Gendered Violence and Human Rights in Black World Literature and Film

Naomi Nkealah, Obioma Nnaemeka, Naomi Nkealah, Obioma Nnaemeka

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000367775
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia africana

This book investigates how the intersection between gendered violence and human rights is depicted and engaged with in Africana literature and films.

The rich and multifarious range of film and literature emanating from Africa and the diaspora provides a fascinating lens through which we can understand the complex consequences of gendered violence on the lives of women, children and minorities. Contributors to this volume examine the many ways in which gendered violence mirrors, expresses, projects and articulates the larger phenomenon of human rights violations in Africa and the African diaspora and how, in turn, the discourse of human rights informs the ways in which we articulate, interrogate, conceptualise and interpret gendered violence in literature and film. The book also shines a light on the linguistic contradictions and ambiguities in the articulation of gendered violence in private spaces and war.

This book will be essential reading for scholars, critics, feminists, teachers and students seeking solid grounding in exploring gendered violence and human rights in theory and practice.

Part I
The language of violence in gendered spaces

1 The public-ation of domestic violence in Calixthe Beyala’s Le Christ selon l’Afrique

Gloria Onyeoziri-Miller

Le Christ selon l’Afrique (Beyala 2014) is a sustained parody of public discourse in a semi-fictional city of Cameroon. Religious, political and cultural views collide openly in the presence of a vociferous, opinionated, though impressionable, crowd of onlookers. In Beyala’s postcolonial city, corruption, demagoguery, authoritarianism, charlatanism and rhetorical persuasion come before the court of public opinion, while at the same time passing through the prism of protagonist-narrator Edeme Boréale’s ironic gaze.

Not only are violence and misogyny deeply embedded in Beyala’s African polity, but they are also being perpetuated and reinforced by the religious discourse of the day. Pan-Africanist movements of various forms, often citing Egyptian origins of African civilisation, present competing visions which Edeme considers without fully embracing.

But imperfectly hidden behind this public forum is Edeme’s personal experience of domestic violence, beginning with paternal abandonment, followed by maternal neglect and inculpation. Her mother inflicts on her constant verbal violence, unjustifiably blaming the daughter for abuse that she herself (the mother) has suffered:

She waited for my birth to transfer her bitterness and frustration onto me. As far back as I can remember, I’d always heard her saying that I was the spitting image of my father, and that I was as mean and deceitful as he was.

15¹

This family situation reaches its climax when a childless relative, M’am Dorota, coerces Edeme into a role of surrogate motherhood. When Edeme refuses to honour the “contract” and insists on keeping her biological child to whom she has given the first name Christ, she is arrested and exposed to a strange and highly public trial.

A central argument of African women’s engagement with feminism has been the assertion that African women have always been ready and able to speak for themselves, to theorise their positions on patriarchy and violence and to act on those positions. In the context of a discussion of third-world women taking action to support battered women, Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi (1997: 10) states that

before feminism became a movement with a global political agenda, African women both ‘theorized’ and practiced what for them was crucial to the development of women, although no terminology was used to describe what these women were actively doing, and are still practicing, on a day-to-day basis.

Specifically addressing the issue of the representation in literature of sexual violence towards women of African origin, Lorna Milne (2007: 211) demonstrates that Gisèle Pineau’s novel Espérance-Macadam “underlines the victim’s power to seize her own destiny and to act, for while there may be little one could do to counter a cyclone or a supernatural curse, a mere human criminal can be apprehended and condemned”. It is my contention that Beyala’s portrayal of sexualised violence in Africa and the diaspora is part of a larger pattern of African and Caribbean women writers who theorise through their fiction both the causes of violence towards women and women’s ability to respond critically to that violence.

Beginning with a reflection on Beyala’s previous representations of domestic and public violence, I argue in this chapter that for Beyala, the growing preeminence of an aggressive public discourse of the sacred in postcolonial African societies is responsible to a large degree for both the concealment and public-ation (bringing into the arena of public debate and judgement) of sexual violence and oppression. Public discourse is used on the one hand to hide sexual violence by normalising and legitimising its practice as traditional, authentic and/or religiously orthodox. On the other hand, public discourse is used to shame women by bringing their struggles for sexual and personal freedom into the open where those efforts may be condemned by a group of judgemental spectators. Beyond this analysis of public and private spaces, however, Beyala projects a potential for resistance that spans the personal will of her protagonist and the multiple voices of African society, never fully silenced by any claim to moral authority.

Both sexual and domestic violence have been recurring central themes of Beyala’s fiction from her earliest to her most recent works. This focus was clearly established in Tu t’Appelleras Tanga (1988), as Nfah-Abbenyi (1997: 85) explains:

Tanga’s story is an indictment of human depravity in African urban slums, of a patriarchal society that condones child abuse, child slavery, and child prostitution – a society that is not only oppressive to women, but one in which women also act as oppressive agents toward other women.

The most egregious example of domestic violence appears in Amours Sauvages (1999) where a white woman is strangled to death by her white lover, Jean-Pierre Pierre. Her body is deposited on the doorstep of his African neighbours to suggest a racist practice in France which attributes to immigrant communities a long-standing tradition of sexual violence. After an improvised “funeral” for the body of Mlle Personne, the narrator Ève-Marie concludes,

Then we scattered, touched by sadness but reassured that Mlle Personne would find herself again among the real French people that smell of fleur-de-lys and lavender, rose and clover, those who benefit without being suspect from welfare payments and enjoy a good reputation.

Beyala (1999: 44)²

Ève-Marie represents the funeral service as a repatriation of a body that symbolises endemic violence to the apparently stable and self-assured community that generates that violence.

In Le Roman de Pauline (2009), the adolescent narrator of African origin growing up in a Paris suburb begins by thinking that having an abusive macho boyfriend is a source of pride. When she soon learns that her own fate depends on her rejection of his authority over her, she tells him, “Now it’s my turn to answer you, Nicolas. Go shit yourself. I’ve no wish to be the heroine of a documentary on convicts’ wives” (Beyala 2009: 159).³ The pervasive atmosphere of sexual and social violence is not only a representation of the misogynist and racially charged culture of the Paris suburbs but also the testing ground for a young woman’s experimentation with self-worth.

One of the most troubling scenes of sexual violence in Beyala’s fiction appears in a church service near the end of Les Arbres en Parlent Encore (2002). A religious elder in an indigenous charismatic church publicly strikes and mortally wounds his wife for testifying publicly to the sexual corruption of the church leadership. This shocking incident is strangely incongruent with the overall thrust of a novel in which the heroine Édène violates all the norms of “traditional” African society by publicly attacking and beating an abusive husband. The stark incongruity of the church scene, which is barely connected with the main plotline of the novel, suggests that Beyala was already concerned about the possible relationship between traditional and colonial patriarchy, with its deeply anchored acceptance of violence against women, and public religious discourse.

We find in Le Christ selon l’Afrique a complex tapestry of public discourse in which Beyala has embedded multiple references to misogynist violence. There are public attacks on women, such as the shaming of sex-trade workers and a probable arson attack on their premises. There are also instances of the groping of women in public, where the victim’s reaction is condemned by onlookers in the name of tradition. With respect to Edeme’s own family, different men have abused her mother with moral, physical and emotional violence, treating her like a slave:

Mom had to her account a marriage – without a divorce, three cohabitations followed by abandonment, a few snacks in between, all of which left her a married single woman. Each of the men had beat her up seriously, and not one of them had ever apologised to her for physical or moral damages.

67⁴

Yet Edeme’s mother systematically blames Edeme for her problems and neglects her in favour of a more sexually attractive sister.

The arrangement forced on Edeme by her aunt, M’am Dorota, for Edeme to bear M’am Dorota’s aged husband’s child reflects a violence imposed within the family through economic power. Edeme’s own mother admits that she would not have neglected Edeme had she known that Edeme’s imposed sacrifice through child-bearing would enrich the family: “To think that I always thought you were worthless, and now you’re my old age security. God forgive me” (75).⁵

The violence Beyala represents in Le Christ selon l’Afrique is not unique to African women, for Edeme works as a housekeeper for a French woman who was raped by her own father:

[…] Sylvie went through a thousand experiences. She experienced the railroad workers’ strike […] fought as a union organiser, and yet none of those occupations made her forget that memorable initiation. She burned her childhood pictures, spat on her father’s tomb the day he was buried, burned her bridges with her mother and hated the members of her family. But nothing could ever erase that bruise on her soul.

56⁶

Sylvie’s experience suggests that the climate of violence towards women, though fuelled by many contradictory ideas about what exactly are the “traditional African values” swirling around a postcolonial African city, is a world problem, perhaps even more horrifying in other cultures less forthcoming about their reality. As Suzanne Gauch (2010: 217) points out in her analysis of transcultural relationships in Le Petit Prince de Belleville, “Beyala highlights the multidirectional, if unequal, circuits of transculturation and actualizes a cultural globalization that destabilizes the colonial binary of oppressor and victim without, however, substituting for it easy new relational categories”.

Although violence towards women is not the only form of violence represented in Le Christ selon l’Afrique, as men are both secretly murdered and publicly lynched, it is a central narrative problem because the story is told from the perspective of a young woman whose life has been characterised by antagonistic sexual encounters between men and women, with women themselves, such as her own mother, acting in self-destructive and patriarchal roles, closely mirroring the experiences of Édène in Les Arbres en Parlent Encore. The contractual sex, supposedly (or ironically) leading to the conception and birth of Christ, and the breaking of that contract by the child’s mother at the cost of public condemnation bring these antagonistic relationships into focus. At the same time, the suggestive nature of the child’s name, as well as the probability that the actual father is a white man met in a chance encounter rather than M’am Dorota’s husband, lead us to suspect that Beyala is seeking to confront a postcolonial society highly preoccupied with the political and social status of the sacred, with the underlying violence of its varying, often contradictory, claims to truth and justice.

Claire Mouflard (2011: 178) states that for Beyala, “no voice is almighty or void of trauma”. Mikhail Bakhtin, in describing Dostoevsky’s novels as polyphonic, provides an apt description of the way that competing voices form the fabric of novels that defy unifying authority:

The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by socio-ideological consciousness around the given object of an utterance; it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue.

Bakhtin (1981: 276)

Le Christ selon l’Afrique is an eminently polyphonic text. Bakhtin defines polyphony as “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses” (Bakhtin 1984: 6). Beyala highlights this polyphonic structure by presenting sequences of speakers, such as Homotype, Prophet Paul, Madame Foning, Bola Achao and Doctaire Modeste, who debate openly, barely stopping to hear the voice of others.

The discourse of the sacred is not content, however, to be only one voice among many striving to be heard through the words of Edeme’s narrative: this discourse, whether its claim to the sacred is valid or not, seeks to dominate, challenge and control every facet of social life, but especially the sexuality and sociability of women. As the novel’s title might suggest, all the voices represented in the novel respond in one way or another to the challenge of the discourse of the sacred.

Despite the association one might tend to expect between the sacred and the religious conventions prevalent in a given society, a brief discussion of the theoretical positions of Mircea Eliade (1959) suggests that the concept of the sacred is difficult to define, generally foreign to conventional thinking, and in fact troubling for established social conventions. In his discussion of Eliade’s thinking, Stanislas Deprez (1999: 90) explains that the sacred “arises with every crisis, with every evolution of human life, as soon as man wants to go beyond his situation towards a state that in his eyes offers greater value”. According to Deprez (1999: 87), Eliade borrows from Rudolf Otto (1923) the idea of the sacred that is “completely other” and “comes from elsewhere”. Even if the members of a given society think that they know what is sacred in the world around them (one thinks of the crowds of followers in Le Christ selon l’Afrique who know all the psalms and choruses they need to punctuate public pronouncements by their leaders), even if they know all the special places and voices in which the divine may manifest itself, once lived experience overflows this knowledge, one is once again confronted with the sacred, something that continuously puts into question reality as it has always been understood. Thus, the historical events that form the backdrop of Le Christ selon l’Afrique, such as colonisation, neo-colonialism and globalisation, do not fit neatly into a meta-narrative of human progress or regression in relation to some earlier state of pure...