Memory and Mourning: Tadjo’s Loin de Mon Père

Abstract

The essay presents an analysis of the latest novel by the Ivorian writer Véronique Tadjo, the story of a meeting between two worlds and two ways of living and dying; it is also a chronicle of happiness and sorrow rooted in the reality of métissage. In French the words métisse and métissage are quite common in the vocabulary, while equivalent translation does not exist in English, and the term Coloured  still, at least in South Africa, has a bureaucratic, apartheid-style tone to it

  The title of the book Loin de mon pèreparadoxically does not really mean ‘far, or away, from my father’, but ‘near him’. From the beginning we immediately understand that this book of mourning is based upon a negative that is a positive statement. It is the painful contradiction of Life meeting Death, a presence meeting an absence.