Le Ventre De l’atlantique: a dialogical analysis of the ideological valuation of a woman on the border
Dialogism. Feminine ideological formation. Hybridization. Le ventre de l’atlantique.
Topics related to (im)migration have continuously been the focus of social, political and academic discussions. Literature, ideologically filled with axiological positions in regard to them, represents fictional worlds in which the migration experience becomes an arena of discourses that reflect and refract the process of hyphenation of migrating characters. Among these discourses, we find the one related to women and their position in social patriarchy. This research aims, thus, to participate in this dialogue by analyzing the novel Le ventre de l’atlantique by Fatou Diome (2003), the corpus of this study, whose plot is centered around the migration experience. Theoretically based on dialogism (BAKHTIN, 2011; 2015; 2016; 2017; VOLOCHÍNOV, 2013; VOLÓCHINOV, 2017), discussing concepts, such as word, ideology, dialogism, utterance, discourse in life and in art as well as discourse in the novel, we seek to understand the feminine ideological formation of a woman on the border in the novel. Methodologically, we adopted Volochínov’s (2013) sociological analysis, through which an analysis must start from the materiality of the text, which, as the word, an ideological sign (VOLÓCHINOV, 2017), is its material and instrument, seeks social significance (BAKHTIN, 2015). Therefore, through discourses by and about Salie, the protagonist of Le ventre de l’atlantique, we tried to understand her ideological formation, which, according to Bakhtin (2015), is a process of ongoing battle between authoritative and internally persuasive discourses. We found that the battle between these discourses in a border situation allowed her, through the selective assimilation of discourses (BAKHTIN, 2015), to recognize herself as belonging here and there, that is, as a woman to whom the term “hybridization” does not mean imprisonment to the discourse of tradition anymore; now it means the freedom of the migration experience.