ABSTRACT
This study, using Michelle Cliff’s Abeng and Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl Brownstones, explores these novels as coming of age narratives that challenge the bildungsroman genre and these novels are therefore placed in a new theoretical model termed Yere-wolo. Cliff and Marshall illuminate the need for a reevaluation of the bildungsroman genre. The construction of, Toward a Theory of Yere-wolo, emerges out of the unsettling disposition of black female development within the bildungsroman genre. The critics within this genre have failed to adequately address obstacles that are specific to black female identity construction. This study illustrates how a theory of Yere-wolo offers a space for a diverse reading of the coming of age novels of black women. Toward a Theory of Yere-wolo offers a space in which differences in the identity construction of various black women is shared. If identity constitutes a variety of meanings, including race, gender, and class, then it is imperative that authors writing about identity construction have a space to do so. Cliff’s construction of Clare’s identity differs greatly from Marshall’s construction of Selina’s. Under the umbrella of bildungsroman, black bildungsroman, and female bildungsroman, the protagonist’s development is universalized as woman or black, with little room for different subject positions. A marginal and monolithic view of black women has been the tendency amongst essentialists, and female bildungsroman scholars. However, the construction of a theory of Yere-wolo is centered on the experiences of black women and it opens a space for various aspects of black female development that have been erased from contemporary scholarship.
