UCLA

“Voices of Silence in Francophone Women’s Literature: Comparisons of Algerian and Mauritian Novels” examines the use of silence in African Francophone women’s literature. The topic of silence with regards to women, their voices and their writing has been central to feminist movements worldwide. In the novels analyzed in this dissertation, the gesture of breaking women’s silences paradoxically, it would seem, still includes a variety of silences within the narrative. This dissertation queries at such an aesthetic, and how the use of multivalent silences enhances rather than undermines the act of speaking out. It aims to (re)valorize the use of silence in women’s writing, and purports in fact to show its necessity in the iteration of subjectivity. I argue that silence operates as purposeful aesthetic narrative tool in Francophone African women’s writing; I term this generative quality of silence within the narrative as productive silence.

As part of my interrogation of productive silence, I analyze six novels written by Francophone women from Algeria and Mauritius. Each chapter pairs together an Algerian and Mauritian novel; this transnational comparative approach puts the Francophone literature into dialogue in order to highlight the unique multicultural contexts of Algeria and Mauritius. In addition, I incorporate a multidisciplinary theoretical approach that looks at silence through the lens of literaray, linguistic, communication, and philosophical theories. This project examines the ways in which silence is deployed to write autobiographical texts, to journey through the unknown in order to discover personal truths, and to recognize and memorialize the suffering and bravery of lost heroes. Within this selection of Francophone women’s writing, multiform silences create a threshold for self-discovery, motivation to seek out untold histories, and a language with which to do it.