Narrative and perspective in African women writers: from the memory of experience to the experience of memory

Abstract

As shown by the analysis of the narrative perspective, the texts of French-language African women writers reveal a gradual move towards ever more complex expressive forms. Focusing almost exclusively on the narrator, early-written stories tend to present events as a whole already filtered by conscience, thus conveying the memory of an experience. However, the monological interpretation of the past is later replaced by a polymodal representation where memory grows richer through an overall processing of past experiences, which we dub the experience of memory.