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

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 Lieselot De Taeye Ancestral spirits can be powerful presences. Their ghostly appearances gesture to death, to places and histories of belonging, to family bonds, and to events and truths that elude linear temporalities. Their enduring desires tend to evoke both respect and fear. In most Central African cosmologies, ancestors who have passed away bear much cultural meaning: they are considered to still be present and active in the world of the living; and ancestral veneration, therefore, is a common practice (MacGaffey 5–7). In Western belief systems, "ghosts" are commonly relegated to the domain of superstition; interventional agency or life beyond death for the deceased ancestors, therefore, are considered unambiguously factual to a much lesser extent than they are in Central African cultures. The literary productions that emerged from mid-century Congo reflect the cultural importance of these ancestral spirits in the region and the different possible perspectives on that. In Sony Labou Tansi's La vie et demie (1979), for instance, dead characters possess an agency that resembles that of living beings (see Clark). They use this power to intervene in political matters and steer the life courses of their progeny. Het stigma (The Stigma, 1970), a novel by the Belgian missionary and anthropologist Jacques Bergeyck, who worked in Congo before the country gained its independence, was published around the same time. Bergeyck's novel also engages with the spirituality [End Page 155] of the Congolese people, but from a Western, colonialist point of view. The tension between the Catholic conversion project of the missionary and the ancestral veneration honored by the community he lives in dominates the story (see Van Uffelen). In their entangling of the realm of the spiritual and the political, the novels project two very different future views onto Congo After a period of uprisings and political struggle, Belgian colonial rule in Congo ended in 1960. When we pay attention to Tansi's and Bergeyck's evocations of ancestral spirits, the colonial and postcolonial power dynamics governing mid-twentieth-century Congo emerge as a defining context (Garuba 284–85). In what is currently known as the Democratic Republic of Congo, the secular systems installed by the colonial administrations continued to work to "repress popular beliefs, characterized as primitive superstition" after independence (MacGaffey x). Intellectuals in Congo struggled with this situation: Much of the difficulty turns onto the question of establishing an authentic "text" in which African values are expressed; the philosopher, theologian, or anthropologist, writing as such, must shape his discourse according to criteria and categories that are alien to the community he is writing about. (MacGaffey x-xi) Magical realism offers interesting possibilities in that view. Because of its intertwining of two worlds in written form, the mode allows suppressed beliefs to play a defining role in the Western genre of the novel (see Garuba; Omotoso). Christopher Warnes, for instance, considered the magical realism that enables such a rehabilitation to be one of the two main iterations of the mode: "As a postcolonial response to colonialism's often brutal enforcing of a selectively-conceived modernity, magical realism of this kind seeks to reclaim what has been lost: knowledge, values, traditions, ways of seeing, beliefs" (12). Such magical realism grants Congolese authors the possibility to create space for an animist cosmology in a postcolonial secularized context. Missionaries like Bergeyck, however, also explored this third space of hybridity (see Bhabha 55). As Catholic and Protestant missions continued to be present in Congo after 1960, attempts were still being made to merge the Congolese belief system with Western Christianity. In the narrative aesthetics practiced in Bergeyck's Het stigma and Tansi's La vie et demie, different views of magical realism come to the fore. The two novels differ in the extent to which "magic" is allowed into the realist world of mid-century Congo and the political meanings that are attributed to it. In this article, I will compare these two different iterations, by focusing on the narrative evocations of ancestral spirits. There is a long tradition...

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