#french literature
Hélène Cixous, from The Selected Plays of Hélène Cixous; “Portrait of Dora”
Text ID: She resembles hidden, / vindictive, dangerous loves.
Hélène Cixous, from The Selected Plays of Hélène Cixous; “Black Sail, White Sail”
Text ID: A hundred times already I have lain in my tomb, / Perhaps I am still there now…
Hélène Cixous, from The Selected Plays of Hélène Cixous; “The Perjured City”
Text ID: Through blood our love and hate flow wild.
Hélène Cixous, from The Selected Plays of Hélène Cixous; “The Perjured City”
Text ID: We are all equal before death,
Hélène Cixous, from The Selected Plays of Hélène Cixous; “Black Sail, White Sail”
Text ID: I am what I am, may you find someone better.
Simone Weil, from The Notebooks of Simone Weil
Text ID: May the whole universe become for me a second body in both senses. / The only one attains to this by a methodical transformation of oneself.
In any case, they wouldn’t’ be able to appease the brutal awakening in her body. It was more of a psycho-sentimental awakening that shocked her. Masturbation was not her thing. She always felt the need for physical content. And as Dominique’s body was similar to her own, it allowed her not only to rediscover herself, but also to provide her with a certain balance. This forbidden relationship was like a drug, and she knew that its sudden withdrawal would make her completely crazy.
Emilienne, the in many ways privileged protagonist of Angèle Rawiri’s The Fury and Cries of Women, has gained repute involved supporting women’s causes and a successful career eclipsing that of her husband, Joseph. But suffering and feeling a failure in her social and personal life, especially when it comes to marriage and the maternal, her future and life becomes hazy, as she both compromises on and defies the roles society, family, and herself set for her.
Today with one able to peruse the works of several Gabonese writers, this older novel, translated by Sara Hanaburgh, I chose in part for its main character. Emilienne is a defiant woman who at one point finds solace in the arms of another woman. Indeed, even the word lesbian is on the page. Though this use is not in a positive scene, negative shifts further mirrored earlier in the writing around the relationship. While Rawiri‘s last novel of three, notable for more greatly broaching several subjects, including the taboo, it is nonetheless not one where breadth or sensitivity is always reflected. A more detailed evaluation involves a long tangle of quotes and spoilers you can find here.
For a novel classed and immersed in its protagonist’s convictions around women’s issues, the varieties therein of feminism and individual meaning of such in action and conflict, the writing neglects to fully defy certain (personal?) beliefs. Is it at the same time too much for 1989 yet radical perhaps? Comparing some other contemporary works with intimate relationships between women by other African writers (though an author might disagree with the perspectives of academics, readers, ect about their works or, or hold real life prejudices not clearly reflected in their work) the answer is it’s complicated— especially when works and concepts cross the globe. Today over three decades later, the matter is still a longstanding taboo causing stigmatisation. Though in 2020 Gabon did pass legislation to decriminalise homosexuality revising its laws, made formally illegal just a year previous. Unsurprisingly this revision decried by religious leaders. As well religious or spiritual themes appear in Rawiri’s novel. One instance is around another still relevant and big, taboo topic of the 1980s, HIV/AIDS. (FYI if you follow the link found in the previous paragraph the passage is quoted.)
While an example of the multiple way Rawiri also introduces parallels in the dichotomy of African vs Western, tradition vs modern, once more the writing is not evenhanded. Again, one must ponder the same question of time, culture, and literary canon. Too while the ending of the novel, I am not going to describe, can be interpreted as good for its protagonist, it is not necessarily well-written or without a dual edge.
However, what cannot be argued is Rawiri made her mark in history during a short writing career as her country’s first woman novelist in the 1980s, an influence inspiring more authors. Also, to her credit The Fury and Cries of Women, despite weaknesses, is writing that can still hold interest and is worth sitting with.
The Fury and Cries of Women by Angèle Rawiri is available in English, translated by Sara Hanaburgh, in print and digital from University of Virginia Press
It was then, from beneath the ancient iron trellis sagging to the left under the wisteria, that my mother would make her appearance, small and plump in those days when age had not yet wasted her. She would scan the thick green clumps and, raising her head, fling her call into the air: ‘Children! Where are the children?’
Where indeed? Nowhere. My mother’s cry would ring through the garden, striking the great wall of the barn and returning to her as a faint exhausted echo. 'Where…? Children…?’
Nowhere. My mother would throw back her head and gaze heavenwards, as though waiting for a flock of winged children to alight from the skies. After a moment she would repeat her call; then, grown tired of questioning the heavens, she could crack a dry poppy-head with her finger-nail, rub the greenfly from a rose shoot, fill her pockets with unripe walnuts, and return to the house shaking her head over the vanished children.
And all the while, from among the leaves of the walnut tree above her, gleamed the pale, pointed face of a child who lay stretched like a tom-cat along a big branch and never uttered a word.
My Mother’s House (Le Maison de Claudine), Colette
(1922)
trans. Una Vincenzo Troubridge and Enid Macleod (1953)
