Veneration and desecration in Calixthe Beyala's La petite fille du réverbère

Abstract

The Franco-Cameroonian novelist Calixthe Beyala has, in recent years, made a name for herself as a radical feminist novelist. Her anti-patriarchal and antiestablishment attack lakes on an obsessively sacred coloration in her eighth novel, La petite fille du réverbère, for, while venerating herself, Grandmother, and earth-bound Africa, she systematically desecrates what appears to her as incarnations of the inimical hydra-headed Father: imperialists, negligent genitor, opportunistic fathers, Fathers-of-Nation, sexual taboos, the sky-God, and literary critics who accuse her of plagiarism. Using as a point of departure the notions of the sacred embedded in collective and contemporary consciousness, the essay examines the dual process of sanctification and profanation at work in the novel. © 2005.