Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at manifold issues of social and physical mobility through the literacy practices of an urbanite from Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire) who through his autobiographical writing(s) self-identifies as a subaltern-on-the-move. His autobiography is a process and a product of literary becoming.

Paper long abstract:

The literary 'object' under consideration is a 500-page autobiography written in a mixture of different 'Frenches' as well as the Abidjan urban vernacular known as Nouchi. The 'emergence' in the title refers to the text trajectory largely coinciding with the collaboration between the author ‒ whose nom de plume is Marcus Mausiah Garvey ‒ and myself as an anthropologist. An eight-year long literary companionship resulted in the publication of 'Le companion: journal d'un Noussi en guerre: 2002-2011' in 2016.

The proposed ethnography of grassroots literacy is grounded in dialogical analyses of Garvey's writing and rewriting in combination with conversations about diversity and inequality in (school-based or popular) writing, in languages and repertoires (such as French, Nouchi, slangs, etc.), and how these correlate to generational, ethnic, regional, etc. positions and identities. On the whole, Garvey's literary endeavour appropriates a multivalent expressive medium and operates repositionings and re/de-identifications aimed at transcending established boundaries and mitigating intersected exclusions. Such complex literary process, this paper argues, targets precarity and offers insights into multiple aspects of mobility.

The precarity represented in (the emergence of) 'Le companion' is précised in the 'Noussi' label. This idiosyncratic reworking of 'Nouchi' indexes not only the many aspects of urban and urban-rural, national and international, generational and social, as well as ideological and (geo)political subalternity and enclavation but also indexes the desire and the potential to transcend it. Thus, as a product and a process of literary becoming, 'Le companion' addresses manifold issues of social and physical mobility.