Ecopetics of liminality in three postcolonial French-speaking African novels

Abstract

In addition to the chaos associated with a post-colonial human ecology that decentralises nature and disconnects Africans from their traditional places, the French-language African novels analysed set out the conditions for a possible rebirth. The descent into the valleys, the climbing of mountains, hills and trees, the refuge in caves, the initiation in the forests or the return to the village constitute a practice of symbolic natural places which, through the imaginary ascent, mysticism and cyclicality they represent, translates the crossing of the threshold of postcolonial chaos to affirm a decolonial ecology (Malcolm Ferdinand) carrying the hope of renewal. A mythocritical (Gilbert Durand) and ecopoetic (Pierre Schoentjes and Xavier Garnier) analysis of the corpus allows us to posit nature as the liminal space where initiation into the 'post-pandora postcolonial' era takes place.