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.