In their novels, Ken Bugni and Fatou Diome portray fragile female identities characterized by a cultural conflict between Africa and Europe, staging an aesthetic of vulnerability of un-heard voices, dealing with the topics of returning and remaining and the struggle for recognition. The power and strength associated with the erotic promise of the female body is under constant threat from self- and external exploitation. The un-heard female voices try to make themselves heard and to create identities of empowerment in literary writing, to express the demand to be perceived and to be healed, both in the autobiographical and the fictional dimension. The novels emphasize the ambivalence between the fascination with and rejection of the foreign culture. The protagonists experience the hybridity of the narrative identity as a painful wound that requires the experience of return to be healed.