Narrativising Community, Surviving Contagion: Orality in Véronique Tadjo’s In the Company of Men

Sreya M.  Datta

doi:10.35684/JLCI.2023.9201

Authors

Sreya M. Datta Alan Price Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Liverpool

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.35684/JLCI.2023.9201

Keywords:

orality, community, pandemics, temporality

Abstract

This essay is a meditative reflection on the critical, creative, and narrative labour involved in making the community “real” as a part of contemporary lived and temporal experiences of modernity. I analyse the crucial role that fiction plays in realising the community. Taking Amitav Ghosh’s provocation regarding the “derangement” of normative notions of realism as the starting point, this essay re-examines the place of orality in the contemporary African novel. Chief among its claims is that orality and realism are companionate terms. The deployment of oral forms provides a more expansive view of reality that is otherwise unavailable within capitalist conceptions of time and linear development. In the essay, I read Véronique Tadjo’s ‘Ebola’ novel In the Company of Men (English trans. 2021) as an invitation to the community in the wake of the devastation struck by deadly diseases such as Ebola and COVID-19. I argue that Tadjo organises a literary imagination of community and solidarity as the basis of a collective reckoning that is yet to come. In this sense, the book operates as a “portal,” fashioning both a cultural memory of collective survival (from human and nonhuman perspectives) and raising an urgent, anticipatory call for more expansive forms of imagination facing the future.

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Author Biography

Sreya M. Datta, Alan Price Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Liverpool

Sreya Mallika Datta is currently the Alan Price Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Liverpool and the incoming Jean Humphreys Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Leicester. Her interests are in postcolonial and decolonial studies with a specialisation in African literatures and additional interests in Indian Ocean studies, Southern theory, and black feminisms. Her doctoral project (University of Leeds) on ‘The Critical Inheritance of Community in Nigerian Literature’ earned an award of Research Excellence, and she is currently working on a monograph based on this project. She is also one of the steering coordinators of the Collaborative Research Group on ‘African Literatures’ under the AEGIS Europe network and has most recently co-convened a panel on ‘African literatures: collective futures/utopias’ at the European Conference on African Studies (2023).