Modelling the African Woman in Alice Salomé Ngah Ateba’s Le Féminin humain Prolegomena to a Feminist Ethopoetics

Résumé

Alice S. Ngah’s Le Féminin humain: Pensées poétiques et les éthiques des vies de
femme is a set of poems that presents holistic issues about women. These poems depict the
stereotypes attributed to women by the macho society. According to machismo, women
appear as the weaker sex. They assume subsidiary roles in a world where gender partnership
is increasingly claimed in terms of parity in serious social governance projects. How does
biology work to undermine the dynamics of living together that should govern the social relations
between the sexes and the genders who are called upon to work together to build a new world? By
building on feminist antinaturalism, a theory to which we add the semiotics of poetry, we
show that in the end, Alice S. Ngah Ateba’s text draws the contours of feminist ethopoetics
in a world. This feminist variant, whose drop point is neo-feminism, militates for the
rehabilitation of women. It urges action, thus going beyond the feminism of demonstrations
and demands that Molara Ogundipe Leslie represses, through her Stiwanism.