Ceriana Mayneri, Andrea <br/><br/>
The impasses of trance at school. Gender violence, religions and protests in N’Djamena 

 -  2018.<br/>							 
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<br/><br/> ‪For several years, schoolgirls in N’Djamena have been entering into a state of trance. This article analyses some of the reactions of the girls’ teachers and parents, as well as those of the media and the political and religious authorities who have been commenting or directly intervening during these crisis in the schools. The frequent references to “illnesses,” “syncopes” or “hysteria” refer, often simultaneously, to various kinds of threat that seem to be menacing N’Djamena and its inhabitants. The rush experienced by anxious adolescent girls is associated with the appearance of djiins, shâyatîns, water sirens and other figures from witchcraft, whose threatening presence is supposedly borne out by the abundance of beauty accessories among the girls, but also by the effects of a “Boko Haram perfume” (the sect having perpetrated a series of deadly attacks in N’Djamena). Apart from these popular, political and religious interpretations, young students’ trances in Chad’s capital city seem to take the form of suffering and recurrent abuse, but also of their various struggles for emancipation. In conclusion, I conjecture that this exceptional behaviour actually enables the young student in Chad to express their sufferings and aspirations, while, due to the characteristic properties of the trance phenomenon, at the same time imposing binding limits upon them.‪