Mythology and fairytales are a wide field of representation. When it comes to the images of femininity and maternity, we cannot help making links with the ideas that come from our cultural heritage. African oral literature was more and more conceptualized and recorded in the last years by authors from many African countries. It brings an overview of our common unconscious, giving shape to traditional aspects of our lives. It also explains the symbolism of some traditions.
The messages appearing in those tales are a description of our history, impulses and anxious movements, which have shaped the boundaries our superego.
The images of women in mythology and tales have different dimensions, and represent aspects of the common unconscious that cannot be ignored. Those representations go through time and frontiers, drawing the architecture of the society.
The evolution of social roles, and status, brings two new questions: where does this fear of women empowerment come from? And what do women want?
Working with women in Africa, as an African clinical psychologist and a researcher, has brought me to question the female gender in all its complexity. The problematics of women in contemporary African societies may be different from those recalled by history. However, the determinism of their condition is still raising doubts on the structure of the society and the expectations it has from women. As a therapist, the transference and countertransference mechanisms were rich of projections that enhanced my ambition to analyze the question of the difference between femininity and maternity.
My previous research was conducted in SĂ©nĂ©gal and was focused on women who had undergone hysterectomy and mastectomy. The references to the female body and the symbolism of some of its specific parts have reinforced my belief that the images of femininity and maternity are related to a dissociation operated by cultures through the construction of social representations. The latter are themselves reinforced by mothering techniques, and rites of passages. Women are prepared for their roles from birth through their childhood, until marriage, to ensure their adequacy to the needs of the society. Moreover, the participants pointed out that the guilt and castration anxiety they had experienced, were linked to their representations of their mother, and of themselves as women. This led me to make a connection with the Kleinian conception of an archaic maternal superego, and thus to the motherâdaughter relationship.
The relationship between women is another dimension of these questions, why do they perpetuate the gender domination over the younger generation. What does this ambivalence represent, and what is its source? The analysis of African mythology and tales brings interesting images of women at the center of a system of representations. This leads us to the traces of ancient matriarchy, the idea of a female tyrannic entity at the beginning of creation, whose rule was overpowered by men to bring a kind of balance that advantages them.
Many psychoanalysts and anthropologists have tried to establish the link between ancient matriarchy and womenâs status. This book aims to understand the meaning of tales, and finds through mythological archetypes, the images of femininity and maternity.
In African mythology, iconic figures like Mami Wata, Njeddo Dewal, Caraweelo and Bouti, among others, clearly represent reminiscence of matriarchy in the common unconscious. They take different forms and images, but still represent a powerful entity that had a certain power over humanity. For all of these characters, we have found that they were described as powerful and deadly. Further in this book, we will describe their legends, and how they represented (or still represent for Mami Wata or Bouti), a threat for humanity. Moreover, each of these characters have shown how the control of sexuality is important to ensure domination. Caraweelo emasculated most men around her, and Ndjeddo Dewal used her daughters as baits to attract young suitors, Mami Wata seduces men and makes them lose their sanity. In addition, most of them were defeated by young men putting an end to their reign of terror, by instating a masculine order.
This victory of men over the tyrannic female authority is historically the beginning of the society as we know it. We make connections with the freudian idea of the Father ancestor, surviving through totemism, and religion, at the source of the two primary interdictions. And at the light of the Lacanian concept of the Great Symbolic Other, we can imagine how this freudian concept of the Father could actually have replaced that of the Mother, as the figure of the Other. The tyrannic mother would be the reminiscence of this archaic maternal superego, and the feelings of envy and fear along with the fantasies of incorporation and introjection, would be the trace of this primary relationship between mother and child. The identification with the girl is different because, as Lacan interpreted, the mother is the one who has, until the daughter understands that she signifies her lack, and is the very place of her desire.
For her to emerge from this fusion, she has to find herself in the mirror instead of the image of her mother, or the image her mother wants her to have. Psychoanalysts call ravage, the effect of the devastating power of the mother on her daughter, preventing her to follow her own path and get out of that guilt, imprisoning her in a destructive relationship. The mythical figures of Ndjeddo Dewal and Caraweelo both have fusional and destructive relationships with their daughters, keeping them in positions of submission, and preventing them from escaping or becoming women and mothers. The dissociation between femininity and maternity is another aspect of the ravage, since girls cannot become mothers, and mothers are not willing to sacrifice their position of power, for the sake of their daughters. However the intrusion of men, to defeat the ravaging mother and put the girl back to her position of exchange is supposed to bring harmony. They truly represent the intrusion of a third part in the fusional motherâdaughter relationship, protecting her from aggressive maternal impulses of reintegration.
Further in this book, we will make a comparison with European and Middle Eastern tales, and analyze the position of women in those tales. It seems that the representations of women in Europe are paradoxical, oscillating between that of Eve the seductive woman and Mary the saint mother. This dissociation still appears in this paradox, introducing the guilt of humanity, through the character of Eve who brought shame and death.
In some of the European tales, we observe the three feminine figures of the ravaging mother or sorcerer, the child who attract her jealousy and the good mother. Men are mostly helpers or saviors, but usually witnesses of this destructive motherâdaughter relationship. So we can imagine that this representation of the ravaging mother is universal, and representative of this collective reminiscence of an archaic maternal superego. The analysis and comparison of those tales, with African tales, allows us to observe the differences and similarities of strategies and representations.
The analysis of contemporary African literature is another space of comparison, because feminine characters also are images of contemporary representations of femalesâ impulses and affective movements. We will observe how these character describe psychological conflicts, and are representative of a society that is unbalanced for women. Female and male writers, through their stories, show how this unbalance is structural and transgenerational. The concept of peace is then either the acceptation of domination, or the sacrifice of power for equality. The feminist movement in its entirety aims for equality and is often criticized as opposed to the traditional/religious order of things, putting women in a position of subordination. The identification to powerful feminine figures is usually connected with guilt, because of their tyrannic connotation.
The path through construction of womanhood is henceforth, the acceptation of this guilt and its acceptation to integrate femininity and maternity without cleavage. The African woman has the rites of passage to ensure this construction, and the projection of her aggressive impulses on the world of the invisible or the goddesses of maternity. We will see how, in many cultures, the rites of separation of mother and child, serve the purpose to protect the latter from the fantasy of infanticide, keeping the woman in her position of power, but simultaneously underlining her castration.
The writers of the contemporary African literature have shown different aspects of womenâs status in Africa. We can imagine how their characters reflect their visions and feelings as women or men of African societies. In fact, social realities are depicted in the literature and have evolved simultaneously to the effect of globalization. There is, indeed, an evolution of the conception of individuality, and it has added another dimension to the representation of feminism. Women are now allowed to live for themselves, they are still under the radar of the social judgment but more and more of them fulfill their professional and political ambitions. However, there still is a specific expectation from them, different from what is expected from men, even for writers, because of their gender.
In the first and second section of this book, we will try to introduce the concept of matriarchy in African culture, and analyze it through the work of psychoanalysts. Then we will present the different feminine figures of African tales: the devouring mother, the old woman and the good mother. We will see tales from Europe and Middle East to observe the ways of expression of femininity and maternity, and compare the descriptions of the characters.
In the third section, we will focus on the symbolic aspects of the feminine body, we will see how it is built through massages and rites of passages, along with the symbolic aspects of the breast and the uterus. We will also discuss the representation of the calabash, as specifically symbolic of the female body.
In the fourth and fifth sections, we will discuss the social representations of women in the religious, and civil law. Then we will dive into contemporary African literature, to describe the female characters, and their motherâdaughter relationship.
Finally, in the last section, we will discuss two of our clinical cases, and make an interpretation of the situations we have seen in our clinical practice. We will discuss their motherâdaughter relationship at the light of all our analysis of tales and myths.