Femigritude Writers: Reclaiming the Self Through Return and Agency

Ernest Cole’s Migration and Return in Modern African Literature: Black Bodies in White Spaces (2025) provides a critical framework for understanding how literature captures the complex realities of African mobility. This study examines Fatou Diome’s Ventre d’Atlantique, Calixthe Beyala’s Tu t’appelleras Tanga, Aminata Sow Fall’s Douceur de bercail, and Monique Ilboudo’s Si loin de ma vieto argue that post-migration life in the West is structured by racialized and ethnicized exclusion, where Blackness places African migrants at the margins of social, economic, and political hierarchies. Such precarity threatens the promise of success and frequently results in psychological difficulties. In response to the question about "Literature, what for?" this essay argues that through the writings of these femigritude writers, return is portrayed not only as option but as an agency for African women rather than as failure. Through Cole’s concept of “constructive liminality,” these texts depict characters navigating dual nationalities, blending Western experiences with Indigenous knowledge systems to forge new pathways for identity, belonging, and national development. In doing so, they redefine African diaspora literature as a site of self-reclamation, resilience, and transformative possibility. Keywords: Femigritude, Migration, Return, Agency, Constructive Liminality