Ficción y realidad en las primeras novelas femeninas negro-africanas de expresión francesa

Abstract

The literary production of the first generation of black-African women writers in the French language consists of a dozen stories written in the first person and characterised by their eminently testimonial vocation. Despite being an emerging literature, the works deal with highly controversial themes such as polygamous marriage, forced marriage and imposed motherhood. Although they fall, at least from a formal point of view, within the realm of the novel – and therefore of fiction – half of these texts present very significant elements of indefiniteness, including the high presence of absent, ambiguous or contradictory reading pacts, the dilation of character identification and, finally, the manifest biographical similarity between the women writers and their protagonists. Far from being accidental, this elimination of the frontiers that separate reality from fiction constitutes a premeditated strategy that allows the writers to defy social taboos by shielding themselves in the space of fiction and, at the same time, arousing in the reader a strong impression of the veracity of what is told.