Of writing and freedom in Sony Labou Tansi’s novel Life and a Half

Abstract

This essay offers a critical re-reading of Sony Labou Tansi’s début novel Life and a Half that was both formally innovative and conceptually challenging. As a point of departure, I consider Tansi’s statements about his vocation as a writer and the interpretive questions they raise. One such question is why the novel’s critical reception has tended to focus on its representation of dictatorship, while not engaging as productively with its existential dimensions. To get at these issues, this essay explores the integral relationship between writing and freedom. I structure the argument around an interpretation of three aliases for the writer, Martial, Chaïdana, and Layisho, who are fictional projections of the author in the novel. My critical approach to the text is informed by the published archive of Tansi’s extra-literary writing, my own fieldwork in Congo-Brazzaville, and interdisciplinary scholarship on the Kongo people and their culture from art history to political anthropology. My re-reading of this classic novel argues that the archive and Kongo culture are valuable resources for understanding the writer’s creative repertoire, which allows us to expand our interpretive framework for explicating aesthetic choices and their meanings in the text. Freedom as a concept broadens our critical parameters and brings a range of interrelated experiences into focus in the same interpretive frame, helping us to elucidate distinctions between them. By showing how Sony Labou Tansi elevates writing as a weapon of resistance with a spiritual dimension drawing on Kongo ritual and culture, we are better able to appreciate the extent of his capacious longing for freedom at home.

Keywords:

• Writing
• freedom
• censorship
• Sony Labou Tansi
• Congo-Brazzaville
• La Vie et demie

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 All translations from the French in Encre, sueur, salive et sang are my own.

2 All references in text indicated as LH; any deviations from the translation are in brackets.

3 Original text in Kikongo: “Mpeve na ngolo za mbi bia bia na pi-pi kundu dia luzolo tugendi munu nkumbu a Mfumu. Lu ni lumbu lwa tiya twa yenge tutungidi di Nzambi a zulu na Zambi a ntoto. Bi ni bikandu bia ndinzi a mpungu. Kongo dia tu kandiki” (“Passionate Engagements” 54).

4 “Minkisi, literally, “medicine”; a specific spiritual force and the material composite through which it may be ritually harnassed” (LaGamma 294). Christian artifacts and iconography had been circulating in this region since the sixteenth century; however, the crucifixion is unlikely to have inspired this ritual practice (LaGamma 37).

5 Yengo translates kundu as “witchcraft substance,” situated in the belly and obtained through heritage, status, or initiation; the substance in the belly characterizes all actions associated with invisible powers, whether used for beneficial or destructive ends (311). Vansina documents the existence of the word -kundú in thirteen Bantu languages including Kikongo and translates it as “stomach,” noting the “witchcraft organ was supposed to be in the stomach” (299).

6 The Catholic ritual of blessing a believer with a sign of the cross on the forehead was believed to be especially beneficial to the Kongo as the soul was situated in the forehead (MacGaffey, “Kimbanguism” 249).

7 The word kongo or nkongo can mean “Congo peoples,” “founding ancestor,” and “hunter” (LaGamma 294).

8 See, for example, L’Atelier de Sony Labou Tansi. 1. Correspondence.

9 For my definition of types of freedom that are interdependent, see: Phyllis Taoua, African Freedom.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Phyllis Clark Taoua

Phyllis Taoua is a professor at the University of Arizona where she teaches courses on Africa and the diaspora, including the French-speaking world. She is the author of African Freedom: How Africa Responded to Independence (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and curator of the audiovisual archive Documenting Freedom in Africa (africanfreedom.arizona.edu).