Political Engagement and Fiction Writing at Rachid Mimouni and Ahmadou Kourouma

Abstract

This research, which unfolds in three stages, provides a reflection about the ideological, but also aesthetic dimension of postcolonial Francophone literature in sub-Saharan Africa and Maghreb. It aims precisely to show how a political and ideological discourse is linked up with a literary and aesthetic practice in the novels of the Ivorian Ahmadou Kourouma and the Algerian Rachid Mimouni. In the first two parts, we examine the different aspects of the political engagement of these two francophone writers belonging to different geographic, political social and cultural areas. It is precisely a question of staging their convictions and ideological positions expressed in the novels of the corpus about the phenomena of dictatorship, ideological drifts and war violence, which marked in Africa the period going from the first years of independence to the first decade of the 21st century. The last part aims at examining how poetics can provide suitable models for thinking politics at both writers. More precisely, studying the structures of narration at work in the novels of the corpus allows to highlight the aesthetic issues of their politically engaged writing which draws as much from the forms of the European novel as from African oral tradition.