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Emerging Perspectives on Ken Bugul: From Alternative Choices to Oppositional Practices

ADA UZOAMAKA AZODO AND JEANNE-SARAH DE LARQUIER, EDS.
Trenton, NJ: Africa World P, 2009. 371 pp. ISBN 1-59221-673-0.

Twenty-six years ago, Ken Bugul published her seminal work, Le baobab fou. She is now one of the most important figures in African sub-Saharan literature written in French. Aware of her tremendous contribution, Ada Uzoamaka Azodo and Jeanne-Sarah de Larquier compiled thirteen articles that focus on Buguls work: Le baobab fou, Cendres et braises, Riwan ou le chemin de sable, De lautre ct du regard, La folie et la mort, Rue Flix Faure, and La pice dor. Emerging Perspectives on Ken Bugul: From Alternative Choices to Oppositional Practices examines the narrative patterns that made Buguls a trademark of African female writing: alienation, identity crisis, authenticity, mother-daughter relationships, self-discovery, healing, the interconnectedness of postcolonial uneasiness and female subjectivity, the search for better tomorrows. By offering several readings of the same texts, Azodo and Larquiers ambitious project could have turned into a repetitive and monotonous effort. Yet, most of the articles managed to avoid this trap. Anchored in a theoretical framework inspired by Raymond Williamss discourse on alternative and oppositional practices in literature, the methodology of this collection of essays is conducive to original approaches that reflect Buguls literary progression. Emerging Perspectives on Ken Bugul unravels the Buguls transition from writing about the self to writing about issues impacting postcolonial African societies, from mainly (auto)biographic works to more imaginative stories that rely less on her personal experience. The centrality of identity in Buguls Le baobab fou is at the core of four articles. Although few essays fall prey to the topo of a critic that subsumes socio-anthropological concerns to literary analysis, one must acknowledge those that shed a very unique light on Buguls first novel. Cecilia W. Franciss semiotic examination of identity strives to analyze various phases of identity dissolution and reconstruction targeting structural consistencies and socio-cultural factors, which infiltrate Buguls autobiographical act of enunciation (28). By viewing Buguls identity crisis through the lenses of disabilities studies, Julie Nack C Nack Ngue reveals the implications of healing and survival in her (auto)biographic novel. In her implementation of a methodology that derives from psychic health concerns, the critic explain how: for a postcolonial female subject, her somatic and psychic crises are not only contingent upon the material realities of history, but are also subject to myriad socio-cultural constructions (55). The two approaches previously mentioned display new theoretical perspectives that assert the depth of Buguls work while finding a perfect balance between what the literary text articulates and how it articulates it; that is, finding a balance between thematizing and problematizing narrative devices. The nine other essays are devoted to the novels that follow Le baobab fou. They either focus on a specific novel, compare two novels by Bugul, or analyze her work in conjunction to other writers or filmmakers. In establishing a dialogue

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between Bugul, Calixthe Beyala, and Mongo Beti, Jacqueline Couti gives birth to a polysemic reflection on the specificity of literary portrayal of seduction in African literature. Jeanne Garanes study on the cinematic intertext discloses the commonalities between Buguls and Mambetys works in which postcolonial realities are portrayed, challenged, and reversed through the art of storytelling that seeks to achieve the ultimate truth. Rangira Bea Gallimores Dismantling or Reconstructing the Universality Principle in Riwan ou le chemin de sable problematizes the disjunction between the success of literary decentering and the failure of ontological decentering. In a very thorough analysis, Gallimore shows how the centrality of African orality in Buguls novel enables her to free herself from Western literary norms. She also argues that the freedom acquired on a formal level does not translate on an ontological level. In her detailed examination of female characters, she pins down the pitfalls of a novel that reproduces the oppositional categories of a universalist discourse which it undertook to dismantle from the outset (203). In Symbolism, Imitation, and Allegory in La folie et la mort Ada Uzoamaka Azodo offers a very subtle analysis of the symbolism of death and rebirth, woman and Africa, the individual and the community. Against a background that views death through pessimism, she offers a spiritual reading of Buguls novels through which loss and mourning operate as a preamble to rebirth, dream and hope by placing Africa in front of her responsibilities. Emerging Perspectives on Ken Bugul: From Alternative Choices to Oppositional Practices also contains an interview from the writer, which provides the reader with a wide range of literary, biographic, and analytical details that help delineate the issues at stake in Buguls work. Azodo and Larquiers cutting-edge collection of articles is a tremendous contribution that underscores the relevancy of studying African women writers who are constantly negotiating boundaries between the private and the public sphere, the individual and the community. The contributors have examined how Ken Buguls commitment to literary explorations of gender, identity and social political issues reveals her unending quest for hope, happiness and freedom.

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The Spirit and the Word: A Theory of Spirituality in Africana Literary Criticism
Trenton, NJ: Africa World P, 2008. xvii + 243pp. ISBN 1-59221-567-X paper.

GEORGENE BESS MONTGOMERY

In this project of privileging African-oriented critical paradigm, Georgene Bess Montgomery takes recourse in bricolage, reverting to Ifa divination, a spiritual ritual rooted in African cosmology mainly of the West African people. Instructive