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Latest publication The writer and painter from Côte d'Ivoire Véronique TADJO has been awarded the Grand Prix Littéraire de l’Afrique Noire (The Grand Prize for African Literature) - 2005 for her book, Reine Pokou, (published by Actes Sud). The award ceremony will take place on March 18, 2006 at the Senate House in Paris.
According
to legend, Queen Pokou had to flee from the Ashanti kingdom after a war of
succession. When the fugitives could not cross a wide river to escape, Pokou
threw her infant son into the water, and her followers, founders of the kingdom
of Baoulé (Baouli means "the child is dead"), were allowed to
escape their pursuers. Was Queen Pokou a heroine or a power‑mad ruler? Véronique
Tadjo, an Ivoirian writer, explores the myth of the founding of the Baoulé
kingdom in what is now the Côte d'Ivoire, in relation to the history of the
region, and indirectly to the current political upheaval, where ethnic tensions
and ambitious politicians have almost destroyed her country. As
a child Tadjo thought that Pokou was a black Madonna. Later she thought the
Queen was an Amazonian hero leading her people towards freedom. More recently
she found Pokou an embodiment of a ruler willing to do anything to reign. The
myth, Tadjo feels, can be read in many ways. Reine
Pokou is a series of prose stories, interspersed occasionally with poetry, in
which Tadjo imagines five ways of reading the character of the mythical queen
and five possible endings to her life. In one version Pokou, who has given birth
to a son after many years and several husbands, obeys the grand priest and
throws the child into the water, allowing her people to escape. In another
reading, after Pokou sacrifices her son she joins him in the waters, where, half
human, half fish, she is the goddess of the oceans. In still another version,
Pokou refuses the sacrifice, is captured and sold into slavery. Later her sons
lead an abortive revolt against their masters in the New World and are hanged.
In the most horrific version, Pokou sacrifices both her son and her son's
father, as she wants the power that can come from a denial of any feminine or
maternal feelings. Tadjo
explores particularly the relationship of women to political power and to
violence. Pokou's sacrifice is seen as a version of the sacrifice mothers always
have made in sending their sons to war. Children become pawns in battles of
power; a child may even become a "enfant‑soldat" (p. 84), an
allusion to the contemporary practice of kidnapping children to fight in several
West African countries. Reine Pokou is a powerful indictment of war and
of the tribalism that has caused such havoc in Africa, a message told indirectly
and poetically through the reading of myth. Adele
King Paris
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