Publisher's Synopsis
Ahmadou Kourouma systematized the use of the aesthetics of laughter and ugliness through his five novels. He based his work on African political realities by referring to royalty, democracy, dictatorship, independence and war. As for the African cultural realities, they concern the highlighting of the religious and the shortcomings of Africans, as well as the hybridization of the language of writing. But he also constructs spaces, characters and a bestiary corresponding to a will to create the laughter and the ugly. Our study found that Kourouma often emphasizes the worst through the topoi of death and blood. But the novelistic action is very picaresque and turned towards the carnivalesque as well as the grotesque. The omnipresence of the scatological and the erotic in the language as well as in the action, translates a will not only to create the macabre, but also the obscene and the indecent. In the end, it can be said that the aesthetics of laughter and the ugly constitute a posture that Kourouma has chosen to differentiate himself in the African literary field.
