If she had no fears, she could begin here, without a name. It is cumbersome to have a name. It is an anchor. It brings figures to her memory. It recalls this place to her, which earlier, she has chosen to forget.
Names inspire an entire childhood, faces reaching and touching.
The intriguing questions about these representations have to do with the centrality of heterosexual relations in any understanding of femininity and the creation of 'Africa' in opposition to an idea of 'the West' as a crucial determinant in these representations. Both these factors combine to make the question of hegemonic understandings of sexual difference a very complex one. These texts are on the one hand involved in the postcolonial enterprise of resisting imposed identities and creating new ones. The gendered nature of resistance means that the subject position is usurped by an unacknowledged but very specifically male subject. These strategies are expressed in different forms in different contexts.