Panegyric, performance, and ritual emotions: the poetic of donsomaana in Zassi Goro and Ahmadou Kourouma

Abstract

Donsomaana is a cultural and literary practice specific to the Manding cultural area. It is an epic genre closely related to other forms of literary discourse, particularly panegyric, invocations, and prayers. These narrative forms are also manifested in the works of Francophone writers of Manding origin, notably Zassi Goro and Ahmadou Kourouma. This study examines how Z. Goro and A. Kourouma transform the laudatory, genealogical, and ritual procedures of donsomaana into novelistic devices capable of simultaneously producing legitimation, memory, emotion, and critique. More specifically, it focuses on the panegyric rhetoric and ritual emotions evoked by Z. Goro in Le dernier Sîm-bon and A. Kourouma in En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages. The study demonstrates both the continuity with the forms of donsomaana and their novelistic transformation, particularly their satirical reorientation in Kourouma’s work. The analysis draws on sociocriticism and literary anthropology to explore the relationship between these forms of speech, transposed, reconfigured, or stylized through novelistic writing, and donsomaana, the hunters’ purificatory narrative.