Definition

Sony Labou Tansi’s play, published in 1990, is an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, which focuses on the political state of civil war between two families. The play anatomizes the endless cycle of violence in which the characters are trapped and uses Romeo and Juliet’s love and deaths as a form of individual political resistance.

Sony Labou Tansi (real name Marcel Ntonsi) was born in Bas-Congo, part of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo and moved “across the river” to Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo, when he was 12. He lived in the city until his death in 1995. Sony was a novelist, poet, playwright, and dramaturge as well as a political activist.

One of his key concerns was to delineate a Pan-Congolese way of thinking which in his later writings came close to a form of tribalism. His relationship with France, and Europe in general, was not a smooth one. He relied on funding from sources directly or indirectly linked to the French government and, despite criticism, chose to work within those parameters. Sony’s perceived concessions toward the Republic of Congo’s ex-colonial power and its structure of funding for the arts meant that he attracted both attention and criticism from his peers in Congo and in Europe. The balancing act between artistic integrity and dissemination of their work remained especially acute in Sony’s case. As a result of his political activism, (he was elected a député for an area of Brazzaville), he had his passport confiscated on several occasions and, toward the end of his life, was unable to seek medical treatment abroad for AIDS-related illnesses.

La Résurrection Rouge et Blanche de Romeo et Juliette (The Red and White Revival of Romeo and Juliet, all translations from the original French are mine) is a play set in South Africa in the early 1990s. The racial mixture is overt; the cast list has the characters identified by race or racial mix. The tableaux into which Sony divides the play, a technique which he uses in several other plays, speaks to stasis not action. It is more like a series of snapshots than a narrative. Sony’s play is so different from the original that it seems only to retain a “whiff” of Shakespeare (as Sony himself put it) that comes from the characters’ names and their thwarted love story. There are certain pieces of dialogue (Romeo’s and Juliet’s soliloquies) and additional characters (such as the Nurse) that call Shakespeare’s play to mind; however, the main take away of Sony’s play is the monstrous absurdity of a political system that venerates violent death.

In the first scene, “Tableau 1” a “Montague” talks about cultivating some legitimacy stating that “law is the thermometer of civility” (lines 15–16). The law appears as a ghostly voice, a spectral force which appears and disappears without any obvious rationale. The nature of its appearance and its “apparitions” colors the law itself. Color is a key motif in the play, in the explicit racial casting, as well as in the blue and red colors that the members of each house wear.

There is an illusion of the rule of law, but being seen, behaving in a certain way, is most important. One Montague describes politics as “the art of snacking on the future in small pieces” (Scene 1, lines 47–48), the implication is that one’s political actions affect one’s future wealth in both material and political senses. What happens to the law in a dictatorship is an overwhelming focus on documentation: proofs, parchments, and depositions. The Prince figure (the voice of authority) speaks only through a spokesman, never directly. He is as mute as the law that has to be articulated through the voices of others.

In the scene “The Second Morning,” the trappings of the law are presented: the ghost dressed in “the law’s colors,” a bugle, the declamation of what is on the parchment, and the violations which have been committed, “addition to the basic law of March 22nd – May disposition. Exposure to banishment with loss of job, goods, and nationality. Contraveners of the law on co-existence, notably articles 15 and 16, lines 3, 4 and 5” (Scene 2, lines 9–11). Every time a fight breaks out, he wanders around in the aftermath, giving his “decision” through a spokesman, and another fight begins as the two sides continue to apportion blame. At the end of his tether, the Prince decides on a tennis match in which the winner can claim the loser’s goods. The loser relinquishes his nationality and is banished. The feud gets even more ridiculous when the Prince’s tennis match, originally intended to settle it once and for all, brings it to a new climax. In one scene, a whole list of deaths from disease and natural causes is blamed on the other family’s devilry. Despite the characters of the Prince and the Voice of Authority in the play, there is no sense of reason operating within its society. Every action is a reaction to the previous set of insults, injuries, and deaths.

The collocation between civil war and sport is used several times in Sony’s work. Here it is a tennis match, in another work, a football game. There is much to be said on the parallels between dictatorial rule and competitive sports, not least in the area of permitted and ritualized violence. The farce-like nature of the play counteracts the violent seriousness of the content. The overplayed tennis match, the Prince’s righteous anger, and Romeo’s desire for death highlight the absurd position of the post-independent state.

Romeo is searching for an end to hate: “I’m dying to love while all around me enflame and cultivate hate. Everywhere smells of iron, fire and powder” (Scene 4, lines 27–29). It is Balthazar who reminds Romeo that Juliet thinks of him and that he can go to make love to her at the Capulet party that evening. The feud feeds off itself so that every death is another reason to continue and every death leads to a further death. That is why Romeo yearns for a way to love, an alternative to the vicious cycle of death in which he is trapped: “she [Juliette] sends some rays of hope to lift up my broken body. She extinguishes this weariness in which my soul is bogged down” (Scene 4, lines 35–36).

There is an interesting distinction between the Capulet parents: Papa Capulet tries to dampen his wife’s hatred while she accelerates it. It is unusual to find hatred portrayed as a female emotion especially in such a violent manner. However, this is a recurrent theme in Sony’s work. Although women suffer from many creative and varied forms of violence in Sony’s work, they are also its perpetrators and have to share responsibility for the cyclical violence that pervades his novels and plays. Papa Capulet tells his wife: “hate finishes by being tedious and boring” (Scene 5, line 35), but she revels in it, responding: “this hate fits me like a velvet dress” (Scene 5, line 44). Only at the end of the play does Juliet’s mother show any remorse, collapsing over the news of her daughter’s death. Sony’s inclusion of hate appears as a feminine characteristic, which is passed from generation to generation in a kind of intrauterine flow and adds to the sense of political violence as an unending and interminable cycle.

Absurdity and hyperbolic violence against the human body and by extension, the body politic, is at the heart of Sony Labou Tansi’s work. However, the play has little narrative drive and even less character development. It certainly is not an arresting drama in the same sense as Romeo and Juliet. The reader remains unsure of how valid the characters’ professions of love are. Romeo dies by his own hand just as in Shakespeare’s play but not because Juliet is dead; instead he kills himself as vengeance for all the deaths that have preceded his. There is a strong sense that Romeo does want to die that particular death. Death is the only factor over which the citizens have a choice. In a totalitarian state, the only element of choice may be the way in which you are able to die. Sony consistently plays with this idea: choosing death, specifically the “right” kind of death, is an important theme in nearly all his work.

The environment in which the characters operate is one defined by death: Juliet calls it “a country of the dead” containing “cockroaches and toads” and “these fields of skulls” (Scene 14, lines 1–4). The link between love and death has a political dimension. Romeo is not a martyr to his love for Juliet but to his desperation over the “necro-society” in which he lives. The choice to die is the only choice that the members of this claustrophobic and hopeless society can make. Sony argues that if we can choose the manner of our deaths, we are not powerless but resisting beings who can reclaim some sense of agency through a sacrificial action. According to Sony, we are caught between “parentheses of blood,” and our death is the only part of life over which we have control. Some of the most powerful words in this play are “spoken” by Romeo and Juliet postmortem through their testaments. Romeo’s testament is written to Juliet, urging her to use his death to live better and more freely “choose laughter over tears as I chose death to live” (“Romeo’s Testament,” line 25). Juliet tells Romeo that she is unable to consider life after he is dead. She addresses the senseless quarrel, reminding those involved that “you don’t need me to give you hate for you to hate” (“Juliet’s Testament,” line 30) There is no reconciliation, only a sense of loss: “the tragic tax” that the two families have paid.

The Republic of Congo has alternated in the postindependence period between economic bankruptcy, violent civil conflicts, and indirect rule by the former French oil giant, ELF Aquitaine. It is through writers such as Sony that attention can be brought to the dilemma of small and endlessly manipulated countries. Theater was for Sony a vital and living language through which to exchange ideas. It was also a means to communicate with people in rural areas, often illiterate, who were the key constituency for Sony’s political and social activism. It is unclear when and where this play was performed. However, there is anecdotal evidence from Sony’s letters of his theater group traveling to remote areas of the country, putting on plays and providing health education to the rural population. Such strategies not only remind us of Shakespeare’s traveling players but also of the urgency of theater, then and now.

Conclusion

Sony Labou Tansi is best known for his novels, several of which are available in English translation. However, his only adaptation of a Shakespeare play, which this entry discusses, is an interesting exercise in what he termed action theatre. As a strong believer in the power of drama to convey a message, especially among non-literate communities, Sony’s adaptation gives us a fresh and forceful message about the destructive nature of political and state-sanctioned violence.

Cross-References