"Life and a half", by Sony Labou Tansi

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By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow

The Congolese Sony Labou Tansi, who disappeared in 1995 at the age of 48, was one of the most innovative writers in contemporary African literature. Revealed in the 1970s thanks to the theater competition organized by Radio France Internationale, its prolific and deeply subversive theater enjoys an international audience. Sony was also a novelist, with six novels to his credit. His novels have revolutionized romantic writing, breaking radically with the social realism that has long characterized African fiction. His first novel "La Vie et demie", which has become a French classic, is closer to the wonderful Latin American imagination than Balzac or Zola.

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Write by carelessness

"Life and a half is called writing by thoughtlessness,  " writes Sony Labou Tansi in the Warning that accompanies his novel. This statement is more like an artist's coquetry than a real feeling of having inadvertently entered literature. Writing was his life, as his friends who saw him at work kept saying.

Poet, man of theater and novelist, Sony was the author of fifteen plays, poems and six novels including La Vie et demie . Both cruel and funny,this first novel under the pen of this man of the theater is a ferocious satire on the Africa of dictatorial regimes. In the Congolese context from which Sony Labou Tansi is inspired, the dictatorship is characterized by its marxizing verbal loghorea calling for revolution and the end of the "comprador bourgeoisie". To recount these hypocrisies, the author will privilege the playful, the parodic and the baroque, tearing away African fiction from its social and self-celebratory roots, to firmly place it in critical realism. Life and a half , stripped of all didactic intention, is part of this movement.

An unassailable novel

Difficult to summarize this novel because its sophisticated and complex narration, proceeds by successions of caricatural and unbearable images, favoring the visual and the aesthetic at the expense of the narrative. Sexual orgies, summary executions, torments, carnival banquets follow each other and look alike in these pages which do not hesitate to summon them to come and lend a hand to the living.

The novel opens with a banquet scene organized by the head of state to celebrate his victory over Martial, the leader of the opposition. The opponent's barbaric killing took place before the eyes of his wife and children. The latter then found themselves at the anthropophagic banquet where they were forced to eat the body of their parent, literally reduced to pâté and stew. We are in Katamalanasia, imaginary country of Africa, on which reign generations of "providential guides" whose misdeeds are reproduced identically in a sort of vicious, infernal and repetitive circle. Main victim of the terror that reigns this dynasty of bloodthirsty dictators at the head of their country, the population is exhausted and desperate.

Hope will be reborn, with the return of the specter of the deceased Martial returned to haunt the "providential guides". In the works of Sony Labou Tansi where the real meets the fantastic, the dead never die there altogether. The ghost of the murdered opponent imprints a black mark on the faces of tyrants, condemning them to helplessness and madness. At the same time, the daughter of Martial, the only survivor of the traitor's family, takes the lead in the rebellion against the dictatorship. Inhabited by the spirit of her father, the beautiful Chaïdana will take revenge on the misdeeds of the regime, eliminating during romantic lovemaking the most influential members of the Katamalanasian dictatorship. Having become a veritable killing machine, it leads the reader through a labyrinth of intrigue, leading its people through their distant descendants towards final victory.

Shakespearean resonances

Life and a half does not tell a great story, but "  the neuroses of a blocked society  ", as the specialist of this author Boniface Mongo-Mboussa recalls. The models of Sony Labou Tansi are neither Balzac nor Zola, but rather the unbridled and zany fantasy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which is undoubtedly more adapted to say the dysfunctions of Africa of the dictatorships and the civil wars than it incarnates the imaginary republic of Katalamanasie.

It's also a very literary book, rich in Shakespearean resonances - think of Macbeth assailed by the bloody ghosts of his victims. The heroine of the novel, Chaidana, sharing the layer of the Providential Guide on which her life depends, is reminiscent of the fate of Scheherazade in Arabian Nights. All this wealth makes that, despite the decadences of the sad postcolonial period that this novel stages, by closing the volume the reader keeps in mind only the joyful inventiveness of its author who prophesied that "one day, the earth and the sky will be joined again".

Life and a half , by Sony Labou Tansi. Editions du Seuil, 1979 (available in pocket edition)

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