Tag Archives: Gabon

Book of the month: Angèle Rawiri

November 26, 2024 By in Africa, Book of the month Tags: , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

This was a recommendation from Suroor Alikhan, who kindly invited me to be part of the Hyderabad Literature Festival Online series earlier this year and wrote about our event on her blog. Suroor is an extremely widely read person, so I knew when she suggested Gabonese author Angèle Rawiri’s The Fury and Cries of Women, translated into English by Sara Hanaburgh, that it would be worth a look. As the translation came out in 2014, the book fell comfortably before the 2021 cut off I’ve set myself for my year of reading nothing new. I wasted no time in ordering it.

The novel follows Emilienne, a wealthy businesswoman in what we are told is a surprisingly progressive marriage according to the norms of her community. She is the major breadwinner and her husband – who, like her, studied in Paris – was present at the birth of their daughter Rékia and plays an active role in childcare. But all is not well, and when Rékia dies suddenly and violently, the tragedy exposes cracks in the family that threaten Emilienne’s very existence, plunging her into an identity crisis, and forcing her to confront the prejudices, inequalities and values underpinning her life.

It took me a while to understand quite how pioneering a book this is. Because the translation came out in 2014 and because the subject matter feels contemporary (involving a lot of reflection on secondary infertility and female sexuality, including a same-sex love affair), I had assumed the novel was relatively recent. It was only when the subject of AIDS came up some way into the narrative that I discovered it was first published in 1989.

Not only that, but Angèle Rawiri is widely credited with being Gabon’s first novelist, leading with Elonga, published in 1986. I’ve featured a number of trailblazing female writers lauded as their nations’ first published women on this blog over the years (among them Kunzang Choden and Paulina Chiziane), but it is rare to see a female writer named as a nation’s first published author.

Rawiri certainly seems to feel a duty to tackle national problems in her writing. Women’s rights take centre stage but many other political and social issues pass through her narrative too, among them corruption, the way workers become jaded in a capitalist system, and the legacy of colonialism. I was particularly struck by a passage in which Emilienne’s husband Joseph extolls the merits of a single-party system:

let’s have the courage to recognize that we are a selfish tribal people. Take a look at what is happening in the ministries and state-owned companies! First they hire a member of the family, regardless of their abilities, and, if they have none, they look among those around them from their own ethnic group. No, believe me, in order to have a real multiparty system, Africans are going to have to manage to place national interests above their own. In the meantime, the single-party system seems to be what we need. Let me explain: when a country is under the aegis of a single party, its nationals, whatever group they’re from, are forced to meet, discuss, and exchange their opinions about issues that concern them all. They don’t have the time to dwell on tribal issues. Collective motivations almost always win against frictions between individuals. Obviously, with such a political alliance, men learn how to tolerate one another, to love one another, and above all to work toward the same ideals. Isn’t that the goal sought by our leaders!

I don’t agree with Joseph (and I suspect Rawiri doesn’t either), but I’ve never seen the arguments for such a system put so persuasively before.

The passages that deal with female agency and reproductive rights are particularly arresting, and sometimes shocking. For all her professional status and qualifications, Emilienne finds herself at the mercy of a value system that judges women’s worth by their ability to bear children. When she struggles to conceive a second child, her social stock plummets and she is judged to be in need of a ‘cure’. (Indeed, at one stage we are told that a woman choosing not to have children would have to be ‘sick’ in the head.)

As with her presentation of the arguments for a single-party system, Rawiri makes the characters who express these views alarmingly persuasive. (Indeed, were it not for the dedication of the novel to a friend who struggled to conceive, it would sometimes be tempting to think the author’s sympathies lie with them.) In this, the work recalls the brilliant One Part Woman, reviewed on this blog last year.

The novel presents numerous challenges for a twenty-first century reader steeped in the Anglo-American literary tradition. Pacing, a perennial sticking point when stories cross borders, works differently: some apparently major issues are presented or resolved abruptly, while the narrative lingers on events that may seem relatively inconsequential to Western eyes. Some of the dialogue feels rather direct or on-the-nose, and the handling of sexual encounters works according to different norms and assumptions. I also found the choice (whether Rawiri’s or translator Hanaburgh’s) to withhold specific cultural terms a little distancing – referring to another community as ‘that ethnic group’ rather than by name or telling us that characters are speaking the ‘local language’ rather than giving us the word for it.

But this is distance worth travelling in order to experience this trailblazing literary work. Rawiri was not only dealing with challenging subject matter but also carving out a path for a new tradition, depicting places and people who had never been seen in novels before. When novelists like me sit down to write, we follow well-trodden paths, lined with countless examples of how the world around us might be depicted on the page. But although Rawiri may have had some exemplars in the work of Francophone African feminist writers like Mariama Bâ, no-one in her nation had put her surroundings into a published print story before. The scale of her ambition and achievement is extraordinary.

The Fury and Cries of Women (Fureurs et cris de femme) by Angèle Rawiri, translated from the French by Sara Hanaburgh (University of Virginia Press, 2014)

Gabon: mother courage

May 8, 2012 By in Africa, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Gabon. It’s not a country that we in the UK hear much about. In fact, a quick search of the BBC website shows that only a handful of stories have mentioned the place in the last 12 months – and most of them were to do with the African football Cup of Nations.

With nothing to go on, it seemed to make sense to return to a trusted source for a steer on what to read. And so I picked out Daniel Mengara’s Mema from Heinemann’s African Writers Series, a collection which introduced me to the excellent Bessie Head a month or so ago.

I was in for a surprise. Told by a son in memory and praise of his ostracized mother, this is one of the most unusual books I’ve read.

The novel records the downfall of Mema (mother) as she runs up against the strict codes and mores of rural Gabonese society. Left to fend for herself in her in-laws’ village after her meek husband dies, the fearless and even fearsome woman, who has a habit of settling disputes with a machete, finds the whispers and suspicions that have dogged her throughout her marriage swell to fever pitch until she is separated from her children and must watch her son go off alone ‘into the new world that the white man was slowly creating for us’ because it is ‘the only way out’.

Mema’s world is a world of storytelling and rhetoric. When problems crop up, they are dealt with through a medzo or village meeting, during which the most persuasive speakers – usually the old women – carry the day. ‘Tales were what made people wise’ in this milieu of ‘psychological games and scare tactics’, the narrator explains, adding that ‘it was up to the youngsters to show cleverness by getting out of the tale the wisdom that they needed’.

The impact of growing up in a world where everyone is expected to be a literary critic and stories are the way of getting things done, is clear from the narrator’s doubts about what he is doing with his own act of telling:

‘Is it because I have travelled across the seas to the white man’s land that I have decided to desecrate my mother’s memories by telling them to strangers who will not even care to read her story to the end? Strangers who may not like what I have to say or may hate me for daring to say it? And how could strangers understand what I have to say? What will they do when the story of my mother proves too much for them and starts to haunt them, eating them from the inside?’

The novel’s portrayal of the power of women is equally intriguing. While making clear that the society he describes is ostensibly patriarchal, the narrator shows how women maintain control behind closed doors. ‘The lion had to be kept roaring for the sake of appearance’, he explains, but ‘when a woman was angry, nothing in the village worked’. The most striking demonstration of this is played out in the description of the rituals surrounding deserting wives in the region. Form dictates that the husband, who has usually been deserted on the grounds of cruelty, must go to apologise and beg his spouse back from his in-laws,. However if a husband is slow to do this the village women will launch a campaign of non-cooperation with their partners to force his hand.

For all the power women wield collectively, though, the radical Mema finds that individuals who don’t conform face a lonely road. Shunned for displaying masculine traits and daring to use mimbiri (witchcraft) to try to heal her dying husband, she is forced out of society and must carve out her own road for herself and her child.

In the wake of her death, only her son’s fierce admiration remains, fuelling this passionate elegy, which cannot fail to resonate with readers. Angry, abrupt, strange and moving, Mema’s tale is as haunting as its narrator describes. I was consumed and challenged by it. In its turn it will give me food for thought for a long time to come.

Mema by Daniel Mengara (Heinemann Educational Publishers, 2003)