Orphaned Language as Means of Narrating Trauma in Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah n’est pas obligé

Imposed by the colonizer, the French language in sub-Saharan Africa was subverted and reconstituted by its new speakers in order to reverse the metropolitan power over it and to reflect their own sociocultural experience. In literary texts, this language became the tool of narrating postcolonial trauma by blending oral tradition and written literary techniques. The paper focuses on how multilingualism inherent in postcolonial literature nourishes narrative capable of conveying traumatic experience beyond the Western paradigm. The analysis is carried out on the basis of Allah n’est pas obligé (Allah Is Not Obliged, 2000) by Ivorian writer Ahmadou Kourouma, where the main character is an orphan forced to become a child soldier. His suffering is expressed through deviation from the literary norm, which produces a narrative consisting of abrupt sentences punctuated by loanwords, calques, relexified lexemes and coinages. Pain and rage are unleashed through grotesque and sarcasm. Multilingual lexicographic elements deployed in an unusual context mediate the narrator’s estrangement from all of the languages he evokes. Only this orphaned language allows him to speak about the unspeakable. Multilingualism is also perceived through text organization, which involves cohesion mechanisms and rhetorical devices nurtured by orality.