%0 Journal Article
%T A Wall Graffiti of the Blood in Justine Mintsa’s Histoire d’Awu
%A Mbala-Nkanga, Honorine B.
%J Cahiers ERTA
%V 2018
%R 10.4467/23538953CE.18.008.8831
%N Numéro 14 La terre, le territoire, la carte
%P 37-53
%K becoming, faciality, indiscernability, procreation, chora
%@ 2300-4681
%D 2018
%U https://ejournals.eu/en/journal/cahiers-erta/article/ada-un-graffiti-mural-du-sang-dans-histoire-dawu-de-justine-mintsa
%X Ada is a 12 year‐old girl who has been impregnated by her teacher in a Middle School where corruption and debauchery are normalized. Mintsa’s esthetics condenses a social criticism of phallocentric discourse through Ada’s grandfather, Afane Obame, a high priest of the Ancestor’s rite called Melan, whose primary focus is to further establish his power. He normalizes Ada’s pregnancy, as tradition dictates, and serves as a receptacle through which Mintsa’s narrative displays a shocking picture of discarded and decomposing placentae along outside walls of the Maternity Ward like graffiti. An allegorical reading of Plato’s Chora, as it relates to Ada’s parturition, opens up a narrative that actualizes the fluidity of a symbiosis between traditional and modern cultural practices. The overlapping imagery of the repulsive wall of decomposing placentae and the symbiotic cultural practices end in a mirror within a mirror graphism with colorful disjunctive syntheses.