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BIOGRAPHY
Born in 1961 in Douala, Calixthe Beyala is an ´Eton from Saa, situated about seventy-two kilometers from Yaounde, the capital city of Cameroon. In the early years of her life, Beyala lived with her Cameroonian mother and Central African stepfather in the Republic of Central Africa. She was separated from her mother at age five and was then raised by an elder sister, four years her senior, in one of the ghettos of Douala. Although her childhood was characterized by loneli- ness, with her elder sister as her only close companion, Beyala claims to have been raised in a women’s world, one in which women like her aunt and her grandmother were extraordinarily powerful. These women, unlike many others, never chose prostitution as a means of survival. They were self-determined and hardworking and, according to Beyala, could divorce their husbands whenever they wanted. Beyala was therefore molded by these strong women and learned at an early age to have a firm grip on life.
The influence of her grandmother was particularly important. The young Bey- ala spent many an evening listening to her stories. Her grandmother once told her that in order not to provoke the wrath of evil spirits, tales could not be told during the day and that one had to wait for the first stars to appear in the sky. At sunset, Beyala would stand outside waiting for the first star to appear in the sky and would scream with joy and beckon her namesake to come and see the star. Then the storytelling would begin. The young girl enjoyed these worlds of energetic women and storytelling, and this made life bearable in the shantytowns of Douala. She was fascinated by the stars, and they became part of her world of fantasies and literary expression.
Her grandmother’s stories and her fascination with the stars gave her a chance to dream dreams that most children in the ghetto do not and cannot. Most of these children are not given the care and the education that Beyala was fortunate
enough to get. She attended primary school at the ´Ecole Principale du Camp Mboppi in Douala and obtained her high-school education at the Lyce´e des Rapides a` Bangui and the Lyce´e Polyvalent de Douala. She never really liked school, but had one teacher who would beat the daylights out of her if she stayed away from school. Beyala then took her schoolwork seriously and even- tually won a scholarship. She left for Paris at the age of seventeen, where she wrote her baccalaurat. She then went to Spain, where she lived for six years with her husband and also studied management. She returned to France, where she earned a B.A. in letters. She held a variety of jobs and, among other things, was a florist and a model. She is now divorced, lives with her two children in Paris, and earns her living as a full-time novelist.
Beyala has always been saddened by the fact that children in her native coun- try and continent who grow up as she did are left hungry and illiterate and are either used for manual labor or treated as a commodity. The plight of children has become one of the dominant themes in her writing and living. She has adopted dozens of orphans in Yaounde and Douala and dreams of the day when she will be able to take care of all the dispossessed children of the world. Beyala is also an advocate of women’s rights. She states that the African woman has three types of struggles: her gender, her race, and her social integration. Chil- dren’s and women’s issues are therefore at the heart of her writing.
She has been hailed as the precursor of a new literary movement of writers born after independence. Their post-colonial experiences and writings distin- guish them from their counterparts whose works span the colonial and post- colonial periods. Beyala particularly notes that being born after independence completely modifies and shapes her thinking in ways that are different from those of writers of the Negritude era. The oppressor is no longer white but the black brother who lives next door.
The recognition that she has been getting is important to Beyala the writer and African woman. She openly challenges the saying that goes that African women publish once and then vanish into oblivion. She is one of the rare African women writers who, from the beginning, has not had problems with publishing her novels and actually writes for a living. She maintains that her goal is to publish at least one novel every two years. Beyala writes in French, a language whose ‘‘elasticity’’ she finds comfortable to work with. She uses the French language as a tool that she can dominate, manipulate, and transform with her own culture and traditions. Rewriting languages, cultures, traditions, children’s issues, and women’s issues and putting the individual child or woman (instead of an elusive collective consciousness) at the center of her stories are part of the goals that Beyala has set for herself and her writing. (This biography has been gleaned from a few published interviews: Genevoix, Ce´vae¨r, Ormerod, Volet, Matateyou, and an unpublished interview given by Beyala to Eloı¨se Bri- e`re and Be´atrice Rangira Gallimore.)
MAJOR WORKS AND THEMES
Calixthe Beyala has published five novels: C’est le soleil qui m’a brule (1987), Tu t’appelleras Tanga (1988), Seul le diable le savait (1990), Le petit prince de Belleville (1992), and Maman a un amant (1993). Three of these novels have been translated into English by Marjolin de Jager: Le petit prince de Belleville as Loukoun (1995), C’est le soleil qui m’a brule as The Sun Hath Looked Upon Me (1996), and Tu t’appelleras Tanga as Your Name Shall Be Tanga (1996). The first three novels are set in Africa and the last two in Paris. With a tone that is often harsh and sometimes ironic and humorous, Beyala paints a bleak picture of humankind and the plight of women and children in a male-dominated society. Her novels lay emphases on individuals instead of the ‘‘masses,’’ making universal points out of the consciousness and experiences of these individual characters.
Beyala told Mouelle´ Kombi II in an interview: ‘‘Le lien entre mes diffe´rents romans est constitue´ par les proble`mes essentiels de la femme dans la socite´’’ (The connection between my different novels is constituted essentially by women’s problems in society) (Mouelle´ Kombi II, 12; my translation). The main protagonists in her novels are teenagers or young women in their twenties. Ateba Le´ocadie is nineteen and Tanga is seventeen, while Me´grita is twenty-six. In the last two novels (which actually tell one story), the narrative voice is that of a naı¨ve but pragmatic ten-year-old boy, Loukoum, who through his questions and observations puts into perspective the lives of his and other African im- migrant families eking out a living in Parisian slums.
The effects of poverty, social degradation, and injustices occupy a significant space in Beyala’s texts. Promiscuity, prostitution, and child abuse are dominant themes in the first three novels. They question and problematize the identities, be they constituted or constituting, and subjectivities of women and children in African post-colonial society. These three novels are an indictment of human depravity in African urban slums; of patriarchal society and the appropriation and misuse of power; and of a society that condones child abuse, child slavery, and prostitution, a society that is not only oppressive to women, but one in which women also act as oppressive agents toward other women. The brutal specter of revenge and death that permeates the setting in these novels, especially in C’est le soleil qui m’a brule and Tu t’appelleras Tanga, is balanced by a break for freedom in Seul le diable le savait. C’est le soleil qui m’a brule tells the story of one woman’s struggles toward self-determination in an urban ghetto, QG, a male-dominated world where promiscuity and corruption reign supreme and where women’s entrapment lies in marriage, multiple pregnancies, and pros- titution. In Tu t’appelleras Tanga, this theme is further explored in darker, vi- olent tones, in conjunction with the harsh realities of the exploitation of deprived children.
Abandoned as a child by her mother, who was a prostitute, Ateba, the heroine in C’est le soleil qui m’a brule, is raised by a domineering aunt who treats her niece and the array of lovers in her own life with contempt. Ada seeks to ascertain a position of authority, under the guise of family honor, by subjecting Ateba to the egg ritual. Ironically, Ateba is still a virgin, and it is this virginity that Ada publicly brandishes as if it were a trophy. It is by condoning and reinforcing such cruel practices on women’s bodies that adults like Ada control and stifle the aspirations and womanhood of children like Ateba. The young woman rebels against what she considers to be a society that has no sense of direction or hope for a better future, and her introspective look at her society confronts this status quo. Her acts of defiance are seen in her questioning of women’s sexuality and her strong eroticization of the woman’s body. Humiliated and violated by the egg ritual, she seeks solace in her friendship with a young prostitute, Ire`ne, and through this friendship observes the subjugation of women and their struggles to be free. When her friend dies from an abortion, she com- mits a murder that in the rashness of her adolescent mind is symbolic of the destruction of Man, the agent of Woman’s subjugation: a violent act that both is self-liberatory and challenges the recurring statement in the novel that pro- claims, ‘‘God created woman on her knees, at the feet of men. ’’
This theme spills over into Tanga’s story in Tu t’appelleras Tanga. Raised by a father who orders her not to look people in their faces, Tanga is an illus- tration of a woman who refuses ‘‘to be on her knees at the feet of men. ’’ Physically battered and psychologically damaged by rape and incest at the tender age of twelve by her father, forced to undergo a clitoridectomy and to go into the market of prostitution by her mother, Tanga, like Ateba, is determined not to let the tragedies that have become part of her daily life stifle her efforts toward self-actualization in a post-colonial climate of destitution and violence. Women are prostitutes and children a commodity. Tanga’s story tells of the degradation that children in African slums are forced to live with; it is a direct indictment of a society that has lost its traditional family values. But in the bleakness and harshness of Beyala’s stories is a persistent glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. The women and the children that are at the center of her stories seek out other forms of self-liberation and self-determination. They are not con- demned to rot in their slums or sell their bodies all their lives. What we see consistently is Beyala’s ability to portray tragic conditions that Africans in the post-colonial era have created or have to live with, but she also leaves the post- colonial subject with a potential for change.
For instance, Ateba seeks out Ire`ne’s friendship, never judging her lifestyle, but using this friendship to understand what happened to her own mother and many other women like her. She also has an ability to fantasize, to dream about the stars, and to write letters to other women, acts that in themselves are lib- eratory, acts that most dispossessed children of the ghettos are incapable of. In the same way, Tanga’s friendship with a group of disinherited, street-wise chil- dren brings her closer than most people to their daily lived realities and expe- riences and gives new meaning to her own existence, one that is different from the constant possession and objectification of her body. These children, and especially Mala (the son she adopts who later dies), become her support group. She spiritually survives her death through the woman Anna-Claude with whom she shares her story in prison. Women in Beyala’s stories are an intrinsic com- ponent of a network of support for other women, even though individual women must eventually redefine their own lives.
Me´grita also benefits from such support and diverse friendships, and these help balance the inconsistencies that plague her life in Seul le diable le savait. Raised in a home by her mother and two fathers, the red-haired, mixed-race Me´grita lives a marginal life because she is different. Beyala uses Bertha An- dela’s ‘‘unusual’’ lifestyle and Me´gri’s ‘‘shady’’ origins to spin a yarn about Wuel, a society rife with superstition, tale mongering, and corruption. When a Stranger comes to town and gives them money, the people in the community neglect their work and seek to exorcise the demons within themselves by using the Pygmy’s death as an opportunity to subject Me´gri to a hallucinatory ritual performance and witch hunt. Me´gri’s road to self-discovery is paved by this ordeal and the friendships that she shares with her mother, Laetitia, and other women. They teach her to appreciate the complexities that are part of women’s daily lives. She falls in love with the Stranger and has his baby, but never really marries him, for he is hunted down by the police and killed. Mutual respect and love between Me´gri and the Stranger is a new development in Beyala’s third novel. Whereas Ateba and Tanga shun and condemn motherhood, Me´grita gets pregnant out of love. Her love for the Stranger fuels and legitimizes her escape to freedom on her wedding day from the husband she had been forced to marry. She liberates herself from these oppressive conditions by fleeing, first, to the Stranger’s village and then to Paris.
Paris becomes the setting of the next two novels, Le petit prince de Belleville and Maman a un amant. The focus shifts from the lives of post independence post-colonial subjects in Africa to the discrimination, adjustments, and integra- tion that post-colonial subjects are confronted with when they move out of the former colonies to the countries and metropolitan spaces of the former coloniz- ers. Particularly telling is the position of immigrant women, of women living in a polygamous family life, in a context where the laws and regulations offer them little or no protection.
The ten-year-old Loukoum, Abdou Traore´’s son, tells the story of their Malian family living in a Parisian ghetto in an apartment that Traore´ refers to as a ‘‘coffin.’’ This metaphor succinctly highlights the stifling and devastating real- ities that poverty and clandestine living have on African immigrants, and the effects that the struggle for integration in their new ‘‘home’’ has on their lives as they simultaneously seek to maintain their Africanness. Abdou Traore´, the war veteran, Muslim, polygamist, and revered patriarch, is embittered by the treatment he has received at the hands of the French and the changes that he sees in his wives and children. He continues to fantasize about a fleetingly distant African past and traditions that he can no longer have or maintain under his control. Traore´ remains locked up in his womanizing and in his inability to see women in nondomestic, nonsexual roles. M’ammaryam, his first wife, cannot have children. Soumana, his second wife, has three daughters. Loukoum’s mother, his former mistress, is a prostitute and part-time singer. Under French law, M’ammaryam is the only and official wife. She is, therefore, the only wife and mother of Traore´’s four children. Soumana, on the other hand, is ‘‘offi- cially’’ not married and has no children, legal documents, or status. In other words, Soumana does not exist. Soumana becomes ill but in actuality dies out of frustration, anger, and despair both at a system that erases her very existence and at a husband who validates and buries his own bitterness under the skirts of countless other women. The process of integration into a different culture, therefore, radically redefines the African family institution and sexual politics, reshaping conceptions and inscriptions of masculinity and femininity.
Ironically, only in death is Soumana liberated. She ‘‘exists,’’ becoming an agent for change, for her husband goes to prison on a charge of family-allowance fraud, and only then does M’ammaryam take charge of her own life. These circumstances force her to give new direction to her life by opening a jewelry business that she operates with the help of Loukoum. M’ammaryam and Lou- koum’s personal growths go hand in hand. Loukoum learns how to negotiate racist attitudes and ideologies, while M’am juggles her pursuit of literacy with her jewelry business. Learning to read and write becomes, for both of them, a valuable tool for resistance and self-determination. M’am’s personal growth leads her to give up her white, French lover while negotiating a reentry into the lives of ‘‘her children.’’ The choices she makes seek to complement her new lifestyle and the traditional African values that she strives to maintain. This correlation is also aptly illustrated by Beyala’s integration of colloquial French- African expressions and specific street-wise language into the diction, expres- sions, and attitudes of the immigrants. M’am’s ultimate goal is to enable these children of immigrants to grow up and have better lives than either Abdou, Soumana, or she herself had. The children therefore deserve a better deal. Fol- lowing the publication of Le petit prince de Belleville, Beyala had this to say to Sylvia Genevoix:
Quand on est ne´ dans un bidonville, on ne peut pas accrocher son pass un porte- manteau et dormir en paix. Quand j’e´tais petite, on m’a aide manger, a` aller a` l’e´cole. Je me suis dis tous les jours que j’ai eu beaucoup de chance, et c’est maintenant a` mon tour de me battre pour que les enfants des bidonvilles aient un peu moins faim, pour qu’ils aient des chaussures a` mettre a` leurs pieds et qu’ils soient e´duque´s comme les autres. (18)
(When one is born in a ghetto, one cannot hang one’s past on a coat-rack and sleep in peace. When I was young, I was given help with food, with going to school. I told myself every day that I had a lot of luck, and it is now my turn to fight so that all the children of the ghettos are a little less hungry, so that they can have shoes to wear on their feet and be educated like the others.)
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