Sunday Independent Feature on Veronique Tadjo and As the Crow Flies

October 22nd, 2009 by Tracey

Johanensburg-based Veronique Tadjo, originally from the Ivory Coast, brings the world of Francophone African letters into her writing.

Her novel As the Crow Flies has been published as part of the new Penguin African Writers Series. It weaves together a rich tapestry of voices to tell stories of parting and return, suffering, healing and desire in a lyrical and moving exploration of the human heart.

In this Maureen Isaacson feature from the Sunday Independent, Tadjo speculates about where her novel might be situated, in the grand run of the “new roman” from Alain Robbe-Grillet’s 1950s experiments until now:

Necklace of beaded messages
Veronique Tadjo, the author of As the Crow Flies, is head of French at the School of Literature and Language Studies at Wits University. Born in Paris, she was raised and educated in Cote d’Ivoire.
Among her publications are novels, poetry collections and children’s books. As the Crow Flies, originally A Vol d’Oiseau, was translated from the French by Wangui wa Goro, a Kenyan writer and translator in 2001.
Tadjo says in an interview that this was her first book of stories. A first edition of The Flight of the Crow was published in the Heinemann Africa Writer’s Series.
The author “would have loved to write one of those serene stories with a beginning and an end. But… lives mingle, people tame one another and part. Destinies are lost.”
This is her message in a preface to the reader. Tadjo says that her work is “not experimental”. She describes her book as “a necklace. Each story is a bead. It requires a second reading, a thread that goes through all the stories – I think this thread is love.”
She begins with a poem: “If you want to love/Do so/To the ends of the earth/With no shortcuts/Do so/ As the crow flies.”