Werewere Liking (born 1950, in Cameroon) is a writer, playwright and performer based in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. She established the Ki-Yi Mbock theatre troupe in 1980 and founded the Ki-Yi village in 1985 for the artistic education of young people.
Her novel Elle sera de jaspe et de corail is a song-novel recounted by an astute misovire (literally 'man-hater' from misos Gr. "hate" and vir Lat. "man") in writing a journal on nine themes as a dialectic between two men wherein the author of the journal imagines a new race of people uninhibited by the historical baggage of patriarchy and colonialism. She is the author of the African feminist theory "misovirism."
She received a Prince Claus Award in 2000 for her contributions to culture and society, and the Noma Award in 2005 for her book La mémoire amputée.
Writing
Her books and plays include:
- La mémoire amputée, Nouvelles Editions Ivoiriennes (2004),
- Elle sera de jaspe et de corail, Editions L'Harmattan (1983), - trans. Marjolijn De Jager, It shall be of jasper and coral; and, Love-across-a-hundred-lives (two novels), University Press of Virginia (2000),
- La puissance de Um (1979) and Une nouvelle terre (1980) - trans. Jeanne Dingome, African Ritual Theatre: The Power of Um and a New Earth, International Scholars Pubs. (1997),
Further reading
- Simon Gikandi, Encyclopedia of African Literature, Routledge (2002), - pp. 288âÂÂ9
- Katheryn Wright, Extending generic boundaries: Werewere Liking's L'amour-cent-vies, in Research in African Literatures, June 2002 accessed at http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb265/is_200206/ai_n5663530 March 5, 2007
- Don Rubin, World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre: Africa, Routledge (2000),
- Nicki Hitchcott, Women Writers in Francophone Africa, Berg Publishers (2000), - focuses on Mariama Bâ, Aminata Sow Fall, Werewere Liking and Calixthe Beyala: see publisher's details https://web.archive.org/web/20070927062232/http://www.bergpublishers.com/us/book_page.asp?BKTitle=Women%20Writers%20in%20Francophone%20Africa
- Peter Hawkins, Werewere Liking at the Villa Ki-Yi, in African Affairs, Vol.90, No.359 (Apr. 1991), pp. 207âÂÂ222 - accessed at https://www.jstor.org/stable/722779 March 1, 2007
- Kaboré, André. "Orature as a Characteristic of the Literatures of Werewere-Liking and Pacéré." International Journal on Studies in English Language and Literature (IJSELL) 2, no. 4 (2014): 13-30.
Notes
External links