In the novels Les Sept solitudes de Lorsa Lopez by Sony Labou Tansi and Za by Raharimanana, grotesque poetics participate in the representation of an imaginary of the crisis that cannot be reduced to a socio-political satire. While the grotesque is a particularly apt mode of expression for expressing the disarray resulting from the anomie into which the post-independence world seems to have fallen, this one does however make the novel escape from a purely pessimistic or miserable discourse by opening up to an elsewhere. Insofar as it blurs established boundaries and puts Manichean norms in crisis, the grotesque appears in the novels studied as an attempt to overcome a dichotomous way of thinking about otherness, in favour of more ambivalent and shifting representations of the so-called postcolonial space.