} In his first novel, tells Amal Dajïli Amadou attitudes that four Muslim women have adopted in order to share a husband.
It is with some regret that the reader closes this book of 134 pages, as the story it tells is amazing. Published by Ifriqiyah "Walaande, the art of sharing a husband" comes on a hackneyed theme: polygamy in a Muslim family. But Amadou Djaïli Amal came to renew it brilliantly in telling the existence of four co-wives who, surprisingly, shifted and personal, live their daily fact of patience, secrets and unspoken for crossing time and survive the tests.
Sakina is the last wife. She worked in a bank when she agreed to marry Oumarou, a wealthy merchant of Maroua she was in love. Since then, her life comes down to await his "walaande" turn to sleep with her husband. But secretly, she takes the pill to stop childbearing. Nafissa, the third wife, is the youngest, most fragile too. Married 14 years to a man who intimidates, she could never fit into her home. She is in love with a doctor who becomes his lover. Djaïli, the second wife, is consumed by jealousy. Its time she devotes to concocting dirty tricks to harm her co-wives and to consult marabouts bewitch her husband. Aissatou, the "mother of the house," Oumarou married when he was a poor businessman. Over the years she has seen rich and away her. Bruised, she developed an excruciating wait.
Amidst these four women, Umaru, the cock of the farmyard, is also unhappy that one. His wives and children are only shadows that populate her life worse, the wolves that devour small fire Aissatou intimidated by his temper, his fatigue with the Djaïli jealousy Nafissa afraid of him, Sakina s' is far away from him, his children are foreigners.
And these children that come the revolution. The seemingly tranquil life of the family changes when Oumarou decides to marry three of his children without their consent. The son steals money from the father and fled with one of her sisters, while the other girl left to die of grief. Family breakdown. Disarmed, Oumarou faces his wives angry and more united than ever.
In this novel with autobiographical overtones, Amal Djaïli Amadou denounces discrimination against women. To make that charge less boring, she made a point of honor to delineate the universe of her heroines, to tell the banality of their humanity to finally take the reader through feelings. At the bend, she found a subject too often ignored in the Cameroonian literature: emotional loneliness of men in general and polygamous, in particular.
Like some of his characters, Amadou Djaïli Amal refused to stay locked in the compound of a polygamist. After Maroua, the graduate in business management is now based in Douala, where she is preparing a second novel.
Stephanie Dongmo
Djaïli Amadou Amal
Walaande. The art of sharing a husband
Editions Ifriqiyah
Collection
Near Yaounde, September 2010
134 pages, price: 3000Fcfa
0 comments:
Post a Comment