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 Congolese
novelist, poet, and dramatist, a member of the African avant-garde,
who's critical but hopeful satires, met much censorship. Tansi's
central themes are the corruption of power and the possibilities
of resistance. He often provocatively deconstructs common Western
literary models, styles, and genres, switching point of views, employing
carnival like exaggeration, dismembered language, and antinaturalistic
aesthetics. Although in his later works Tansi did not abandon political
satire and critique, he often touches 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 in Kimwanza, Zaire, the eldest of seven
children. His father was a Zairian and mother Congolese. Tansi learned
French in a school - in the then French Congo on the other side
of the river - where using ones native 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 Collége
Tchicaya-Pierre in Pointe Noire and then worked in Brazzaville as
an administrator in several ministries, before devoting his time
to writing and the theatre.
"Africa is a volcano. The whole world is another volcano.
Our peoples are volcanoes and their eyes are watching us."
(from Les Yeux du volcan, 1988)
In 1979 Tansi founded the Rocardo Zulu Theatre and published his
first novel, La Vie et demie, which won the Prix Spécial
du Festival de la Francophonie. His plays were staged in Paris,
Dakar, and New York. However, in his own country Parti Congolais
du Travail criticized Tansi for his ideologically doubtful views.
During the era when the Congo underwent 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 a 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 from traditional
African herbal medicine and incantations. Tansi died on June 14,
1955, in Foufoudou of an AIDS-related illness. His wife, who was
with him, also died.
Tansi won several literary awards, including 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) is 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, a director of
a girl's school, is tormented by thoughts of Yavalde, a student
who has a crush on him. Another man makes Yavalde pregnant, she
kills herself and Nita is accused of the tragedy. His family is
murdered by a mob. The dead girls father, a politician, pulls strings
and Nita ends up in jail. He manages to escape but 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", advises an old fisherman in a small river village.
La vie et demie (1979) is set in an imagined African country,
Katamalanasie, which has 228 national holidays. The self-acclaimed
"Providential guide" has banned the words "hell" and "pain" from
the nation's lexicon. The guide has the chief opposition leader
cut into pieces, but his spirit refuses to die and he continues
to speak and torment the cannibalistic dictator.
Les septs solitudes de Lorsa Lopez (1985, The seven solitudes
of Lorsa Lopez) is a collection of stories and takes 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.
In the story Lorsa Lopez's husband, an esteemed citizen, murders
a woman. 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 account of chaos and 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 yeaux du volcan (1988) a mysterious colossus, Affonso
Sombro, arrives to 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
revels the inventiveness, absurd humour, and political commitment
of his fiction. La paranthèse de sang (1978) is about a group
of soldiers who are sent to kill a rebel leader who is already dead.
They proceed to interrogate the family, and after a massacre they
receive news that the "Capitale" is no longer interested in the
deceased Libertashio. In Qui a mangé Madame d'Avoine Bergotha
a dictator expels nearly all the men from his country. 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)
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