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This essay challenges the traditional focus of the Black Atlantic on Anglophone-dominant movement and culture by prioritizing Afro-Francophone discussion, through a philosophical contextualization of Fatou Diome's Le Ventre de L'Atlantique in conversation with Aminata Traoré's Le Viol de L'Imaginaire. The essay offers an exploration of fugitivity or exile from colonially structured material conditions and lived experiences of unfreedom in African contexts, notions present in both narratives. After presenting and analyzing a key element of the encounter between Western human beings and African human be-ings, it considers a central element of Diome's novel, in counterpart with a central theme of Traoré's text. It explores the idea that the type of fugitivity that transpires in Diome's novel, and the kind of exile of which Traoré speaks, can be understood as, in part, a result of a salient feature of the relationality between human beings and human be-ings. In that Diome's Salie and Traoré tell their communities what they know about the West and how Africans really fare there, they break through community lies and ignorance that aid and abet – but do not, at the root, cause – the complex situation of capture and captivation that coerce or seduce Africa's youth into varying states of fugitivity or exile. Both propose reimaging and rebuilding Africa for Africans – an endeavour requiring that African youth remain in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A produção literária senegalesa de autoria feminina assume um caráter recente, tendo em vista que as primeiras obras datam de 1970. Destarte, na contemporaneidade, o nome de Fatou Diome figura entre as principais escritoras que aborda, em seus livros, temas como a condição das mulheres, o racismo e questão diaspórica. Contudo, em Kétala, romance de 2006 e traduzido para o português em 2008, a autora traz temas considerados caros para o Senegal: a homossexualidade e a transexualidade, já que, no país, a questão LGBTQIAP+ é criminalizada. Com isso, o seguinte artigo visa problematizar como a autoria feminina senegalesa é vista, a partir da produção literária de Fatou Diome. Além disto, destaca-se, também, como os móveis, objetos e utensílios, responsáveis pela narração da história, são representados e representantes por revelar algumas problemáticas presentes no Senegal, como a já citada questão da autoria feminina, a condição das mulheres e como o romance aborda, de modo ousado, a questão homo/transexual.

Winner of the 2003 Prix des Hémisphères Chantal Lapicque, and translated into German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and English, Fatou Diome's 2003 novel, Le Ventre de l'Atlantique [ The Belly of the Atlantic, 2006] plays on the image of the Atlantic as an oceanic belly. This article explores the usefulness of the black Atlantic epistemology (Glissant 1990, Gilroy 1993) as a site for imagining the production of diasporic space, alongside the critique that 'by excluding Africa, Gilroy has in effect narrowed the Africanness or Africanity of the 'Black Atlantic' (Masilela 1996, p. 88). Through Diome's novel, I explore how this intersects with a feminist project of rendering visible the spatialization of difference, through an engagement with the geographies of domination. Borrowing from Zymunt Bauman's (2006) notion of liquid modernity, I therefore propose 'liquid feminism' as a framework that relates the globalised oceanic mobilities of African migrants to the structures of patriarchal domination which render black women's lives 'ungeographic' (McKittrick 2006). I start by exploring the geographic sensibility of Diome's poetics, including her use of the language of geography and her personification of the Atlantic Ocean. I then analyse how her portrayal of a geulwaar matriclan subverts the notion of Western feminism as rescuing African women who are trapped by 'tradition'. Finally, I explore Diome's notion of 'geographic suicide' as associated with the reflexivity of African women as modern subjects a site for the 'affective mapping' (Flatley 2009) of diasporic identity. Ultimately, the article illustrates how Diome's feminist re-imagining of the black Atlantic centres Africa and Africanness, combating the temporal dislocation that fixes the continent as a space that is lost in the originary moment of rupture of the Middle Passage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Le ventre de l’Atlantique, roman de l’écrivaine Fatou Diome se présente comme un « éloge littéraire » du football. A travers la représentation de ce sport, plusieurs questions sont abordées : l’immigration, le racisme, la pauvreté, les écarts Nord/Sud, la binarité dichotomique identité/altérité, etc. Tout au long du récit le football agit comme une passerelle culturelle permettant de tisser les liens rompus par l’exil, entre l’ici et l’ailleurs, dans une vision dénonciatrice des inégalités humaines et des idéologies monolithiques qui divisent le monde en Moi/Autre, œuvrant pour le dialogue et la rencontre.

This article aims to identify the metafictional processes that involve an introverted narration in the novel Kétala by Fatou Diome. It also tries to track down their references while trying, however, to link the author’s textual performance her personal experience in order to see the investment of the reflexive games that Diome links to a real narrative work, which she calls: the word-motage

Cette étude vise à examiner comment Diome utilise, dans Marianne porte plainte !, texte hybride entre l’essai et le pamphlet, certains procédés scripturaux et son expérience personnelle pour pointer du doigt les menaces idéologiques et politiques qui pèsent sur la République française, représentée par l’allégorie de Marianne, qu’elle défend face à des adversaires qui menacent ses principes fondamentaux à la veille d’une élection présidentielle. En outre, à travers cet ouvrage, elle affirme une prise de position qui est que toute nation se construit, comme le conçoit Hédi Bouraoui, dans le « trans/vasement des cultures qui se chevauchent, se croisent et s’entrecroisent, s’attirent et se repoussent » (Transpoétique 42). Dès lors, il s’agit aussi d’observer l’expression des idées de l’écrivaine sur les questions d’identité, de transculturalité, de nationalité et d’humanité.

This paper proposes a study of the fictional works of two African women authors in French, Calixthe Beyala and Fatou Diome, and the various ways in which they explore constructions of identity in the transnational individual. Identifying forms are explored in their works in the manipulations of personal appearance, in more “official” representations such as documents and identification papers, and in other individual performances of a certain vision of the “authentic” African immigrant. Special attention will be paid to the figure of the author as a character within each text, and the relation of this particular authorial performance to the writers themselves. This paper seeks to explore several questions, based on three axes of analysis. First, I investigate the performative nature of identity as demonstrated by characters in these works. What aspects of the performance are particular to the migrant or transnational individual? Second, I examine the intersections of migrant identity and gender. How are performativity and gender related? How is the migrant experience embodied in a gendered individual? Finally, I analyze the image of the writer within each work. Who are the author figures in these texts? How do these characters perform an authorial identity? How do these characters perform an authorial identity, and can these two authors be said to represent authors differently? Using selections of their recent work, this paper will demonstrate how performativity intersects with the contemporary migrant fiction in the texts of Beyala and Diome.

Several prominent contemporary Francophone women writers have embraced activism in compelling forms. In her written creations, Maïssa Bey from Algeria has continually called attention to the lack of women's rights in her homeland; she has also initiated writing workshops for women to reflect and express themselves. Fatou Diome, who left Senegal for Strasbourg, has shed light in her work on racism and sexism that African immigrants often face in Europe, and she has created an association in her homeland to help individuals become financially solvent. Yanick Lahens from Haiti has similarly devoted herself to activist endeavours on her island, including co-founding a library and working with youth after the earthquake. As these authors seek to create compassion through writing, they also promote empathy through their engagement outside the text, empowering people of various backgrounds by providing them with literacy skills, business acumen, and a sense that their story matters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fatou Diome’s first novel, Le Ventre de l’Atlantique (2003), can be read as a work of migrant literature in which the Atlantic figures as a separating expanse beholden to a single past, that of the Atlantic Slave Trade. The ocean divides contemporary African migrants to Europe from the continent, as it did enslaved Africans taken forcibly to the Americas; it consumes a returned impoverished migrant, as it swallowed those who did not survive the Middle Passage. Yet for the authorial protagonist, Salie, and her island home, the Senegalese fishing village of Niodior, the Atlantic evokes multiple histories and experiences. This ocean is a place of freedom, as well as its absence; of daily sustenance, as well as migration; of life, as well as death; of postcolonial violence, as well as the violence of the Trade. The novel’s Atlantic, like the text as a whole, alludes to many pasts and, at times, abandons the dualities of place, race, and gender that organize most contemporary discourse about migration and oppression. Passages of opaque desire and oblique critique diverge from a dichotomous geography of continents and subject positions. Where Salie and Niodior emerge uncontained by categories inherited from colonial discourses, there are intimations of what genuinely postcolonial freedom might be.

Novelist Fatou Diome, Senegalese migrant to France, in 2019 reached the twenty-fifth year in her adopted country. Silver-anniversary motives encouraged the author to chart the quarter century of progress of this "megaphone of migritude," as Lila Azam Zanganeh notably called her. Moving from the rich exegeses of the liminal, haunted, frequently abjected, migritude conditions of her fictional—and often autobiographical—heroines, Diome has now arrived inside the Hexagon, where her words harmonize with a sizable chorus of interior-left establishment voices. However, she has not abandoned her powerful interest in the complexities of migritude's pains and difficult opportunities. On the contrary, in Marianne porte plainte! Identité nationale: Des passerelles, pas des barrières! (Marianne Complains! National Identity: Gangways, Not Barriers!) (2017), Diome takes up the many threads of the migritude tapestry so fully depicted in her novels and reweaves them into a portrait of an ideal new multicultural French identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marcel Taibé, L’esthétique du fragment et l’identité chez Ben Jelloun et Fatou Diome

Copyright of Présence Francophone is the property of College of Holy Cross, Department of Modern Languages & Literatures and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Présence Francophone is the property of College of Holy Cross, Department of Modern Languages & Literatures and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Présence Francophone is the property of College of Holy Cross, Department of Modern Languages & Literatures and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Fatou Diome's first novel, Le Ventre de l'Atlantique (2003), can be read as a work of migrant literature in which the Atlantic figures as a separating expanse beholden to a single past, that of the Atlantic Slave Trade. The ocean divides contemporary African migrants to Europe from the continent, as it did enslaved Africans taken forcibly to the Americas; it consumes a returned impoverished migrant, as it swallowed those who did not survive the Middle Passage. Yet for the authorial protagonist, Salie, and her island home, the Senegalese fishing village of Niodior, the Atlantic evokes multiple histories and experiences. This ocean is a place of freedom, as well as its absence; of daily sustenance, as well as migration; of life, as well as death; of postcolonial violence, as well as the violence of the Trade. The novel's Atlantic, like the text as a whole, alludes to many pasts and, at times, abandons the dualities of place, race, and gender that organize most contemporary discourse about migration and oppression. Passages of opaque desire and oblique critique diverge from a dichotomous geography of continents and subject positions. Where Salie and Niodior emerge uncontained by categories inherited from colonial discourses, there are intimations of what genuinely postcolonial freedom might be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cincinnati Romance Review is the property of University of Cincinnati, Department of Romance Languages & Literatures and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper I focus on the penultimate installment of the oeuvre of the much-celebrated Franco-Senegalese writer Fatou Diome, whose largely autobiographical work has garnered a wide following and a lucrative contract with the Flammarion publishing house. I propose that Diome’s 2010 novel Celles qui attendent strongly contributes to a discourse surrounding the roles of males and females in an African economy increasingly dominated by migration. Diome started as a writer who portrayed the empowered role of the female migrant, who is able to accumulate financial capital in Europe and send it back to Africa in order for males to slowly hoard goods and start businesses. Her more recent work, however, has been marked by a shift to reflect a portrait of Senegalese society and migration that is backed by sociological studies: men take on the role of migrants, tempted by “marchands d’illusions” 'merchants of illusions,' but are also determined to get away from social pressures in order to accumulate their own set of experiences in the world, at a distance from the expectations of a traditional African society. Women, on the other hand, are left in extreme proximity to the problems of everyday life on a cash-starved continent, as they have to go about the business of surviving and raising children, engaging in many forms of hoarding that have to do with accumulating finance, memories and myths.

Analyzing Fatou Diome's 2003 novel Le Ventre de l'Atlantique, this article explores its treatment of the international migration system, particularly the causes of migration between Senegal and France and the social ills that go along with this, as well as the novel's location in the genealogy of Francophone literature. It argues that Diome's position is ambiguous, portraying the principal causes of migration as intellectual and cultural, rooted in a mythologized image of France, yet prescribing an economic solution to the problem: Diome depicts the (largely autobiographical) protagonist, Salie, financing a local business with French capital for her brother in an effort to dissuade him from leaving Senegal. This article also examines the novel's exploration of identity, belonging, and memory through the protagonist's engagement with the act of writing. It argues that, in particular, Diome illuminates the lesser-known marginalization faced by ‘failed’ migrants in their home society, and how migration can lead to a persistent state of alienation even among those who return home. Prenant comme sujet le roman Le Ventre de l'Atlantique de Fatou Diome paru en 2003, cet article analyse sa conception du système international de la migration, notamment les causes de la migration entre le Sénégal et la France et les inconvénients sociaux qu'elle peut entrainer, ainsi que la place qu'occupe le roman dans la lignée de la littérature francophone. L'article propose que la pensée de Diome au sujet de la migration est quelque peu troublée, mettant l'accent sur les motifs culturels et intellectuels du problème tout en cherchant une solution économique: au juste, Salie, la protagoniste assez autobiographique du roman, arrive à convaincre son frère de rester au Sénégal en raison d'un transfert de fonds qu'elle effectue de la France pour lui financer une boutique. Cet article considère également la figuration des idées de l'identité, du sentiment d'appartenance, et de la mémoire, que le roman aborde à travers l'écriture pratiquée par la protagoniste. Particulièrement, l'article propose que Le Ventre de l'Atlantique rende plus nette la réalité plutôt méconnue de la périphérisation que peuvent subir les migrants dits ‘échoués’ une fois rentrés chez eux. Mots-clés: migration; littérature francophone; périphérisation; mythologie de la migration; France; Sénégal; Fatou Diome [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]