Juletane by Myriam Warner-Vieyra is a novel about woman's alienation, a struggle against the textual diagrams and the representations imposed on the central characters of Juletane and Hélène. The power structures establish the relative power of the female as wife in Senegalese society according to her access to money, which then determines the type and size of space she may occupy. For both of the central characters, Juletane's journal with its clearly-defined spatial relationships acts as a catalyst. In writing the journal, Juletane begins to author her own existence through questioning "comment suis-je déscendue dans ce puits de misère" 1 ; through reading the journal, Hélène reconstitutes her identity alongside Juletane's.
As the outside reader, we are brought to question cultural assumptions not just in Sénégal, but also in a broader context to which Hélène serves as a link. The destabilizing of the social paradigm occurs not only on a thematic level, but also in Warner-Vieyra's writing. The bifurcation of the speaking voice and the layers of memory create a text with many folds both between the voices and within each of them, a text which deliberately opposes itself to a linear narrative. Consequently, Warner-Vieyra and Juletane are new cartographers of textual space. What of Hélène? She is not the narrating subject of either text, she is only the "destinataire" of Juletane's and the central figure of the middle text. As I will show, the processes of reading and of writing women into texts are interdependent given Juletane's struggle with her intersticial position in society, thereby linking sexual, textual and social space.
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1 Myriam Warner-Vieyra. Juletane. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1982. 18.