Motif de l’ailleurs et poétique de l’hybridité dans le roman féminin francophone noir: lecture de Ces Âmes chagrines de Léonora Miano

Abstract

Usually classified in the category of migrant writers (Papa Samba Diop, 2011), Leonora Miano is considered as one of the pioneers in bringing the Afropean people into literature. Therefore, her novel Ces âmes chagrines – published in 2011 – develops a narrative space where the notions of elsewhere, race, difference or ontherness are questionned, among other things. The analysis of the journey of the characters in the metropolis, in particular Thamar, highlights the complexity of the relations and exchanges between Africa and the West, or Cameroon and France. From this combination, a set of dialogues and cultural and aesthetic interactions is born: so can we see a kind of poetics of hybridity. In then appears a going beyond racial, aesthetic, national borders, and the reappropriation of the imagination and the thought of the Other (France). There is then a form of dialogism which can be read essentially at two levels. Our analysis will therefore be based on the reconstitution of the mechanisms and the phenomenon of hybridization which lead on the one hand to the creation of a space in between where «border identities» are being built through «afropian» characters like Thamar and her son Anton. On the other hand, this intercultural process is at the center of an aesthetic issue that produces a writing integrating the dialogue of genres (novel and poetry), the mixture of oral and written forms and bilinguism – more specificly withs words borrowed from a local Cameroonian language.