By Phil Williams
phil@franklin.uga.edu
One morning when he was a boy, Karim Traoré went with his brother into the millet fields near his home village of Tcheriba, in the African country of Burkina Faso. It was just another day of subsistence farming. Looking back now, as he sits in his office in Joe Brown Hall, he knows it was the day that his life changed.
“My father’s adopted son, whom I knew as my brother, asked me if I knew this was the day to register if you wanted to go to primary school,” says Traoré. “Children in the village were not compelled to go school, and new students were admitted only every second year. I left the fields and went to the school and lied to them and said my father sent me.”
Though his father quickly accepted the idea when he found out about it, Traoré’s mother, fearing the corruption of outside influences, was very angry. That first step, however, led Traoré to work he could barely imagine--full elementary and secondary schooling in Burkina Faso, college in the Ivory Coast and graduate school in Germany.
Now an associate professor of comparative literature and a member of the African-studies faculty at UGA, he spends his scholarly hours turning back toward Africa--to the traditions of oral storytelling that have lasted for centuries.
Traoré is recognizable in Joe Brown Hall for his dulokiba--flowing clothing from Africa. His knowledge of languages extends far beyond English: he speaks nine languages “comfortably” and reads another two or three. Whether the language is Spanish, French, German or the Mande languages with which he grew up, Traoré is at home in the world of words.
“My village was multilingual, and I was from a large family--I have three brothers and three sisters--and so I always liked languages and telling, listening to and reading stories,” he says. “I have never gotten away from that.”
After six years of primary school in his village, he was one of four children out of about 40 from Tcheriba selected to continue with high school in the town of Bobo-Dioulasso. After finishing his secondary education, he went to the University of Abidjan. Then it was on to the University of Saarbrücken for his doctoral degree.
While his focus in graduate school was in German literature and linguistics, he never lost his fascination with the stories he’d heard as a boy in Burkina Faso.
What he discovered in his studies was that the entire issue of African identity was clouded by complex layers of past colonialism, varied religious beliefs and geography, among many things. He began to study African oral literature, seeing how biases became observable when the stories were written down by people ignorant of the underlying aesthetic principles. Detached from the essential rules of the oral version, stories lose the richness that gave them power and durability.
“The amazing thing to me was that in Western scholarship, oral literature is never dealt with as literature,” he says. “I want to restore the contribution of these stories to literary theory and to literature itself.”
In 1997 Traoré received his final degree, in African literatures, and he came to UGA the next year.
“University of Georgia students are very curious about Africa,” he says. “I taught an Honors class last year that was really amazing. For the first half of the semester, we studied Western literature and for the second half, we contrasted that with non-Western literatures. Their interest in Africa was very strong.”
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