"L'illusion, C'est Moi/la Folie, C'est Moi" ("I am Illusion/I am Madness"): Madness, Merging and the Articulation of Universal Female Suffering in Calixthe Beyala's Tu T'appelleras Tanga‪.‬

Cameroonian author, Calixthe Beyala, is known for her commitment to racial and gender politics as well as for her depictions of graphic sexual and psychological violence inflicted on and caused by her female protagonists. Working within this specifically postcolonial framework, she is not only one of the most prolific francophone African diasporic writers of our time, but also one of the most controversial. As a result of her constantly evolving style and the complexity of her female characters, Beyala is an author who consistently upsets fixed literary and authorial categorizations. Similar to the ways in which Beyala's novels transgresses certain aesthetic boundaries, her protagonists surpass the restrictions imposed by hegemonic discourses of femininity in both French and African contexts. In her 1988 novel, Tu t'appelleras Tanga (Your Name Shall Be Tanga), Beyala writes about transgression of both physical and ideological spaces as a commentary on power structures and female agency in Western and African phallocratic societies. The story opens with a conversation between Tanga, an African woman and former prostitute and Anna-Claude, a Belgian woman who has recently arrived in the unnamed African colony after leaving her job as a philosophy teacher in Paris. This dialogue takes place in their shared prison cell; Tanga is on the brink of death and Anna-Claude has been badly beaten by the prison guards. Both have been imprisoned as a result of their "subversive actions" and both are arguably "mad." (1) In this project, I contend that each is imprisoned not only as a result of actions that transgress certain social norms, but also on account of her identity that cannot be categorized within the stringent female identitarian codes of both France and Africa. As a result of their varying forms of madness and hybrid identities, both Anna-Claude and Tanga resist normative female constructions of identity, and are thus unclassifiable according to the systems of categorization (both Western and African) that would permit them to be part of society. Moreover, Beyala's description of the merging of these two women articulates a universal condition of female suffering that transgresses the boundaries of "fixed" notions of race, sexuality, and gender in both African and European discourses.