Pour Ahmadou Kourouma: (en)jeux et ambivalence de la fiction by Justin K. Bisanswa (review)

At various points in this excellent critique of Ahmadou Kourouma's work, Justin K. Bisanswa puts us on our guard against some of the failings of earlier Kourouma criticism, in particular a tendency to take at face value many of the pronouncements made by the author himself when questioned about his writings. This is good advice and Kourouma himself would probably have agreed with Bisanswa on the point. Any private astonishment and disappointment Kourouma felt about the tone and direction of critical responses to his work (his second novel, Monnè, outrages et défis, in particular) were carefully managed in the course of the numerous public engagements that he undertook. Unlike a great many critiques of Kourouma's work, Bisanswa's detailed and highly perspicacious analysis of the novels makes no attempt to draw on such debates. It remains intensely focused on the novels themselves, relying on close textual readings to focus discussion on areas that have all too frequently been accorded scant attention. For once, Kourouma's reputation as linguistic innovator, iconoclast, political dissident is accorded no explicatory value for the work he produced. Instead, refreshingly, Bisanswa concerns himself with Kourouma's poetics in the broadest sense of the term: his critique addresses the processes of fabrication of the texts, their rhetorical underpinning, the technical aspects of the writing, the linguistic tics, habits, and subterfuges that Kourouma employs whether these be at the level of lexis, syntax, and phrasing, or at the level of macro-structural organization. The main lines of enquiry will, however, be immediately recognizable to Kourouma scholars. For example, running throughout the book is a preoccupation with the way Kourouma draws on the resources of the African oral heritage, particularly the epic genre but also proverbs, hunters' tales, songs, and specific forms of enunciation and performance, in order to create a distinctive novelistic style that incorporates a range of registers, multiple voices, and switches in narrative focalization. This hybridity is indissociable from the humour and the irony (Bisanswa's 'ambivalence') that is so characteristic of Kourouma's method. Complementary to this narratological emphasis is the importance accorded, in the second part of the book, to Kourouma's exploration of what Bisanswa describes as 'sociologies de terrain' (p. 202). Bisanswa argues convincingly that Kourouma sees individuals as issuing from a collectivity which is vital to their sense of identity but through which they are also subjected to various constraints. The historical and political themes that are so clearly in evidence in all of Kourouma's novels can thus be incorporated into Bisanswa's critique as so many forms of 'social' activity writ large. Indeed Kourouma's writing about oppression, domination, colonial, and postcolonial exploitation, the experience of child soldiers and other such themes, is undertaken as a means, less of 'telling a story' than of creating knowledge about them and about ourselves. Kourouma's practice as a writer thus emerges as the central issue explored in this book, making it a telling contribution to Kourouma criticism to date.