The Serpent's Tongue: Gendering Autoethnography in Paulina Chiziane's "Balada de Amor ao Vento"

Abstract

Abstract: This article discusses the gendering of power and language in Paulina Chiziane’s first novel Balada de Amor ao Vento (1990). Drawing on Cynthia Ward’s analyses, informed by Bakhtin, I argue that Chiziane undoes the gender hierarchy implicit in constructing a dominant, national literary language in opposition to the naturalized feminine domestic realm associated with the “Mother Tongue.” Exploring the gendering of poetic language in transcultural narratives such as auto-ethnography, I demonstrate that Chiziane’s novel ironizes the pastoral mode that is central to colonial and anti-colonial (auto)ethnography, by positing a feminine pastoral subject of disillusion and displacement. Chiziane thus transposes onto African men the traditional culpability of Eve for Man’s postlapsarian disillusion, colonially reiterated in representations of the conquest as the Fall. This appropriative move enables her to express the materiality of feminine desire through areas of miscommunication and untranslatability in traditionally male contact zones, so that she effectively disrupts any unitary, pastoral concept of a feminine “Mother Tongue” as the necessary, constitutive “other” to national literary language.