Response to “Living Presence in Postcolonial Congo: A Comparison between the Narrative Evocations of Ancestral Spirits in Jacques Bergeyck’s Het stigma and Sony Labou Tansi’s La vie et demie” by Lieselot De Taeye

Abstract

Response to “Living Presence in Postcolonial Congo: A Comparison between the Narrative Evocations of Ancestral Spirits in Jacques Bergeyck’s Het stigma and Sony Labou Tansi’s La vie et demie” by Lieselot De Taeye Pooja Sancheti, Respondent Lieselot De Taeye’s article compares two magical realist novels, written within the same decade, about Congolese society as it transited from a colonial state to a post-colonial one, the legacy of colonization (both political and material oppression as well as evangelism), the complex intersections of indigenous myths and beliefs with Christianity, a lopsided modernity brought in by the West in conflict with already existing systems, and internal political upheavals. What is striking, especially in the context of postcolonialism, is the article’s early framing of the “positionality” of the two writers. Sony Labou Tansi was a native Congolese author, while Jacques Bergeyck was a Belgian missionary and anthropologist who spent considerable time in the Congo before and after independence. This difference in affiliation-national, racial, communal, and even epistemological-is articulated in the ways indigenous belief systems, functions of cultures, notions of power, assimilation and hybridity, and even narrative access and focalization are deployed and presented. So, where Bergeyck’s protagonist, Leo, finds hybridity between Christian beliefs and rituals and indigenous beliefs as the way to transition into the future, Tansi’s narrative implodes upon itself, finding little, from within or without, to break the cycle of (political) violence. I feel that magical realism makes the author’s positionality an important basis for the kind of access the author has to a culture and history, and for their choice of instances, explanations, and their treatments of these instances. This positionality of the author vis-á-vis a culture has been a key argument in defining magical realism, starting from Alejandro Carpentier. As shown in the article, the author’s position is also pertinent to the project of decolonization, because colonization causes a fractured terrain and unique power struggles, as well as cultural and economic unevenness. Authorial voices are important interruptions that may not always speak for the margins or be subversive, but can create the space for these to be heard. They can also, as the article elaborates, imagine very different futures for a people and a nation. A case in point is how Bergeyck and Tansi work with the central motif of Congolese culture: ancestral spirits. The belief that ancestral spirits can and do influence the living world, with varying degrees of agency, is common to many (African) cultures, and is also a primary motif in magical realism more broadly. The intermingling of [End Page 229] the spirits and the living is one of the ways to challenge the notion of linear time, since there is a collapse of the apparently neat distinctions between present, past, and future. Additionally, the idea that lineages spill over is a close analogy to counter the argument that the moment of political independence cleaves a nation’s history into a (colonial) past and (postcolonial) present. Really, can neat compartments ever be set up within history and memory-personal or political? What is also striking about the spirits in the two novels is that they are not always kind or benign and, simply by virtue of having moved on, have not lost the personalities or political persuasions of their living selves. Martial especially, in Sony Labou Tansi’s La vie et demie, is violent and ill-tempered, and does not hesitate to rape his own daughter to ensure she (and future descendants) moves away and lives in a safer place. These spirits are, as De Taeye puts it, not “exemplary martyrs” but “adamant victims of an absurd system haunted by colonial oppression”. This desacralization of spirits humanizes them while also personifying history. The two novels present two different futures for the Congo among the many possible ones. Each future is based on the premise it began with, tied to the author’s own experiences and belief systems. One proposes a depoliticized hybrid of spiritual cultures, with less problematization of the many other intersections in this process, such as political and economic hegemony. The other fails to find any way out of the violence embedded deep...