About to die, presumably from wounds and hunger, the incarcerated 17-year-old Cameroonian “girlchild-woman” Tanga from Your Name Shall Be Tanga is cajoled to tell her life-story, probably for the first time, to a middle-aged French-Jewish woman, Anna-Claude, a teacher of philosophy who worked for a long time “collecting money so that not one child in the world would ever go hungry again” (100). Imprisoned for protesting Iningué’s poor governorship, Anna Claude earns Tanga’s trust. Unfolds a dark story of rape, poverty, and brutality in which Tanga searches for language to describe her pain.
Addressed in part to all women and children in Africa, the novel is an intricately designed literary piece, told in a continuous flow of nonchronological and fragmentary stories that are devoid of chapter headings. The interrupted and disjointed narrative that meshes the past with the present features a young woman who masters the art of storytelling so that her body is not erased and her life has more value than the money she collected while a prostitute. She shares the many injustices she experiences, including being forced by her mother to undergo female circumcision so she can prostitute herself and earn money for her family, being raped and impregnated by her father (who poisons the baby), falling in love with one of her clients Hassan who does not see her as anything more than a sex object. Tanga’s story is not completely one of victimization, however. She decides to stop prostituting herself and then to mother a 12-year-old boy abandoned by his birth mother (Mala). To sustain Mala when he falls ill, Tanga deals in counterfeit currency, which is how she lands herself in prison. It is significant that unlike her mother, who makes her feed the family, Tanga goes to extreme lengths to keep Mala alive even though she is “worn to the bones” herself (134). Mala dies, Tanga dies, but the suggestion is that her story lives on through Anna-Claude, who claims to be Tanga when Tanga’s mother shows up at the prison. In this novel, Beyala expresses the unity that binds people despite the boundaries of ethnicity, faith, and socioeconomic class. Anthony Jacobs, Spring 2020 |