Chronotopic play and shuffle oral narrative in Veronique Tadjo’s Queen Pokou concerto for a sacrifice

Abstract EN

In queen Pokou : Concerto for a Sacrifice (2009), Véronique Tadjo re-writes the legend of Pokou of Cote d'Ivoire, a West African queen who orchestrates a mythic exodus and builds her own kingdom.

this article deals with Tadjo's special re-structuring of the black national narrative.

through her postmodern re-writing of the ancient Ashante myth of Pokou and her reversal of the ordinary chronotopic dynamics of narrative, Tadjo employs the Bakhtinian dialogic play between space and time.

Ergo, the vertical axis of phenomenological and transcendental perceptions permeates the horizontal line of history.

Queen Pokou is an oral text in which the story is retold in circles and in the fashion of the griots.

the chapters are 'aleatory' and the plot is shufflable within a multiplicity of narrative possibilities.