Ivorienne writer Veronique Tadjo is now living in South Africa. She spoke to Stephen Gray
Veronique Tadjo has been resident in Johannesburg since last year, when her first novel, As the Crow Flies, was published in an English translation in the Heinemann African Writers Series.
You were saying that your stay in South Africa has affected your sense of self.
Yes, because I had always wanted to come to South Africa after 1994, because a lot of what is now happening here is relevant for those of us from the rest of the continent. Your big questions may be applied in Cte d’Ivoire as well. But I have come here by a long route, you know, and I am happy to contribute wherever I find myself, but especially if it’s in Africa.
But your reputation rests on being a novelist in French. Before As the Crow Flies came out, all we had of yours were a few excerpts from it in anthologies.
Yes, and we have to say how grievously Africa is divided between French and English, without for the moment talking about the many other languages. That is a big problem and we are not communicating enough across it. But in my case being of a mixed family my mother was French and my father Ivoirien I’ve always understood I do not belong to just one place.
As a judge for the first two years of the very English Caine Prize you could include the French-language world, as you say in your note in the Tenderfoots anthology published by the Mail & Guardian.
Indeed, and I am pleased as well that it targets exclusively the short story, which in the African context is shall we say? a very user-friendly genre. As the Crow Flies is labelled as a novel, but is really a group of short stories or vignettes, with a lot of mixing of genres, very much inspired by the oral tradition of Africa.
Your most recent work is about Rwanda, alas not yet available in English.
That was as a result of a project whereby a dozen or so African writers were given the opportunity and the challenge to reside in Kigali, but not as journalists or historians reporting on the recent genocide. We were to react purely as individual writers. The experience gave me a shot of maturity, that’s for sure. We knew of the Holocaust, thought it could never happen again and in Africa. In the end we saw it as a human problem, after all, adding a very dark dimension to my understanding. The book I came up with was an attempt to prod and prod at such a situation, as every writer must, African or not.
You’ve said that in Cte d’Ivoire there is nowhere to hide, and there is still much to be done.
Yes, but that is just my personal statement. I do get very restless though, when I’m not there, even though I have to be in the West too and resource myself on a regular basis. But how can I leave it, since it is the main source of my writing, my painting and, well, my creative being? South Africa is good stimulation in the meanwhile.