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Accepted Paper:
An Eco-critical Reading of Veronique Tadjo’s In the Company of Men
Paul Muindi
(University of Nairobi)
This paper critically reads the novel as an African cultural inscription offering a point of relational consciousness with its narrative enlisting planetary relationality.
Paper long abstract:
Veronique Tadjo’s In the Company of Men (2021) dramatises the Ebola outbreak to perform African ecologies at the intersection of environment and geographies of resistance. This paper critically reads the novel as an African cultural inscription offering a point of relational consciousness with its narrative enlisting planetary relationality. The ecological mapping of the novel’s fable carves a space for an exploration of the fragility of life within realities of problematic extractive industries which leave social structures eroded hence the paradox of loss and hope in configuring the planetary. Whereas the novel enmeshes human and non-human characters as symbolic of planetary relationality, it consents to the profound disruption in the relationship between humans and nature and platforms this vis a viz the discursive engagement with Ebola to decipher this paradox. Hence, the novel can be understood as problematising human/non-human relationships through African ecologies.