The protean work of Franco-Ivorian Véronique Tadjo
Audio 03:44
Véronique Tadjo is a poet, novelist, youth writer, designer.
She divides her life between London, Paris and Abidjan.
Personal archives / Odile Motelet
By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow
9 min
Franco-Ivorian Véronique Tadjo is the author of a plural body of work, which is divided between poetry, fiction, children's books and painting.
Entered into literature through poetry, the writer has twenty books to her credit.
They draw on African tales and legends to tell about the disorder of the contemporary world.
Portrait of a writer nourished by her African and deeply modern heritage.
Publicity
“
I write for a lot of reasons.
I'm probably writing to put my mind in order, to try to change the world, to console myself for not having been able to do so.
I write to communicate with others, I write to reach out to others.
I write quite simply to inhabit the world.
"
We owe this beautiful and moving profession of faith to Véronique Tadjo, one of the great ladies of modern African literature.
Born to an Ivorian father and a Burgundian mother, the writer grew up in Abidjan and has lived in three continents: Europe, America and Africa.
She shares her life today between London and the Ivory Coast, her favorite land where her imagination is rooted.
Véronique Tadjo is the author of a masterful, atypical work, divided between poetry, poetic prose, novels, stories, children's books, essays and painting.
A universe full of echoes and resonances, with thematic bridges between different audiences.
Both writer and artist, Tadjo herself illustrates her children's albums, with oh-so-evocative titles -
Mamy Wata and the Monster
or
The Beautiful Bird and the Rain
or even
The Lord of the Dance
, to name but a few. three titles out of fifteen children's texts to his credit.
“
The paint purifies my brain,
” she likes to repeat.
Locating her creativity at the intersection of art and verb, she has made the decompartmentalization of genres the hallmark of her work.
And to add: “
I find that I am a better writer when I paint.
It allows me to see the world in a different way, to use different eyes.
For a long time, we thought we had to specialize and only in one genre.
I think it is to hide the multiple part that we have in us
”.
Commitment and lyricism
Coming to literature through poetry, Véronique Tadjo became known by publishing in 1983 a short collection of poems, soberly titled
Laterite
, which won her the literary prize of the Agency for Cultural and Technical Cooperation, predecessor of the Organization. of La Francophonie.
Laterite
, whose narrative dynamic takes us into the African space, is an invitation to travel.
Behind the first lyrical outpourings, themes are already emerging that cross Véronique Tadjo's work: harmful cities, quest for love to face the violence of the world, nostalgia for ancient times where, in the words of the author, "
the lines and colors hugged the sky in their serene clarity
”.
There are, in these pages, Baudelaire, Prévert, but also poets of negritude.
Senghor, Césaire, Birago Diop that the young Tadjo had discovered during her years of training in Abidjan, have long accompanied her on the path of her quest for identity.
"
Their political commitment mixed with lyricism won me over
," she recalls.
We can say that engagement mixed with lyricism is the guiding thread of the novelistic work of Véronique Tadjo whose most famous titles are inspired by the major crises that the African continent has experienced in recent decades.
The shadow of Imana, voyages to the end of Rwanda (2000)
, which features the stories of survivors of the Tutsi genocide, is a meditation on Good and Evil and the darkness of the human soul
.
Reine Pokou
(2005) is inspired by the Ivorian civil war.
Halfway between fairy tale and historical narrative, this book questions the theme of national identity, with for reading the founding myth of Côte d'Ivoire, that of the queen who sacrificed her son by handing him over to the gods of the river, so that his people can reach the other side and found the Baulee nation.
Ecological story
Finally,
In the company of men
, published in 2017, is an ecological story coupled with a reflection on the fragility of man, with as a starting point the devastation caused in West Africa by the Ebola epidemic.
But the originality of this book lies mainly in its choral construction, as the author explains.
“In the company of men
is a polyphonic story.
We have the voices of people who participated in the fight against the 2014 Ebola epidemic in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.
This is how we will hear the voice of a doctor, a nurse, an administrator, a young person who uses purine to be able to get rid of the virus.
We even hear the voice of the virus, the bat and this tree, the baobab, which in fact tells the story because the baobab is the symbol of an ancestral wisdom
.
"
Véronique Tadjo likes to remind people that she is not a novelist in the conventional sense of the word.
Heir to the African oral tradition from which she borrows rhetorical procedures and symbols, Mamy Wata and mythical figures, she reinvents ways of speaking the world, playing on the multiplicity of genres and heritages.
Her prose is poetic, bewitching, living up to the promise she made to her readers in her first book: “
You will see / I am a witch / If you listen to my word / The river will flow in you
.
".
Last publication:
To love according to Véronique Tadjo
, by Véronique Tadjo.
Museo Editions, 2020. 88 pages, 14.50 euros.
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