she has to face the racism that does not allow her to call France home. Hence the collapse of France as a tentative home:
L'illusion est tombée. Le rêve s'est effrité. Tous ces grands désirs, ces enthousiasmes, ces petites fiertés, tout est mort, pour toujours, a existé en vain. Me voici soudain femme nue. Abandonnée, stupéfaite, une femme nue qui veut comprendre, une pensée emplie de pierre dans ce cercueil—ma maison. [. . .] Peut-être bien qu'après ma mort, une inconnue se demandera pourquoi je suis venue en France, pourquoi j'ai vécu si absurdement et pourquoi j'ai si ridiculement souffert de ce qui me paraissait au loin le champ de liberté, le chant de l'aimée.
The illusion has collapsed. The dream is shattered. All the big dreams, the enthusiasm, the pride, everything is dead, forever, it was in vain. Here I am. A naked woman, abandoned, A Naked woman in this coffin—my house. [. . .] Maybe after my death, somebody will wonder why I came to France, why I have lived such an absurd life, and why I have, in the most ridiculous manner, suffered because of what seemed from a distance to be a place of freedom, a song of love. (63)
Despite her disillusion following the collapse of the French home, Mam does not want to go back to Africa: "La peur d'être réexpédiée en Afrique dans un bateau, dans une cale, là où crèvent les exilés" 'The fear of being sent back to Africa in a boat, where exile people die' (80). With her home neither here, nor there, Mam is in her own words "un oiseau apatride" 'a homeless bird' (28).
Through Beyala's representation of Africa, it appears that the continent is a collapsing home to her. This representation can be read as a justification of her own exile. As a matter of fact, Beyala states in her interview with Matateyou:
Que va devenir cette terre qui va bientôt mourir? C'est un peuple qui me fait honte car nous sommes les seuls au monde à ne pas pouvoir nous en sortir. [. . .] L'Afrique est folle. [. . . ] On y est tous fous. Quand j'y vais, je deviens un peu folle. [. . .] Je ne pourrai pas vivre en Afrique.
What is the future of this dying continent? It is a people that makes me ashamed because we are the only ones in the world who are not able to free ouselves. [ . . ] Africa is crazy. [. . . ] Everyone is crazy there. Whenever I go to Africa, I myself become a bit crazy. [. . .] I cannot live in Africa. (609-13)
These statements that denigrate Africa as home imply that France, where the author has relocated as home, is the only place to live. The movement of Beyala's protagonists from Africa to France mirrors the movement of Beyala from Africa to France. Commenting on her expatriation, Beyala writes in Lettre d'une Africaine à ses soeurs occidentales:
J'ai quitté ma société pour la votre sans me retourner. J'ai rompu mes chaînes et c'était fantastique comme la mort.
I have left my society for yours without looking back. I have cut my chains and it was fantastic like death. (13)
However, in the face of stricter immigration laws and the growing xenophobia in France, one can only wonder how France can be home to an African woman? As my reading of Maman a un amant and Le petit prince de Belleville have demonstrated, the ambivalence towards France that surfaces in these texts shatters the possibility of France being the new home. That ambivalence is noticeable in Beyala as well. In her earlier interviews she has praised the many possibilities that France offers her as a writer. By her later interviews, Beyala documents her daily battles as an African woman writer in France, the disdain that envelops the black writer in France, and the image of sexuality that is associated with young black women (see Jules-Rosette). It seems that for Beyala also, the French home has collapsed. She thus finds herself homeless, like the immigrants she describes. In fact, Belleville, the immigrant community where the two novels are set, symbolizes the condition of these immigrants. Belleville is a hybrid. It is neither France nor Africa. As with Belleville, Calixthe Beyala's home is neither here nor there.
WORKS CITED
Bachelard, Gaston. La poétique de l'espace. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958.
Beyala, Calixthe. C'est le soleil qui m'a brûlée. Paris: Stock, 1987. Trans. by Marjolijn de Jager as The Sun Hath Looked upon Me. London: Heinemann, 1996.
. Tu t'appelleras Tanga. Paris: Stock, 1988. Trans. by Marjolijn de Jager as Your Name Shall Be Tanga. London: Heinemann, 1996.
. Le petit prince de Belleville. Paris: Albin Michel, 1992. Trans. by Marjolijn de Jager as Loukoum. The Little Prince of Belleville. London: Heinemann, 1995.
. Maman a un amant. Paris: Albin Michel, 1993.
Brière, EloÔse. "Le retour des mères dévorantes." Notre Librairie 117 (1994): 66-71.
Brodsky, Joseph. "The Condition We Call Exile." New York Review of Books 21 Jan. 1998: 16, 18, 20.
Gallimore, Rangira Béatrice. L'univers romanesque de Calixthe Beyala: le renouveau de l'écriture féminine en Afrique Francophone Sub-Saharienne. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1997.
Gurr, Andrew. Writers in Exile: the Identity of Home in Modern Literature. Brighton, Sussex: Atlantic Highlands, 1981.
Jules-Rosette, Benetta. Black Paris: The African Writers' Landscape. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1998.
Matateyou, Emmanuel. "Calixthe Beyala: entre le terroir et l'exil." The French Review 69 (1996): 605-15.
IU Press Journals
Home PageMore about Research in African Literatures
Tables of
ContentsLibrary
RecommendationAdvance
InformationCopyright
Clearance