L'enfant noir a book that will be used as one of the main focuses of this paper, tells a story of an adult man who remembers and looks back at his happy childhood in French Guinea through the eyes of a small child. It is partially a chronological account: the narrator skips his actual birth time, but starts directly with the story of a five-year-old child, proceeding with his adolescence period and ending with the age of 17/18 when, he went to Paris.
The author has chosen a very interesting narrative plotting to present and shape his nostalgic autobiography. The autobiographical ''I'' (a grown-up man) takes a position of a child (a narrative ''I'') and have a constant dialogue between each other. It is a dialogue between a child not yet Westernised and an adult, who realised the falsity and gaps of his colonial education and, who wants to remember the loss of his traditional self. According to N. ''Nowhere in the novel is the African child explicitly identified. It is mainly through…show more content… Many African texts have been written partially with Western in mind, and his text is not an exception. He addressed two public in a single text (507J). The author, by using French language as a ''tool,'' shares his memories with the Westerners in order to show them ''the intrinsic beauty'' of Malinke culture (53A) and naturalness of African civilization. At the same time, Laye wants to show to his own African people why and how he had become who he is. The book is dedicated to his mother whom he immensely misses and loves. It is she who evokes those lost childhood memories and experiences, and it is because of his distance from her and exilic position in Paris, he decides to write this book. Laye was scared that he would forget his childhood and roots. It was a consious decision of a grown-up man to recapture the mysterious aspects of African civilization which were constantly being eroded by time, colonization and modern European
