Reading African Francophone Literature in Translation

Abstract

Francophone African authors sometimes choose not to conform to metropolitan French language norms in their literary works. This is often read as a strategy of subversion and decolonization, a means of resisting literary and linguistic conventions imposed during colonial rule and of achieving intellectual liberation and self-expression. However, other readings of linguistic non-conformity are possible: for example, inflecting the French language with one or more African languages may be seen as a means through which authors assert the nature of their writing as African literature, even though they are using a European language as the main language of expression. The particular significance that readers ascribe to such innovations will be affected by many different factors, including the book’s paratexts and the reader’s own positionality. The broader “meanings” of the innovative features of Francophone African literature are thus complex and open to change, and they are also inevitably affected by translation. As readers, translators bring their own interpretation to the significance of linguistic innovation in the original works, and their decisions around how to render non-standard language have significant potential to change the political import of the original writing.