Frieda Ekotto

Shamelessness as a Creative Mechanism in Jean Genet's Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs and Dany Laferrière's Comment faire l' amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer

THERE IS NO NEED TO STRESS THAT an affect so fundamental as shame alters us, nor that one of the accompanying feelings can be guilt, which often sets damaging limits to life by blocking the power to create new possibilities for action. And yet, I know today that creative activities are instrumental in unveiling shame, and that is why, for years, I have tried to turn my veil of shame into a protective armor of shamelessness by being creative. As Joseph Adamson and Hilary Clark suggest in Scenes of Shame, creative works lend themselves to the process of unveiling shame:

Paris My Paradise dir. by Eléonore Yaméogo, and: Sisters in Law dir. by Kim Longinotto and Florence Aysi (review)

Eléonore Yaméogo, the director of the documentary Paris mon paradis , is from Burkina Faso, where the preeminent international festival of African fi lm, FESPACO (Festival Panafricain du Cinéma et de la Télévision de Ouagadougou), is held biennially in the capital city of Ouagadougou. Paris mon paradis is a documentary about how the myths of return and of Eldorado keep reviving the infl ux to and suffering of African migrants in the Occident. In the quest for “salvation” and wealth, Africans are quite regularly heading to the global North, their idyllic goal. This fi lm focuses on migrants to Paris—to the country of their former colonizer—and on the tireless struggle that characterizes their lives. The Eldorado of France has been portrayed and demystifi ed in other works of sub-Saharan literature and cinema. Ousmane Sembène was perhaps the fi rst fi lmmaker to show the tragedy of immigration from Africa to France in his La Noire de... (1968), in which a young African woman kills herself to end her loneliness and despair. Like Sembène’s short fi lm, Yaméogo’s documentary also explores the issues related to migration. Shame haunts all of her characters’ lives—both the lives of those who experience success but feel they are failing to share their good fortune with others, and those who end up returning to Africa empty-handed. The fi lm also asks central questions that go beyond individual epistemology—questions about what it means to be an African and about the role of Africa within modernity, especially given the colonized past of sub-Saharan nations. Paris mon Paradis asks, for example, about the place occupied by the African nation-state in the dramas of it emigrants. It might appear to us now that the “nation” is a defunct unit of analysis, especially given the work of scholars of globalization theory such as Hardt and Negri and Arjun Appadurai. With boundaries between nation-states becoming all the more

Language and Confinement in Francophone Women Writers

TWO TERMS OR CONCEPTS are particularly relevant to the three narratives discussed here, confinement and das unheimliche. They recur explicitly or implicitly in Evelyne Mpoudi Ngolles Sous la cendre le feu (1990), Myriam Warner-Vieyras Juletane (1982) and Mariama Bâs Une si longue lettre (1980). Confinement in all its multifarious forms relates to a traumatic paralyzing space that Freud has called das unheimliche. For the main characters of our texts it derives from a conflictual event which