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