Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls: Seeking Subjecthood Through Madness in Francophone Women’s Writing of Africa and the Caribbean 

(Lexington Books, 2003)

This book analyzes the many representations of madness that are portrayed in post-colonial novels by women authors from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, Cameroon, Guadeloupe, Martinique and Haiti. These regions, specific and unique each in their own way, also share many similarities in how their women’s literature has developed in recent years. I compare the literatures of these regions as well as the socio-cultural and historical contexts that have often forced many women into mental instability. My book demonstrates that women francophone novelists of Africa and the Caribbean, much like Anglo-European women writers (Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath), have often used the madness of their heroines as a symbolic reference point to study and analyze the socio-cultural conditions of their contemporary milieus. Female novelists from Senegal (Mariama Bâ), Algeria (Yamina Mechakra), Cameroon (Calixthe Beyala), Tunisia (Hajer Djilani), Haiti (Marie-Vieux Chauvet) and Guadeloupe (Michèle Lacrosil and Myriam Warner-Vieyra) produce literature that is caught up in the ever shifting social realities and constructions of francophone identity in our postcolonial era.

 

 

 

Francophone Voices of the ‘New Morocco’ in Film and Print: (Re)presenting a Society in Transition (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009)

This book focuses on literature, journalism and film produced in Morocco since 1999, which marked the end of the repressive reign of Hassan II known as les années de plomb (the Lead Years). Encouraged by the more open democratic climate fostered by his son, King Mohammed VI, men and women authors, journalists, poets, and filmmakers of French expression explore the socio-cultural and political debates of their country. Today literary works, newspapers, magazines, and cinematic productions depict a tolerant and inclusive nation now known as “Le Nouveau Maroc” [The New Morocco]; a country that is seeking the means to come to terms with a violent past, while plotting new strategies for a more democratic future. The work, based on research conducted in Morocco while a Fulbright Senior Scholar in spring 2007, delves into Moroccan society, exploring how those who produce culture represent a country as it transits from traditionalism to modernity within the conflicted polemics of the post-9/11 world—a world increasingly polarized between Arab/Muslim/East and US-European/Christian/West.

 

 

Nomadic Voices of Exile: Feminine Identity in Francophone Literature of the Maghreb (Ohio University Press, 1999)

This book demonstrates how postmodern sentiment has altered perceptions concerning Maghrebian feminine identity since the end of the French-colonial era. The authors I discuss in my book are contemporary and either reside in the Maghreb (Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco) or have had to seek asylum in France because of political persecution. Works analyzed in my book are primarily by women whose themes, I contend, extend beyond a gender-based dialogue to include other issues such as race, politics, religion and history in order to explore the changing landscape of the literature and culture of Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. Nomadic Voices has been well reviewed and has proved useful to professors and students in a variety of disciplines: Women's Studies, Middle East Studies, African Literature and Cultural Studies.

 

 

Sunset,  Essaouira, Morocco, 2008