The postcolonial world of Sony Labou Tansi: between magic and science

Author(s)

  • Sara Buekens Ghent University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.51777/relief12375

Keywords:

Sony Labou Tansi, African Literature, postcolonial literary ecology, magical realism

Abstract

This paper focuses on Sony Labou Tansi’s Le Commencement des douleurs (1995), which tells the story of an African village, Hondo-Noote, subjected to the violence of the elements and suffering from numerous environmental cataclysms. I will analyze how Sony Labou Tansi inserts a scientific discourse into this magic realist novel in order to reveal a changing and hybrid natural environment and to evoke the coexistence of pre-capitalist or primitive aspects and capitalist and technological elements so characteristic of everyday life in postcolonial sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, we will explore how magic realism allows for the integration of science fictional elements into this novel to show the ecological destruction perceived by the natives as « magical » or « supernatural » because of its alienating and inexplicable nature.

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Author Biography

  • Sara Buekens, Ghent University

     Sara Buekens holds a PhD in French literature (Ghent University, 2020). She published a monograph on her ecopoetic research, Émergence d'une littérature environnementale : Gary, Gascar, Gracq, Le Clézio, Trassard à la lumière de l’écopoétique (Droz, 2020). Her postdoctoral research (Ghent University / University of Idaho) focuses on the representation of nature and environmental problems in Francophone African literature. She co-edited with Julien Defraeye a collective volume on the literary representation of animals and animal life (Classiques Garnier, 2022) and has published articles in several journals (Roman 20-50, Revue critique de fixxion française contemporaine, French Studies in Southern Africa, Études littéraires, Elfe XX-XXI, Phantasia, Ecozon@, Romanesques). She is editor-in-chief of the Revue critique de fixxion française contemporaine.

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Published

2022-07-08

Issue

Vol. 16 No. 1 (2022): Crossed views on francophone literature & ecology

Section

Articles - thematic dossier

License

Copyright (c) 2022 Sara Buekens

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

All articles published in RELIEF appear in Open Access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). Under this licence, authors retain ownership of the copyright of their article, but they allow its unrestricted use, provided it is properly cited.

How to Cite

Buekens, S. (2022) “The postcolonial world of Sony Labou Tansi: between magic and science ”, RELIEF - REVUE ÉLECTRONIQUE DE LITTÉRATURE FRANÇAISE, 16(1), pp. 150–165. doi:10.51777/relief12375.