Véronique Tadjo is the daughter of a French painter and sculptor and an Ivorian civil servant. She was born in Paris and raised in Abidjan (the economic capital of Ivory Coast and the most populous French-speaking city in Africa).
A Fulbright scholar, Tadjo has a BA from the University of Abidjan and a doctorate from the University of Paris. She has lived and worked in many African countries and travelled all over the world. She sees herself as a pan-Africanist and much of these travels come out in the subject matter and imagery in her work.
Queen Pokou: Ivory Coast
Véronique Tadjo is a poet, novelist, essayist and an artist. What she tends to do in her writing is fuse different genres and styles to challenge the borders between different literary forms. She refers to her literary works as 'texts' or, more correctly, in French 'récits', which are pieces of writing whose genre is not defined.This is no different in "Queen Pokou", which cannot be classified as a novel.
The book starts off with a prelude in which Tadjo tells of how the story of Queen Pokou kept coming up at different times in her life, essentially haunting her until she wrote it.
Pokou was a princess of the powerful Ashanti nation, who saved her people by sacrificing her baby. She threw him into a river so that her people could cross safely. After crossing the river she is said to have repeated the word 'baouli', 'the child is dead' and the people she saved decided to call themselves the Baouli in honour of her sacrifice.
In the rest of the book, Tadjo writes what could have happened if things had gone differently. What if she had refused to sacrifice her son, she and her people had been sold as slaves and shipped across the Atlantic to the cotton fields of America? What if the baby's father had protested to his son being thrown in the river? What if they had not crossed the river, but seeked refuge in a village nearby?
All these 're-imaginings' make the reader question this history/legend that Tadjo and her people grew up taking for granted. It also makes one as a reader question the oral stories/legends/histories that one grew up with as well.
The poetic language of the book makes one think of epic poems and and oral story telling traditions that formed a big part of some of our upbringing. With the continuous re-telling of this well-established legend in Ivory Coast, Tadjo re-appropriates this story and insist that open-ended stories can teach us a great deal about our own damaged and imperfect humanity.
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