In the Steps of the Griots: Traveling Bards in Shay Youngblood’s Black Girl in Paris

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This paper explores the figure of the griot in Shay Youngblood’s Black Girl in Paris (2000). More precisely, it traces how the protagonist Eden becomes an itinerant bard, historian, and exhorter who retraces Black Atlantic routes while proudly asserting her roots as member of the African Diaspora. Through her mental and physical journeys, the heroine creates cartographies of experience that seek to better express one’s feelings and grow as individual and as artist, attesting to the need to maintain a sense of imagined community to fight the lasting effects of racism as a global phenomenon, a discrimination that she feels doubly as a Black woman. Following her predecessors James Baldwin and Langston Hughes, the protagonist comes to embody a new generation of bards who encourage us to look at the past and learn not to declare too quickly a ‘post-race’ era. She represents a new generation of griots, those Jean Ouédraogo fits under the category of ‘griot novateur ou explorateur’ (86), because their roles go beyond upholding tradition and keeping a record of history. But while Ouédraogo focuses on works set in West Africa, I expand this definition to include writers like Youngblood who also carry on the legacy of the griots, their art outliving colonialism and slavery. In fact under the pen of a writer like Youngblood, who answers Amiri Baraka’s call to offer ‘what the Griot/Djali provided, information, inspiration, reformation, and self-determination’ (Suso 82), the griots’ art finds a new breath in the Americas.