Angèle Rawiri’s The Fury and Cries of Women — set in the Gabon where Rawiri lived much of her life and translated into English by Sara Hanaburgh — is focused on a trio of strong women. Emilienne, the protagonist, marries a man from a different ethnic group over the objections of both their families. She is a professional success and earns more money than her husband. While she bucks traditional values in many ways, she still has trouble escaping her society’s pressure to provide children, and when her one daughter goes missing, the pressure rises. Emilienne’s mother-in-law, a strong, unlikable presence, continually schemes to unite her son with a match more to her liking. Emilienne’s secretary, another woman fighting to survive, provides a shoulder to cry on which turns into more. Rawiri creates melodrama as she shows these women sometimes bowing to and other times battling the social forces around them. Emilienne encounters corruption (“I’ve learned that in order to succeed, anything goes, and, believe me, I will use all means necessary”), despair (“Emilienne was swimming with broad strokes in the stagnant waters of apathy”), prejudice (“I don’t trust those women who’ve been to the top-notch schools”), and the future of her continent (“What will become of Africa, incapable of self-governance, victim of natural disasters, and attacked from within by economic and financial crisis? The least one can say is that the future seems frightful. Africa’s belly will soon be as sterile as mine.”). The Fury and Cries of Women is a wild ride with a bold ending.Rawiri is credited as being Gabon’s first novelist in the afterword by Cheryl Toman, a professor who specializes in African women’s writing. (Toman also translated the first novel by an African woman, Thérèse Kuoh-Moukoury’s Essential Encounters.) This is Rawiri’s third and final novel. You can read more about her life here.
This is book #42 in my effort to read a book by an author from every African country in 2019.
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