Abstract
Amy Baram Reid’s chapter identifies and explores a crucial transitional stage in a woman’s life as depicted in Tadjo’s Loin de mon père: when an adult women experiences the deaths of both of her parents, there is a profound realignment of her personal identity. The adult orphan claims a new role within her family story and new responsibilities for the future. Tadjo’s autobiographical novel retraces a daughter’s confrontation with mortality, a confrontation central to the self-redefinition that often accompanies the approach of old age. As Reid’s analysis demonstrates, the reflections on adult orphanhood in Tadjo’s novel are also embedded within broader social contexts, specifically the practice of de facto polygamy and the redefinition of Ivorian national identity in the twenty-first century.
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- 1.
The incipit of Camus’s L’étranger is among his most famous quotations: “Aujourd’hui, Maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas” (9) ; and it finds an echo in the opening of Ernaux’s Une femme, “Ma mère est morte le lundi 7 avril à la maison de retraite de l’hôpital de Pontoise, où je l’avais placée il y a deux ans” (11).
- 2.
Victoria Secunda’s psychological study, based on a survey of adults following the death of their parents, opens with a poignant confession: “When my mother died in 1993, I did not attend her funeral” (xv). Her foreword traces their troubled mother–daughter relationship in order to explain why Secunda chose to study the experience of adult orphans (xv–xxvii). Similarly, Nancy K. Miller explains the genesis of her book Bequest and Betrayal, which combines autobiographical reflection with an analysis of the exploration of parental death by authors including John Cheever, Annie Ernaux, Philip Roth, and Art Speigelman, as the result of an “irresistible need to think about the death of my parents” (v). I will also note that my interest in Tadjo’s novel as an exploration of the experience of an adult orphan is bound up in my experience of mourning following my father’s death in 2009.
- 3.
I would like to thank Pierre-Louis Fort for providing me with a copy of his paper “La ‘couleur du deuil’ dans Loin de mon père de Véronique Tadjo,” which was presented at the conference “Véronique Tadjo: postcolonialité littéraire, post-féminité ou africanité revendiquée,” University of Johannesburg, RSA, November 23–26, 2013.
- 4.
In the afterword to my translation of the novel, I explore the resonances between this passage and another from Reine Pokou, where the bereaved queen is given a carved wooden figure that embodies the spirit of her sacrificed infant, in order to suggest that, like Tadjo’s rewriting of the Baoulé foundational tale, Loin de mon père “challenge[s] narrow definitions of Ivorian identity” (Tadjo, Far 142–143).
- 5.
See the articles by Daddieh and Yéré for nuanced discussions of ivoirité.
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Reid, A.B. (2016). A Daughter No More: (National) Identity and the Adult Orphan in Loin de mon père by Véronique Tadjo. In: Ramond Jurney, F., McPherson, K. (eds) Women’s Lives in Contemporary French and Francophone Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40850-7_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40850-7_9
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