FROM SINGULAR TESTIMONY TO RHIZOMATIC DISCOURSE: Language, Memory and Shared Identity in Francophone African Writing

FROM SINGULAR TESTIMONY TO RHIZOMATIC DISCOURSE:

Language, Memory and Shared Identity in Francophone African Writing

Abstract

Éloïse Brezault's Afrique: Paroles d'écrivains (2010) documents the poetic consciousness of a

generation through interviews with leading contemporary Francophone African writers. What defines

this generation is its collective rejection of the restrictive framework imposed by the "Francophone

literature" label, the burden of the "spokesperson for the people" role, and the expectations of Western

publishing markets, as writers claim their own individual voices. This paper analyses this collective

voice through the conceptual lens of the rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari) and Édouard Glissant's

Poétique de la Relation. This framework allows the writers strategies to be examined along three

thematic axes. In the dimension of language, French is not rejected as a colonial inheritance but

transformed from within, reshaped through vernacular speech, oral culture, and local vocabulary,

while some writers opt to return to their native languages altogether. In the dimension of memory,

historically traumatic events such as the Rwandan Genocide are conveyed through experimental

narrative forms that push literary language to its limits; fiction becomes not a means of denying

reality but of bearing it. In the dimension of identity, the writers embrace not a singular and

exclusionary identity rooted in either African or Western origin, but a rhizomatic one that crosses

borders, remains in constant dialogue with the Other, and holds plurality as its defining characteristic.

Read at the intersection of these three axes, Brezault's book emerges as a rich and polyphonic

cartography of the transformation currently underway in contemporary Francophone African writing.