The Fury and Cries of Women by Angele Rawiri

Hayley's father very clearly has PTSD, and this is well explored.

To begin with, this is a book that misses so many of the opportunities it itself raises to tackle major issues. It's certainly not terrible, but I found myself taking issue with quite a few portions of the novel. It could be that the book just isn't very good, I don't know. Perhaps writing conventions have shifted just so in the three years since I purchased The Impossible Knife of Memory. Perhaps it's that the book hasn't aged very well. So it was time to visit an author that I loved as a teen, with a novel that - when it had been published - was touted as being an important, powerful novel of PTSD. Except, of course, I enacted a book buying ban on myself to exactly motivate myself to read these older, forgotten books. It examines works in French by Werewere Liking, Aminata Sow Fall, and Veronique Tadjo.The Impossible Knife of Memory has been on my shelves for so long, that I honestly wasn't sure I'd ever get around to reading it. The third section, 'W/Riting Change: Women as Social Critics', discusses the ways female novelists link problems that affect women's lives to those affecting society at large. She discusses Your Name Will Be Tanga, by Calixthe Beyala, Cries and Fury of Women, by Angele Rawiri (both published only in French), and Scarlet Song, by Mariama Ba.

In the second section the author looks at women and the family, including problems related to 'compulsory' motherhood. The section also examines The Abandoned Baobab, by Ken Bugul, a book that broke sexual taboos, and My Country, Africa, by Andree Blouin. The first deals with autobiography and begins with A Dakar Childhood, by Nafissatou Diallo, the first Francophone African woman to write her own life history. D'Almeida divides her analysis into sections on three aspects of literary production. They use it to critique the patriarchal order, to champion the cause of women and the community, and to preserve positive aspects of tradition. She finds that writing has liberated Francophone African women. D'Almeida's book, the first single-author critical study in English of literary expression by Francophone African women, examines novels and autobiographies by nine new and established writers, all published since 1975. A few more books by women were published in the '70s, followed by a creative explosion in the '80s that d'Almeida describes as a militant feminist appropriation of the written word. Irene Assiba d'Almeida dates this emerging phenomenon to 1969, the year Kuoh-Moukouri's Rencontres essentielles was published. Previously silent in print, today they also speak through the written word, and their stories constitute one of the most significant recent developments in African literature. French-speaking African women traditionally expressed their creativity through oral storytelling.

The Fury and Cries of Women by Angele Rawiri