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- Title
Veneration and Desecration in Calixthe Beyala's La petite fille du réverbère.
- Authors
Asaah, Augustine H.
- Abstract
The Franco-Cameroonian novelist Calixthe Beyala has, in recent years, made a name for herself as a radical feminist novelist. Her anti-patriarchal and antiestablishment attack takes on an obsessively sacred coloration in her eighth novel, La petite fille du rèverbère, for, while venerating herself, Grandmother, and earth-bound Africa, she systematically desecrates what appears to her as incarnations of the inimical hydra-headed Father: imperialists, negligent genitor, opportunistic fathers, Fathers-of-Nation, sexual taboos, the sky-God, and literary critics who accuse her of plagiarism. Using as a point of departure the notions of the sacred embedded in collective and contemporary consciousness, the essay examines the dual process of sanctification and profanation at work in the novel.
- Subjects
BEYALA, Calixthe; FEMINISM; HUMAN sexuality in literature; WOMEN'S rights; SALVATION; RITUAL purity
- Publication
Research in African Literatures, 2005, Vol 36, Issue 4, p155
- ISSN
0034-5210
- Publication type
Literary Criticism
- DOI
10.1353/ral.2005.0158