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Sony Labou Tansi (1947-1995) |
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Congolese novelist, poet, and dramatist, a member of the African avant-garde, whose critical but hopeful satires met with a great deal of censorship. Tansi's central themes were the corruption of power and the possibilities of resistance. He often provocatively broke common Western literary models, styles, and genres, switched point of views, employed carnival-like exaggeration, dismembered language, and anti-naturalistic aesthetics. Although Tansi did not abandon in his later works political satire and criticism he often touched on such universal themes as love, life and death. "They are blind, like the law. And equally brutal. The only escape from the brutalities of the shabby law of the uniform is to be big – big as in bigshot. And there is also a communicable kind of bigness, the bigness through contact that comes from being a relative or friend of the original bigshot. Dadou remembered something else he had read: Africa, that great shit-heap where one will take his place. What a putrid shit-heap of the word was! Neither more nor less than a great big shit market." (from The Antipeople, 1983) Sony Labou Tansi was born as Marcel Ntsoni at Kimwanza, Zaire, the oldest of seven children. His father was a Congolese from Congo-Kinshasa (the Belgian Congo) and mother Congolese from Congo-Brazzaville (formerly the French Congo). Tansi learnt French at school in Brazzaville – on the other side of the river – where using one’s own language was forbidden and mistakes were punished by ridiculing the pupil. Later he stated that French was the language "in which I myself was raped." At the age of twelve Tansi moved to Brazzaville and completed his education at the Ecole Normale Supérieure d'Afrique Centrale. In 1971 he was appointed to teach French and English at Kindauba. In the same year he started to write seriously. He taught English at the Collège Tchicaya-Pierre in Pointe Noire and then worked in Brazzaville as an administrator in several ministries, before devoting his time to writing and to the theater. In 1979 Tansi founded the Rocardo Zulu Theatre and published his first novel, La Vie et demie (1979, Life and a Half), which
won the Prix Spécial du Festival de la Francophonie. Soon after his
entry in the literary world, Tansi began to earn himself a reputation
for his ability to make provocative comments. "I write in French," he
once said, "because that is the language in which the people I speak
for were raped, that is the language in which myself was raped."
His plays were staged in Paris, Dakar, and New York. However, in his
own country Tansi was criticized by the Parti Congolais du Travail for
his ideologically doubtful views. "Africa is a volcano;" he later wrote
in Les Yeux du volcan (1988). "The whole world is another volcano. Our peoples are volcanoes and their eyes are watching us." During the era when Congo underwent a transition from a Marxist-Leninist people's republic to a pluralist democracy, Tansi was active in the Mouvement Congolais pour le Développement de la Démocratie Intégrale (M.C.D.D.I.), a group opposed to Congo's single political party system. In 1992 he was elected deputy for Makélékélé in Brazzaville. As a consequence of his public activities and involvement in tribal politics his passport was withdrawn. Tansi suffered from AIDS, but he was for a long time unable to obtain the medical attention he needed; after being in hospital in Paris he sought help with his wife from traditional African herbal medicine and incantations. Tansi died on June 14, 1995, in Foufoudou of AIDS-related illness. His wife had died a few days earlier. Tansi won several literary awards, including the Concours theatral interafricain de Radio-France Internationale in 1979 for Conscience de tracteur, the Grand Prix Littéraire de l'Afrique Noire for L'anté-peuple, the Palme de la Francophonie in 1985 for Les sept solitudes de Lorsa Lopez, and in 1988 the Ibsen Foundation Prize. The Antipeople (1983) was partly based on the story of a refugee, the author's friend, who was falsely accused of the murder of a young woman. In the bitter satire Nita Dadou, director of a girl's school, is tormented by thoughts of Yavalde, a student who has a crush on him. Yavalde is made pregnant by another man; she kills herself and Nita is accused of the tragedy. His family is murdered by a mob. The dead girl’s father, a politician, pulls strings and Nita ends up in jail. He manages to escape but in freedom, as a poor fugitive, he must prepare himself to assassinate, in the name of an ideology, a State and Party official during a mass in the cathedral. "The most important, the first revolution: the heart, the brain, against the soldier", says an old fisherman in a small river village. La vie et demie was set in an imagined African country,
Katamalanasie, which has 228 national holidays. A self-proclaimed
"Providential guide" has banned the words "hell" and "pain" from the
nation's lexicon. The guide has the chief opposition leader cut up into
pieces, but his spirit refuses to die and he continues to speak and
torment the cannibalistic dictator. The English translation of this
novel was based on the 1979 version by the Éditions du Seuil; Tansi
continually worked and reworked his writings. Les septs solitudes de Lorsa Lopez (1985, The seven solitudes of Lorsa Lopez) was a set of stories which took the reader into the city of Valancia, an African Macondo. Tansi got the idea for the novel from a real event, the sight of a body, surrounded by a crowd, outside the Brazzaville hospital where his wife worked. A woman is murdered by her husband, an esteemed citizen, Lorsa Lopez. When the police fail to investigate the death, and no one can remember the murdered woman's maiden name, Estina Bronzario advocates a ban of sex, and demands that men take their wives' names. In the background of the story is international politics, corruption, mixed with an account of chaos and some hallucinatory scenes: "One morning, unprecedented crowds gathered in the Plaza de la Poudra, not to await the arrival of the police, nor to bury Estina Benta's bones, nor even to watch the departure of Sarnata Nola's troupe. The multitudes jostled for position to see the fish with the death's head that the fishermen. Fernando Lambert and Luizo Martinèz Lopèz, had just caught. It was a winged monster at least seventy feet long and weighing some three tons. On its hide, covered with scales, feathers and hair gleamed the seven colours of the rainbow." The stories are told by the female narrator Gracia who at the end removes herself from Valancia to Nsanga-Norda, swallowed by the sea. In the foreword of the book Tansi wrote: "Art stems from its ability to enable reality to express what it would otherwise have been unable to articulate through its own means or, in any case, that which it ran the risk of consciously passing over in silence." In Les yeux du volcan (1988) a mysterious colossus, Affonso Sombro, arrives at the town of
Hozanna, where Benoit Goldman reads Genesis aloud, to avoid sex with his wife, and Claudio Lahenda
announces: "Comrades, the revolution has been postponed." In his plays Tansi showed
absurd or grotesque humour, in which the underlying message is serious, and
the political commitment of his fiction. Due to his political opinios,
Tansi was also imprisoned and his passport was revoked. Tansi's famous tragic farce La paranthèse de
sang (1981, The Parenthesis of Blood) was set in a country, where the most feared
opponent of the government, Libertashio, is already dead, but soldiers keep on
terrorising people who claim that he is dead.
Qui a mangé Madame d'Avoine Bergotha? (1989) potrayed a dictator, named Walante, who throws out of his country nearly all males. He vows to fight against the mind, intelligence and rationality, and plans to guillotine the Pope. Labou himself took the role of the dictator, when the play was presented with great success in 1989 at the Sixth International Festival des Francophones in Limoges. In Antoine M'a vendu son destin (1986) another dictator plots against plots to overthrow him. The secretary Hortense says in Je soussigné cardiaque: "Today, 'our own' do it from the heart. They mistreat us as though they had our permission. It's worse." For further reading: Littérature nègre by Jacques Chevrier (1984); Nouvelles écritures africaines by Séwanou Dabla (1986); Francophone African Fiction by Jonathan Ngaté (1988); Littérature et politique en Afrique noire by Koffi Anyinefa (1990); La fonction critique de l'oeuvre romanesque de Sony Labou Tansi by S. Osazuwa (1991); 'Passages: The Women of Sony Labou Tansi' by Louise Fiber Luce (in The French Review, 64.5, 1991); Rape and Representation, ed. by Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver (1991); Introduction á l'oeuvre de Sony Labou Tansi by M. Cakabakulu (1995); Sony Labou Tansi by J.-M. Devésa (1996); Les procédés de création dans l'oeuvre de Sony Labou Tansi by A. Mbanga (1996); 'The Works of Sony Labou Tansi' by J. Updike (in New Yorker, 5 Februart 1996); Sony Labou Tansi ou La quête permanente du sens by M. Kadiima-Nzvji (1997); 'L'écriture romanesque de Sony Labou Tansi. L'oeuvre littéraire dans un environnement francophone' by Janusz Krzywicki (in Studies of the Department of African Languages and Cultures, 1998); 'Passionate Engagements: A Reading of Sony Labou Tansi's Private Ancestral Shrine' by Phyllis Suzanne Clark (in Research in African Literatures, 1999); 'Sony Labou Tansi'. Special Issue of Research in African Literatures, ed. by Phyllis Suzanne Clark and Alain Ricard (October 2000); Mémocriture: Sony Labou Tansi ou les enjeux oppositionnels d'une archéologie documentaire by Eugène Nshimiyimana (2010); 'Introduction: Sony Labou Tansi – the Conscience of Africa and the Voice of the People' by Dominic Thomas, in Life and a Half: A Novel by Sony Labou Tansi (2011) Selected works:
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