Surrealism, Subversion, and S torytelling in Véronique Tadjo’s As the crow flies

• Main Author: Nii Okain Teiko
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Ghana 2015-05-01
• Series: Legon Journal of the Humanities
• Subjects: micro - text; surrealism; outer frame; femino - centric; imagistic symbols

This paper seeks to examine Tadjo’s art of storytelling in As the crow flies, focusing on her approach which is partly surrealistic and partly traditional in blending several artistic modes, such as poetry, narration, drama, myth-making, and imagistic symbols. The examination establishes Tadjo’s style in the art of storytelling as an innovator who breaks with the traditional relationships between narration and plot; and introduces a fluid and liberating style which has “no frontiers”. This approach ofpostmodernism radicalizes the traditional mode and subverts the craft of storytelling. The paper makes the claim that Tadjo utilizes several principles of surrealism to relate the disconnection and unreality of human stories in which the unconscious is used as a source material to deal with life’s ills and traumas.