Abstract

Voicelessness, alienation, confinement, deracination, rupture, exclusion, madness and exile: the thematic preoccupations of Myriam Warner-Vieyra's Juletane are familiar to readers of francophone Caribbean women's writing. The legacy of slavery and 20th century departmentalization have produced a complex politics of identity, whose points of reference and sites of longing—though privileged in a variety of ways in the psyches of Caribbean subjects—are Africa and France. The orphaned protagonist Juletane seeks love in Africa in the heady days before Independence. Warner-Vieyra uses the device of the fictional first-person journal mode to examine Juletane's disillusionment as well as the interplay of colonially-produced cultural differences among Caribbean and West African women in a traditional West African community. One of the effects of this devastating narrative is that Western feminist criticism's universalizing theories about reading and writing appear hopelessly reductive from a contemporary francophone African perspective.

Keywords: voice, voicelessness, alienation, confinement, deracination, rupture, exclusion, madness, exile, Myriam Warner-Vieyra, Juletane, francophone Caribbean women's writing, slavery, Caribbean women, West African women, West African community Western feminist

How to Cite:

Brodzki, B., (1993) “Reading/Writing Women in Myriam Warner-Vieyra's Juletane”, Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature 17(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1312