ABSTRACT
Boni's writing is resistant reading of power in its complex colonial, neocolonial, patriarchal, discursive, and material manifestations to unsettle power's epistemology, its claims to truth, and its strategies of representation. Boni uses minority discourse and subaltern communication perspectives of mediation that examine the means by which marginalized people have a voice in society by re-focalizing and subverting hegemonic discourse through narrations that articulate their identities, interests, anxieties, and dedications. Engaged with feminine discourse, Boni has written cautionary essays since the 1990s decrying the xenophobic nature of government-sanctioned ivoirité (Ivorian-ness) in Côte d’Ivoire. Forced into exile owing to the subsequent crisis (2000–2010), she wrote Matins de couvre-feu (Mornings under Curfew) (2005), an allegorical novel in which the woman's status as a second-class citizen is equated with that of a foreigner in a xenophobic state. My analysis explores the internalization of national politics through the domestication of an anonymous Narratrice who is placed under house arrest. Thereafter, Kanga Ba, a victim of xenophobic nationalism, is used to substantiate the equation of the woman's social and political marginalization as being that of the foreigner. Boni's representational framework ultimately subverts the very notion of a public/domestic dichotomy through narrative strategies that illustrate the porous nature of both spaces, thus eliding the separation between private and national experiences.
