[Review of] Charlotte H. Bruner, ed. Unwinding Threads: Writing by Women in Africa

Looking at the map of Africa locating contributors to this collection of women writers, one is struck by the seeming over-representation from some countries -- Ghana, Algeria, Egypt, Republic of South Africa -- and the vast stretch of lands that have, apparently, produced no female with a story to tell. In her Preface, Charlotte Bruner details some of the obstacles confronting women who defy the traditions of formerly nonliterate societies, where the rigidity and permanence of the written word itself confounds a view of art as something fluid and circumstantial, where community takes precedence over the individual, where the act of writing is seen less as a means of recording and perpetuating folk materials than as a catalyst for change, and where questioning the legitimacy of confining women to the role of domestic servant amounts to religious iconoclasm