Tale
Contes de ma grand-mère
Not translated into English
Salim Hatubou · 1994
Synopsis
The collection sets down in writing the Comorian tales the author heard as a child at his maternal grandmother's evening gatherings, in the village of Milépvani. The book opens with the memory of those evenings when the children hung “on the lips” of a storyteller who told each story as if she were its heroine or a witness. The tales take up classics of the archipelago's oral tradition, each carrying a moral.
Context
Published in 1994 in Paris by L'Harmattan, in the series “La légende des mondes”, the book runs to 110 pages; it was the author's first, published at twenty-two. The publisher's presentation recalls that the Comoros are rich in tales and that the evening gatherings where a voice carried the listeners off into an imaginary world have declined, except in the small villages. Faïza Soulé Youssouf, in Al-Watwan Magazine in 2013, sees it as the author's first success, and the collection was the first book deposited at the Marseille media library that bears his name.
Who it is for
For hearing the oral tradition of the Comoros, handed down by a grandmother to the writer who fixed it on the page.
Prizes and reception
Faïza Soulé Youssouf reads in it an innocent way of teaching morals in a troubled world.
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