Writing resilience
Following an online discussion with Ivorian writer Véronique Tadjo at Emory University in March 2022, this interview examines the notion of writing resilience in Tadjo’s work. Writing resilience is as much the description of the resilience process after a disaster as it is the potential resilience i...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Liverpool University Press
2023-06-01
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| Series: | Francosphères |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/franc.2023.6 |
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| Summary: | Following an online discussion with Ivorian writer Véronique Tadjo at Emory University in March 2022, this interview examines the notion of writing resilience in Tadjo’s work. Writing resilience is as much the description of the resilience process after a disaster as it is the potential resilience in the very act of writing. With this dual vision of resilience, Tadjo discusses the imperfect, nonlinear, dynamic process of resilience as theorized and practiced in her own creation. In her literary production, from Latérite (1984) and L’Ombre d’Imana (2001) to En compagnie des hommes (2017), Tadjo voices the voiceless, the misunderstood, and the silenced. An ethical call courses through her work, urging readers to decentre narratives from a single dominating voice. Indeed, her polyphonic style entails a vision of our contemporary world as multiple, fragmented, and yet inherently intertwined. In that sense, Tadjo also provides a space for nonhuman perspectives, as is the case in En compagnie des hommes, which situates Ebola crisis within an exploited ecosystem, where the crisis is seen through the eyes of the bats, the baobab, and the virus itself. More than a final goal, resilience reveals itself as a concept that permeates and frames her art, be it writing, oral literature, drawing, or painting. |
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| ISSN: | 2046-3820 2046-3839 |