Your Name Shall Be Tanga

Calixthe Beyala has an unflinching, raw way of exploring gender and exploitation of women by family and men. I admired this rawness but I felt that as the story progressed the scenes of abuse, of sex, of scatological references, became so frequent that they lost their power. Instead of moving me, they merely irritated me. Characters often read as if the writer could not resist having them be the worst they could possibly be. The writing was interesting, with nice turns of phrase, although there were too many one-word sentences. Above all, there was that unapologetically angry sense underlying the story that impressed me very much. It is as if Beyala, in this book, refuses to make nice, chooses her own honesty above anything else, and for this she gets my respect.