Transcultural Dynamics and Intertextual Aesthetics as a Narrative Challenge in the Writing of Paul Youba Kiebre

Abstract

Contemporary African literature is characterized by writing permeated by cultural, religious, and symbolic tensions arising from the encounter between local traditions and global modernity. Paul Youba Kiébré's work fully embraces this dynamic, presenting, through his short stories "La Vasectomie" (2021) and the ten others in the collection Ma maudite race (2025), situations where intercultural mediation is not resolved harmoniously, but manifests as persistent narrative conflicts: body, marriage, lineage, and beliefs thus become privileged sites of confrontation between biomedical rationality, religious norms, and traditional imaginaries. This article proposes to analyze how this intercultural conflict unfolds through a unique intertextual aesthetic. In this vein, it will demonstrate that the Burkinabè short story writer's writing rests on a poetics of defamiliarization. Through an analysis of marital figures, the reproductive body, prohibitions, transgressions, and paratextual devices, the study highlights an intercultural mediation conceived as a recognition of irreducible difference. This aesthetic thus appears as a writing of the in-between, where cultural fractures are not only represented but erected as a structuring principle of the narrative.