ABSTRACT
In Féminisme ou la mort (1974), Françoise d’Eaubonne was one of the first thinkers to coin the concept of ecofeminism. Author and civil rights activists, d’Eaubonne described in this work the crucial relation between feminism and ecology, and their intertwined domination under patriarchy. She considers how the fertility of both the soil and women has effectively been put to work to serve patriarchal capitalism. This work importantly grounded ecofeminism within French studies. However, d’Eaubonne’s work is limited in its lack of intersectionality as well as its essentialist conceptions of womanhood and nature. The essentialist imagery of the “terre mère” trope that emerges in her work can be found in other French works, both from works of the Global North and from the Global South. This chapter follows the decolonization of this trope in an analysis of four Francophone postcolonial ecofeminist texts that, I argue, permit us to identify ecosystemic relationality at the core of “terre mère” discourses: Chantal Spitz’s L’île des rêves écrasés (1991, Pōrīnetia Farāni), Maryse Condé’s Le cœur à rire et à pleurer (1999, Gwadloup), Sandrine Bessora’s Petroleum (2004, Gabon) and Déwé Gorodé and Imasango’s Se donner le pays. Paroles jumelles (2016, Kanaky/Nouvelle Calédonie).
