The image of the Africa through the female characters in Assèze the African woman by Calixthe Beyala (1994)

Abstract: The purpose of this mini thesis is to analyze the life of the woman Calixthe Beyala’s novel “Asséze the African woman”. In this novel, Beyala presents the postindependence of Africa through the sorrows, the illusions, and the hope. The reader discovers through the reading of Assèze the African woman how the woman, martyr of the tradition with the help of modernism and the reconquest of her body finds its fulfilment. After a thorough reading of Assèze, the African woman, we can see that Beyala puts the woman as her main subject in her novel and analyses the themes of the woman in the face of the male customs and domination, the struggle of the woman for her emancipation and her blossoming and the fight of the reappropriation of her body. How does the woman get rid of the social struggle that are the tradition and phallocracy? How does she reclaim her body? How does the woman fight for her freedom, her growth, and her independence? In a discussion of postcolonial literature, we talk about how feminist writers of the 1980s such as Calixthe Beyala present the new African era, the neo-colonial era. We will adopt three theoretical approaches which are: thematic, socio-critical, and stylistic approaches. The thematic approach according to Louis Hebert allows us to understand the meaning of the novel and to analyse the subject image of Africa through the female characters in “Asséze, the African woman” and to identify themes such as childhood and adolescence, sexuality, love, prostitution and identify research...M.A. (French