Kourouma’s narrative texts bring to the fore misery and desperation, resulting largely from human exploitation connected to ignorance and religious irrationality. Descartes’ all time famous statement “I think therefore I am” grounds the essence of human existence on thinking. Descartes’ assertion has implications for religion when it is postulated as the quest for the ultimate source of meaning in life. Kourouma’s (2000) Allah is Not Obliged establishes a link between human exploitation and unsound practice of religion, revealing his nauseating aversion to and denunciation of irrational religion. From literary and philosophy of religion perspectives, Allah is Not Obliged can be read as a narrative that raises consciousness about the potential of irrational religion becoming a source of exploitation and mental enslavement. Within the framework of such reading, Allah is Not Obliged becomes a plea for an intra-cultural critique of African religiosity.
Cet article examine le thème du pessimisme comme une perspective dominante dans
Les Soleils des Indépendances d’Ahmadou Kourouma.
Il retrace le pessimisme à travers le jeu des personnages et les indices spatio-temporels
tels que Kourouma les déploie dans ce texte. À cet égard, l’article y examine certains des
personnages clés dans le cadre spatio-temporel dans lequel ils évoluent. L’examen de ces
phénomènes révèle la réalité de l’idée de l’Afro-pessimisme. L’indépendance de l’Afrique
telle que perçue à travers ces trois phénomènes littéraires que sont les personnages, la
spatialité et la temporalité, est un échec total sur tous les fronts, un concept vide de
substance. Par conséquent, l’étude conclut que la mort tragique de Fama, le protagoniste du
texte, dans sa tentative de reconstruction de sa dignité et humanité perdues sous « les
soleils des indépendances » est une évidente manifestation et concrétisation du pessimisme
dans ce texte romanesque d’Ahmadou Kourouma.
In the face of the fast depletion of natural resources worldwide resulting from industrial and economic cannibalism, selfishness and marginalization are becoming more and more pronounced in a globalizing world. The phenomena of selfishness and marginalization are manifest in the introduction of stringent immigration laws by most industrialized countries in the North to ward off migrants from the less developed economies in the South; and also the reinforcement of existing laws by the latter to protect their citizens and natural resources in recent years. Issues of national identity, territorial integrity as against the centrality of humanity remain an Achilles heel toward the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As far as 1968, Ahmadou Kourouma, an Ivorian novelist, in his very first narrative text, “Les Soleils des Indépendances” later translated into English as The Suns of Independence, raised the tragic dilemma of national identity at the expense of ‘human identity’. In the absence of concrete steps to address the issues over the years, Liberia, Sierra Leone and La Côte d’Ivoire were engulfed in intestine civil strife over two decades later. The main causes of this strife are found in the irrational quest for self-identity in the name of nationality and ethnic superiority for greater access and control of “national” resources. This paper examines the upsurge of socioeconomic and political exclusion, and the potential threats they pose to the realization of the recently launched Sustainable Development Goals. It is done through a critical reading of Kourouma’s The Suns of Independence, Allah is not obliged and ‘Quand on refuse, on dit non’. The study is posited within the analytical framework of literary studies and sociocriticism
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