Tragédies africaines postcoloniales et poétique de la défaillance des mots
Postcolonial African Tragedies and the Deficiency of Words

Summary/Abstract: Sub-Saharan Africa is the theater of an unending series of postcolonial tragedies. The literary attempts by African writers to take stock of these crises through various discursive strategies confront them with the inadequacy between the means offered by language and reality, especially the inability of words to name beyond words and incommunicable experiences. A critical analysis of two of these attempts, the narratives of civil wars by children-soldiers and the project “Rwanda: écrire par devoir de mémoire”, shows that the novels struggle to depict the ineffable. Instead, authors and narrators acknowledge the deficiency of language in general and of their language in particular to capture the unspeakable. For this reason, the present study postulates that those narratives are actually arenas of a dramatic, impossible quest for words, to be used by man, through fiction, to represent collective African human experience. Language here is to be considered as a theme that brings up to date the fundamental issue of the “power(s)” of literature.

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