Prose poétique africaine et philosophie de la création verbale

Abstract

The question of mixing genres or generic hybridization does not necessarily arise for African literature whose nature is to be hybrid at the origin. The African creator does not choose to make of the mixture of the kinds, it is the mixture of the kinds which offers itself to him through the total word which it uses. To speak then of poetic prose is to speak of African written literature as a whole. This is the heritage of the first black artists of the emancipatory struggles, among others the negritudians, insofar as they are the manatees who drank from the source of Simal, that is to say here the African orality. This African culture has as its “dogma” this “old principle” of African classical philosophy: “everything is in everything; the unity in the multiple, the multiple in the unity... everything is interaction and mutual influence. This is our law of one universal movement” (Zadi Zaourou 1978: 216). It is to this monistic philosophy of the aesthetics of verbal creation that we will focus in this contribution devoted to African poetic prose. With the help of examples of texts in poetic prose, we will see how, through the poetic and stylistic analyses of the genres that we will apply to these texts, the literarity of the latter derives from the holistic character of the word that founds them.