Poétique et métaphorisation du corps dans l'œuvre de Sony Labou Tansi
Poetics and metaphorization of the body in the work of Sony LabouTansi

Summary/Abstract: The author of a rich and continuous poetic work, albeit published posthumously, the Congolese Sony Labou Tansi (1947-1995) is one of the strong voices of the négro-africaine literature of the second half of the twentieth century. If his various collections are in line with the writers of negritude by the way he treats the various themes analysed and the relationship, made up of familiarity and strangeness, that he maintains with the language of the coloniser, it remains one of the most misunderstood and contested. His experience seems to be based on a "poetics" at the centre of which man and nature are constantly connected. His propensity to spiritualise the relationship to the world and to nature is reminiscent of a certain metaphysics scattered throughout his poems. However, from this poetic posture, at the same time archaic and modern, there results an imagery of the body which is noteworthy for its immorality: the obscene, the scabrous, the coarse are so many registers in which the poet, in his posthumous work, struggles to metaphorise the body, and thus to signify the political violence which characterises the Congolese society where he was born and where he died, persecuted politically.

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