Examines the novels of two African writers to determine the nature of the black African women's experience. Attempts to determine how this experience can be analyzed in depth and breadth by progressing through four feminist perspectives: (1) personal, (2) social, (3) multicultural, and (4) spiritual/philosophical. (Author/SA)

Discusses the literary style of Bildungsroman of various West Indian and American writers. The need of various authors to look back, to reassess one's childhood from the vantage point of maturity is discussed as it relates to the wishes to establish an authoritative basis of experience and reinterpret a fragmentary past. (SA)