Delito Expiación y Culpa (Spanish Edition)

Around Foucault is probably thinking of Francis Bacon there is a new regime of classification and mensuration being born in England. The will to truth has a history of its own, which is not the history of constraining truths: It is sustained by institutional practices, among them the use of knowledge. This "truth" exerts pressure on the other discourses, which converge towards the discourse of truth. The penal code is no longer founded on power or spectacle, but on the scientific discourse of psychology, psychiatry, etc. See on this point Foucault's work Discipline and Punish.

That is, procedures of exclusion 1 and 2 become subordinated to 3: But 3 is masked: In Nietzsche, Artaud, Bataille B Internal procedures Other procedures for the control of discourse are internal—principles of order within the discourses themselves. Some texts are privileged the canon, in religion, law, literature or science ; others are commentaries of these major texts.

The two poems called 'Jordan' from the fount of their inspiration describe the act of writing a sacred poetry which eschews a structural 'winding stair' and the 'curling with metaphors' of a 'plain intention'. As with his most influential models, the parables of Jesus, Herbert's illustrations of the central mysteries of God and his creation take the form of sharply observed but 'plain' stories drawn from, and illuminated by, everyday experience.

The elegance of Herbert's poetry is as much the result of art as it is an expression of a cultivated, but not forced, spiritual humility. He had been born into a distinguished and cultured noble family but his decision to take deacon's orders in , and his ordination to the priesthood and appointment as rector of a country parish in struck many of his grand contemporaries as a deliberate turning of his back on secular ambition. According to Izaak Walton, Herbert responded to a friend who taxed him with taking 'too mean an employment, and too much below his birth' that 'the Domestick Servants of the King of Heaven, should be of the noblest Families on Earth'.

He would, he insisted, make 'Humility lovely in the eyes of all men'. Herbert's work is permeated with reference to service and to Christ as the type of the suffering servant, but his poetry is equally informed by a gentlemanly grasp of the chivalric code of obligation. Society, as we glimpse it in this world and the next, is hierarchical and ordered, and the human response to God's love can be expressed in terms of an almost feudal obligation. In 'The Collar' the remarkable evocation of impatient resistance to service ends as the 'raving' protests subside in response to the steady call of Christ.

The call to the ' Child' perhaps here both the disciple and a youth of gentle birth evokes the willing reply 'My Lord'. Herbert's vocation as a priest of the Church of England, and his loyalty to its rituals, calendar, and discipline is central both to his prose study of the ideal country parson, A Priest to the Temple published in The Remaines of that Sweet Singer of the Temple George Herbert in , and to his Latin sequence Musae Responsariae poems which assert the propriety of Anglican ceremonial and orders in the face of Puritan criticism.

It is however, in The Temple, the influential collection of his English poems published posthumously in , that Herbert most fully expresses his aspirations, failures, and triumphs as a priest and as a believer. Sections of The Temple are shaped according to the spiritual rhythms and the ups and downs of religious experience. More significantly, the volume as a whole possesses both an architectonic and a ritual patterning which derives from the shape of an English parish church and from the festivals and feasts celebrated within its walls.

The whole work is prefaced by a gnomic poetic expression of conventional moral advice to a young man. The title of this preliminary poem, 'The Church-Porch', serves as a reminder not only of a preparatory exercise before worship but also of the physical importance of the porch itself once the setting of important sections of certain church services.

The titles of poems in the body of the volume 'The Church' imply both a movement through the building noting its features 'The Altar', 'Chruch Monuments', 'Church-lock and key', 'The Church-floore', 'The Windows' and the significance of its liturgical commemorations 'Good Friday', 'Easter', 'H. Communion', 'Whitsunday', 'Sunday', 'Christma'. Feelings —affect— are manipulated by programs and codes.

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The world, whether real or generated by a computer program, or the immersive environment of a story, impinges on to the self, the self incorporates the world. The non-corpa, which occurs as a disembodied voice in one chapter of Ghostwritten and then a voice on the radio as well as an omniscient eye in the sky, is the ur-uncanny, if one wants to conceptualize it. This is precisely what Mitchell explores. The cultural uncanny that generates the exotic in Mitchell is these ghostly presences intersecting with the everyday life of people.

Berthold Schoene correctly points out that Mitchell imagine[s] globality by depicting worldwide human living in multifaceted, delicately entwined, serialized snapshots of the human condition, marked by global connectivity and virtual proximity as much as psychogeographical detachment and xenophobic segregation. Nayar within other frames of reference. This implies a recontextualization in a wholly new context. In the age of globalization, the Other culture is not distanced or framed as singular.

Mitchell does not posit pockets of Otherness, rather he shows how Otherness intersects with the global producing a new aesthetic. The exotic, in this reading, is the imagining of multiplicities all aligned along a continuum in a fetishizing of difference. That is, cosmopolitan thinking in Mitchell acknowledges and recognizes difference — a hallmark of the exotic — but does something more.

People Caspar and his Australian girlfriend Sherry meeting on trains, the fortuitous rescue of Marco by Mowleen from a certain road accident , a random military operation, and conspiracies bring people together. The transnational exotic is the process of random, nearly metaphysical, uncanny meetings through which Otherness enters the worlds of the characters.

We are struck by the randomness of meetings, chance encounters and cultural negotiations in Ghostwritten. This transnational cosmopolitanism does not try to frame difference either. The exotic, as Christa Knellwolf has argued, is primarily about contexts: This means, simply, that the different, the Other, is adjacent to the viewing point, even if this proximity is accidental. In other words, what I am proposing is that in the transnational exotic, the different is not out there, or unique: The uncanny is the presence of the Other in proximity producing a spectral cosmopolitanism.

The transnational exotic is the accidental cosmopolitan, or more accurately, a spectral cosmopolitanism. Why are these events so juxtaposed [in reportage, on TV]? What connects them to each other? Yet obviously most of them happen independently, without the actors being aware of each other or what the others are up to. The arbitrariness of their inclusion and juxtaposition … shows that the linkage between them is imagined. There is no intellectual project here, neither for the characters nor for us. True, it is cosmopolitan in the sense there is no hierarchic organization or ranking of cultures in Mitchell.

But suggesting that differences meet by accident rather than through agential effort is to show cosmopolitanism as a result of chaos rather than consciousness a defect somewhat remedied in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. There is no attempt at a cosmopolitan outlook or attitude. The transnational exotic is this mosaic where cultures meet and separate, meet and separate, in an endless proliferation of uncanny accidental encounters.

The contact zones are ephemeral. Thus, when Marco saves Mowleen from being hit by a cab, there is the ephemerality of an encounter, loaded with angst and sentiment, but nothing more.

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Mowleen proceeds to Ireland and her family, to be eventually taken away, under duress, by the American military to aid in their missile program, and Marco goes his way. This is a theatrical strategy, where people run into each other, mysterious encounters bring people face-to-face with the cultural The Grove. Exoticism is the surprising conjunction of random elements, but does not approximate to a conscious, political cosmopolitanism.

Another interpretation of this play of exoticism is possible. Exoticism emerges, as commentators have noted, around times of cultural anxieties Gallini. By producing narratives where worlds, rather than stay apart, collide and intersect while preserving their differences, Mitchell generates an exoticism of chiasmatic encounters. He does not propose assimilation, rather he suggests a mutuality of several streams running alongside each other, intersecting at points, and then diverging again.

Mitchell does not suggest an assimilative apparatus of globalizing cultures which Huggan sees as generating the postcolonial exotic, Rather he sees exoticism as the inevitable product of the supernatural, metaphysical cultural economy. What we do not see in Mitchell is the spectacle of differences retained in their pristine uniqueness. What we see is a spectacularization of intersecting differences, an exoticism of rhizomatic connections. Unlike the routine exoticism of the global north, there is no emphasis on marginality. Nayar cosmopolitanism is the strange, ghostly and inexplicable connections that constitute everyday life in a spectral globality or is it a globalization of the spectral?

Spectral cosmopolitanism does not always entail a knowledge of the other. The uncanny is itself about a crisis of perception, an epistemological uncertainty, as every single commentator on the uncanny has pointed out. Spectral cosmopolitanism in Mitchell is precisely this: It is in these uncertain, unstable uncanny encounters with the Other that the spectral cosmopolitanism emerges. It is between nature and culture, governed by laws we do not understand the uncanny is adjacent to the fantastic. Our lives ghostwritten by somebody else, somebody we might never meet, gives us a cosmopolitanism that is at once felt but not knowable.

Thus to behold a species is to respond with respect, to acknowledge that this Other is a part of us. This in no way negates the Other, neither does it assimilate the other. We become cultural and individual companion species, adjacent to, constitutive of the Others. This itself becomes a response to globalization. The world evolves in a symbiogenesis, in unexpected, uncanny ways because of these random, metaphysical connections. Minnesota University Press in has launched a new series, Posthumanities. The write-up on the series is illuminating and captures much of what the discipline, of the posthumanities, is likely to become: Posthumanities situates itself at a crossroads: Rather than simply reproducing established forms and methods of disciplinary knowledge, posthumanists confront how changes in society and culture require that scholars rethink what they do—theoretically, methodologically, and ethically.

In human and social geography in the age of globalization and electronic linkages we see a similar trend, as posthumanism speaks of the interconnectedness of human-non-human linkages. In Ghostwritten several tragedies, for example, are connected: Cavendish is also the guy who publishes the writings of Serendipity, the cult leader.

The subway gas attack is engineered by this cult. Mitchell thus proposes an exoticism of connections, not of separations. In a sense, therefore, Mitchell is offering a new form of globalism, where fate and tragedy link all of us. Nayar cosmopolitanism is the cultural arm of this globalization.

Exoticism works with fragmentation and dismemberment, where fragments of a culture, or particular objects, are synecdochic of a culture as a whole Fosdick That Mitchell chooses to show this via the metaphysical-supernatural is a different matter. Perhaps the uncanny is a descriptor of all contemporary lives, as companion species, in the world of spectral cosmopolitanism. Barringer, Tim and Tom Flynn, eds. Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum. London and New York: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York and London: Postcolonial Approaches to Exoticism.

The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, Common Skies, Divided Horizons. Iain Chambers and L. Ghosts, Doubles, and Writing. U of Minneapolis P, Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Hodder and Stoughton, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Exit, the Human…Pursued by a Cyborg. A Guide for the Perplexed. Posthuman and Other Possibilities.

Fictions of a New World Order. S and Roy Porter. U of Chicago P, Evan Thompson and Eleonor Rosch. Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Remarks on a Canny Moment. El paisaje resulta ser un tropo apropiado para examinar distintos estratos The Grove. Yet for the faithful reader of her poetry, coming across terms associated with land is commonplace: To be precise, four main notions of landscape are applied: Long in the past remains the criticism made to her poetry based on the idea that certain topics should never inhabit the high place of poetry.

This goal is accomplished through her employment of domestic and suburban images. Yet the poet further tackles the problem: There are younger women now, new poets Tall 39 But what is striking is that Boland comments on such phenomenon in terms of maps and cartography: Yeats and other contemporary male poets, yet the lack of an aesthetic place where to stand as a woman and a poet. Due to the absence of female models within the received heritage, Boland quenched her thirst for aesthetic guides in other traditions and turned to Sappho, Anna Akhmatova, Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath as literary guides which helped her in her distinct blending of public and private spheres.

However, Boland did not claim ownership of foremothers in the Irish literary tradition. Against Love Poetry exhibits the multifold nature of human relationships spanning from romantic love to lasting spiritual friendship. The overall tone of the collection is that of celebration: It is structured in two main sections: Boland understands that the female scientist is also a poet because of her ability to re-create reality with another language, an alternative code.

The Irish poet successfully portrays lovers, husbands and wives throughout the lifetime of their marriages. We were married in summer, thirty years ago. I have loved you deeply from that moment to this. I have loved other things as well. Why do I put these words side by side? Because I am a woman. Because marriage is not freedom. Therefore, every word here is written 9 The title coincides only with the American edition of the volume, published by W. In the Irish edition, by Carcanet Press, the title is Code.

A Conversation with Eavan Boland. Love poetry can do no justice to this. Here, instead, is a remembered story from a faraway history: A great king lost a war and was paraded in chains through the city of his enemy. They brought his wife and children to him—he showed no emotion. They brought his former courtiers—he showed no emotion.

They brought his old servant—only then did he break down and weep.

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But I saw my humanity look back at me there. It is to mark the contradictions of a daily love that I have written this. She particularly highlights that, contrary to received history, freedom permeates her love for both. Therefore, she is committed to publicly re-establishing the past as a scene of elements privately chosen, as well as to inhabit such scene with her own feelings as a woman in a tradition which has traditionally silenced her kind.

Therefore, a new terrain has to be explored or, at least, the edges of this well-known place need broadening. But such routine is regarded in very positive terms. Boland excels at portraying highly sensorial landscapes: Boland also suggests strong associations of images with wild animals in Irish land. Edged in dateless moonlight. The lovers thus fully integrate within the Irish landscape as its natural inhabitants. These mental landscapes are highly dependent on memory as a poetic device, that is, Boland feels the need to do justice to those spaces —and its inhabitants— suffering the violence of silence and oppression.

Therefore, she rescues from oblivion histories of the Irish past muted by the lack of interest by the social and political circumstances. So, the Irish poet sets herself an appalling task: Furthermore, Boland reaches further in her consideration when linking constellations to women to make their existence noticeable and meaningful: The ships, the compasses and night skies owe their being to these women in the sky: And the mill wheel turned so the mill could make paper and the paper money.

Boland, however, describes herself as nature poet portraying indoors and her poetry is frequently labeled as domestic. That reverence to nature poetry lies in the fact that Boland, like other nature poets, attempts to delve into the sight before her eyes in order to experience it by transcending the barriers of time and place.

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A famous battle happened in this valley. You never understood the nature poem. Till this moment—if these statements seem separate, unrelated, follow this silence to its edge and you will hear the history of air: After setting the scene, the critic continues: Boland has generously referred to her views of what a poem is pristinely made for: I write them to experience it. And it is in this reshaping that a fresh approach to the received reality takes place. Yet, not only history but myths are used in her poetic forging.

Boland puts the emphasis on such multiplicity: The place which existed before you and will continue after you have gone. Yet, the critic adds, the Poem is such place where she represents and recognizes herself In fact, one of the sources for her need to reconstruct lies in her early discovery that history and past were not synonym terms. The landscape that Boland reconstructs through her verse is not the suburb of Dundrum, not even the past as received from history; it rather springs to life thanks to her re-landscaping poetic vision. But Boland resists the labeling as feminist together with poetry: The poem is a place—at least for me—where all kinds of certainties stop.

All sorts of beliefs, convictions, certainties get left on that threshold. Simply because the poem is a place of experience and not a place of convictions. Nevertheless, Boland concedes what became so important for her when commenting on the poet Sylvia Plath: We always knew there was no Orpheus in Ireland. No music stored at the doors of hell. No god to make it. No wild beasts to weep and lie down to it. Poetry and other arts: In addition, photographs, paintings, engravings, sculptures, or other artworks commonly appear in her poetry. Photography, painting, music certainly excel as methods of expression.

Others, like photography for instance, are much better. However, Boland recognizes the advantage that poetry has over other arts: In the same line, Boland employs the metaphor of painting landscapes when expressing nuances of her poetry: There were no maps in our house when I was growing up, none that I remember. But there were maps at school. This poem begins—or at least I intended it to—where maps fail. I was certainly aware, long before I wrote this poem, that the act of mapmaking is an act of power and that I—as a poet, as a woman and as a witness to the strange Irish silences which met that mixture of identities—was more and more inclined to contest those acts of power.

He highlights that any kind of distance —physical, temporal, intellectual and affective— supplies the background setting in which the poet works out the imperfect and imprecise meaning of things But such play with distance or empty spaces between the portrayed objects is the mechanism which provides, as in painting, the perspective 14 A twin declaration is her famous statement: But such spaces are not simply absences.

Indeed, the limits of paintings are surveyed as well. In Night Feed Boland uses some paintings as poetic matter: And how much control Stand by the window: This leads her to poetically re-landscape—re-create, reshape, reconstruct— the past which remains out of history and out of maps and to meaningfully link it to the present. She employs memory as a means to particularly rescue disregarded instances of oppression and injustices from the past and again link it to the present.

Pictorial landscaping of these poetic concerns results in an appropriate metaphor for approaching the very many nuances of her craft, as well as it is for her, who continues to use these images liberally. An Interview with Eavan Boland. An International Journal of Contemporary Writing The Politics of Place in Boland and Heaney. Irish Women Writers and National Identities. U of Alabama P, New Essays in Literature and Culture. Gillis and Aaron Kelly.

The Poetry of Eavan Boland. U of Tennessee, Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. Sex, History, and Myth. Eavan Boland and the Reconstruction of Identity. A Review of Irish Books 7. The Edwin Mellen Press, A Review of Irish Books Toni Morrison, autobiography, novel, African American literature. Aunque el papel de la The Grove. Relying on memory and her own resources, she cobbled together neglected rites, merged Europe medicine with native, scripture with lore, and recalled or invented the hidden meaning of things. Found, in other words, a way to be in the world.

Toni Morrison, A Mercy Throughout her writing career, Toni Morrison has been often asked whether her novels can be analyzed from an autobiographical standpoint. From her earliest interviews, she has steadfastly disavowed any conscious use of autobiography in her writing, on the grounds that the core of her writing lies mainly in the realm of imagination, combined with personal and collective recollections and some research. Likewise, as a member of the African American community in the United States, she feels indebted to autobiography as a genre since it represents the origins of written African American literature in her country.

Literary archaeology is described by Morrison in the following terms: On the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply. As a matter of fact, the recollections Morrison uses in her narrative usually hark back to her own African American community —their socio-cultural dimension together with their ethnic lore— her family and even herself. Thus, her endeavors to explore the interior life of her ancestors, her family and the world she came from, imply an ensuing self-knowledge and encounter with her own self in what is clearly an implied autobiographical drive.

Duvall claims the interconnectedness between both genres which sometimes escapes the conscious intentions of the writer: Jones she leaves the door open to a deeply close connection between what is actually autobiographical and what is not.

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Morrison expresses this in-between position as follows: Her childhood and upbringing weigh heavily on all her works, as well as a special concern with ethnogenesis and identity politics, which is intimately connected to her own lived experience as an African American woman in the United States. Music, the oral tradition of storytelling, myth, dream The Grove. This is an autobiographical sketch of part of her family, some of whom appear in her novels.

A grandeur, a cohesiveness, a constant reminder of what they all had done to survive and even triumph over He spoke the language in the old way The song in Song of Solomon is a song from that wing of the family in Alabama. So I altered the words for Song of Solomon. Thus, there is a The Grove. Therefore, the name Son Green in Tar Baby appears as a doubly loaded name and attests to undeniable autobiographical connections. Claudia was born the same year as Morrison. Both come from poor but non-self-debased families, unlike the Breedlove family.

I have an older sister, but our relationship was not at all like the girls in The Bluest Eye. But here are scenes in The Bluest Eye that are bits and pieces—my father, he could be very aggressive about people who troubled us. The story line of a young girl who hankers after blue eyes was also taken The Grove. The ending is highly revealing in this respect: I was Pecola, Claudia And I fell in love with myself. I reclaimed myself and the world—a real revelation. She remembers overhearing her mother and other women talk about a woman named Hannah Peace in a way that implied there was some kind of unspeakable secret around her.

Female bonding will reappear as a main thematic line in Love. The theme of the Great Migration of African Americans to the North at the beginning of the twentieth century will appear again in Jazz. Milkman Dead, Son Green, Sethe, Joe and Violet Trace, Heed and Christine Cosey and Florens are some examples of characters re-born to a renewed identity, after either having confronted a painful past or having acknowledged and claimed a previously disavowed ethno- cultural and ancestral baggage.

Brought up in a working-class family in the steel town of Lorain, Ohio, she soon learned the vital importance of being faithful to oneself and to family. To her father, who during his upbringing in the South had lived amidst racism and violence against African Americans, whites were inferior to blacks precisely because of their amorality and inhumanity.

Although she was raised in a multicultural town where workers from different European origins lived and there were not actually black neighborhoods, she could still experience some instances of segregation in places which were reserved to whites only. Thus, she soon learned about race and its implications from her parents and grandparents.

Whereas her father and grandfather were wary of whites and had no hope of change, her mother and grandmother held a more optimistic view on the issue of racism and oppression. At home, with your people. Just go to work; get your money and come on home. This is what I heard: Whatever the work, do it well, not for the boss but for yourself.

Your real life is with us, your family. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are. On another occasion, Morrison tells another lesson from her father related to work and dignity. He worked as a ship welder and Morrison remembers how one day he told her he had welded such a perfect seam that he had signed his name on it. When his daughter, Morrison, asked him what the use was of a signed work nobody would ever see, his father provided another sustaining lesson: The idea of survival is very much in keeping with that of ancestral connection.

Conversations with the dead and visitations from the beyond are abundant in her books. Such concern for the ancestors has a lot to do with her background, both with her African American milieu and with her own family, where ancestors and the supernatural were one more element of their daily lives. The Ancestor as Foundation. And it is out of these learned and selected attitudes that I look at the quality of life for my people in this country now. Ancestral characters meddle in spiritual matters and provide guidance and solace to others. They are the connection with spirits of the dead.

In the idea of the black outlaw woman coalesces supernaturalism, mother wit, tricksterism and healing skills. Although some of these women do not actually perform as a literal healer or conjure woman, all of them provoke to some degree The Grove. They came for other kinds of medical care too. At home she grew up immersed in the tradition of storytelling, listening to ghost stories told by her parents and her grandmother kept a dream book to interpret the dream symbols. Although Morrison converted to Catholicism when she was a teenager Li 12 , she draws on both Catholic religion and African American religious beliefs and her novels are good proof of this hybridity.

When talking about her novel Paradise, the author points to this conscious religious syncretism, resorting once again to autobiographical elements: First, we live in a dual existence. We are American citizens, yet, we are not. We have one identity that are two identities, Secondly, we may embody a predisposition to diunity that arises from our African identity.

As such, their ambiguous and indeterminate attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols, In fact, their real identity or nature is not always clear and they leave the door open to multiple interpretations by the reader. Their marked bodies in most cases hint to a supernatural connection. In her interview with Cecil Brown, she states: Thus, by advocating liminality, in- betweenness, paradoxes and defending the merging of different points of view and diverse voices in her work, Morrison is once again taking the cue from the lessons she learned from her family and the richness of her ethno-cultural background.

In a similar vein, 4 According to Bass, conjurers are usually physically marked by a birthmark or red eyes, for example Although Morrison has always tried not to talk about her husband and her divorce, she has nonetheless referred to her married life in the following terms: When she is actually asked about her diverse roles in life, she is prompt to assert that nothing is as important to her in life as writing, except her being a mother to her children Ross.

Morrison has found in writing her safe haven and her life, a path to self-discovery through the recollections and imaginative exploration of her personal experience and that of her family and community. A Collection of Critical Essays.

Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: An Interview with Toni Morrison. Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore. University Press of Mississippi, What Moves at the Margin: Beyond Black or White: The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern Blackness.

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Princeton University Press, Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. A Conversation with Toni Morrison. Harding, Wendy and Jacky Martin. A World of Difference: Originally published in Other Voices Explorations in Literary Criticism. Jones and Audrey L. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Marlo Thomas New York: Simon and Schuster, , The Art and Craft of Memoir. Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison. Originally published in Southern Review McGraw Hill, , The Art of Fiction.

Originally published in Massachusetts Review 18 Cornell University Press, Such a sisterhood, which can be found in a wide range of circumstances, operates as a counterbalance or compensation for the hardness of the personal and social conditions surrounding female characters.

To support this thesis this paper will analyze two African novels which share the same colour1 in their title: In both books this colour shares a similar symbolic meaning that will be explained in the article. Hopefully, by the end of this paper, readers will have been shown that sisterhood is an essential element, as well as a repeated behavioral model, in the literature written by African women.

However, as she is not an African but an Afro-American woman writer, I have purposely left it out of my analysis. In order to clarify key concepts, I have considered relevant to begin with an explanation of the meaning, connotations and different interpretations of the word sisterhood. Besides, this term does not have an alternative concept —as womanism versus feminism3— and, on the other hand, it also leads to shortcomings since it assumes solidarity among women rather than considering it a goal to be reached, as I will explain in the next paragraphs.

Due to this perception, the feminist ideology could not identify itself with a word referring to motherhood because this was a doomed concept, something that its followers wanted to avoid. On the other hand, feminist women found it possible to identify themselves with sisters who feared the father and wanted to become separated from their mothers: The mother-daughter relationship was hierarchical, but sisters were equal. Sisterhood, which developed to signal the gender exclusivity necessary for white women to escape male control, also symbolized common victimhood and shared oppression, which made for equal relations and solidarity.

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Here in lies the historical and cultural roots of sisterhood. This author holds the view that western feminist discourses follow the same path, since they consider the white woman as the general rule and the model to look at. On the other hand, western feminists were the ones to study, to create knowledge and do research, thus making clear that they were intellectually superior to all the other women. Besides, from the west, many African traditions are viewed as barbaric because their own perspectives or contexts have not been considered.

Once explained the connotations of the term sisterhood, I will start the analysis of the two novels considered in this article. Both book titles possess a symbolic content. Their friendship bond is strong, The Grove. By that turning point of her existence, she has learnt that the person who has been battered by life is the most resilient against adversities. Her husband, who had never shown any love or respect towards her, has died; her in-laws have thrown her and her children away from their former home and, in spite of all these adversities, Kauna even dares to dream with a better future and with worthwhile men, as her farewell conversation with her friend Ali shows: You have not seen anything yet.

You know what happens to the mahangu millet? She never complains about them, even though it is going to be much harder to start a new life with the children under her charge, but in African societies motherhood4 is extremely valued and very rarely will a woman reject her maternal responsibilities.

However, Kauna does not accept passively tradition —which keeps women almost permanently pregnant— but, on the contrary, she secretly takes contraceptives that Sustera, the local nurse, has provided her. Nevertheless she does it in secret as Kauna knows that, if her husband knew it, he would kill her and the nurse. This is a fact that does not only appear in this novel but in many others written by African women.

While a few items will traditionally be sold by men, most of the trading activity is conducted by women.