Negotiating growth in turbulentscapes: Violence, secrecy and growth in Goretti Kyomuhendo's Secrets No More
DOI :
https://doi.org/10.4314/tvl.v52i2.9Mots-clés :
African child-figure, Bildungsroman, dementia, Goretti Kyomuhendo, identityRésumé
The traditional Western variant of the Bildungsroman explores the dialectic of growth and change in the developmental process of the protagonist and how he is socialized into the society. However, most of the criticism on the form hardly explores the growth process of a child who suffers partial dementia as a result of human evil and sadism. This essay therefore, examines how a partially demented child-protagonist negotiates her identity in the absence of her parents and the comfort zone of a nuclear family in Goretti Kyomuhendo's Secrets No More. The protagonist negotiates the growth process around the turbulent national space, a trans-ethnic community of orphans and provincial subjects and the heavily patriarchal familial base where she struggles for self-assertion through a kind of voicing which is not associated with speech. In order to understand the developmental or growth process of the child-protagonist, I organize my argument around the possible violence of varied kinds performed on the body of the girl-child and the family and how she constructs identity from the limited choices she is offered in a turbulent African space where parental agency and guidance are unavailable for the child to emulate models in order to construct her own identity. Applying some of the theoretical positions of some Bildungsroman scholars, I will demonstrate through close reading, how Secrets No More aptly articulates some of the fundamental features of the narrative of growth.
Téléchargements
Références
Abel Elizabeth, Marianne Hirsch & Elizabeth Langland, eds. “Introduction”. The Voyage in Fictions of Female Development. Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1983.
Adesokan, Akin. “New Writing and the Question of Audience.” Research in African Literatures 43.3(2012): 1–20.
Al-Mousa, Nadal M. “The Arabic Bildungsroman: A Generic Appraisal.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 25.2 (1993): 223–40.
Amoko, Apollo. “Autobiography and Bildungsroman in African literature”. The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel Ed. Abiola Irele, Cambridge: CUP, 2009: 195–208.
Applegate, Elizabeth. “Reimagining the Swallow and the Toad: Narrating Identity and Reconciliation in Postgenocide Rwanda”. Research in African Literatures 43.1 (2012): 70–88.
Armstrong, H. Andrew. “Reporting from the Edge of Reality: Writing as Phantom Limb in Goretti Kyomuhendo’s Fiction”. Journal of International Women’s Studies 10.4 (2009): 259–75.
Avendaño, Nadia. “The Chicana Subaltern and the Ethnic Female Bildungsroman in Patricia Santana’s Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility”. Letras Hispanas 9.1 (2013): 66–75.
Bigger, Stephen. Thresholds, Liminality and Fruitful Chaos: Revolutionary Change in Education? 2010. 2014. <http://www.educationstudies.org.uk/journal/>.
Boes, Tobias. “Modernist Studies and the Bildungsroman: A Historical Survey of Critical Trends”. Literature Compass 3.2 (2006): 230–43. 17 Jan 2006. 3 Mar 2009. <http://www3.interscience.wiley.com.webproxy.student.hig.se:2048/cgibin/ fulltext/118578083/PDFSTART>.
Brownmiller, Susan. Against our Will: Men, Women and Rape. New York: Fawcett, Columbine, 1975.
Buckley, Jerome Hamilton. Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1974.
Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.
Caton, Louis F. “Romantic Struggles: The Bildungsroman and Mother-Daughter Bonding in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John”. MELUS 21.3 (1996): 125–42.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Rethinking Working Class History: Bengal 1890–1940. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1989.
Chatterjee, Partha. “Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonialized Women: The Contest in India”. American Ethnologist 16.4 (1989): 622–33.
Dauge-Roth, Alexandre. Writing and Filming the Genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda: Dismembering and Remembering Traumatic History. Lanham/Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2010.
Doub, Yolanda. Journeys of Formation: The Spanish American Bildungsroman. New York: Peter Lang, 2010.
Eke, Maureen, Marie Kruger & Mildred Mortimer. “Memory/History, Violence, and Reconciliation: Introduction”. Research in African Literatures 43.1 (2012): 65–69.
Eko, Ebele. “Nigeria Literature of the 21st Century: New Challenges”. Journal of the Annual International Conference on African Literature and English Language 2006: 43–54.
Emenyonu, Ernest. “The African Novel in the 21st Century: Sustain the Gains of 20th Century” (Editorial Article). African Literature Today 27 (2010): x–xii.
Felski, Rita. “The Novel of Self-Discover: A Necessary Fiction?” Southern Review 19 (1986): 13–48.
Feng, Pin-Chia. The Female Bildungsroman by Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston: A Postmodern Reading. New York: Peter Lang, 1998.
Fictions of Female Development. Hanover: UP of New England, 1983. 3–19.
Fraiman, Susan. Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.
Hitchcott, Nicki. “Between Remembering and Forgetting: (In) Visible Rwanda in Gilbert Gatore’s Le Passé devant soi”. Research in African Literatures 44. 2 (2013): 76–90.
Hitchcott, Nicki. “Writing on Bones: Commemorating Genocide in Boubacar Boris Diop’s Murambi”. Research in African Literatures 40.3 (2009): 48–61.
Honwana, Alcinda & Filip De Boeck. Makers and Breakers: Children and Youth in Postcolonial Africa. Trenton NJ: Africa World Press, 2005.
Hron, Madelaine. “Ora na-azu nwa: The Figure of the Child in Third-Generation Nigerian Novels”. Research in African Literatures 39.2 (2008): 27–48.
Kiyimba, Abasi. “Male Identity and Female Space in the Fiction of Ugandan Women Writers”. Journal of International Women’s Studies 9.3 (2008): 193–222. <http://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol9/iss3/11>.
Kuperman, A. J. The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention: Genocide in Rwanda. Washington D. C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2001.
Kyomuhendo, Goretti. Secrets No More. 1999. Kampala: Femrite, 2001.
Nabutanyi, Fred Edgar. “Affect in Representations of Children’s Experiences of Mass Violence”. Tradition and Change in Contemporary West and East African Fiction. Matatu 45 (2014): 101–17.
Nnolim, Charles E. “African Literature in the 21st Century: Challenges for Writers and Critics.” African Literature Today 25 (2006): 1–9.
Nwakanma, Obi. “Metonymic Eruptions: Igbo Novelists, the Narrative of the Nation, and New Developments in the Contemporary Nigerian Novel”. Research in African Literatures 39.2 (2008): 1–14.
Ojaide, Tanure. Contemporary African Literature: New Approaches. Durham: Carolina, 2012.
Okuyade, Ogaga. “Continuity and Renewal in the Endless Tales of a Continent: New Voices in the African Novel”. Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 44.1 (2013): 1–24.
Okuyade, Ogaga. “Washing the Childhood from Their Eyes: Recent African Narratives and the Politics of Growth”. Journal of the Annual International Conference on African Literature and English Language 6: 110–25.
Reynolds, Pamela. “Forming Identities: Conception of Pain and Children‘s Expression of it in Southern Africa”. Makers and Breakers: Children and Youth in Postcolonial Africa. Eds. Alcinda Honwana & Filip De Boeck. Trenton NJ: Africa World Press, 2005. 81–101.
Shaw, Carolyn Martin. “Turning Her Back on the Moon: Virginity, Sexuality, and Mothering in the Works of Yvonne Vera”. Africa Today 51.2 (2004): 35–52.
Sullivan, Joana. “Redefining the Novel in Africa”. Research in African Literatures 37.4 (2006): 177–88.
Wagner, Linda W. “Plath’s The Bell Jar as Female Bildungsroman”. Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12 (1986): 56–68 <http://www.sylviaplath.de/plath/wagner2.html>.
Téléchargements
Publiée
Numéro
Rubrique
Licence
(c) Copyright Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 2015
Ce travail est disponible sous licence Creative Commons Attribution - Partage dans les Mêmes Conditions 4.0 International.
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6465-6584
.png){kind=spacer}