Dictatorship and the Emptiness of the Rhetoric of Totalitarian Discourse in Sony Labou Tansiis La vie et demie

For many decades African literature has been a battleground of protest. Topics germane to the historical experiences of slavery, colonialism, and neocolonialism have persistently provided authors with master motifs that have authorized the production of literary discourses concerned with the long-standing exploitation of Africa. For many of the writers engaged in this task, which is one of denunciation, part of the major concerns of literature has been the recognition of the down-trodden dignity of African people. In the francophone tradition, in particular, such a perspective on literary expression has been labeled littérature engagée. Consistent with their determination to denounce social and political injustice, writers like Sony Labou Tansi, among others, propose a literary mode of expression that is clearly prone to undertaking, to use Emmanuel Yewah's phrase, "an introspective critical examination of the African cultural and political structures themselves" (94). Without sacrificing form, this "critical examination" cannot be detached from the so-called littérature engagée, which was particularly famous for its virulent attacks on all forms of sociopolitical injustice, including colonialism, regardless of whether the latter has been draped in its old or new forms.

However, and as if to further complicate the narrowness of tags of affiliation, Sony Labou Tansi defines himself as "un homme engageant" rather than "un auteur engagé." ¹ As he argues, "à ceux qui cherchent un auteur engagé je propose un homme engageant" 'to those who are seeking an auteur engagé, I propose an homme engageant' (9). ¹ But what does Labou Tansi's statement really mean? Is it expressive of anything more than what Margreet de Lange identifies as a "masking [way] of telling" (2), which in turn functions merely as a strategy to circumvent censorship? Does the difference that Labou Tansi draws between homme engageant and auteur engagé determine much more than an engagement with a calculated rhetorical ploy?

Auteur engagé describes a textual element in the struggle against all forms of dictatorship within the fictional framework of the text, a virtual element that cannot transcend fictional boundaries to become reality. Homme engageant, on the contrary, refers to a real person (perhaps Labou Tansi himself) out there in the real world acting as the voice of the silenced, the repressed, and fighting for the downtrodden, the marginalized, the dispossessed, and so forth. ¹ From Labou Tansi's clear distinction above, Yewah has derived the interesting and useful concept of littérature engageante as a new mode of writing that differs from littérature engagée in its enactment of a "narrator [who] is omnipresent and [an] author [who acts] as a committed agent, [and is] seen as omniscient and as having full control over the text." Yewah goes on to argue that whereas "texts of the earlier trend [i.e., littérature engagée] portrayed their political figures realistically through detailed moral/psychological and physical descriptions and depicted them as somewhat stable, real-life, historical figures in full control of their society," Sony Labou Tansi's "texts no longer claim, if implicitly, to give everything to the armchair reader. They do not pretend to close all the gaps" (94-95).

At this juncture, the main distinction between the two literary trends seems, therefore, to be built upon aesthetics rather than thematics. Both trends are equally interested in the historical and societal dimensions of life, but with the littérature engageante, fiction as a mirror of life reinforces the importance of the conceptual world by giving some autonomy to the text without disconnecting it from reality. It is not merely, as Jacques Chevrier argues, a matter of substituting "the politics of writing" for "the writing of politics," or vice versa, but a combination of both. ² Besides, as de Lange argues apropos of what, in French, is rendered in terms of auteur...