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ABSTRACT
The literary field in Africa came into emergence as a result of a collective yearning for lesser dependency on the symbolic constraints the Western center is forcing on its margins. Granted that a work sets itself up by setting up its own context, and that the African context stands out as one where oral literature is still alive in society, the manifestation of expressive forms associated with traditional literature in a novel must carry heavy weight in an interpretation of African works. For that reason, this essay will argue that, through her "smuggling" of narrative forms drawn from oral literature, Aminata Sow Fall's fiction testifies to an oral discursivity at work in the novel. The archi-textual approach focuses on various strategies the Senegalese woman writer resorts to in order to inscribe, deep within her creative work in French, a traditional universe hitherto conveyed through oral forms of expression.
hat is the specificity of a given literary work?" Confronted with this general question, the African literature scholar would be well advised to formulate, as a substitute to it, a more complex research hypothesis of a strictly functional nature: "How does Black African specificity, be it cultural, sociohistorical, or otherwise, contribute to the setup of a representational mecha- nism that is part and parcel of a signifying universe, of a narrative structure?" (Kasende 51). African literary critics, in their concerted efforts toward generating explanatory frameworks, have come to raise and address issues related to the reading, interpretation, understanding, and evaluation of African literature. Echo- ing the ongoing debate on orality and the postcolonial paradigm, Locha Mateso implicitly asks, "What does it entail, this postcolonial orality that is said to be informing postcolonial African fiction?" (13).1
To tackle these issues, I will scrutinize the narrative and discursive strate- gies inscribed within Aminata Sow Fall's work, grounded as they are-and as I will argue-in oral traditions. Sow Fall's novelistic output has been likened to a "Comédie humaine sénégalaise" (Gadjigo 20) 'Senegalese human comedy,' inasmuch as in most of her works the novelist registers a certain form of social dysfunction, at both the individual and collective levels. This orientation, essen- tially tied to the didactic function of Sow Fall's literary art, accounts for a charac- terization technique in...