Passionate Engagements: A Reading of Sony Labou Tansi's Private Ancestral Shrine

In a loud voice, in a soft voice or without any voice at all, we asked that we be given justice. The situation, alas, just got worse.

Sony Labou Tansi, Le commencement des douleurs

To an uninitiated reader, Sony Labou Tansi's novels may seem full of humor and wit. He has a wonderfully irreverent way with words but his irony does have an edge to it. The names in the series of dictators beginning with C in La vie et demie (1978), for example, are hilarious: Jean Coriace, Jean Casse-Pipe, Jean Cash, Jean Cacahuète, Jean Cache-Sexe, Jean Crocodile, Jean Catafalque, Jean Carburateur and so on (148-49). The consequences of dictatorial leadership, on the other hand, appear less amusing even to a foreign readership. Sony's novels express a deep moral indignation in their denunciation of the shameful state into which humanity has sunk today. An attentive reading uncovers this dimension of the author's rage and bitter disappointment underneath the burlesque satire offered at the surface of the text. In the West, Sony Labou Tansi has enjoyed the status of an exemplary figure of political engagement in African francophone literature; his editors at Seuil advertised L'état honteux (1981) with the following statement on the back cover "L'auteur de La Vie et demie dénonce de nouveau l'arbitraire et la bétise qui régentent certains Etats africains" 'The author denounces once again the arbitrariness and stupidity that governs certain African states.' ¹ An interest in exploring this impression of Sony Labou Tansi as dissident and writer motivated my research trip to Congo-Brazzaville in August 1996.

The form my visit to Brazzaville took turned out to be a significant expression of cultural content which is now intimately wedded to my understanding of the material collected. I will thus briefly outline this experience. I had enlisted the help of the cultural attaché at the Congolese Embassy in Washington, DC, in the planning of my visit to Brazzaville. Through this diplomatic contact, I was put in touch with poets, journalists, professors, and writers who knew Sony Labou Tansi both personally and professionally. Unfortunately, Sony had passed away the previous summer, during the same week as his wife, after a battle with AIDS. Two round table discussions were organized by Marie-Léontine Tsibinda at a literary meeting place in the Plateau des 15 ans district of Brazzaville. ² The first of these discussions involved young writers and the second the established intelligentsia. ³

This customary organization by peer group proved to be consequential. With the young writers, the conversation went on for hours almost uninterrupted and ended in town over beers. With the elders, the atmosphere was extremely tense. The topic was the same: Sony's political engagement as a writer. Almost an hour into the discussion with the elders, the gentleman seated across from me finally announced that he had been the chief of censorship during Sony's literary career and that he had been responsible for banning the writer's books in Congo-Brazzaville. This gesture of frankness created an opening and soon the conversation irrupted into a vigorous debate about the author's political activism and controversial attachment to "traditions." But it was a relatively young journalist, Jean-Clotaire Hymboud, who initiated the transition: he reproached his colleagues for skirting the issue and confessed, openly expressing his pity for me, that Sony's political engagement had been a disaster. ⁴ A huge disaster, he proclaimed. ⁵

In August of 1996, there were still occasional roadblocks in town, especially near the presidential palace, where motorists were asked to show their papers. Burned-out vehicles sat abandoned on the roadside. I had been told by the young poets who took me around town on foot that the city had been sorted out ethnically; there was very little ethnic...