Enfance post-traumatique et plaidoyer humanisteUne relecture de Le retour de l’enfant soldatde François d’Assise N’dah

Abstract

War and its outrageous cohort of demonstrations plunge the village of Soukoussa into fear, tears and horror. Its toll is heavy as entire families are decimated, material goods burned, men murdered and women raped. This escalation of barbarism is however theprerogative of the village children and rebels who came from elsewhere to undermine the peace that reigned in the village. But to look at it carefully, is the child not really a pawn in the chessboard of violence seduced by adults without faith or law? Following the phenotext-genotext diptych bundled by the sociocritical approach as systematized by Edmond Cros, this contribution proposes to question the springs of an unwelcome barbarity at a time when the world is singing in chorus the anthem of living together. The work is divided into two main parts, each of which articulates three main ideas. In the first one, the contours of the phenotext are deciphered. It explores the causes of a problematic childhood characterized by the banishment of the child from village society. Scrutinizing François N’dah’s aesthetics in his project to rebuild a non-violent city, the last part focuses on the meaning revealed by the genotext. Form and meaning therefore converge in order to reconfigure the course of a new world whose new paradigms are now the pat-rimonialization of the child and no longer his instrumentalization