Where Prolixity is Art: Understanding the Francophone African Novels of Ahmadou Kourouma

Abstract

Understanding the fiction of the West African Ivorian writer, Ahmadou Kourouma has remained a challenge to critics primarily due to his powerful use of African rhythm, register and lexicon to create a new French through Malinke, his mother tongue. Although language is central to the understanding of Francophone literature, the classical approach has consisted in narrowly focusing on language from a linguistic point of view. Arguing that literary criticism limited to the isolated meditation on textual or contextual parameters ignores the creative dimension of art in the novel, this paper attempts to adopt Bakhtin's poetics of the dialogical to Kourouma's novel, Allah is Not Obliged, to understand the living principle (of dialogic threads) that animates and binds the entire work.