Francophone Women Coming of Age: Memoirs of Childhood and Adolescence from France, Africa, Quebec and the Caribbean

129 Pages·2007·4.28 MB·English

by  Debra Popkin

Francophone Women Coming of Age

Francophone Women Coming of Age
Memoirs of Childhood and Adolescence from
France, Africa, Quebec and the Caribbean

Edited by

Debra Popkin

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING
Francophone Women Coming of Age: Memoirs of Childhood and Adolescence from France, Africa,
Quebec and the Caribbean, edited by Debra Popkin

This book first published 2007 by

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2007 by Debra Popkin and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN 1-84718-322-0; ISBN 13: 9781847183224
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstracts....................................................................................................vii

Introduction.................................................................................................1
Debra Popkin

Chapter One.................................................................................................3
“Multiple Identities as Adolescent Coping Mechanism in Annie Ernaux’s
Les Armoires vides and Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia”
Beth Gale

Chapter Two..............................................................................................18
“An Absent Presence: Adolescence and the Inadequate Female Role
Model in Myriam Warner-Vieyra’s Le Quimboiseur l’avait dit…
As the Sorcerer Said… ”
Leah Tolbert Lyons

Chapter Three............................................................................................34
“Growing up with Julia: Gisèle Pineau and her Grandmother,
a Caribbean Girl’s Journey to Self-Discovery”
Debra Popkin

Chapter Four..............................................................................................51
“La terre ne ment pas”: Aminata Sow Fall’s Douceurs du bercail
as Bildungsroman”
Natalie Edwards

Chapter Five..............................................................................................63
“Female Portraits of Childhood and Adolescence in Selected Works
of Gabrielle Roy”
Myrna Delson-Karan

Chapter Six................................................................................................79
“Salvation through Writing in Marie-Claire Blais’ Manuscrits de Pauline
Archange “
S. Pascale Vergereau-Dewey
vi Table of Contents

Chapter Seven............................................................................................97
“Female Adolescence in Quebec’s Post-Quiet Revolution Novels:
Gabrielle Gourdeau’s L'écho du silence, Monique Proulx’s Le sexe des
étoiles, and Marie Laberge’s Annabelle.”
Edith B. Vandervoort

Contributors.............................................................................................114
ABSTRACTS

Chapter One
Most adults can remember some sort of play with the notion of a
malleable identity during adolescence. In her novel Les Armoires vides,
Annie Ernaux takes this notion and constructs a novel around it, showing
how one adolescent girl copes with the different pressures and traumas in
her life by creating two worlds for herself, each of which has its own rules,
language, and characters. It is the only way that she can understand and
process the traumatizing conflict between what she experiences at home
and at school, and the ways she is expected to behave in each place.
This chapter studies the specific ways in which Denise comprehends
and orders her two worlds as a response to stress and various sources of
pressure to conform. The second part of this chapter analyzes a counter
example, Assia Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia, as another text in which
two worlds collide.
Djebar's adolescent narrator uses language as a means of navigation
between her two worlds, which she associates with her father and mother,
different cultures and traditions. Language is problematized in various
ways, particularly the relationship to French, the language of the
colonizers. For both of these adolescents, malleable identity becomes a
soothing coping mechanism that allows them to negotiate conflict and to
embrace different aspects of themselves during the turbulence of
adolescence.
Chapter Two
Guadeloupean writer Myriam Warner-Vieyra paints a chaotic canvas
of teen angst in her first novel Le Quimboiseur l’avait dit…. At first
glance, it would appear that Suzette (Zétou), the novel’s protagonist, is
driven by an obsessive desire to continue her education and that this desire
leads to her downfall. Upon closer examination, however, it becomes
evident that Zétou’s downfall may be attributed to her mother’s
extraordinarily bad parenting. Zétou’s mother, Rosemonde, abandons her
children and her husband and moves to France with her lover, the
Frenchman Roger Milan. The irony, then, is that even through her
viii Abstracts

absence because of abandonment, Rosemonde’s presence serves as
hindrance to Zétou and foils her life plans.
The events described in Warner-Vieyra’s novel create a disturbing
depiction of what happens in a girl’s life when there are no appropriate
female role models to assist in the process of becoming. As an “absent
presence” in Zétou’s life, Rosemonde’s character shows that the mother
figure, whether absent or present, is always serving as a role model,
whether good or bad. Zétou’s failure to receive the formal education that
she seeks is compounded by the improper moral education that she
unwittingly receives from her mother. The purpose of this chapter is to
examine the impact of the absent female role model in Myriam Warner-
Vieyra’s Le Quimboiseur l’avait dit…in an attempt to better understand
the writer’s view of the importance of women as role models in the
process of leading girls to womanhood.
Chapter Three
This chapter focuses on the ties that bind Gisèle Pineau to her proud
and staunchly nationalistic grandmother Julia (Ma Ya) during their time
together in Paris in involuntary exile from their native Guadeloupe. The
grandmother teaches young Gisèle memorable lessons on how to
safeguard and cherish her Caribbean identity, by refusing to surrender to
Parisian customs while clinging to her Creole language, her favorite
recipes, legends and folk tales. Every time the sadistic teacher punishes
young Gisèle by making her stay under the teacher’s desk, Gisèle blocks
out the suffering by dreaming of being transported to her homeland:
Guadeloupe. In her semi-autobiographical memoir L’Exil selon Julia
(1996), Gisèle Pineau examines the roles of the family and education in
forming her character. Racism, social unrest, and the changes in French
society in the 1960s all come to light in this sometimes humorous but
often serious memoir.
This study then analyzes the light, cheerful tale Un Papillon dans la
cité (1992) in which Félicie, the young narrator, experiences the pains of
separation from her beloved grandmother after Félicie is taken to Paris to
live with her birth mother, who abandoned her ten years earlier. Félicie’s
friendship with a North African boy, Mohamed Ben Doussan, a poor
student but a delightful companion, leads to self-discovery and an
appreciation of multi-cultural society in a Paris apartment complex during
the 1980s. In conclusion, this chapter examines Gisèle’s difficult
adjustment to the Caribbean lifestyle after she and her family return to
Guadeloupe and the role of her grandmother in helping her to re-adjust.
Francophone Women Coming of Age ix
Included are references to an interview with Gisèle Pineau conducted by
Debra Popkin in Oct. 2003.
Chapter Four
In ““La terre ne ment pas”: Aminata Sow Fall’s Douceurs du bercail
as Bildungsroman,” Natalie Edwards analyzes the Bildung of a female,
postcolonial subject. The chapter begins with an overview of theories of
traditional, male Bildungsroman and a discussion of more recent
scholarship on specifically female Bildungsroman. Edwards then reads a
text by contemporary Senegalese author Aminata Sow Fall in relation to
these theories. The protagonist of Douceurs du bercail is a Senegalese
woman who travels from her native land to France but, upon her arrival, is
stopped and detained at the unnamed French airport. Edwards examines
the protagonist’s Bildung in each of the three spaces that constitute her
journey: the airport, the cave in which she is detained, and the Senegalese
Embassy in France. Edwards shows how Fall deconstructs these
successive man-made spaces that each denote nations and national
belonging, thus casting doubt upon categories of identity used to theorize
the Bildungsroman genre: “society,” “hero,” “self-knowledge,” “maturity”
and “stage of completeness,” for example. This chapter argues that stories
become the protagonist’s only strategy for survival in this precarious
journey, and that Fall’s text thus constitutes a valorization of behaviors
and alternative communities, rather than of nations or of the much-hyped
“third space” between them. The protagonist’s final Bildung is that
categories of monolithic cultures are unreliable as cultures and subcultures
are constantly changing, international relations affect individuals in any
number of ways, and the cultural mixing that occurs as nations come
together is not necessarily a positive or emancipatory experience.
Chapter Five
Children are central to most of the works of Gabrielle Roy. In her
books, children grow up in a society where their mothers suffer severely
from the misery of the feminine condition and, under the domination of
the Catholic Church, they give birth to large numbers of children while
living in abject poverty, with husbands who are either absent or unable to
provide for their families. Women at that time had little or no
opportunities for personal growth.
In this study, portraits of female children growing up before the Quiet
Revolution in Quebec will be elaborated upon. It will also be shown that