The Plays of Aristide Tarnagda: Contemporary Francophone Theatre from Burkina Faso

The first English-language anthology of Aristide Tarnagda’s theatre, this book brings together six of the acclaimed West African playwright’s recent French-language plays.

Winner of ADELF’s 2017 Grand prix littéraire d’Afrique noire(Best African Literary Work), Tarnagda blends poetic and colloquial registers to create powerful characters that resonate with the universal themes of longing, the need to be heard, and the realities of everyday life. This debut anthology now invites the anglophone world to encounter Tarnagda’s theatre alongside voices of West African scholars and theatre artists whose short forwards and afterword contextualise each of the translated plays and his impactful theatre career.

The plays include:

And If I Killed Them All, Ma’am?(2013)
Tears from the August Sky(2013)
Sank, or the Patience of the Dead(2016)
Ways of Loving(2017)
Red Earth(2017)
Musika(2019)

Along with an introduction by Heather Jeanne Denyer and completed by images of these productions, The Plays of Aristide Tarnagda is a fantastic introduction to not only this acclaimed and beloved playwright, but also to the themes and joys of francophone African theatre.

Aristide Tarnagda is a Burkinabè actor, playwright, and director who has led the Récréâtrales Festival since 2016. He is the author of over twenty plays which have been performed throughout Africa and around the world.
Heather Jeanne Denyer, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Theatre at California State University, Fullerton, is a dramaturg, translator, and scholar of African theatre, gender studies, and puppetry.
Anna G. R. Miller, Ph.D., is a translator, teacher, and scholar specializing in twentieth and twenty-first century French and Francophone literature.