Translation in Writing and Heterolingual Poetics in Djaïli Amadou Amal’s ‘Munyal, les larmes de la patience’ and ‘Mistiriijo: la mangeuse d’âmes’

Abstract

This paper investigated the writing technique used by Djaïli Amadou Amalu to express the African oral poetics in her novels. In particular, it examined the role played by translation in an heterolingual fictional world where Fulfulde and French coexist. The article posited that, in order to overcome the resistance to reception of her texts, and to enable the reader to become accustomed to the foreignisation of their language, the novelist established a complicity with this multilingual reader, for whom reading itself remains an act of translation. She facilitated this reading by means of endnotes and footnotes. The aim of the study was therefore to show that the writing-translation offered by this author was a means of achieving inter-comprehension between French and Sudano-Sahelian cultures. To this end, the study drew on Bhabha’s theory of cultural hybridity (1994), which sheds light on how postcolonial fiction leverages hybridity and métissage in textual and semantic terms.