Cutting a Long Story Short: A Semiotic and Postmodern Reading of Veronique Tadjo’sas the Crow Flies

Abstract

As the Crow Flies,written by Ivorian female writer VéronqueTadjo, deals with several stories in everyday life. Tadjo is a writer, artist, academic and author of books for young people. In As the crow flies, she ushers us into a wonderful world full of images, rhythm, colours, feelings, people, musicality, reflections about life in order to open the reader's mind and eyes. The work provokes pertinent questions in our daily lives through characters who are both nameless and faceless. This stylistic choice allows the reader to identify himself with these nondescript characters. The text is revolutionary in its construction and shuffles between the Short Story, Novella and Novel. Over all, it is a stylistic choice driven by postmodernism in its bold attempt to subvert existing conventional novelistic forms and makes meaning only when it is consciously located within such a framework. I, therefore, posit that, to critically engage with the text by way of content and form, one needs to approach it from semiotic and postmodernist perspectives.