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Queen Pokou
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ISBN: ISBN: 978-0-9555079-9-1 | | Weight: 0kg | | | Rights:
Categories: African | Black Interest | Fiction | Literature | Heritage | Languages | History |
Synopsis
Tadjo uses her powerful and fertile imagination to rekindle an ancient Akan myth and deliberately sets it ablaze! In deceptively simple but poetically elegant prose, she revisits the legend of the Baoulé female ancestor, Queen Abraha Pokou – presenting it not as one authoritative, impermeable text, but as a series of self-regenerating narratives; each version just as colourful, persuasive and compelling as the others. Through this process, Tadjo shows the received texts of history and tradition as they truly are – as subjective fictions capaciously vulnerable to interpretations and reinterpretations.Femi Osofisan, Professor of Drama, Department of Theatre Arts, University of Ibadan, Nigeria.Recommendations
Queen Pokou
by Véronique Tadjo
translated from the Frenchby Amy Baram Reid
(Ayebia, ISBN 9780955507991)
Ivorian author Véronique Tadjo
grounds her novel Queen Pokou firmly
in tradition, taking as her subject matter
the legend of Queen Abraha Pokou,
ancestral founder of the Baoule people
in what is today’s Côte d’Ivoire.
As her people desperately flee their
enemies, discarding their valuables as
they attempt to cross a great river and
reach safety, Pokou realizes that she
must give up her own most precious
possession, sacrificing her infant son
for the common good. Her cry ‘Ba-ouli:
the child is dead!’ is adopted as the
name of the people. Véronique Tadjo
recounts this tale in a straightforward
fashion and then revisits the central
narrative in a series of overlapping and
radically differing scenarios, thereby
interrogating the nature of ‘truth’ and
exploring the mutability of oral history
and received wisdom.
Queen Pokou is a lyrical and
deceptively simple tale, beneath whose
shimmering surface lies much wisdom
regarding love and loss and the ties
that bind.
★★★★
New Internationalist ● OCTOBER 2010
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