Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls: Seeking Subjecthood through Madness in Francophone Women’s Writing of Africa and the Caribbean

Female characters who suffer madness and insanity are strikingly prominent in novels by women writers of Africa and the Caribbean. To find out why there are so many suffocated hearts and tortured souls in this literature, Valerie Orlando here closely reads the work of Aminata Sow Fall, Mariama Ba, Myrian Warner-Vieyra and Simone Schwarz-Bart, among others. In these women’s novels, Orlando finds, madness is the manifestation of a rent identity; this study thus is one that interrogates the nature of that identity. Francophone women novelists of Africa and the Caribbean - though they come from countries whose unique experiences of colonialism, revolution and postcolonial regimes have shaped specific and discrete cultures - express a common search for a meaningful relationship between their experience as women to the history and destiny of their nations. Only when woman is understood not as an ahistorical object but as a subject whose lived body is entwined with political, cultural and economic structures, Orlando argues, will insanity finally give way to clarity of being.