Myths and modernity in Madame Bâ by Érik Orsenna

Abstract

Questioning modernity, nowadays in the tragic context of migration between Africa and Europe, raises the fundamental problem of travel in general articulated to the construction of a humanity. Madame Bâ, the heroine of the same name, Madame Bâ and Mali Ô Mali, two novels by French writer Érik Orsenna, succeeds in the Herculean tour de force of bravely rubbing against the identity and dehumanizing reductionism of Western modernity, of getting rid of the inextricable and often stifling links of the African tradition. Behind the foam of these solitary struggles is the central question of a humanism which, summoned to live on, makes the substance of myths work in the background.