Go to AfricaBib home

Go to AfricaBib home Africana Periodical Literature Go to database home

bibliographic database
Line
Previous page New search

The free AfricaBib App for Android is available here

Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Reversals of exile: Williams Sassine's 'Wirriyamu' and Tierno Monénembo's 'Pelourinho'
Author:Small, Audrey
Year:2014
Periodical:African Studies Review (ISSN 1555-2462)
Volume:57
Issue:3
Pages:41-54
Language:English
Geographic term:Guinea
Subjects:novels
exile
literary criticism
About persons:Williams Sassine (1944-1997)ISNI
Tierno Monénembo (1947-)ISNI
External link:https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2014.91
Abstract:This article examines two novels by exiled Guinean writers in which physical space functions as a central point of reference for very different, though related, considerations of traumatized memory, identity, and exile. In Williams Sassine's 'Wirriyamu' (1976), a violent and violated rural landscape becomes emblematic of a specific traumatic event occurring within the time frame of the novel and of contemporary political reality. While in Tierno Monénembo's 'Pelourinho' (1995), a present-day cityscape provides consistently uncertain territory for thinking through a trauma that transcends history: that of the transatlantic slave trade. The article seeks to examine some of the ways in which contemporary trauma theory may be useful in reading Francophone West African fiction as well as some of the limitations of this theory in its applications to this corpus. Bibliogr., notes, ref., summary in English and French. [Journal abstract]
Views
Cover