HETEROLINGUISTIC POETICS AS CHARACTERISTIC OF A POSTMODERN LANGUAGE IN MARGUERITE ABOUET’S AND CLEMENT OUBRERIE’S AYA DE YOPOUGON

Abstract

Marguerite Abouet’s and Clement Oubrerie’s graphic novel titled Aya de Yopougon represents a lived experience of a suburb of
Abidjan, known as Yopougon and nicknamed “Yop City”, as a means of expressing its postmodern sensibilities. Yop City’s language is postcolonially postmodern because of its morphological arbitrariness, its postcolonial hybridism and its adherence to the postmodern character of montage. It is a language of a social group of a geospace, mapped and spoken among young Yopougon dwellers. This paper reads Aya de Yopougon as a heterolinguistic text, a product of postcolonial and postmodern discourses; it employs Rainier Grutman’s heterolinguistic poetics. Abouet’s text fits into heterolingistic paradigm since it makes a
variable space for other languages, engages in syntactic and lexical borrowings, and adopts multiple registers of all social groups and status. In this context, a postmodern space appropriates its language or language appropriates its space and gives birth to its postmodern cultures and identities. In Yopougon’s “third space”, Abouet’s characters adopt codeswitching and interlanguage as a means of navigating linguistic boundaries of its geospace, thereby violating linguistic sacredness; they
create a language that can be described as “profane” by its deconstruction of standard rules through linguistic deviations.