Event Details

Tuesday February 20th in HUM 401 at 4:45pm, Monique Ilboudo will be talking about  " Être une femme au pays des hommes intègres".

Monique Ilboudo (born 1959) is an author and human rights activist from Burkina Faso. She was  Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Burkina Faso to the Nordic and Baltic countries.

Ilboudo has written many articles and several books, and is a major figure in Francophone African literature.[6] In addition to her "Féminin Pluriel" column, she often contributed articles to the weekly Le Regard.[1] In the preface to the third volume of collected articles from "Féminin Pluriel" she wrote:

"If women take to writing a little more, take the microphone or the camera, they will not be so underrepresented in the media, which focus almost exclusively on keeping us informed of daily life, but life without women, is that really life? Men speak of women, yes, but the image that they present of them is not always very positive, and above all, it's not always an image of their reality: the aim is only to legitimize the established order in society and the position of the woman within it. This is a real danger and serious obstacle to change of attitudes relative to the current role"

Ilboudo received the national first prize for Best Novel with her 1992 Le Mal de Peau (The Ill of the Skin). The novel deals sensitively with subjects such as the colonial experience, prejudice and miscegenation. Murekatete, a novel written as part of the project "Rwanda, writing as a duty of memory", was published in 2001. Murekatete is the name of a woman, and means "let her live". The woman is haunted by memories of the Rwandan genocide. Trying to overcome her complex and return to normal life, she and her husband visit the memorial site at Murambi. The move only makes the problem worse. The story is written in the first person, in few words. In 2006, Ilboudo published Droit de cité, être femme au Burkina Faso (Freedom of the City, being a woman in Burkina Faso). ( Source Wikipedia)