As a Francophone novelist, Linda Lê realizes, better than anyone else, that literary language implies a certain freedom. However, entering this mystical world of language is always an exciting and risky mission for her. In this alchemy of the verb, the author has discreetly invented new forms by making suppression and, as a result, her posture. The removal of punctuation in his novel Les dits d’un idiot may surprise the readers who are familiar with her other grammatically well-structured texts. But this new writing technique is a fundamental experience, revealing another poetic aspect in Lê’s writing. This writing game leads us, at first, to question what the function of dismissing punctuation system is. The question suggests to return to a quick observation on literary grammar. Secondly, we will present some methods of removing punctuation in Les dits d’un idiot, particularly the process of organizing chapters and the rising tide of the words of the character, an ‘idiot’ son.
In the context of usually little tolerance policies in North African political culture towards public gatherings, this article demonstrates the importance of understanding why street art has become unpredictable and unpunishable since the social protests of 2011 in Tunisia and Egypt. Studying graffiti has relevance for research and policies on artistic rebellion as this art is part of a little defined area of performance that is not harmful but can nonetheless be labelled as unrest. It has a role of eyes on the street in multifunctional neighbourhoods, when people's presence in the streets contemplating murals or demonstrating nearby could contribute to attract more people, but distinct from people who hang around in urban spaces as social disorder. In the region's public space some official or government supported demonstrations can be performed, while everything that departs from the mainstream is removed or excluded. This article establishes that straying perspectives on public manifestations, graffiti included, lead to confusion about appropriate political responses. In fact, it addresses the question that if offensiveness is subjective, how can authorities discern what is acceptable and what is not. And to whom should authorities listen: to the majority, to those with most political or economic influence, or to more marginal artistic groups who enact their 'right to the city'.
This article examines the issues of literary impudence and homosexuality so much repudiated by African feminist theorists in Calixthe Beyala’s erotic novel, Femme nue, femme noire. It reflects on the pertinence of using African feminist ideologies in the criticism of Beyala’s fictions considering the fact her novelistic themes run contrary to the African feminist postulation where homosexuality, sex work and other transgressive tendencies constitute a strange and imported phenomenon. This article analyses the radicalization of African feminism through a close reading of Calixthe Beyala’s Femme nue, femme noire by highlighting recourse to subversion as a radical tendency in Beyala’s writings, which consists not only subverting the status quo through engaging in taboo-related discourse but also defending the sexual independence of the modern African woman as a form of emancipation. It concludes that the novel exhibits a new African feminism which is neither adapted to the collective feminist ethics nor to the African literary canon but to the individual feminine reality aimed at the total emancipation of the African woman.
Beginning in the late 1960s, the entire population of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, part of a British colony, was deported in order to establish an American military base in this geostrategic location. Ignorant about their fate, most of the traumatized Chagos islanders were dumped in shacks on the island of Mauritius. This article analyses the representation of the Chagossians' plight and eventual fight for justice through the prism of three fictional Francophone texts: Shenaz Patel's Le Silence des Chagos (2005), Caroline Laurent's Rivage de la colere (2021) and Jean-Michel Fillol's Chago, l'orphelin de l'histoire (2014). The focus will be on the development of three prevailing themes, (post) memory, trauma and reclaimed agency, by engaging with an array of approaches to trauma theory, in particular as they pertain to a social and cultural postcolonial context. Therefore, the article aims to uncover how these narratives reflect the nostalgic and critical memories, the revolt and the legal battle against the Mauritian and British authorities by the Chagossians. The most significant function of the texts is to enable the Chagossian exiles and their descendants to process the traumatic event, thus empowering and healing them.
Albert Camus’s ‘The Guest’ ([1957] 2012) is a short narrative that displays several conflicts at the colonial, existential, psychological, and individual levels at once. The narrative introduces these conflicts through its simple plot that fully relies on the relationship between Daru (the schoolmaster), Balducci (the gendarme) and the Arab (the prisoner). Understanding the relationships between these three constitutes the foundation to decoding the thematic value or message of the narrative. Therefore, this article scrutinizes the deeper level of the relationship between these characters and argues that the main conflict in the narrative is between humans of authentic self and those of unauthentic one. The article concludes that ‘The Guest’ is not a simple narrative about postcolonialism or schoolteachers’ ethics, but a heavily sophisticated piece that celebrates humans’ authenticity and freedom as the main foundations or principles of peaceful life.
