Nibir K. Ghosh
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Through a comprehensive examination of Léonora Miano’s
ground-breaking novel Twilight of Torment, this paper highlights the power and intensity of the newly
emergent Francophone African Women writings in portraying the resilience,
courage and resolution of African women to challenge the status quo. Through
four independent, though connected, narratives that showcase the life and
experiences of each of the four characters – Madame, Amandla, Ixora and Tiki – in
their relationship with Dio, the absent character addressed by the four women
in turn, Léonora Miano delves deep into issues of gender, patriarchy,
masculinity, ancestry, lineage, color, superstition, violence and colonialism
to create a counter-narrative against the assumption that “there is no place for a soft/ black/ woman.” The
paper also foregrounds how Miano’s women characters strive not only to survive and evolve their individual identities but also project their dreams and
aspirations.
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For a considerable period of time in the twentieth century,
Francophone African literature saw the dominance of male writers like Leopold
Senghor, Aime Cesaire, Leon-Gontran Damas, Mongo Beti, Ferdinand Leopold Oyono, Mbella Sonne Dipoko, Ahmadou
Mapaté Diagne, Bakary Diallo, Joseph Owono, among others. The concern of most
of these writers revolved around themes like the Negritude movement, French
colonialism, displacement of Africans from their native tradition, similarity
and contrast between the French and the African traditions etc. In comparison
to such male dominance, women’s writing in Francophone African literature is a
relatively new phenomenon.
Though writings by women were sparsely visible during 1960s
and ‘70s, it was not until the publication of Francophone African Women
Writers: Destroying the Emptiness of Silence by Irène Assiba d'Almeida in 1994 (University Press of Florida) that the domain of African women writings began to
attract attention in and beyond the Francophone world of letters. d'Almeida’s
pioneering study showcases the novels and autobiographies of nine new and established writers who had
been publishing since 1975. Prominent among these were Nafissatou Diallo’s
A Dakar Childhood, Ken Bugul’s The Abandoned Baobab, My Country,
Africa by Andrée Blouin, Your Name Will Be Tanga by Calixthe
Beyala, Cries and Fury of Women by Angèle Rawiri, Scarlet Song by
Mariama Bâ, Werewere Liking’s Orphée d'Afrique, Aminata Sow Fall’s L'ex-pere de la Nation and Véronique
Tadjo’s As the Crow Flies. d'Almeida highlights
in her book the significant role played by such writings in liberating Francophone
African women from the fetters of the
patriarchal order that had hitherto constrained them from articulating
the cause of women and the community.
Léonora Miano, born in 1973
in Douala on Cameroon’s Atlantic coast, began publishing her work since 2005. She moved to France as a
student in 1991 where she adopted the French language as a medium to give
expression to her creative endeavours. Though she emerged as a writer of novels,
short stories and essays in French, her work is relatively less known in
comparison to that of other women writers mentioned above. I discovered this
when the University of Chicago press sent me a copy of Miano’s novel, Twilight
of Torment, for reviewing the book for the Asymptote journal.
Subsequently, when I mentioned the author to some of my celebrity-writer
friends in Africa and the U.S., they readily accepted that they were not aware
of her name or the work in question.
After a close reading of the
novel, I discovered that anyone even remotely familiar with the novels of the
Francophone Cameroonian writer Léonora Miano would not be caught unawares by the title of her recent
work Twilight
of Torment,
translated from the French by Gila Walker. Following on the heels of Dark Heart of the Night (2012) and Season
of the Shadow (2018), Twilight
of Torment visibly enhances the terrain
of Miano’s exploration of African diversity. As one flips open the first page
of the book, the reader’s eye is immediately struck by an epigraph from the
Black celebrity writer Sonia Sanchez’s poem “Present”: “there is no place for a
soft/ black/ woman.” (ToT 1)
In an interview with Flashmag TV in October 2013, Leonora
Miano highlighted the fact that she was “passionate about sub-Saharan and African descent experiences,
since adolescence” (Miano, Flashmag Interview) and that in her list of
priorities, as a sub-Saharan writer, was her commitment to articulate her own voice and see the world
in her own way by challenging existing stereotypes regarding Africa and
Africans, especially women.
The
opening line of the novel, “It’s suffocating like before a storm,” (TOT 1)
seems to suggest the anxiety that precedes a calamitous situation and prepares
the reader for becoming acquainted with the “subterranean wounds” from which
Black women “never recover.” (ToT 2) The main protagonist, Madame, readily
avers, “There’s no room for romance, for soppiness in the lives of women here.
In these lands where the sky is neither shelter nor recourse, being a woman
means deadening your heart.” (ToT 2)
In
providing this backdrop at
the very outset of the novel, the author reveals her intent to confront head-on
the predicament of women, especially of African women, for whom even day-to-day
existence is fraught with the perennial torment of “deadening your heart.”
Observing a stony silence rather than giving vent to the bottled-up anger,
rage, and discontent stemming from the curse of being Black and a woman seems
the norm: “We scream or cry only to create a diversion. Our true sorrows are
not exhibited, they are not uttered. Those who open their hearts live to rue
the day they did so. There are no exceptions.” (ToT 2). However, not content
with being an accomplice in the conspiracy of silence, Miano allows her
protagonists to believe that “being a woman in these parts means evaluating,
probing, calculating, anticipating, deciding, and shouldering.” (ToT 2)
Consequently, Black women are free to realize what Virginia Woolf stated in her
essay “Modern Novels” (1919): “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically
arranged. Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope that surrounds
us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”
It is by delving deep into
the consciousness and interiority of events, memories, desires, ancestral
history, and tradition that Miano’s four protagonists are able to convey not
only their agony and anguish but also their resolve to discover panaceas located
beyond torment and torture.
Twilight of Torment is spread across four
distinct narratives that showcase the life and experiences of each of the four
figures – Madame, Amandla, Ixora and Tiki. The blurb indicates how the four
women
speak to the same man, who
is not there. He is the son of the first, the great-yet-impossible love of the
second, the platonic companion of the third, the older brother of the last.
Speaking to him in his absence, it is to themselves that these women turn,
examining their own stories to make sense of their journey, from twilight to
twilight, through a mysterious stormy night in the middle of the dry season.
(blurb)
Dio is the absent character
addressed by the four women in turn. Their tales show how each one of them, in
their complex relationship with him, have been affected by Dio’s inexplicable
approach to life and people.
Léonora Miano skillfully
brings together various stories to offer a panoramic view of “femininity,
sexuality, self-love, and the intrusion of history into the intimate lives of
people of African descent.” (blurb) Through these inter-connected narratives,
Miano successfully creates a comprehensive picture of women caught in an
intricate web of multiple relationships that governs the action that each may
adopt to survive in a seemingly hostile world impacted by considerations of
gender, patriarchy, masculinity, ancestry, lineage, color, superstition, and
violence.
Madame Mususedi’s narrative
occupies weighty space in Twilight of Torment as she articulates her
relationships with the other major characters in the novel. In marrying Amos,
who carries with him the tag of royalty, she bargained her material resources
for the reflected glory that she thought she would find in the union with him.
The marriage took place in the “North,” against her parents’ wishes. Ruminating
on the initial days of her relationship with Amos, Madame talks of her early
dreams about the success of their companionship: “Amos will forget that my
fortune is not really his and that it takes a little power away from him. He
will enjoy my company. Never will I refuse myself to him. Never will I divulge
his secrets or his frailties. We will be happy.” (ToT 54) However, disillusionment
soon follows as Madame realises that things are not going to be as she had
visualised: “Amos is not bad, he is sick. There is a duality in him that he
does not understand and cannot control. As for us as a couple, I finally
admitted that love would not come to him out of habit. If he had ever felt it,
it had fizzled out after we were married.” (ToT 57)
Soon the brutality of
Amos’s domestic violence becomes a regular feature of her life. Amos’s sisters
also play their part in taming her to keep her in her “place.” She exclaims
wistfully: “Royalty is forged in women’s wombs, but the power that it confers
is held by men.” (ToT 55) She also accepts that “What I lived through in this
house is an atrocity.” (ToT 56)
Madame’s son Dio and
daughter Tiki, who constantly witness the spectacle of violence at home, deeply
resent Amos’s inhuman behavior and often encourage their mother to abandon her
husband and live a life of freedom and dignity. She does give the prospect
serious thought when she goes on a vacation with her children and meets a lady
called Eshe. Through her brief but intense relationship with Eshe (which means life),
Madame experiences the feeling of warmth and security that a durable
association with her could provide:
A door opened, revealing an
expanse within that I did not even know it existed. A territory so vast that I
had no idea how to cross it. What I would find at the end of the road was
visible from the threshold. All I needed to do was make the journey. Make up my
mind to set out on one of the courses, all of which would bring me safely to
harbor. I was free. (ToT 58)
Besides their common
sub-Saharan heritage, the two women are drawn to each other through an
intensely powerful feeling of belonging. Madame uninhibitingly shares with Eshe
the story of her past without fear or shame. Madame discloses she was drawn to
Eshe because “She did not judge me. I felt understood, loved for who I was. She
was my shadows, my flaws, and was not alarmed.” (ToT 61) While she is
contemplating going ahead with what her heart and soul earnestly desire, the
ghosts of propriety, fear, and shame make their presence felt and dissuade her
from giving free rein to her personal desire. She finds herself in a dilemma:
“It was hard for me to give Eshe up. Hard for me to stay in this unimagined
space … I was not ready to tear down the walls, clear away the rubble, wash and
then repaint the walls of my interior.” (ToT 62) As a result, instead of
concentrating on her togetherness with Eshe, her mind’s focus shifts to “what
people would say, about the shame.” (ToT 62) The other thing that was worrying
her was the consequences of a ‘sisterhood’ not sanctioned by society: “To my
mind, this kind of love, created to avoid reproduction, one of the most
accomplished expression of fertility, should seek renewal within itself.” (ToT
63) Aware of her inability to take up cudgels against the so-called established
patriarchal as well as racial order, Madame confesses with resig-nation:
The challenge seemed
colossal to me. It required resources I did not have, especially if it meant
being exclusive. I realised that I was one of those people who could only
achieve emotional stability where a woman could love a woman and carry a man’s
children. Love a man and receive pleasure from a woman. (ToT 63)
Madame, finally, returns to
her husband with her children. She bemoans that the idea of striking an
intimate bond with other women is never transmitted as a part of any heritage.
On the contrary, Madame avers: “We forcefully push away the women who embody
the possibility of fulfilment. Women don’t like women, people say. But
they do not explain why or since when.” (ToT 64)
In due course of the
novel’s narrative, Dio leaves for the North where he develops a deep friendship
with an immigrant. Following the sudden death of his friend in an accident, Dio
reaches out to the deceased’s family and takes on the responsibility of looking
after his wife Ixora and her son Kabral. He gets close to them and readily
leaves the North and returns home to his mother with Ixora and her son. The
return of Dio with the two newcomers greatly offends Madame who takes an
instant dislike to Ixora but gradually warms up to her son. It is Ixora’s lack
of a family lineage that prompts Madame’s scorn. She finds Ixora’s ordinariness
detestable. Madame’s narrative also includes a description of Amandla and her
relationship with Dio, which somehow never matures into a union of any kind. In
comparison with Dio’s unacknowledged relationship with Ixora, Madame finds his
relationship with Amandla more acceptable.
The three narratives that follow in the novel
poignantly bring into focus not only the experiences, trials, and tribulations
of Amandla, Ixora, and Tiki with respect to their relationships with Dio,
Madame, and other characters who appear in their lives, but also reveal the
author’s concern with bringing into bold relief elements of African culture
that were cast into oblivion and replaced with French culture through
stratagems of colonial design. Describing the effect of colo-nialism on the
natives, Madame remarks emphatically: “Every nook and cranny of this land,
every square inch is the property of postcolonial power or of the
multinationals that are an extension of it.” (ToT 29) Yet, she reminds Dio that
she has done everything to ensure “a comfortable inheritance” for him and his
sister Tiki. Although Madame attaches least importance to material things, she
knows well what significance material things have for a society “bled dry in
spirit.” (ToT 29) In this regard, the novel may be seen to resonate with Gabriel Okara’s poem “The
Piano and the Drums,” where he writes of the colonial strategy of overpowering
the sound of the drums with that of “a wailing piano/ solo speaking of complex
ways/ in tear-furrowed concerto.”
It may be pointed out that
the “North” figures quite a few times in the novel though there is no reference
to any specific country. Dio meets Ixora when he is in the North. Amandla
mentions the city Per-Isis when she refers to her past wanderings ‘Up North’.
Per-Isis, she says, “belongs to us like the rest of the world. Our people
spread the seeds of humankind to the four corners of the planet. We wouldn’t
have to defend ourselves so doggedly if our humanity had not been questioned.”
(ToT 109) The North does signify a territory that had its roots in the ancient
Egyptian civilization but the ravages of time and tide had seen a cataclysmic
change with the advent of colonialism. Amandla laments that “the North belongs
to us but doesn’t want us. We’re better off turning our backs on it with
dignity. Preserving our honor since that’s all we possess.” (ToT 109) According
to a sociologist, in her story, many native Africans find it difficult to
surrender to the process of assimilation and integration with the dominant
culture in the North. Amandla resents that assimilation professed by the North
is mainly one-sided and not reciprocal: “We’ve never seen the Northerners
embrace the customs here. Let their culture dissolve into ours. Forget their
language…The Northerners don’t feel concerned by multiethnicity. The notion
only interests them insofar as it lets them claim a part of themselves in
others. It is never a question of recognizing the presence of the other in
themselves.” (ToT 110) Tiki narrates in her tale that “the men of the North”
were subtle enough in not using only force and power to subjugate the people of
the Continent: “If there had been only brutality, they would have exercised
domination without achieving submission…To subdue your fellow man, you have to
get him to recognise your greatness. You have to seduce, even dazzle if you
have what it takes.” (ToT 251)
These references show that,
perhaps, Miano is using the term North to designate a fictional space where
African women, irrespective of nationality and culture, have to confront the
dichotomies of day-to-day existence against the backdrop of machinations used
by colonial forces to subjugate and control the natives in fulfilling what
Kipling had called the “White man’s burden.”
The section of the novel that follows Madame’s
account is Amandla’s story which begins with the reference to her relationship
with Dio, while she was a teacher at Heru School – an institution that she had
founded with the avowed purpose of teaching the values of African culture and
tradition to girls. She acknowledges that she had, by choice, taken
responsibility for the preservation and propagation of African customs against the
onslaught of what the colonial powers call modernism. She recounts:
I was just a child when my mother taught me to
reject the names used to trample on our identity. Words by way of which our
humanity was denied. I knew very early on that the land where the human race
was born was called Kemet. That we were Kemites. Not Blacks. The Black race was
invented purely to cast us outside humankind. To justify the transatlantic
dispersion. To make chattel of us to be bought in install-ments. (ToT 69)
Amandla points out that the invaders never bothered
to learn the language of the people they colonized. They, according to Amandla,
prioritized material happiness over the love for life:
They disdain us for not always asking more of life
than what it gives us. For not setting our sights on where they set theirs. Our
civilization is at odds with all their conceptions. This is why they still know
nothing of us. This is why modelling on their example would be suicide. (ToT 83)
Amandla’s view appears to echo what Ralph Waldo
Emerson, the American Transcendentalist philosopher, had warned his fellow
Americans about blindly following the British by stating, in his essay
“Self-Reliance,” that “Imitation is suicide.” (Emerson 67)
Strongly conscious of her roots going back to the
ancient Kemite civilization1, Amandla finds herself committed to
protect the ancestral traditions against the forces of colonialisation and
modernization. “Aset2, Goddess of reunification, is the rock” (Tot
71) on which she leans. She feels the pressing urge to undertake the
responsibility to undo the damage done. She pointedly asks, “Who will pay to
heal our souls? Doesn’t someone have to pay? … For all the blood spilt. For all
the humiliations. For the unending dispossessions… For all that we suffer
without being able to name it because we have been robbed of so much and so
ripped apart. Who will pay to repair the Kemite soul?” (ToT 101) Amandla makes
it clear that she does not idealize the Kemites but nevertheless they are
special to her because they remind her of wrongs done to them. She says: “The
injustices that still afflict us. That’s why our rehabilitation means so much
to me. How can it be otherwise when I come from a country where our people are
continually ostracized.” (ToT 83) Filled with the pain and agony of seeing the
world with ‘foreign eyes’, she bemoans: “I wailed that I wouldn’t pronounce the
word Black to name my people or myself. I wailed that our names have been
stolen. Our spiritual protections. Our particular vibration. I wailed that
there’s no place on earth where we are not disdained.” (ToT 101)
Amandla reiterates her rationale to start the Heru
school: “I wanted to empower my people and their contribution to the world. It
was essential for everyone to recognize the universal wherever it existed, in
all its diverse modes of ex-pression.” (ToT 100) Amandla clarifies further that
she may have initially started the school of Heru3 as a means of
exacting retribution for the damage caused by the “spoliators” but her mission,
she affirms, is to endeavour to “restore Humanity’s missing piece. The Kemite
presence.” (ToT 103). Her purpose is to “reach the stage of universal
love…where there is neither race nor culture. It will come.” (ToT 104)
On the personal front, Amandla attributes the
failure of her union with Dio to the incompatibility arising out of his lack of
concern for her as a person. He was there and yet not there. It is important
that Amandla does not allow the failure of her relationship with Dio to plunge
her into deep despair. Strengthened by the higher goals she has set for herself
in life, she seeks her need for companionship through her ties with her new
lover, Misipo, a carpenter by profession and an already married man. This is
made apparent when she declares to the memory of Dio:
I don’t love him like I loved you but he gives me
what you always denied me. What your body withheld. What I need more than
anything. I can admit it now. I am a woman with him. It’s important to me. To
be touched. To be taken. … What happens between two people who surrender
completely to each other is beyond the flesh. It’s a spiritual act…To discover
too that desire is more than a craving. It’s a feeling. (ToT 81)
What seems to characterize Amandla is her faith in
a relationship reminiscent of what D. H. Lawrence calls the “religion of blood”
that seeks the unity of humankind through love, compassion and forgiveness.
Ixora’s account follows Amandla’s story. Madame’s
narrative does shed a good deal of light on why she finds it difficult to
accept Ixora in her household but through Ixora’s story one gets to know what
she has gone through in her life before she and her son Kabral arrive at
Madame’s and Dio’s home. The chapter on Ixora begins with her disclosing how
she had been beaten violently by Dio and thrown out of his car amid a
torrential downpour for breaking off her engagement with him. Even in such a
perilous moment of agony, Ixora expe-riences a feeling of deliverance from her
plight:
I don’t care, I feel free, even though I’m lying
here in the mud, without the slightest idea how I’ll get out of this situation,
I’m not in pain, you bashed me too hard for there to be any pain left, it hit
me like a torpedo blast, causing numbness all over, such things happen it
seems, when the pain is too strong, you feel nothing anymore.” (ToT 118-119)
What is evident from Ixora’s outburst is her
resilience in fighting against injustice without fear and anxiety about what
the future has in store. With courage and conviction Ixora unravels various events
and circumstances of her life that have transformed her from being a helpless
individual at the mercy of the storms of fate to a resolute person who can
decide for herself no matter what. In the very first line of her story, she
tells the absent Dio, “the moment is hardly appropriate, but I feel like
laughing.” (ToT 118) After constantly
drifting along with the winds of change and accepting whatever and whoever
seemed to give her hope of companionship, she has finally mustered the courage
to break off her engage-ment with Dio. Her decision sets her free: I
“understood that my life was elsewhere, that I wanted to actually live it after
having carried it around like a millstone.” (Tot 119) From the vantage point of
the present moment, she looks back at her past and shares her observation of
the persons who have figured in her life so far: her debauched father who had
deserted his wife (her mother), her husband who was killed in an accident, her
son Kabral, Dio’s mother and Dio himself. She reminds Dio that they were an odd
pair “that never mates, that never seeks warmth from each other’s bodies, a
couple founded on the loss of a friend…” (ToT 122)
Her love for reading and teaching poetry stimulates
her to reach her point of affirmation in life. “What we wanted most was to feel
at home in the place where we were born, to exist without being challenged, not
to have to do anything special to enjoy a semblance of consideration, to be
able to tell, we too, the story of our presence in our country.” (ToT 135)
Placed at the beginning of the fourth and final
chapter of the novel, the epigraph from Audre Lorde’s poem, “Who Said It Was
Simple,” offers a glimpse into the consciousness of Madame’s daughter, Tiki:
“There are so many roots/ to the tree of anger/ that sometimes/ the branches
shatter/ before they bear.” (ToT 179) Like the trees and people that face the
ravages of the storm, Tiki is determined to “rebuild again.” She points out the
importance of ancestral langu-age in preserving and sustaining time-honored
traditions that unite commu-nities. Tiki calls it the folly of destiny that
their mother, Madame, had to contend with “two lineageless women, two
descendants of slaves” (ToT 190) in her life. She makes a reference to Eshe,
whom they had met on their vacation, and the letters from her to Madame that
Tiki discovered in her mother’s closet: “The last missives were the song of a
wounded bird. There was no anger in them but they spoke of the pain of having
dreamed too brightly, of having to wake up and learn how to breathe again.”
(ToT 191) In her empathy with her mother, Tiki accuses her brother Dio of not
showing any concern. Tiki says, “You know nothing of the forces that have
always oppressed her, you didn’t take enough interest in your parents to find
out who they were, the kind of people they were.” (TOT 205) She adds, “That’s
the way it is for everyone in our community… we know we are the fruit of a tree
that no one will take responsibility for cutting down.” (ToT 206)
Musing over the expectations one has from women,
Tiki cites a long observation of her friend Camilla:
Women should look like flowers and nothing should
mar their light, dainty appearance… Most women find out about life through
having to recover from a humiliation. Learning to get back on your feet is the
first lesson to master. To be a woman is to clench your teeth inside and hang a
smile on your face outside. It’s having to cope all the time. Taking your
husband’s blows. Knowing you belong to him without possessing him….Women have
to give pleasure, not to take it. This is why women are taught moderation in
gesture and in tone. Don’t raise your voice. Eat little in public. Happiness is
not of this world. Not for the people of the Continent.” (ToT 209-210)
Tiki is aware of the demands that are made from
women. It may remind one of Nora, the protagonist of Ibsen’s The Dolls House
who rebukes her husband after being treated as a doll by all concerned till her
awakening to the realities of her selfhood. Tiki recounts that she fell in love
at the age of fifteen with a boy who had no inkling of her feelings. She was
sixteen when she lost her virginity, “with a boy paid for his services.” (ToT
199) Towards the end of the novel Tiki muses over her relationships with
various men and remarks how, in her conversations with her mother, she has
cleverly avoided answering “specific questions on the thorny subject of my love
life. The fact that she loved a woman will not enable her to understand my way
of loving men. It’s my life, my affair.” (ToT 254) It is obvious that Tiki
assumes responsibility for her own future and confidently justifies her relationship
with her present companion: “Our sexual needs are in harmony, we like
alternative medicine and we’re vegetarians. I’m a bit down in the dumps, but no
one dies from that. You’re going to call, Big Bro, I’ll be here.” (ToT 255)
Taken together, the four different, though
interconnected, narratives provide a comprehensive foray into the issues and
challenges that African women have to contend with in freeing themselves from
the oppressive fetters imposed by social, political, and cultural mores that
torment them ceaselessly. Through the stories of four women – Madame, Amandla,
Ixora and Tiki – Leonora Miano offers a comprehensive picture of women in
Francophone Africa who have to regularly engage themselves in the trapeze
balancing act not only to survive and evolve their individual identities but
also to project their dreams and aspirations The hope of redemption lies in this connectedness
despite their individual differences, a fact that is outlined by the epigraph from
Ayi Kwei Armah’s novel Two Thousand Seasons in the section on Amandla:
Our vocation
goes against all
unconnectedness. It
is a call to create the
way again, and where
even the foundations
have been assaulted
and destroyed, where
restoration has been
made impossible, simply
to create the way. (ToT 68)
It is pertinent to mention that, in the manner of
Chinua Achebe, Miano intuitively chose the language of the colonizer to
ascertain her African identity. Going against the norms of assimilation that
demanded forsaking one's own cultural roots, Miano, unlike many Francophone African
writers, opted to ground her concerns in clearing the mist of anonymity that
shrouded the “dark” continent. While African-American writers celebrate 'Black
is Beautiful', it is heartening to see Francophone African women writers beginning
to proclaim to the world the innate beauty of Africa in terms of both natural
and human resources.
Miano's statement that she ‘thinks and writes’ in
French brings into the limelight the credit that must go to Gila Walker for
translating Torment of Twilight into English with obvious expertise at
her command. The powerful and lucid passages cited from the translated version
amply show that not much has been lost in the process of translation. On the
contrary, Walker's aesthetically beautiful renderings may win for Miano a
hugely enlarged audience in comparison to those who read her in the French
original. The context and the content of this novel are bound to draw both lay
readers and scholars who believe, like Leonora Miano, in the imperatives of
“connectedness” to “create the way” for the articulation of the hitherto
suppressed voice of even the “soft/ black/ woman.”
NOTES
1. The
Kemite tribe is associated with Kemet, one of the names given to Egypt by
its ancient indigenous inhabitants. The ancient Kemet people, also known as the
ancient Egyptians, were a civilization that lived along the Nile River in
Northeast Africa from around 3100 BCE to 30 BCE. In a modern context the term
Kemet has become associated with placing Egypt in its African cultural context.
2. Aset, the
goddess of healing and magic, was crucial to ancient Egyptian religious
beliefs. She is known today by her Greek name Isis; however, the ancient
Egyptians called her Aset.
3. Heru, also
known as Horus or Hor in Ancient Egyptian, is one of the most significant
ancient Egyptian deities who served many functions, most notably as the god of
kingship, healing, protection, the sun, and the sky.
WORKS CITED
Armah, Ayi Kwei. Two Thousand Seasons. East
African Pub. House, 1973.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo.
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University Press of Florida. 1994.
Miano, Leonora. Dark Heart of the Night. Translated by Tamsin Black. Bison Books, 2012.
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https://www.flashmag.tv/single-post/2013/10/16/interview-with-author-leonora-miano. Accessed
August 15, 2022.
Miano, Leonora. Season of the Shadow. Translated
by Gila Walker. Seagull Books, 2018.
Miano, Léonora. Twilight of Torment: I. Melancholy. Translated from the French
by Gila Walker. Seagull Books, 2022. Abbreviated in parenthesis as ToT against
page no.(s).
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· Dr. Nibir K. Ghosh is UGC Emeritus Fellow and former Head, Department of English Studies and Research, Agra College, Agra. A Senior Fulbright Fellow (2003-04), University of Washington, Seattle, USA, he is an internationally acclaimed scholar of British, American and African American studies.
Re-Markings Vol.24 No.2 September 2025. pp. 38-49.
v
Comments
Dear Nibir,
I've finally had an
opportunity to read your very fine article on Leonora Miano's Twilight
of Torment. This is a superb work of scholarship, in my view, and it
introduced me to an important writer unknown to me until now. Thank you for
enlightening me, through your discussion of her characters, to how Miano
delivers so completely the pain and passion, suffering and triumphs of African
women. I'll always remember what you've written here, and that haunting yet sad
quote from Sonia Sanchez's poem "Present": "there is no place
for a soft/black/ woman." That speaks volumes, doesn't it?
Dhanyavada,
Chuck - Dr. Charles Johnson, US National Book Award Winner, Seattle, USA
*****
Dear Nibir
Thank you for sending your essay. The subject you write about is one I know very little about, so I learned a great deal by reading it. I think you do a very good job of presenting the big picture and at the same time you focus on the work of Miano. You make effective use of all your strengths as a thinker, a critic, and a writer. Bravo. - Jonah Raskin, Sonoma State University, California, USA
