Femme béyalaène, une libération impossible ? : Autour de quelques controverses sur la trajectoire de la femme chez Calixthe Beyala

Résumé

Calixthe Beyala stands as one of the most prominent francophone African writers. She is very critical
towards social values but is better known through her aesthetics whose main characteristic is the systematic
rejection of some Values of the African society and the Christian civilization such as the notion of family, the
status of the male in the family etc. She gives important roles to the margins in her novels: women, prostitutes,
lesbians etc. Her outcast language goes against social taboos and propriety. She overly talks about sex in a non
“conventional” language. Her determination to emancipate the woman in her novels through the
reappropriation of her body leads nevertheless to a paradox: the perverse use of the said body. In her novels, the woman, once freed, gets herself involved in other degrading situations: prostitutions, lesbianism, sexual
delinquency etc. From the way women behave in her novels, it is as if they free themselves to better compromise
themselves. They are as if doomed since their struggle for freedom leads them to other situations of enslavement hence the boomerang effect that we are analyzing in their path here