Review of The Plays of Aristide Tarnagda: Contemporary Francophone Theatre from Burkina Faso Edited and Translated by Heather Jeanne Denyer and Anna G.R. Miller, Methuen Drama, 2025

Reviewed by Sophie Siegel-Warren

The Plays of Aristide Tarnagda: Contemporary Francophone Theatre from Burkina Faso, edited by Heather Jeanne Denyer and Anna G.R. Miller, presents six plays by the award-winning Burkinabè theatre artist Aristide Tarnagda in English translation. The volume includes an introduction by Denyer, followed by her translations of Red Earth, Ways of Loving, Sank, or the Patience of the Dead, and Musika, along with Miller’s translations of And If I Killed Them All, Ma’am? And Tears from the August Sky.

Tarnagda was born in 1983 in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso—the same city where he attended University and fell in love with theater, beginning as an actor in 1999. Tarnagda transitioned to directing before he discovered his passion for writing during a 2004 playwriting workshop with Ivorian playwright Koffi Kwahulé. In 2013, his first two plays,  And If I Killed Them All, Ma’am? and Tears from the August Sky, were published and performed in French at The Festival les Francophonies in Limoges and at the Avignon Festival. In 2016, Sank, or the Patience of the Dead was published and had its world premiere at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Belgium. In 2017, Tarnagda won the Grand Prix de littéraire d’Afrique noire for the collectively published Red Earth and Ways of Loving, both of which premiered at the Limoges Festival. Musika – which had been nominated for the Radio France Internationale prize for Best Play – had its world premiere in 2018 at the Récréâtrales Festival in Ouagadougou.

As is evidenced by the robust international performance history of all six plays in this collection, Tarnagda’s work has reached audiences around the French speaking world for over a decade. This anthology does the necessary work of bringing his oeuvre to anglophone theater. Moreover, Denyer and Miller wisely link the plays to their performance histories by publishing separately authored introductions to each play—also translated into English by the editors—by individuals representing a range of touchpoints with Tarnagda’s work: scholar Dr. Fatou Ghislaine Sanou (Sank), 2018 Récréâtrales Festival Director Odile Sankara (Musika), the playwright himself (And if), and actors who starred in their respective plays: Ramatou Ouédraogo (Tears), Kiswend-sida Urbain Guiguemdé (Red Earth),  Lionelle Edoxi Gnoula and Safourata Kaboré (Ways). These structural and editorial choices speak to Denyer and Miller’s approach to translation as a form of dramaturgy, one that keeps the embodiment of the text and ultimate goal of performance at the forefront. Denyer and Miller acknowledge the important legacy of oral performance in Tarnagda’s work, highlighting how a translator must, as translator Marjolijn de Jager suggests, “be able to hear when reading, particularly as the nature of African theatre texts is intricately connected to oral traditions involving music.” In this way, Denyer and Miller argue, the oral nature of the work can be “recaptured as it will be by performers on the stage.”

The anthology is organized chronologically, following Tarnagda’s shifting style from earlier works featuring a single speaker and reckoning with the personal as political (And If I Killed Them All, Ma’am, Tears from the August Sky, Red Earth, and Ways of Loving) to his later ensemble pieces, reckoning with the explicitly political as personal (Sank, or the Patience of the Dead and Musika). While some of the translations in the collection have been published previously, presenting them together enables the reader to appreciate how Tarnagda is untying a knot through his writing, working at interrelated questions through different angles and perspectives. This happens literally, as with explicit companion pieces And If I Killed Them All, Ma’am and Tears from the August Sky, in which Lamine (in Killed) and his unnamed pregnant girlfriend (in Tears) both speak in continuous monologues to a woman in a car – addressed only as “ma’am” – who never appears on stage. And it also happens thematically, as with Red Earth and Ways of Loving, monologue plays written for a single actor who speaks as two members of a family. Both plays additionally traffic in the complexity of family memory, in which the realities of physical task of writing weigh heavy (the fraught act of letter writing between brothers in Red Earth and the social alienation faced by the left-handed girl in Ways).   The splitting of the double character into a single body exemplifies the question posed by Kiswend-sida Urbain Guiguemdé in his preface to Red Earth: “Can you leavesomewhere without really leaving it behind? Can your body separate from your soul?”

While technically a monologue play, Ways of Loving has also been performed as a two-hander, and this invitation to a second performer, as well as the play’s courtroom setting, marks Tarnagda’s transition from a single speaker in an unspecified locale to plays that feature larger casts in more explicitly political environments. In Sank, or the Patience of the Dead, Tarnagda resurrects Thomas Sankara – the Burkinabè military officer and Marxist revolutionary leader who chose the name Burkina Faso, or “land of the upright people” –staging Sankara’s final days leading up to his assassination. In Musika, the anthology’s final play, Tarnagda turns to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to dramatize the catastrophe of environmental exploitation. Echoing questions posed in Red Earth, Tarnagda personalizes the environmental devastation through his characters’ agony over staying or going; Musika is determined to remain tied to her sacred homeland and its blessings, while her love, Simba, tries to convince her to leave.  Musika echoes Tarnagda’s earlier monologue plays in the character of Choryphaeus, a narrator who speaks directly to the audience, addressing them in the original French plays in English, as “Ladies and Gentlemen.” Choryphaeus encourages the audience to laugh and feel at ease, as they enjoy their “Reality Theatre”—which, he clarifies, is not meant to make them feel bad, but rather to entertain. Yet Choryphaeus keeps slipping, at one point declaring: “Do you hear those screams in the coltan of your TVs? Of your cell phones?…” before apologizing, “Excuse me, you’re not here for politics, but for magic.” While in Kill and Tears, the audience’s implication is merely a suggestion, in Musika, audience complicity is laid bare.

Part of Tarnagda’s personal and deeply human way into the largescale economic and environmental wreckage of colonialism is through his characters’ shared, continuous love for the physical land, the earth of their home, that co-exists with immense suffering, violence, poverty, and loss. His plays are laced with smells of rain and mud, sounds of birds, and movement of familiar animals. “I just want to go watch the dove caress the sky with its wings,” laments the girl in Ways of Loving. “The earth that holds my story, the earth that holds my dead, the earth that holds the trees, the flowers, the mountains, the waters, the earth that holds my home, our homes,” recalls one brother in Red Earth. “We were gazing up at the stars that light the sky with their white teeth,” remembers Lamine’s girlfriend in Tears from an August Sky. “Listen to the sky. Listen to the river. Listen to the trees. Listen to space. Listen to the unknown,” says Simba in Musika.  Tarnagda lets these odes sing while ensuring his audience understands the particular pain and violence of colonial deprivation and exploitation. As the girl in Ways of Loving declares: “Africans are forced to leave, seeing as they were dispossessed of everything and now they’re without forests, without seas, without oil, without land, without cotton.”

One of the anthology’s strengths as a work of theatrical translation are Miller and Denyer’s shared success in rendering Tarnagda’s pacing, the rhythm of which provides the plays with implied stage directions of sorts. In And If I Killed Them All, Ma’am?,  the speech’s tempo acts as the play’s conductor, steering the speaker’s moments of calm or activation: “Everyone waits at some point. Everyone waits for a bit of bread. A bit of familiarity. A bit of a dream. A bit of sun. A bit of rain. A bit of land. A bit of peace.” Here, Miller relies on alliteration and staccato syllables, allowing the speaker to start out pensive and driving him towards desperation. Denyer achieves a similar rhythmic momentum by foregrounding Tarnagda’s effective use of repetition in her translation Red Earth. “The mosquitos abandon the corpses/The dogs abandon their watch/An explosion of dew on the grass/An explosion of hesitant voices.” There are other moments, however, where the language was less clearly rendered, specifically when the translators toggle back and forth between the singular and plural in a way that frequently trips the rhythm, or when certain word choices muddle the poeticism. When transitioning from Red Earth‘s verse stanzas into its prose, for example, Denyer’s translation loses some of the care displayed in her verse translation: “With mosquitoes in the houses, in the fields, in the wells, it’s impossible for us not to catch a nasty disease. Despite the warm weather, our bodies would become extremely feverish.” Why ‘nasty’ – a word that has adopted a whole host of cultural connotations in English in recent years; similarly, why ‘extremely,’ a word that, coupled with the conditional tense, carries extra syllables that provide unnecessary stumbles for the performer.

All six plays are centered on the question of individual’s actions. As Tarnagda himself writes, his work is rooted in characters who face “dire situations where they have to make tough choices, where they have to define themselves and take charge of their fate. They can’t be indifferent.” This challenge extends to his audience, using the necessitated activation of his characters to compel his audiences to wake from their indifference and even, perhaps, contemplate their own complicity.

Sophie Siegel-Warren (she/her) is a dramaturg, translator, producer, and researcher for creative projects. She recently received her Doctorate in Dramaturgy from the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale for her dissertation, a French-to-English collection of plays from German-Occupied Paris that includes Claude Vermorel’s Jeanne avec nous, Jean Paul Sartre’s Les Mouches, and Jean Anouilh’s Antigone.  As a script consultant and dramaturg, Sophie has worked on over thirty film and theater scripts for screenwriters and playwrights including Tori Sampson and Pulitzer Prize finalists Fake Friends, and for institutions including multidisciplinary creative studio DreamCrew, Yale Repertory Theatre, Ma-Yi Theater Company, and The Guthrie Theater. Sophie was previously a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Drama, Theater, and Dance Department at Queens College and is currently the Development Manager and Associate Producer for site-specific theater company En Garde Arts in New York City.