Gender and Multiplicity in Véronique Tadjo's Reine Pokou

This article addresses the aesthetic and the ethics of multiplicity in Véronique Tadjo's novella, Reine Pokou: concerto pour un sacrifice. This book, which retells and subverts the originary myth of Côte d'Ivoire, asks why this and so many other stories of national origin rest on the sacrifices of women and children. By the subversion of a foundational myth, Tadjo asserts that the Ivory Coast's future can be questioned, revisioned, remediated, and remade by an individual's creative retelling of national memory. Tadjo presents many other possibilities for Ivory Coast's past—several of them self-contradictory—intentionally using a framework of feminist multiplicity that disallows nationalist and xenophobic uses of "natural" historic narratives. A refracted, subverted, and multiplicitous treatment of memory means that the memory is no longer only about the past: it breaks up the monolithic original telling of Pokou's story in order to project a new future for Ivory Coast.