Interdiscours du mythe simiesque : Boubacar Boris Diop et La Planète des singes

This study proposes an intermediate reading of the Simian interdiscourse in Boubacar Boris Diop, who questioned its assumptions in Murambi, le livre des ossements and deconstructed them in his later texts, which followed his writing experience after the Rwanda genocide. The rhetoric of interethnic fratricide war, on the one hand, and the scientific discourses promoted in the 19th century on the inferiority of the black race and its proximity to the monkey, on the other hand, evoke the same racial substrate. The fascination with the hierarchy of races and species is immediately transformed into satire by Pierre Boulle in La Planète des singes. He attacks human vanity and the absurdity of the belligerent vocation of human beings. The resulting film adaptation gives rise to the first Hollywood franchise (Planet of the Apes). The saga regularly resemantizes the ideological and political criticism of imperialist thinking. It also revives the parodic power of art by inverting the patterns which, in Les Petits de la guenon by Boubacar Boris Diop, gives rise to the powerful allegory of the monkey facing the mirror, which symbolizes the drama of aping, namely the distorting image of oneself through the eye of the other.