Picaros and shapeshifters: the postcolonial picaresque style in GauZ’s Standing Heavy

Abstract

I read GauZ’s Standing Heavy in connection with the postcolonial picaresque style, as GauZ’s Ivorian immigrant characters are robust survivors who see through the French system and criticize it through their anti-idealist viewpoints. This cynical view, often disclosed through roguish language, provides the author the possibility of expressing aggression toward the unfair system and highlighting the characters’ need to find their agency within its unequal structures. Meanwhile, the publisher’s marketing techniques and the author’s media appearances have contributed to the novel’s great success on the literary market; however, I argue that the novel’s success on the market should not diminish our understanding of its cultural criticism. Instead, the author himself may act as a shapeshifter in the competitive cultural marketplace, since his engagement in strategies of self-exotism exposes our sanctimonious need as readers to expect authenticity from African authors in Western contexts when they have to conform to Western codes.