A Linguistic-Stylistic Representation of Women Oppression in Selected Calixthe Beyala’s Novels

Abstract

Calixthe Beyala is a notable French writer whose works have attracted readership across the globe. Previous studies have examined Calixthe Beyala’s novels from feminist, psychological, and systemic function linguistic points of view with insufficient attention paid to the linguistic stylistic features in Calixthe Beyala’s novels. This study, therefore, examines linguistic-stylistic representation of women oppression in Calixth Beyala’s novels. Four novels of Calixthe Beyala are purposively selected and form the data for this study. The study reveals that linguistic-stylistic features-culture words, contraction of words, neologism, pidgin French, direct transfer of African expressions characterize Beyalian novels. These linguistic-stylistic features depict women oppressions in a male-dominated African society, negritude experience outside the shores of Africa and are a representation of the socio-cultural, political, and economic realities and experiences in Cameroon in particular and Africa in general. dominated society namely: hegemonic, alternative, and ambiguous masculinity. While Matunda’s work examines how francophone women writers depict masculinity through characters and characterisation, our focuses on the depiction of women oppression in the works of Calixthe Beyala. Olayinka (2014) investigated how juvenile disorders are portrayed in selected works of Calixthe Beyala. The study, with bias from Freudian psychoanalytic and Nietsche’s resentment theories, showed Calixthe Beyala’s angst against oppression, girl-child abuse, violence and women oppression in a male-dominated African society. The study condemns in its entirety gender discrimination, female-sexuality control, girl-child commodification, marriage, forced marriage, motherhood, widowhood, and rape, incest or paedophilia and others which have become the order of the day in Africa.. While Olayinka examines Calixthe Beyala’s works from psychological approach, ours is purely a linguistic-stylistic analysis of selected Beyalian texts. Also, Halimi (2015), with orientations from existentialist points of view, studies the question of “self” and women identities in Beyalian novels. The study investigates the construction of women identities within the ambits of social and fictional francophone contexts. While Halimi investigates the construction of women identities in Calixthe Beyala’s works, ours focusses on the linguistic-stylistic representation of women oppression in Calixthe Beyala’s works. culture words, word clusters, neologism, contraction of words, pidgin French and direct transfer of African expression. Culture words show negritude experience of the African migrants, while words cluster reveal the depression suffered by Africans even in prisons. Neologism expresses creativity as well as foreground Beyala’s identity. The use of contrasted French words by Beyala is deliberate and is deployed to express informality and conviviality of the writer to the socio-political issues. The contrasted words bridge the gap between the privilege and the less privilege. Pidginisation of French serves as an effective tool of communication as a pragmatic instrument of developing French pidgin pidgin enrich her Thus, and socio-political