Ada: Un graffiti mural du sang dans Histoire d’Awu de Justine Mintsa
A Wall Graffiti of the Blood in Justine Mintsa’s Histoire d’Awu

Summary/Abstract: 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.

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