'Wholeness is no trifling matter': An intertextual study of Black women's psychic (dis)eases in novels by contemporary Pan-African women (Tsitsi Dangarembga, Gloria Naylor, Toni Cade Bambara, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Zimbabwe, Guadeloupe)

This study examines the psychic (dis)eases—mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual maladies—of colonized black women as represented in the novels of contemporary Pan-African women. Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills, Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters, and Simone Schwarz-Bart's The Bridge of Beyond explore the devastating and deleterious effects of patriarchal social structures on the health and well-being of African women and women of African descent in particular and their communities in general. These African American and postcolonial literatures focus on what Barbara Christian identifies as the “two colonialisms”—Western domination and black male domination. These literatures also demonstrate how colonized black women attempt to withstand their oppressors and to cope with their noxious environments. This researcher views these particular narratives as resistance novels because they provide a counterdiscourse to oppression.; Although African women and those throughout the diaspora encounter many forms of oppression, these oppressions have a common denominator—patriarchy—and patriarchy engenders and exacerbates black women's ill-health. Because this study looks at black women as colonized subjects/objects whose lives are contained and constrained by their colonizers' constructed social milieux, it bases itself on three very significant and potent theoretical paradigms: one, Monica Sjoo two, and Barbara Mor's feminist theology which states “[Western] patriarchy is disconnection”; two, Franz Fanon's psychoanalytic theory which defines colonialism, a particular kind of patriarchy, as pathological; and three, Mary E. Modupe Kolawole's concept of womanism defined as “the totality of feminine self-expression, self-retrieval, and self-assertion in positive cultural ways.”; Though the women in this study occupy different geopolitical spaces, they are connected by a shared African past, a history of oppression, and a history of resistance against oppression—slavery, racism, colonialism and imperialism. Concerning the subject of black female maladies, the primary themes throughout the novels under investigation are assimilation and alienation: Pan-African women's texts reveal that when black women embrace the colonizers' epistemological and axiological imperatives they become fragmented in mind, body, and spirit.; Some of the novels explicitly reveal that healing for black women lies within their own communities and cultures.