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Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0006-6649-3823

Abstract

In order to analyze how female Burkinabè writers and filmmakers contribute to the decolonial endeavor of recovering knowledge, voice, and historical agency following colonial disruption, this paper introduces the idea of femo loquens, a gendered extension of homo loquens as theorized by François Ngoa Kodena. I contend that fiction makers like Apolline Traoré in her movie Sira, Monique Ilboudo in her novel Carrefour des veuves, and Roukiata Ouedraogo in herr novel Le petit mari serve as sofian thinkers whose artistic creations interact with gendered memory and postcolonial realities, drawing on Kodena's Afrosofian philosophy, which emphasizes epistemic plurality, cosmological rootedness, and ethical responsibility. Kodena contends that texts are mirrors retrospective, circumstantial, and forward-looking reactions to historical, placed circumstances. The works of these women emerge as socio-epistemic objects from a web of cosmological, axiological, and linguistic exchanges. In these stories, widowhood, displacement, caregiving, and insecurity are addressed while reclaiming feminine as a driver of cosmic action and cultural continuity. Regarding Kodena's call for Africa to be "Sphinx-like," their embodied ethics and Multifacet storytelling help the African woman in reclaiming her geo-historical destiny through the principles of collaboration and innovation. This study examines how these works position the speaking woman femo loquens as both subject and thinker, rethinking gender beyond colonial boundaries and contributing to a broader Afrosofian worldview. They support feminist resistance within indigenous systems of knowing and planetary belonging by contributing to the restoration of Africa's history and geopolitical dignity via narrative, memory, and care.

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