This book analyzes the various interfaces between language, culture, gender(woman), history and writing in Senegalese writer Mariama Ba's Une si longue lettre (So Long A Letter), South African(Botswana) writer Bessie Head's A Question of Power, and Toni Morrison's Pulitzer winning book Beloved. Postcolonial or post-slavery contexts denying power and legitimacy to women through the written word frame all three contexts. Ramatoulaye (Ba's heroine) breaks the Muslim convention of mirasse to speak out against a patriarchal society which denies women self-legitimacy through language. Bessie Head...