Werewere Liking
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Werewere Liking (b.1950, Cameroon) is a writer, playwright and performer based in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. 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.
Performances by Ki-Yi Mbock include music and ritual, often using marionettes. This is consistent with Werewere Liking's pan-African aesthetic, lyrical language and reinvention of ritual, and her use of avant-garde techniques. Her novel Elle sera de jaspe et de corail is a song-novel recounted by a misovire (a post-gender being) in writing a journal on nine themes.
She received a Prince Claus Award in 2000 for her outstanding and successful contributions to culture and society, and the Noma Award in 2005 for her book La mémoire amputée.[1]
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[edit] Writing
Her many books and plays include:
- La mémoire amputée, Nouvelles Editions Ivoiriennes (2004), ISBN 2844872360
- Elle sera de jaspe et de corail, Editions L'Harmattan (1983), ISBN 2858023298 - trans. Marjolijn De Jager, It shall be of jasper and coral; and, Love-across-a-hundred-lives (two novels), University Press of Virginia (2000), ISBN 0813919428
- 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), ISBN 1573090662
[edit] Further reading
- Simon Gikandi, Encyclopedia of African Literature, Routledge (2002), ISBN 0415230195 - pp.288-9
- Katheryn Wright, Extending generic boundaries: Werewere Liking's L'amour-cent-vies, in Research in African Literatures, June 2002 accessed at [1] March 5, 2007
- Don Rubin, World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre: Africa, Routledge (2000), ISBN 0415227461
- Nicki Hitchcott, Women Writers in Francophone Africa, Berg Publishers (2000), ISBN 1859733468 - focuses on Mariama Bâ, Aminata Sow Fall, Werewere Liking and Calixthe Beyala: see publisher's details[2]
- Peter Hawkins, Werewere Liking at the Villa Ki-Yi, in African Affairs, Vol.90, No.359 (Apr. 1991), pp. 207-222 - accessed at [3] March 1, 2007
