Ahmadou Kourouma, entre poétique romanesque et littérature politique by Patrick Voisin (review)

This volume of essays represents an important contribution to the growing body of critical work devoted to the writings of Ahmadou Kourouma. Two years on from his participation in the major colloquium held in Abidjan in 2013, which marked the tenth anniversary of Kourouma’s death, Patrick Voisin has gone on to assemble a further substantial body of contributions on the Ivorian novelist’s output. Although the volume is not ostensibly focused on Kourouma’s first novel, Les Soleils des indépendances (1968), it so happens that the twenty or so pieces contained within it only make occasional mention of other writings by Kourouma. This can be explained, no doubt, by the decision in 2011 to include Les Soleils des indépendances among the handful of texts on the programme of study for the entrance examinations to the Écoles normales supérieures in France. The volume may therefore be seen as a very useful response to the thirst among the various classes préparatoires for critical engagements with Kourouma’s first novel. As the volume’s title suggests, Voisin has identified the highly topical dualism of poetics and/or politics as a structuring device for the project as a whole, and he thereby signals his desire to nudge Kourouma criticism (indeed critical responses to francophone literary work more generally) away from the periphery into a more mainstream position. This concern, essentially about the politics of reception, underpins his opening essay, ‘846 . . . une côte mal taillée pour Kourouma’, in which he argues passionately for a dismantling of the French/francophone classificatory divide. This is, of course, well-trodden territory ever since demands dating back to the 1980s that French literature should be seen as a subset of francophone literature rather than the inverse. If Voisin has decided to take up this argument once again it is with the clear intention of demonstrating that Kourouma is no minor literary figure to be relativized by the ‘francophone’ label; quite the contrary, as his concluding essay on ‘Valeur des Soleils des indépendances’ argues: Kourouma’s achievement merits a far more positive assessment. Sandwiched between Voisin’s opening and closing essays, the various contributions rehearse diverse arguments for foregrounding either Kourouma’s political commitment or his idiosyncratic poetics. Among the more thought-provoking pieces are those by Tanella Boni, Jean-Pierre Fewou Ngouloure, and Marion Mas. As is to be expected in a volume of this nature, however, the degree to which individual essays engage with the overarching theme is variable, to say the least, but this does not detract from the overall value of the collection. In any event, readers will undoubtedly dip into this volume rather than expect it to offer a sustained line of argument. What it clearly demonstrates, as the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Les Soleils approaches, is that interest in Kourouma and his novel is by no means on the wane.