This article examines the possible connections between language and silence in three novels by Boubacar Boris Diop: The Drums of Memory (1990), The Knight and His Shadow (1997) and Murambi : The Book of Bones (2000). Thus, our analysis will show that, for the storyteller, silence plays a significant part in the elaboration of literary language. Indeed, it seems that speech and, moreover, the memory of the past just spring up from silence, without really splitting away. By questioning this paradox of a “speaking silence”, Boubacar Boris Diop hints at the possible disclosure of a memory that “cannot be heard by anybody”. It would be discovered through the traces of a code that must be deciphered (if ever decipherable). Ismaïla Ndiaye, Lat-Sukabé and Cornelius Uvimana are all of them different faces of this endless and hopeless quest. At the same time, the author reveals another kind of voice that comes into contrast with the first one and bears alienation and incomprehension, leading ultimately to violence and destruction
