Wirndzerem G. Barfee
Writing in Cameroon, especially Anglophone Cameroon, does not easily figure as one of the dream vocations or pastimes that youngsters espouse in their early reveries and visions of what they aspire to be or do in life. Our material and immaterial values framed within historical and contemporary practices and models explain much about this alienation from the culture of the written word and discourse.
Historically and culturally, we have been an oral society with processes of collective and spontaneous oral and plastic/graphic creativity. Typically in the oral dimension, all of society or a segment of society (perhaps through initiation) contributes its own genius to the original (collective process) with each successive performance, in place and time gaining new inputs or twists (progressive/ dynamic) while maintaining the identifiable and constant base.
This spontaneity refers to ubiquitous improvisations in most oral creativity to which is added a certain volatility of form and content as partially explained by the progressiveness, dynamism of its muse and articulation. These conditions of oral traditions have coloured and communalized, positively, the artistic productions of these oral cultures but have deprived them, most of the times, from the consistency, constancy and epic-ness of the more disciplined written discourses.
The development of analytic and expansive/extensive thought and discourse is more pronounced and predominant in the written cultures while the synthetic and contractive thought is common in oral cultures.
This explains the recourse (except in some cases of improvised or memorized ritual performances) to proverbialisms, briefer (incantational) poetry and prose limited to brief legends, fables, myths etc.
In the same line of reasoning and observation, there is a marked absence and /or under-development of the extensive/expansive genres in the oral cultures. This is understandable, because the oral depends, heavily on unaided memory and that tool is not suitable for the storing of voluminous amounts of consistent argumentations, thought, and narratives.
Writing solves that problem and even creates the platform to manipulate, correct, revisit, analyze and reference discourses. The contemporary situation, tied with an umbilical chord to the historical through an archetypal inhibition of sorts, has continued to manifest the regrettable symptoms of the past. But to locate this inhibition as merely archetypal is to sound evasive and excusive, because the contemporary inhibition operates within a different paradigm. There is literacy with a lesser culture of literary writing: a curious cultural case of the literate without the literary!
Writing is more “functional” (assignments, exams, theses, dissertations, research papers, textbooks, reports requests etc) than ‘creative’ and/or philosophical/essayistic. This condition results in a breed of writing that I term as that of “compulsory functional essentialism” which aims at a direct/immediate ‘material’ objective. This is opposed to the writing of “creative/ philosophical voluntarism” which is engaged out of an endogenous self-will, with usually (though not always) immaterial, ulterior, altruistic objectives primarily attained. Our contemporary scene is characterized by the stage of marked compulsory functional essentialism.
Also within this mind-frame, there is also a lamentable apathy to writing and writers, indicated by their alienation from the centers of power, influence and wealth, which have become pivotal attributes and parameters of role-model consideration in our contemporary Cameroonian society. People dream themselves and /or their children as super remunerated football stars, popular singers/musicians, rich politicians/contractors/administrators/financiers, than as writers—maybe, until writers possess the wealth and clout of the above role models! Not that they have any thing against the writers (my soothing wish!), but I guess they have just a thing against their inability and impossibility to command that clout and riches around here. That is how to understand this apathy. An apathy that soundly suits the system, one-man governments (Solzhenitsyn’s definition), which have always been arm-twisted to embrace free expression especially were writers are deemed as veritable and formidable contending forces. Mongo Beti’s still to be rehabilitated place in our cultural history tells poignant tales of this regrettable confirmation.
This apathy and cynicism towards writing even degenerates when we question the distressing absence of diaries, journals and memoirs by the literate, educated and so-called ‘responsible’ class of Cameroonians. This obdurate absence of diary /journal keeping in our (Cameroon) literate culture solicits and elicits several interrogations. Why are so few people keeping them? What harm is this causing to our literature, arts and history, our common heritage which is the aggregative of all those private and intimate stories plus the added value of the interaction between those texts for comparative truths and values? Can we fathom the damage this is causing to our collective memory, to our intimate and common truths? Why is it that most of the major actors of our socio-political, scene, even the most educated, keep no daily record of their lives and stewardship? Can these entries not offer better alternative or complementary narratives about certain historical questions and events? Imagine the importance of The Diary of Anne Frank to the study of WWII, the Shoah, and Dutch involvement in Nazism! Imagine what treasure it would be to (re) historicize the official narrative/discourse of the Foumban Conference using, as competing texts, the intimate journal entries of the Ahidjos, Fonchas, Munas, Fonlons etc! Will that reading not shed more light on the shadowy corners of that historical event? Or maybe this is a just naive expectation from my humble self. For some may interpret this erasure of record and memory as concordant with the secrecy and occult conduct of affairs in the quasi-police state that our independence graduated us into. This with the ugly consequences of stifling expression, spreading suspicion, the ubiquity and iniquity of incarceration for treason and treasonable offences, the infamous ‘droit de reserve’, ‘secret defense’, ‘secret d’etat’ etc that had been highly perfected tools for state repression and the annihilation of constructive, critical and creative expression. If this argumentation can be, to an extent, tenable for the Ahidjo regime can the same case hold water for the more liberal Biya regime, arm-twisted in the nineties to open up relative spaces of freedom? So if the absence of a journal/memoir culture persists, it goes beyond oppressive and repressive censorship to evidence, regrettably, our archetypal phobia for the disciplined act/culture of writing without exogenous coercions. This generalized scriptophobia leaves us a nation without competing and competent truths.
And a nation without such intrinsic, residual truths is a state helmed with no compass, misdirected and misruled by intrigue, official fallacies, outright miseducation and propaganda. The tragic consequence is that of a nation with an opaque history and histories. These lacunae, opacities and ruse cast before our faces a distorted and flawed mirror of our history and memory. We need that true and glaring image of our past and present in other to erect an even future. Our private stories will complement that effort, because, ethically, the last thing anyone can lie to, under normal circumstances, is his/her journal/diary. You cannot prevaricate with your own memory. Between you and your real entry page is the last truth you can tell the world. Or you say nothing.
With all these obstacles to writing in Cameroon, I have often wondered what prompted me into this sacerdotal. Yes, what could have made me espouse the pen in a country where, artistically, the model dreams resided in the galaxy of singers, musicians, movie stars, TV stars, and footballers (or beyond these, feymania!)?
I suspect the promptings were primarily innate and endogenous: a natural, voluntary curiosity to know and express. This of course drifted me to the avid sea of reading. To be a good writer, you must be a good reader, and if possible an avid one. This has always been counseled. Some get it natural, some are nurtured into it.
During my primarily school days in the late 70s to mid-80s, I became conscious of my thirst for reading when I realized read far ahead of what was required. Those were the days of the staple and fare of JC Gagg and later Ndangam/Weir readers. In Forms 1 and 2, we had a library mistress, an American Peace Corps volunteer, who had noted this interest and made complimentary remarks. My bosom pal and classmate Eric S. Njeng (today a university lecturer in American literature and author of Dance of the Chimps, Confession, etc) and I frequented the library to check out novels. Until this day, my friends still remind me of that penchant for reading. Recently, one of them recalled how I was that guy who never threw away oil stained ‘beignet’ wrapping (typically old newspapers) until I had read its content. And that is still true to this day. It is a reflex—natural and intuitive.
It brings to mind a story I was told a few months ago, following the death of one of Cameroon’s leading philosophers Prof Jean Marc Ela in which many testimonies were written paying lofty tributes to the fallen hero. The narrator, a Lycee General Leclerc alumnus, recalled how when he was at the Lycee, they had invited the eminent professor/philosopher/liberation theologian to offer a talk at one of their student seminars on a subject grandiloquently bannered to pedantically impress. But to their utter surprise (and perhaps disillusionment) the revered ‘eminence grise’ arrived and without much pretensions of grandiose erudition or pedantry, instead gave an off the cuff talk on the importance of reading. And on that, what did he say to grab our main attention here:
Read everything you see or lay hands on, even a piece of torn wrapping!
I am flattered to have been, unwittingly or perhaps wittingly, a life-long practitioner of the old sage’s counsel. After having been reading, and avidly so, it was logical that writing would only also be instinctive in its coming. And it did.
In the turn of the eighties and early into the nineties, I found myself accumulating scrap upon scrap of paper containing pop song lyrics. They began flying and shifting. I bought exercise books and churned tens and maybe even hundreds more of those formulaic, kitsch and schmaltzy lyrics. I even had the guts (as a green teenager, looking at the world through pink-tinted lenses of infinite possibilities) to mail some my lyrics to ‘Sunset Boulevard Records’ as advertised in EBONY magazine. Of course, I never heard from them cannot to this day tell you if Sunset Boulevard Records ever did exist. I often wonder if those dreams simply got lost in the mail or were simply ignored!
After that, I graduated to Rap /R&B compositions grafted to my lyrics. These songwriting skills would bear fruit in the early 2000s when I collaborated with Richard Kings, a musician with a strong following, and penned the French lyrics to the Africa Why track, which was also the title of the well-received album.
In 2007, I was once again solicited in by the talented cabaret pianist/vocalist, TERRY (Kongnyuy Terrence) to write a few Lamnso songs for his album. Still on that songwriting streak, I also worked with the late Chi Christina Ngwe of Tina-Scratch Productions for the original soundtrack to her 2007 movie “Love on the Crossroads”. TERRY did the composition and vocals and I wrote the lyrics.
During this time, I forked out more serious paths into poetry, radio drama, short stories and attempts at a novel. In the mid-nineties, my most significant project was the radio drama Child and the Woods that was nominated alongside other top-plumes like Victor Epie Ngome. In that BBC/British Council/Living Earth sponsored environmental playwriting workshop, Asa’ah Divine who is currently pursuing a movie career in the U.S and myself were the youngest nominees.
The fulcrum of the nineties turned into this magical millennium with its euphoria, hysteria, elations, expectations and apprehensions, and my writing opting for a more intimate and personal trajectory. I decided to continue the voluminous and detailed journal entries to cover my small private place(s) of that ‘fin de siecle’ verve. I was highly enchanted recently to discover these A4 papered entries, untouched and untainted after a 10-year burial in the catacombs of my old belongings. It was a precious discovery, a gold mine, all hand-wrought.
I continued the new millennium with my old muses, oblivious to the dictates of calendars. I continued writing poetry and radio-plays. Then Lancaster University and the British Council came along with CROSSING BORDERS, a pan-African creative writing project in English. I was selected for a one-year stint in poetry under the creative midwifery of the Scottish poet, Brian McCabe. Impressed, he recommended me for the second phase where I took prose, prose that I consider a flawed tendon I must try to right, or should I say write.
While working on the Crossing Borders Project, I penned a comic radio-play Riding Wishes Gambling Horses that did not make a cut in the highly competitive African Performance slot. But this failure was compensated by the Cameroon Ministry of Culture, which granted me a 2 Million FCFA grant (and did I say we/they don’t encourage writing? Hear me now: not like they dote on sports! That is another meat for another soup…) in 2005 to publish my first collection of poems (poems rejected by Editions CLE as ‘un-Cameroonian’).
These poems were largely those positively commented by the CB mentors, so you could understand my dismay with the CLE rejection. Maybe they needed something that could better fit the secondary and high school curricular, something more profitable. But unfortunately, I write with the poetic liberties of personal tropes and topics in mind, not emporic dictates. Perhaps that is where I failed. But the poems were at last published in 2008 as Bird of the Oracular Verb (Iroko Publishers).
The second phase of C.B, as I earlier indicated, saw me picking up the prose gauntlet. I had some real weaknesses in prose that I needed to perfect. After struggling with my mentor on more complicated stories like Across the River of Time and Shifts on the Red Ass Climb, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself easily scribbling away the longer, straightforward and more interesting (should I dare judge!) Jury of the Corrupt in just a couple of days. I sent it to an anticorruption competition organized by the government as a provocative lampoon on the same corrupt system fighting corruption. Except in the logic of vaccines, that scenario cannot function. Only a paradigm shift can. As you must have already predicted my story could not hold its own before a jury it indicts.
But helas, the story was later selected for the latest Cameroon Anglophone short story anthology The Spirit Machine and Other Stories (CCC Press), due out this June 2009 in the UK. With all these done, I am using 2009 to increase the poetic compositions of my second volume of collections. I envisage their publication early 2010.
"An apathy that soundly suits the system, one-man governments (Solzhenitsyn’s definition), which have always been arm-twisted to embrace free expression especially were writers are deemed as veritable and formidable contending forces".
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"An apathy that soundly suits the system, which have always been arm-twisted to embrace free expression especially were writers - one-man governments (Solzhenitsyn’s definition)- are deemed as veritable and formidable contending forces".
Posted by: Wirndzerem Barfee | October 20, 2009 at 03:59 PM