La vengeance chez Frédéric Marcelin et Sony Labou Tansi : La vengeance de Mama (1902, 1974) et La Vie et demie (1979)

Abstract

Nearly 70 years apart, two francophone authors, the Haitian Frédéric Marcelin (1848-1917) and the Congolese Sony Labou Tansi (1947-1995), published novels whose plot either entirely or partially calls upon the theme of vengeance, each featuring the same principal elements: women, dictators, champagne, poison, seduction and sex. In Marcelin’s La vengeance de Mama (1902, 1974), Zulma Corneille, nicknamed Mama, avenges the death of her fiancé, Épaminondas Labasterre, by making his murderer Télémaque drink poisoned champagne during an amourous rendez-vous; in Sony Labou Tansi’s La Vie et demie (1979), after seeing her entire family murdered by the Guide Providientiel de la Katamalanasie, Chaïdana, the daughter of the antagonist Martial, likewise uses poisoned champagne to kill off a number of the totalitarian country’s officials after having offered herself to them in the novel’s eponymous hotel. The goal of this article is to investigate what must be fortuitous similarities between these two novels, as it is unlikely that Labou Tansi would have read Marcelin. It aims to analyse the way in which vengeance is employed in the novels, notably the use of ruses and seduction as a means of enticing the victims.