ABSTRACT
Calixthe Beyala’s Tanga opens with two women in a prison cell, a seventeen-yearold African woman, Tanga, and a French-Jewish woman, Anna-Claude. Tanga is about to die and Anna-Claude cajoles her to tell her story. In the quotation above, Tanga responds affirmatively to Anna-Claude’s request, agreeing to narrate her story on the condition that Anna-Claude feels and “becomes” herself, a black seventeen-year-old woman called Tanga. One is struck by two features of this situation: firstly, a story is being handed down; secondly, this story is being handed down from one woman to another, a black woman to a white woman.3
Black women/feminist critics have in the past decade sought to posit the problematic of womanhood as seen through their own “I”/“Eyes” by positioning themselves and the works that are the object of their critique at the center of their discursive practices.4 By so doing, they have brought the lives of black women to the forefront either by rejecting the position of “Other” ascribed to them by dominant discourses or by claiming their “Otherness” as a weapon of resistance against those hegemonic discourses.5 Trinh Minh-ha aptly states that within the context of such ideologies of dominance, “a concept of the Other is almost unavoidably either opposed to the self or submitted to the self’s dominance. It is always condemned to remain its shadow while attempting at being its equal.”6
These women have sought to lay bridges across such dualistic dichotomies as male/female, woman/nature, subject/object, self/other given that the very nature of their own lives does not obtain at the level of these dichotomies as they simultaneously experience self and other within multiple contradictory locations and by so doing construct for themselves multiple identities/ subjectivities. The story that Tanga tells Anna-Claude can be read in different ways. It is an indictment of human depravity in African urban slums, of patriarchal society as a whole; one that condones child abuse/slavery/prostitution; a society in which
