Tierno Monénembo, l’histoire et la crise du temps

The publication of Pelourinho in 1995 marked a broadening of Monénembo’s novelistic universe, both in space and time, owing to his exploration of the slave trade. Since then, many of the author’s works have dissected the global history of the African continent, that is, the confrontation of Africans with ideas, cultures and political actors that came from elsewhere (Islam, Christianity, colonialism, the slave trade). With this turning point, Monénembo chronicles a “crisis of time,” a multi-layered crisis of which the characters are not always aware, and yet which affects the course of their individual and collective destinies. This article examines how the author explores this crisis in Pelourinho and Peuls (2004). In particular, it develops the idea that the acceleration of time observable in these two novels underpins a tragedy of History that inscribes itself into the bodies and intimacy of the characters.