Résumé: D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love is amongst the most tragic works of the twentieth century for it purveys an unprecedented likeness in its ‘social and moral annihilation’ to Greek tragedies. Yet, one should not take Women in Love tragically. Having Nietzschean philosophy at its core and calling the human condition into question allows what Friedrich Nietzsche calls the “mad unhappy animal”, i.e., man to recreate their “yet not fixed nature” within the flux of what Rupert Birkin in Women in Love defines as “the inverse process, the blood of destructive creation.” Tragedy, if unavoidable, could at least be supplemented, countered, and de-centered. Therefore, the characters portray what Jacques Derrida calls as a movement of free play as they move progressively toward a space where they “pass by man and humanism.”

Résumé: In Queen Pokou: Concerto for a Sacrifice (2009), Véronique Tadjo re-writes the legend of Pokou of Cote d’Ivoire, a West African queen who orchestrates a mythic exodus and builds her own kingdom. This article deals with Tadjo’s special re-structuring of the black national narrative. Through her postmodern re-writing of the ancient Ashante myth of Pokou and her reversal of the ordinary chronotopic dynamics of narrative, Tadjo employs the Bakhtinian dialogic play between space and time. Ergo, the vertical axis of phenomenological and transcendental perceptions permeates the horizontal line of history. Queen Pokou is an oral text in which the story is retold in circles and in the fashion of the griots. The chapters are ‘aleatory’ and the plot is shufflable within a multiplicity of narrative possibilities.