Le plaisir charnel au service de la liberté et du pouvoir chez Calixthe Beyala: une lecture de Femme nue femme noire

Abstract

In the last twenty years, african women novelists have affirmed their visibility on the francophone
literary scene, and have accorded an increasingly central place to the body and sexuality. In the work of each of
these novelists, sexuality takes part in an aesthetic project and demonstrates a newly configured vision of the
world. It is in this context that the work of Calixthe Beyala, a Cameroonian woman novelist, is situated. While in
her first three novels she casts sexuality as part of the war between the sexes, with Femme nue femme noire the
Cameroonian author begins a new phase, defining a new erotic project. This article will show how Femme nue
femme noire constitutes a textualisation of sexuality that symbolizes both social disorder and a woman’s will to
free herself of the chains of phallocratic power and of what Beyala calls a testicular dictatorship