Kangsen Feka Wakai talks with poet Wirndzerem G. Barfee.
KFW: Francis Nyamnjoh, the Cameroonian writer, has addressed the issue of identity in both his scholarly and literary writings. In a way, he has implied that the task of the writer is not restricted to story telling. Part of the writer's task, he argues, especially in the 'postcolony' is to negotiate fleeting and hybrid identities. Do you agree with him?
WGB: It is true obviously, for if we are telling stories, then, these stories must evidently betray or manifest a constitution. No story grows in a vacuum, even if the subject is “air”, “emptiness” or “vacuity” it must be tied down technically to a structure, to some substance; either by conformity, alignment, opposition or a total of all these factors put together in dynamic contradictory, conflicting complex that inherently identifies with the story it fictionalizes. In short, to every text there is a context.
Now, how the writer manipulates his politics will depend on his societal conditions, his ethical stance, his artistic temperament/mood or talent. I do agree that the postcolonial African has been thrown into a violent, riotous crucible, a Babel of confused and confounding identities that constantly torture his perception of self and the ambient reality surrounding him. He is agonizingly trying to reconstitute his image but finds himself (and some times tragically not) through a cracked lens aimed at a screen of splintered mirrors. When Nyamnjoh locates the concerns of identity in the postcolonial setting and discourse, he is ethically taking to task the writer of such space by rousing the political in his/her consciousness, driving him/her to whet the axe of his/her perception and strike it at the tangent where the definition of self/selves of the post-colonial picture is reflected in all its confusions and conflicts, its distorted and shifting compositions.
For instance, symbolically used, official signboards, administrative texts, media programming, quota mathematics of government recruitments and appointments, origin of most state-hired or state-accepted expatriates, etc, will graphically, in the hand and mind of a skillful writer confirm or infirm the veracity, as fiction or not, of our demagogical experiment in independence and integration. A writer will be negotiating – if I take the tricky word in polite terms – mutant/transient and hybrid identities just in a context where our national experiment gives room for those identities to evolve into clusters of identifiable currents, not the nebula that is being fried in a volatile crucible of ethnocentrisms that are constantly splintered into feuding and divisive dualities of autochtony/allogeny. Anglophony/Francophony, Nordiste/Sudiste, SW/NW, Sawa/Graffi, Pahouin/Sawa etc. It is an explosive recipe that is being cocktailed. I find it hard to locate contours of sustainable sutures that baste patterns of national hybridity, for hybridity that can emerge, if we stretch linguistics metaphor, one that has attained the stability of Creoles and not the transience and volatility of pidgins. And I concur that the writer, among other creative concerns, cannot ethically manifest but a culpable apathy towards these rifts, when necessarily called upon to address such endemic and perils that undermine our commonweal and mirth.
KFW: Some have suggested that Cameroon literature has been stunted by the lack of publishing houses and a vibrant reading culture. Do you think this factor has played a role in confining our literature within the tyrannical walls of academia with its sometimes absurd and outdated 'qualifying paradigms'? What can the crop of emerging writers do liberate our writing without circumventing quality of the stories told?
WGB: It’s an all too evident fact that the absence of publication possibilities has arrested the expansion of our literary patrimony. Publishing, and distribution of books is not only a lucrative affair, it is one of those centers where the politics of culture and economics interplay in our neo-colonial context with devastating effects, especially in Francophone African setting where Cameroon is a subset. From creative to educational texts, the business has been in the muscled clasp of the metropole that controls both the financial and technological capital that the publishing industry runs on. The political influence they wield over their neo-colonial underlings have ensured the continued infantilization or even the annihilation of many a local publishing initiative when we consider the unfair competition and corruption that gangrenes the textbook industry in countries that are their exclusive hunting grounds. So when you talk about confining our literature into that trench one understands, because this confinement also operates on a syndrome Bate Besong terms as that of a “disruptive phenomenon” which is why it excludes certain writers and their texts, and these writers are declared “anathema” in spite of their wide and conspicuous recognition and popularity beyond our parochial municipalities. The result of this, he says, is that we end up with some myopic agents and choices that lack “the necessary perspicacity of vision and ability to domesticate school curricula that benefits present and future generations.”
When it is not this practice of politically induced literary ostracism or quarantinism; it is brazen mammonism where the absurd qualifying paradigms operate on downright graft. It becomes more lamentable for the Anglophone writers some of who suffer the above plus the fact that little effort is made, forget the vast mouthing about national integration, to reciprocate by including their texts in the Francophone curricula in translated or original forms. Contradict me! Enough for these indictments and finger pointing and we can now turn to ourselves, autonomous actors in the literary sphere: What can we do? We have appreciable possibilities for engendering a local publishing industry that is not calqued on foreign capitalistic models.
Historically, we can borrow a leaf from the Nigerian experience starting with the looking at the way Onitsha market literature created possibilities for local production and readership, the same thing that has continued with the Nigerian domestication of film production, marketing and distribution. I can, unequivocally, tell them not to write with the profiteering and compromising intention of being including into the system’s opaque transactions on textbook vetting. Write for the world, write for the future and write for eternity. Write about a corrupt present but don’t write for a corrupt present. If you are into writing for survival instincts, then leave literature and start writing party pamphlets and tracts! That is what I will them if they are to remain ethically and aesthetically relevant to both the political and literary vision that is expected from them by future generations.
KFW: Why is the development of an equally vibrant culture of critical theory essential in Cameroon literature?
WGB: No Vibrant creativity can exist and flourish without a critical culture. In simple arithmetic, I’ve put it somewhere as Creativity (C1) + Criticism (C2) = Vibrant Literature (VL): C1 + C2 = VL
Not all writers are good critics and not all good critics are writers. I’m not inventing the wheel there, but what we want to say is that here should be no mutual exclusion but complementarities and symbiosis between these Siamese parts of our literary and artistic culture. Their virile cross-fertilization engenders a literary pedigree that becomes genetically more sustainable. Nigeria, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Uganda, Kenya and so on provide eloquent and prolific examples of literary cultures where this reality is vibrant: this is attested by the vast galactic harvest that they constellate the international literary firmament with. To evolve a sound critical heritage we must have amongst others these:
-
Genuinely intellectual arts faculties stuffed with scholars who demonstrate a ravenous craving for eclectic knowledge, eschewing parochial intellectual insulation and stagnation. We should not have faculties, whose intellectuality is at service of politico-administrative survivalist, scholars with lager-addled brains that only reflect their own intellectual deliquescence and decadence.
-
We must have literary journals/magazines whose perennial lifespan is mark of its refusal to pander to the facility of politico-professional convenience. We should not have journals produced with the sporadic expediency of bogus academico-administrative arrangements whose sole outcomes remain an unabashed quest for promotions, titles and sinecures.
KFW: 'The Writer as Tiger' Bate Besong. Elaborate...
WGB: This statement may be a shift from Soyinka Negritude/Tigritude corrective oppositions between the expressed and the intrinsic valences of a writer and his peoples’ culture and worldviews as evident in their arts; but BB’s metaphor still threads postures of opposition and potency: a writer as tiger who attacks and opposes that which is unjust, unethical, unaesthetic (ugly), and immoral, one who pounces on these evils that leave society corrupt, nepotistic, and consequently unlivable for parts or wholes of that society thereby compromising the unalienable right to happiness of present and future generations.
The writer as tiger must rise above the docile animals of the forest and prey on the predatory and oppressive species. A writer is destined to please, to plead, to preach and to peel (excoriate) where and when necessary. He/she has the moral/ethical duty to defend and offend, to gore and goad where and when the good of present and future society is at stake. A tiger is both beautiful and powerful – a fine combination of aesthetics and politics: of beauty and power. A writer as tiger, I agree, is all that, no wonder Blake Tiger burns but brightly! In Cameroon, no two writers, on our national jungle, have incarnated these lionized postures more than Mongo Beti and Bate Besong in respective Cameroonian contexts. Of Bate Besong, the critic Azore Opio cites his Tigritude as one whose authorial audacity, “is no cat’s paw”. He roars, he does not purr; for his is not a cat’s “enfeeble imitation”. The tiger posture Bate Besong prescribes for our writers, though not being the one and only bearing writers should assume, has been bred by his unapologetic identification with writer-activists like Soyinka (who once did not hesitate to attack a radio station at gunpoint to protest political corruption); like Solzhenitsyn who was incarcerated away in Communist Russia’s gulags and whom Besong cites as saying a great writer is an alternative/competing government and becomes a bête-noire of the regimes in power; like Ngugi Wa Thiongo who has talked about the writer in politics and of course like Mongo Beti who is a tiger of towering dimensions.
KFW: What role will technology play in all of this?
WGB: As I said earlier, technological and financial capital are the pillars of the publishing industry. He who owns the means of production dictates the mode and nature of the product, because the product is a reflection of the production system that produced it, so the Marxists and New historicists tell us. Now, I think your question has lesser proximities with the polemics of the interrelationships or dynamics between structure and superstructure. I guess it simply, seeks to know how the present and available technologies play a role in our struggling literary industry.
To this end, I will like to pinpoint that we have the traditional technologies of the printing press which is mostly mechanical and analog, if we can so say; and on the other, the digital publishing or e-publishing whose production is “soft”, internet and CD based. These are the new technologies have offered cheaper, quicker (almost instantaneous) and democratic access to publishing. But their limitations are still all too evident. Readership is worst limited to the tech-savvy folks, there is a regular availability of energy and connectivity that is required, the publication quality is largely questioned due to its amateurism – also added to this, there is an unreliability associated to some e-publishing. That said, it has come to stay and be improved, as Pala Pala is doing precisely.
KFW: "To prescribe only politics and proscribe any other subject matter would be to kill our creative spirit, to stultify our imaginative efforts and to truncate our literature" Shadrach Ambanasom, critic. What is your opinion on this issue?
WGB: I will start by agreeing substantially with Ambanasom. I will tell you why: His negated use of the exclusive adverbial “only” positions us to accept that politics is not the only subject that we should ram down our writers’ ink bottles and minds. But it is a tricky thing this politics because in literature, by manipulating tropes such as allegories, metaphors, symbols, innuendoes etc, and (re) historicizing texts, everything becomes a play of politics and power. A simple love ballad becomes politics, “Waste Land” written by diehard aesthete becomes political grist, and a creation myth instantly prompts readings of religion and identity politics.
The carpe diem piece “To His Coy Mistress” soon engenders a gender agenda in its politicized reading… the list is infinite. This is not to say Ambanasom’s legitimate concern cannot be contextually deduced. Louise Glucks, an American poet, counsels with pertinence, “a poem, no matter how charged its content, survives not through its content but through its voice, that is its style”. She adds, “the agenda of poetry is not to record the actual but to continuously create a sensation of immersion in the actual.” So artistically speaking, Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I have a dream’ speech survives more not out of its record and reaction to racist actuality but in its stylistic, prophetic rendition that profoundly immerses the listener’s senses in that actuality.
In fact, I personally find insipidity in an overly and relentlessly matter-charged piece,and worse when one’s whole oeuvre is burdened with an unsubtle, lacking in nunace and constant obsession with the overtly political, it becomes the monotonous massacre of an appetite. This indictment literature easily veers towards an overkill that readily mistakes art for brazen propaganda and vile pamphleteering. There is an obscure but very brilliant Nigerian critic Obakanse S. Lakanse who, (though conceding that “there is no way politics can be completely expunged” from our literature) insists obviously that it must be “subtle and creative”. As he continues eloquently, an over-fixation at politics unleashes “an uncreative temper and explicitness” that leaves “very little to chew on… after a gross representation of endless, repetitive diet of politics… crooning the same monotonous things in same monotonous formats” and in the end leaving us with literature that is “rather prolix, prosaic and uninventive”. He cites Thom Gum who says in one of his poems, “whatever is here/it is material for my art”. Following from this and in line with Ambanasom’s point, he indicates direction with other “simple” ontological and existential conditions and subjects such as “sex, loneliness, jealousy, duty, madness, drunkenness”, etc. So what we can conclude from all this is that while politics is all-important and all persuasive it should be handled with nuance and subtlety. Also, the monolithic monotony of politics fixation can be averted through an even dose with these private quotidian issues that hold gemmed poetic potential like carbon-rock holds diamonds! (Even Bate Besong who is regarded cardinally as a political and engaged poet states unequivocally that “I am primarily at artist. I do not relent in the diligent pursuit my work as an artist… the aesthetic value remains paramount”).
KFW: “The contemporary African poet is an artist living and working in conditions of constant siege--an abiding and haunting angst...” from your foreword…
WGB: A Cameroonian writer/poet, to localize the debate, living and writing in conditions of constant siege – an abiding and haunting angst to me provocatively conjures a psycho-martial complex in order to express, keenly, the militant adversities that confront him/her and the practice of his/her craft.
These adversities are both endogenous and exogenous in nature and manifestation. They are internal/personal characterized by identity, survival, and other competing conflicts that he/she is constantly torn between and harassed by. Then, the extrinsic conditions that are circumstantial and institutional: an environment that does not encourage his art due to an indifference that installs artistic silence and absence.
There is also the much lamented poor reading culture among the literate (they’d rather drown their miseries in an inebriating cup of beer, than contemplate on a sublime line of poetry or story, contradict me!); the dearth of affordable and accessible publishing houses with tolerable distribution capacity; absence of book fairs; scantiness of literary competitions and prizes; scarcity of local libraries that up-date their titles; priorities of a system that promotes a consumptive adrenaline culture (sports and pleasure music, with the attendant lucre and graft that understandably continue to generate endless strife at FECAFOOT and CMC/SOCAM) instead of a productive cerebral culture. – as I have said elsewhere, this is due to the ends that such dispensation for political and personal megalomaniac scores, Nyamnjoh has interestingly engaged seminal studies on part of this phenomenon is his study “Entertaining repression: Music and politics in postcolonial Cameroon”.
To continue the argument I am developing above about an institutional reluctance to develop a cerebral – creative and genuinely intellectual-culture, one needs only to look at the valuation paradigms that sports, especially football, has been framed. Look at the billions annually pumped into and siphoned out of football, which is a parasitic consumption industry here in Cameroon (which club is quoted on the DSX? Or you will tell me they sell players and Eto’o is worth billions? But who pays Eto’o? Isn’t it the industries that Eto’o’s club depends on? And what creates industries? Intellectual and imagination capital –so that’s where we are supposed to spend the billions in R and D’s, in polytechnics, research institutes, vocational training centers both private and public and in creative enterprises.
Some fallaciously find a disconnect between creative writing and development forgetting that a people’s power of imagination inherently reflects their power of inspiration and vision – both productive, corrective and prophetic – and that is why all great societies have great writers and who are celebrated as such, instead of being stifled and prosecuted.
These writers are the senses and conscience that inspire and guide both the cultural and techno-scientific vision of a nation that values their relevance. Sports has never developed a country, it rather depends on the development of a country. The presidential couple and ministers will readily receive all the sporting glitterati and selectively shun even our internationally recognized literati.
Who received Leonora Miano after her repeated bravado in the French/Francophone literary big leagues? What about Nganang Patrice of the Marguerite Yourcenar fame? Compare Foe’s funeral pageantry with the almost pedestrian anonymity of those of Mongo Beti and Bate Besong. Palestine celebrated its own national poet with three days of mourning, officially. Presently John Updike’s death is on every lip and eye, lately so was Harold Pinter’s. Blessed are those who honor their prophets, for theirs will be a bumper harvest of more prophets. Their ocular diseases will be healed. But I don’t envision healing in a nation whose system utilizes sports and arts, manipulating them into grist for the political mill and their thrills (did you say pills?) for soporific meals vaccinated daily…and which regime will abet writers, gadflies, whose vocational constancy is to gore awake this collective trance.
KFW: So, why do you write?
WGB: Classically put, reasons for writing, when operated from an Aristotlelian cathartic prism, can be a quest for the purgative and the cognitive. Respectively meaning that we write to purge emotions, to contribute in raising the moral/ethical standing of our society, and thirdly to clarify/instruct or educate. In all, this we move from the personal to collective attainment of happiness, which is every body’s supreme concern for existence. As writers that is why we sublimely write. We complement in this transcendent function other professionals like lawyers human right activists, journalists, doctors, street sweepers, shoe menders etc in this vast and varied effort to make the world a better place to live in.
But writing is a very political act. All forms of expression (and even repression) are all political acts and their politics is differentiated only through stratification from the overt down to the latent. So I write because I am a political animal whose consciousness spurs an anxiety for aesthetic expression. I also write because I celebrate the beauty of things verbally or physically expressed. I write because I relish the production of art as much as I do its consumption. I write because all modern societies have been made better by writing, in all its ethic/aesthetic groundings.
Wirndzerem G. Barfee is the author of the collection, Bird of Oracular Verb. He lives inYaounde.
Comments