“Et Beyala (re)créa Dieu : configurations de la divinité et du sacré chez une écrivaine impie”

Abstract

If there is unanimity among scholars that the harsh conditions of life of the underprivileged (women, children, and immigrants) constitute the major thrust of Calixthe Beyala’s works, there is still a dimension, crucial in my opinion to the understanding of her works, which has not yet received critical inquiry. For, discernible in the fifteen novels of the irreverent writer is a consistent reconstruction of divinity that induces one to think that her feminism is sharpened by the interrogation of the divine essence. The attempt to recreate women and the world is linked inextricably to the gesture of reconstructing God and rethinking sacredness. I will in this article attempt to examine the representations of divinity and the sacred in Beyala’s fiction along four lines: ideological convergence, demolition of androcentric gods, veneration of the female spirit, and the conciliation of opposites.