Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

L'envers du regard

1994; Société des africanistes; Volume: 64; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3406/jafr.1994.2400

1957-7850

Michèle Coquet,

Agriculture and Rural Development Research

The part of the body that especially expresses a person's humanity is the face. For the Bwaba (Burkina Faso), the face is not a natural fact of human morphology. A person acquires a face only when it is marked with graphic incisions. These figures transcribe the myth of the world's creation according to which the human face was born from the tears a god shed when his twin committed a transgression whence death ensued. The trail of his tears drew the first motif ; it has always been marked on cheeks since then. Owing to its form, the flowing tears that marked it and the figures decorating it, the face is the paradigm of a human being's relation to the world of the gods and to the world of the past whence he springs and where he is destined to return. For the Bwaba, the world's origins are revealed in the depths of the eye, beyond the black pupil.