Rapture in Bamako: between adventure and political game

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between crime fiction and children’s literature based on the novel Rapt à Bamako by Alpha-Mandé Diarra and Marie Florence Ehret. It aims more specifically to show how this novel takes up certain themes frequently exploited in the field of children’s literature. We hypothesize that Rapt à Bamako is built on the one hand, around themes and ideas mainly centered on the relationship between literature and society, and, on the other hand, on the search for aesthetic or narrative mechanisms to account for of the life of beings and things in contemporary Africa. The novel uses a series of narrative strategies aimed at revealing the tensions between rational inquiry and supernatural thought. It thus presents the particularity of introducing the reader into a universe that is above all political and into the Malian social imagination where the conception of the world includes, for a good part of the population, both the visible and invisible world.