The Road’s Child, the Child’s Road The Poetics of Displacement in the Novel for the Youth of French-speaking Africa

This article examines the aesthetics of mobility in three youth novels from French-speaking Africa. A priori, the road is not a living space for the child because of its dangerousness, but in these works, it functions as a narrative space in the metaphorical form of the “path of life”. The road arouses the vocation of writer in the child, but it also serves to highlight the childish condition, which finds its expression in an existential rout.