Sony Labou Tansi: From Archive to Corpus

Sony Labou Tansi died in 1995. In the few years since his death scholarship on his work has already had to face many issues and conflicts. With this set of papers we have tried to problematize what we see as a transition from archive to corpus. To begin with, the collection of his papers would be the production of an archive. Sony was a very generous person and tended to give his manuscripts away to friends and acquaintances. Sometimes this produced admirable results as in the case of the publication in Turin of a translation of Le quatrieme côté du triangle (Turin: La Rosa, 1997 ). At other times, this created conflicts involving different claims to legitimacy and rights over the author's works as in the case of his last novel, Le commencement des douleurs (1995). Sony was also prolific and idiosyncratic: he tended to write multiple versions of a text by hand in notebooks. Some manuscripts show evidence of the author's revision but, in general, Sony produced his works through a process of exploration and accumulation. This particular practice generated an impressive proliferation of manuscripts in the author's hand in which one can trace the evolution of each of Sony's works. As a result of both the quantity and quality of his unpublished manuscripts and personal papers, the establishment of an archive is of crucial importance to the future study and definition of Sony's corpus.

Other new and original material can also be included in the corpus, such as the transcript of a public lecture given by Sony in Lomé in February 1988. This will appear in the occasional papers of the CEAN (Bordeaux, in press, 2OOO). The transcript includes questions from the audience and dialogue with Togolese intellectuals. Testimonies from colleagues were collected which throw an interesting light on Sony's writing method as well as literary influence and sources.

Current research on Sony Labou Tansi is in the process of documenting, interpreting, and coming to terms with the multifaceted individual who wrote poetry in Kikongo, published novels in French at Seuil, performed his plays in France as well as in villages throughout Congo-Brazzaville, defended human rights, democracy, and the cause of Kongo nationalism. In order to comprehend Sony's moral, aesthetic, and political trajectory it will be necessary to continue to trace the genealogy of his thought in his published and unpublished works, for which Nicolas Martin-Granel has provided a point of departure. A reading of Sony's private ancestral altar provides new access to the author's spiritual universe and Kongo worldview and its broader significance aesthetically and politically.

More traditional material such as newspapers articles, political tracts--all the traces of Sony's engagement with Congolese politics in the last years of his life--should be listed and collected. Greta Rodriguez Antoniotti has produced the most complete and up to date bibliography of his works, including unpublished material and criticism on Sony Labou Tansi. We hope that this significant contribution to research on the author will be published soon. The necessary background for an understanding of his oeuvre will not be created spontaneously. Sony Labou Tansi wrote in French, but he was Congolese and the Congo has a well-documented history, especially in its relations with the French: no critic can afford to ignore this dimension.

Where will Sony's archive be? Sony was, as we know, often supported by francophony; yet has there been any effort to start gathering this material? The Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas, would certainly be a very good place, but other candidates for establishing an archive would also be: Limoges, Paris . . . . This archive could provide the basis for a delimitation of the corpus and an understanding of his oeuvre. Without knowledge of the context of his work, without knowledge of the Kongo heritage, of his many French connections, how...