Word Games, Roleplays, Speaking Slots: The Promotion of a New Order in Zouglou, Ivory Coast Urban Poetry

Urban music of Ivory Coast, Zouglou was born clearing itself from any linguistic demarcation. Its posted ambition was to unify and rally around a federative speech-language a nation in lack of identity. Paradoxically, territorial markings settling in different neighbourhoods musical choices and linguistic creations that are more or less original and new characterise the movements of which it is an outgrowth – “woyo” and “Ambiance facile”. From these conflicting claims nevertheless emerges a constant : speaking fundamentally means taking power, through the words, over the words of the other. It gives the singer a double power. Based on the cognitive system of the speakers, this article analyses how these productions arise as “whole of meaning”, that is a speech considered, and to consider in its interactive enunciating dimension, assuming there is a speaker and a listener, and the willingness of the first to influence the latter. The basic hypothesis is that the literary text, a linguistic material, is also and may be mainly, a thinking practice, a cultural object socially, culturally and ideologically determined.