Peter Wuteh Vakunta, PhD.
A versatile award-winning novelist, Patrice Nganang has written works that have left an indelible mark on the international literary landscape. With the publication of Temps de chien (2001), a novel that was recognized with two noteworthy awards—the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize and the Grand Prix de la littérature de l’Afrique Noire—he emerged as a writer noted for his innovative use of the French language. In the interview that follows Nganang sheds light on some of the attributes that make him tick as a creative writer.
Peter Wuteh Vakunta: What motivates you to write the way you do?
Patrice Nganang: What compels me to write is the feeling that the complexity of an African life has not been told yet, and the conviction that if we do not tell our stories ourselves, then we should not complain if others speak for us. I am convinced that African stories are just beginning to be told, particularly on the African continent. But I also think that when African stories have been told out of the continent, in general, their richness which lies in their complexity has often been removed and it has given way to flat narratives. Yet, African lives are complex. The national conferences of the nineties constitute one of those moments when Africans actually started to tell their stories, the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, and post-genocide gacacas of Rwanda too. Newspapers are also ways through which our stories are told. For me literature is part of a general drive to tell our story. Remember that all Africans of my age actually grew up in societies where speech was contentious, and sometimes even deadly. Thus, it is obvious that our stories still truly need to be told today.
Peter Wuteh Vakunta: You seem to put a premium on linguistic innovation in your novels. Is it an act of literary subversion or an expression of discomfort with the language of the ex-colonizer?
Patrice Nganang: It is simply a reflection of the way I speak as a Cameroonian, and therefore, of the country I come from. I naturally move from Medumba, to French, to German and to English on a constant basis. Yet, when we look at it closely, it simply reflects Cameroon’s historical condition, our country’s move from its more than two hundred Cameroonian languages, first into German colonialism, and then into the French and British mandates. It is impossible to tell the Cameroonian story in a single language, be it Medumba or French for that matter, without doing injustice to the complexity of Cameroonian lives. It is equally impossible to say that a Cameroonian is a Francophone without falsifying Cameroonian history. For me, history and language are simply matters of fact.
Peter Wuteh Vakunta: After reading your novels, one is tempted to draw the conclusion that you have a predilection for code-switching as a creative writing device. What are your motivations for having recourse to this technique?
Patrice Nganang: Most Cameroonians are multilingual, and I am no exception. I employ four languages in my daily interactions. Most Cameroonians are also accustomed to moving from one language to the other, sometimes in one single sentence. As a matter of fact, the majority of Cameroonians grew up in multilingual communities. As a writer whose desire is to tell the Cameroonian story in its very complexity, the most challenging task for me is, indeed, to capture Cameroon’s casual way of dealing with languages, our ‘décomplexé’ manner of communicating with one another. An impossible task, if there is one, for literature is by definition monolingual, but a challenge for any Cameroonian writer, I think, which reflects the daily challenge of any Cameroonian.
Peter Wuteh Vakunta: Literary critics have contended that readers must be both bilingual and bicultural in order to grasp the full essence of the message intended in your novels. What’s your take on this?
Patrice Nganang: The issue is not bilingualism, I think, but multilingualism. The basic problem confronting any Cameroonian writer is that at its very origins, the multilingual character of our social reality and literature stands at odds with the monolingual reality of our critics. The birth of Cameroonian literature is marked by the publication in 1921 of the book titled Sanga’am, ou Histoire et Coutume des Bamoun, by Sultan Njoya. Njoya was the first Cameroonian writer to struggle with the issue of language. He tried to create, not only a script, but also a language that would bring the multiple languages spoken around him together. He succeeded in creating both, but of course both were banned by the French colonial authorities, who imposed the monolingual tradition of French letters upon us. Today, the Cameroonian writer still faces the problem Njoya wanted to solve: how do you create letters that will reflect the complex nature of our world? Is a critic who reads Cameroonian literature through the prism of ‘francophone studies’ for instance, not repeating the gesture of that colonial officer, Carde, who forestalled Sultan Njoya’s linguistic innovation?
Peter Wuteh Vakunta: How would you describe the type of French you write in your novels in relation to standard French? Africanized French? De-Europeanized French or a third code?
Patrice Nganang: I do not describe the language I use. I simply use it. The biggest mistake made in literary criticism today, and this is attributable to advocates of a return to African languages in writing African literature—Obi Wali, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Boris Diop— is to imagine that creative writing entails a face-to-face confrontation between African languages on the one hand, and European languages on the other. For Cameroonians this cannot be the case, because in a city like Yaoundé where the predominant language is French, there is a congregation of more than two hundred non-European languages spoken in the country. In my novels and in my other fictional writings, Yaoundé is the setting of my storytelling. How can I imagine that in this multilingual city, in this city where most people shift from one language to the other, and in this city where neighborhoods are organized along ethnic lines, there should only be a tandem between French and Cameroonian languages?
Peter Wuteh Vakunta: Do you consciously think of attaining cultural syncretism in your fiction writing?
Patrice Nganang: I would be very happy if a reader would, at the end of my novel, understand that the predicament of African existence cannot be subsumed in the mere concept of duality, say, between Europe and Africa, tradition and modernity, dictatorship and freedom, or something along those lines. The complexity of our lives is exactly what makes all of us humans in the first place, and as far as I am concerned, humanity is still something worth struggling for.
Peter Wuteh Vakunta: Code-switching in Temps de chien involves alternating between Metropolitan French, Camfranglais, Pidgin English and vernacular tongues. Could this constitute an obstacle for a reader not familiar with these local languages?
Patrice Nganang: No, it has not been so far.
Peter Wuteh Vakunta: A translator unfamiliar with the cultural specificities of your works may draw a blank. What would you recommend as a working strategy for your translators?
Patrice Nganang: Most translators of my texts have worked with me, and indeed, I think that translators would gain a lot if they worked with the writers whose works they translate. There are visions of a translator whose freedom is attained by the death of the writer, of the translator who is a writer too, and of the text that is untranslatable. I tend to have the simple habit of most Cameroonians who look at language as a tool, and I therefore tend to be very ‘décomplexé’, if I may say, in front of language. For a writer, language is just a tool.
Peter Wuteh Vakunta: How much of Cameroonian socio-political reality is reflected in your fictional works?
Patrice Nganang: My work is rooted in Cameroonian realities, breathes from Cameroonian realities; it is a reflection of Cameroonian realities. One critic once challenged one of my novels, and took it along to the neighborhood it represents, to see if my geographic representation was accurate. The novel passed the test. At the same time, my novels are rooted in the very complex live I have lived so far, first in Cameroon, then in Germany and now in the United States. I wrote the novel the critic challenged, Dog Days, while living in Germany, and actually spent hours observing dogs to be able to portray their movements accurately. Yet, the idea of writing this novel occurred to me while I was roaming the streets of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso. During my readings in the United States, it always happened that somebody would say that s/he identified with the dog described in my novel, and that the dog could be an American dog.
Peter Wuteh Vakunta: It appears there is a transition from orality to the written word in your novels. How do you achieve this?
Patrice Nganang: Orality is central to my work because I started serious writing during the time of national conferences, when people were actually dying in the streets for the sake of freedom of speech. That was the time when we had a boom of private radios, and people were yearning for their stories to be heard. Thus, orality is essential to me, given that it is linked to the desire people had, and still have, I believe, to have the full range of their existential stories told. Not only their suffering, not only their successes, but the complexity of their struggles in life. I think most people felt that their lives were not accurately depicted in the official governmental news outlets we had back then, very much the way Africans feel today, that our lives are not accurately represented in Western news media. Back in the nineties as well as now, there is a strong need to have the broad spectrum of our voices heard. My literature is an attempt to translate this need into writing.
Peter Wuteh Vakunta: In Temps de chien, your protagonist is a dog. How important is animal characterization to you as a writer?
Patrice Nganang: It is essential because a dog is not only a narrative tool; it represents the absence of a human voice. I don’t think most of us would be happy to hear what dogs actually say or think about us, and yet, literature since the time of Ancient Greeks has always fantasized on the talk of animals. It has also always fantasized on the talk of women, before women started to write, and about Africans, before Africans took the pen to tell their own stories. This is also true for fairy tales. The perspective of an animal character is a very interesting one indeed; it is the position from where an untold story is born. It is the vantage point where a new voice is heard.
Peter Wuteh Vakunta: You seem to have no qualms about transposing Cameroonian indigenous languages into works written in French. Is literary indigenization your ultimate goal?
Patrice Nganang: No, because I do not think about myself as an ‘indigene’. My father was an ‘indigene’ because he was born during the colonial era. I was born in an independent country. I am, therefore, a citizen, and in African history, I belong to the first generation whose political definition is citizenship. It would be strange, indeed, to think of American writers of the 18th Century who wrote in English in terms of ‘indigenization’, yet, what American writers like Thoreau or Emerson or Douglass did with the English language is a story worth reading and rereading.
Peter Wuteh Vakunta: Would you say you’ve been successful in your attempt to decolonize the African novel?
Patrice Nganang: The novel as a genre has a very long history, and that history is not only colonial, given the fact that Apuleus, who wrote the Golden Ass in Latin, was an African and a citizen of Rome. The question is, therefore, not one of decolonization, but one of truth: how can you truthfully tell the story of your world. How can you tell that story in a way that makes it impossible for anybody who reads it to be surprised when something happens on the African continent? A fundamental question, indeed, for it raises awareness to the fact that the novel itself is rooted in fiction, and that the writer has at his or her disposal only the twenty-six letters of the Latin alphabet to tell a story. My quest as a writer is, with one single story, to do justice to the millions of stories I know are circulating around me.
Peter Wuteh Vakunta: In your view, is the language question in African literature a reality or a red herring?
Patrice Nganang: It is an important question, but it is always raised from the wrong angle. It is worth coming back to Njoya here because he addresses that question in a more complex manner than all our language theorists of today, since for him language involves writing systems too. This is the reason why he spent his life perfecting alphabets. Yet, when the issue of language is raised today, the alphabet question is taken for granted, and we have Ngugi and Diop writing their books in their mother tongues, using the Latin alphabet, while at the same time agitating the flag of nationalism!
Peter Wuteh Vakunta: Do you envisage a significant impact of the Africanization of French on future generations of Francophone African writers?
Patrice Nganang: The sad intellectual legacy of colonialism is that it reduced the truly immense dimension of our imagination, and limited it to the realm of a fight with a singular language, say French, which happens to have gone through its own process of jacobinization. As an African writer I could simply say today, as Achebe did in 1952 for English, some twenty years before I was born: ‘finished, French is an African language.’ Would it have taken us further–I mean intellectually? The beauty of literature is that it only asks for an empty piece of paper where we can challenge our own intelligence, and show our skills in front of the sagacity of our complex world. The question of language is never resolved and will never be, for history is open-ended, and language is the only tool a writer has. Apuleus, the African, wrote in Latin with success in Rome, but Dante who came some hundreds of years after him did not. Easy formulas are certainly not a way out, but the quest for truth. And truth can be told in any language.
Peter Wuteh Vakunta: We are going to round off this interview on a didactic note. I know that budding writers are listening to you. Do you have a final word for those who may be venturing into the domain of creative writing?
Patrice Nganang: The quest is endless, but it is an advantage to be born later. Today’s African writers are blessed because many of the problems we face were already solved before us. We don’t have to fight the battles already fought by our parents and grand-parents. It lifts my spirit to know this, and it frees my tongue to tackle the really complex issues in the stories I still have to tell. I wake up every morning smiling.
Peter Wuteh Vakunta: The excerpt below is a passage from Nganang’s award-winning novel Temps de chien and its English language translation Dog Days:
Regardez-moi un énergumène comme ça qui vient dans un bar comme celui-ci où les gens me respectent dire que c’est lui qui me gère, anti zamba ouam! Il ose même dire qu’il voulait m’épouser. Dites-moi vraiment, vous qui me connaissez: est-ce que je mérite un têtard comme ça? […].Vraaaiiiiment, même les cauchemars ont des limites. Moi la femme de ce cancrelat-ci! (Temps de chien , 66)
[But the rest of you, just look at this raving lunatic, who comes into a bar like this where people respect me and says that he is keeping me, anti zamba ouam! He even dares to say he wants to marry me. Take a look at Mini Minor’s husband. Now tell me, you all who know me: do I deserve a polliwog like that? […]. Reeeeally, even nightmares have limits! Me, the wife of this cockroach!] (Dog Days, 44)
When intellectual minds seat at table the crumbs that fall can feed 5000 nations, Islands not counted. Vacunta is intriguing, yet Ngenang is skillful.
You both are Bards... It is the Truth and like Ngenang says only the Truth matters.
Thank you guys for that interesting dialogue.
Posted by: Labang Wang Kencholia | September 27, 2009 at 07:56 PM