Frieda Ekotto is a French-speaking African woman who writes novels and studies literature. She is a professor at the University of Michigan, where she teaches about African American and African cultures and compares literature from different places. She is currently a Hunting Family Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities. She is most famous for her novels that explore gender and sexuality in Sub-Saharan Africa. She also writes about the French writer Jean Genet, especially analyzing his prison writings and how he influenced ideas about race in French-speaking countries. Her research and teaching focus on literature, film, race, and law in French-speaking regions, including France, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Maghreb.
Life
Frieda Ekotto was born in Cameroon and grew up in Switzerland. She earned her B.A. from Colorado College in 1986 and her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Minnesota in 1994. She received the important Chateaubriand fellowship to finish her dissertation. In 1994, she started working at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She has held teaching and leadership roles at Concordia Language Villages in Minnesota, University of Technology in Sydney, Sichuan University, and a group of universities in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan located in Aix-en-Provence, France.
Creative writing
Ekotto's recent novel, Chuchote pas trop/Don't Whisper Too Much, was published by the French publishing company L'Harmattan in 2005. The story follows a romantic relationship between two women, Siliki and Ada. Siliki has a disability and is older than Ada. Their love and connection are shown through writing, which they use to communicate. The name "Siliki" means "silk" in Douala, which is Ekotto's native language. In an interview, Ekotto explained that the novel's focus on same-sex love made it difficult to find a publisher in Africa, as it was the first African book to portray a positive relationship between women. Don't Whisper Too Much and Portrait of A Young Artiste from Bona Mbella, translated into English by Corine Tachtiris, were published by Bucknell University Press in 2019. Ekotto's writing style is known to be inspired by the author Jean Genet.
Critical work
Ekotto's research focuses on the work of Jean Genet and the study of film and literature in French-speaking countries. In her first book, L’Ecriture carcérale et le discours juridique chez Genet/Prison Writing and Legal Discourse in Jean Genet (L'Harmattan, 2001), she examined how prisoners in French literature use writing as a form of "minor literature," a concept introduced by philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In this book, Ekotto explored how prisoners in literature express the effects of legal punishment and imprisonment through the language and styles used in writing.
Her later work expanded to examine how crime and race are shaped by legal and political systems. In her second book, What Color is Black? Race and Sex across the French Atlantic (Lexington, 2011), she argued that the French Atlantic region has influenced ideas about race, slavery, and colonialism in the Atlantic World by contributing a unique French philosophical perspective to the Civil Rights movement. Through analysis of Jean Genet's play Les Nègres/The Blacks, Ekotto explained how Genet connected themes of African-American pride and anger in the Civil Rights Movement with the Francophone Négritude movement.
Throughout her career, Ekotto has studied how cultural symbols can both inspire and limit creative expression. In her recent edited collection on Jean Genet, Toutes Les Images du language: Jean Genet, she explored the role of stereotypes in institutions. In an interview, Ekotto stated, "Confinement is a serious issue for me—and it is not just about being locked up in a prison or behind closed doors. What I mean by confinement is the feeling of not being free, of being unable to fully take part in the world because of things like race, gender, or sexual orientation. In a way, you are never truly free to do what you want because outside forces control many aspects of life."
Race and Sex across the French Atlantic
In Race and Sex across the French Atlantic, Ekotto examines Jean Genet's play Les Nègres/The Blacks from the 1960s United States to explore the Civil Rights Movement, riots in the Parisian banlieues (suburbs), and abstract French theatre. By connecting these three events, Ekotto explains that the French Atlantic represents "a different way of thinking and understanding black identity throughout history."
The first chapter of the book discusses the African-American playwright Lorraine Hansberry's reaction to Les Nègres/The Blacks. The second chapter explores the history of the French term "nègre" and the English term "nigger," and how these words created differences in European and United States cultural discussions. The third chapter uses Faïze Guène's Kiffe, kiffe demain to connect French colonial history to the 2009 Parisian riots. The final chapter closely analyzes Dany Laferrière's Comment faire l'amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer/How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired to study how sexuality influences the creation of differences. Roxanna Curto wrote about the book, stating, "Ekotto makes a strong case for looking at issues across the Atlantic, and clearly shows how French literary works challenge Western philosophy."