Gender Differentiation In God's Bits Of Wood

Looking back on the oral storytelling approaches we learned during the first part of the semester, one in particular can be applied to God’s Bits of Wood by Ousmane Sembène. The focus on gender differentiation within rites of passages is very prevalent in this novel. By manipulating a typical rite of passage story, using a woman as opposed to a man, Sembène is able to communicate his personal take on society’s conceptions of gender. He aims to comment on the idea that men need women to work with them to achieve something great. Women can be just as powerful and accomplished as men.

N’Deye Touti, a young African woman, is initially enamored with the thought of any French fashions and has the goal of being a black Frenchwoman. She wants nothing to do with her own African culture. “She lived in a kind of separate world; the reading she did…made her part of a universe in which her own people had no place, and by the same token she no longer had a place in theirs.” (57). As an educated woman she sees value in the French culture and is enamored with the idea of monogamist relationships, something that her polygamist African culture doesn't follow. N’Deye wants nothing to do with the strike and contributes very little to the efforts that her

female counterparts put forth. As the story progresses we see her begin to go through a rite of passage and a change in her attitude occurs. She moves from the first stage of negritude, in which she cuts herself off from her African past to the second stage of change.
In her second stage, she begins to accept her African roots. This change begins when she overhears the white men referring to Africans as “savages” and to her in sexist ways. “’They’re nothing but savages,’ the officer said. ‘Good God! Look at the woman over there! Look what she’s doing in plain view of everybody! Savages!” (117). This sparks anger in N’Deye and she begins to form negative feelings about the white colonial men. She is flustered, embarrassed and ashamed that someone like her would be categorized as a savage. It immediately makes her rethink her idea of being a black Frenchwoman, as she doesn't want to be associated with a group that calls her own people savages.
Bakayoko contributes to her final transformation when he tells her there are many ways to prostitute oneself and that Penda, a prostitute, was a better person than N’Deye Touti. In this conversation with Bakayoko, N’Deye describes the realization she comes to about learning to accept African traditions instead of hating them. As her rite of passage comes to a close and this event occurs, she involves herself actively in the strike. “…Each day after that, accompanied by Maimouna and little Anta, she rolled the big cask and well, filled it, and brought it back to N’Diayene. Everyone still called her ‘mad’mizelle’, but now there was admiration and affection in their use of he word.” (227) Her nickname epitomizes the entirety of her rite of passage, from a woman obsessed with every part of French culture to a woman fighting against colonialism in the strike; she went through a dramatic change.
In this case, Ousmane Sembène manipulated the typical rite of passage to communicate his viewpoint and the viewpoints of the strikers on society’s conceptions of gender.

Previously, there was an inequality between women and men, but during the strike we see many independent women, like N’Deye, join in the effort to defeat colonialism and protest separating people based on the color of their skin. Stereotypes are broken and women take initiative in fighting for their beliefs. The world in this novel represents an in-between world because the strike being depicted is fictional. The societal norms of gender inequality are commented on and the storyteller tries to examine a world in which women and men work together to enact a

change.