Criticism, Écriture, and Orality in the African Novel: Oral Discourse in Aminata Sow Fall’s Work

The literary field in Africa came into emergence as a result of a collective yearning for lesser dependency on the symbolic constraints the Western center is forcing on its margins. Granted that a work sets itself up by setting up its own context, and that the African context stands out as one where oral literature is still alive in society, the manifestation of expressive forms associated with traditional literature in a novel must carry heavy weight in an interpretation of African works. For that reason, this essay will argue that, through her “smuggling” of narrative forms drawn from oral literature, Aminata Sow Fall’s fiction testifies to an oral discursivity at work in the novel. The archi-textual approach focuses on various strategies the Senegalese woman writer resorts to in order to inscribe, deep within her creative work in French, a traditional universe hitherto conveyed through oral forms of expression.