Wangrin: a caricature of a colonized man

Abstract

L’étrange destin de Wangrin ou les roueries d’un interprète africain (1973) [The fortunes of Wangrin] is considered the only novel written by Malian intellectual, Amadou Hampaté Bâ. The narrative portrays the title character’s adventures, from his ascension as a colonial interpreter to his business success and his final collapse, being cheated by his lover or by fate. Wangrin’s journey unveils the French colonial intricacies in the region of current Mali. Based on the doctoral dissertation, Identity, space and narrative strategies in African novels from Mali, Mozambique and Nigeria (2020), presented at PUC Minas, this paper aims to demonstrate how Wangrin’s identity is built in the intricate and violent moment that was the European colonization in African soil. As a metonymy of political systems, the identity that was fragmented by colonial violence is rebuilt based on new relationships, taking on fluid characteristics that disintegrated fixity. The paper follows a postcolonial reading perspective (Mbembe, Mata, Moura, among other researchers, as well as their predecessors, Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi), which allows us to see beyond modern dichotomies and periodization to enlarge the narrative expression as a literary strategy, as well as the characters themselves, who are a manifestation of this strategy as a caricature of a possible man. By inscribing the novel’s analysis in postcolonial studies, this paper offers an argumentative basis that accentuates the epistemological conflict provoked by the European colonialist presence in African territory.