Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Kourouma 2000 : Humour Obligé!, Annik Doquire Kerzberg

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Ahmadou Kourouma's novel Allah n'est pas oblige belongs to the rich literary vein of texts, both autobiographical and fictitious, that are written in French, for adults, portraying children. This novel stands out however through the young narrator's humor as well as through the tragic nature of its topic: child-soldiers. This article analyzes the humor, presenting it as the only possible and thus the "obliged" mode of narrating and reading the atrocities of recent tribal wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone.