Wirndzerem G. Barfee
To understand the mosaic complex that forms the Cameroon writer’s identity in general, one must first decrypt an essence of his/her historical and cultural canvas. Cameroon is one of those African countries that have the uniqueness of historically (colonial history of course) having undergone, inclusively, the hegemony of three 'colonizing powers'.
First, it was the German, until the end of WW1; then the French and English, concomitantly, under protectorate and mandate configurations, until the wave of African independences in the 1960s.
This uniqueness is also compounded by the intriguing curiosity of having had the English part of Cameroon as a quasi-autonomous region of Nigeria before later rejoining French Cameroons after the 1961 UN sponsored plebiscite. The contemporary cultural threads baste more sophisticated tapestries with a competing ethnographic map that locates about 250 indigenous linguistic groups, two official languages (French and English) and a dynamic lingua franca, Pidgin, which is developing vibrant variants conditioned by hybridities, age group factors, urbanization and education. This latter fact is evidenced by the popularity of “Camfranglais” (the mixture of native French and English languages) among the youths, especially in urban areas and informal student milieus.
In post-independence Cameroon, the Anglophones (a tricky label here, for it does not necessarily mean someone who speaks English, but someone whose ‘origin’ is largely from the former British West Cameroon; so it takes a political, historical, cultural identity that goes beyond the merely linguistic) have as an identity group, been the demographic, social and political minority in relation to the Francophones within the matrix of their 1961 binary re-unification.
These realities have engendered what is generally and recurrently referred to as the ‘Anglophone problem’. These tensions of marginality, domination and exclusion of sorts have been preponderant grist for the creative mill of many Anglophone writers, especially the males. Top on this frame is Bate Besong- an ANA award winning poet\playwright\critic whose lifelong literary and creative postures have been those of the radical assertion of Anglophone position in the Cameroon power equation. That content has also prominently animated the works of Bole Butake, a monument in his own right, and Victor Epie Ngome whose popular allegorical play “What God Has Put Asunder” vividly puts the thorny question on the table with insinuated sides taken.
Personally, as a young male Cameroon writer writing in English, the contextual canvas painted above has both proximately and approximately influenced my textual tissues and textures. I have, willy-nilly and/or voluntarily, found myself addressing the kaleidoscopic span of socio-political questions and issues that pinch the Anglophone Cameroonian in that size of sui generis shoes he wears for the hybrid choreography of this national integration experiment called Cameroon.
These issues are the usual thorns of minority marginalization and assimilation, which function dialectically with those of majority hegemony and arrogance. This politically charged context permeates overt and covert strata of my works. But I go beyond that into the larger Cameroon project, to address trans-national issues, like the endemic vice and curse of corruption and despotism, which to me are the cardinal demons in the machine of our development.(To this end, I have always vehemently contended that Cameroon, potentially rich as it is, has no economic problem or crises. Its true disease can only be diagnosed in governance pathology. Heal that and all else is cured, to borrow from a Nkrumahist rhetoric).
Those major maladies have multiplied other opportunistic infections such as electoral fraud, ethnocentrism, tribalism, mediocrity, mammonism, feymania, administrative banditry, generalized insecurity, cases of injustice(s) of the legal system, sectism, human rights abuses in all subtle but very insidious forms, etc. These ills rudely slap the conscientious and civic writer in the face. And one is far from feigning culpable apathy to their seething existence.
So on a double scale and frame, my writing engages the specific Anglophone worries and values while at the same time addressing the larger Cameroonian concerns. I also transcend national frontiers to address the international and cosmic questions.
In this collective address, there are always incessant explorations of the individual that I do indulge in following the dictates of my muse. The above concentric map replicates the configuration of my consciousness as an individual, Anglophone Cameroonian, Cameroonian, African and world citizen. And I respond to all of that through a prism of cosmopolitanism that informs my writing, needless to conclude.
The content of the independence generation of Cameroonian writers, especially French Cameroonians who marked the epoch like Mongo Beti and Leopold F. Oyono, rotated around the anti-colonial and later especially for Mongo Beti, the anti-neo-imperial.
Beti’s style was that of a fighter, a firebrand, directly affronting and confronting the French colonial and later neo-colonial masters; while Oyono opted for the tamer and sly use of the lampoonic and comic prose to tick off the colonial regime—he later joined the system and stopped writing, comprehensibly—Beti stayed out of the system and continued writing. As a part of the loosely termed “Third Generation” of Cameroonian writers – mostly those who grew up matured and attained literary consciousness in the late 80s and 90s – my creative concerns apart from the generic socio-political fodder indicated above; I, along with some of my generation, have not totally severed that preoccupation with the neo-colonial (though the obsessive hankering and hysteria may be less in our time) because Cameroon has, in the same paradigmatic post-colonial posture like most other African former French colonies and mandates, continued to actively entertain residual and exclusive French interests, privileges and prerogatives.
This is usually defined in neo-colonial discourse as the French ‘chasse gardée' or ‘arrière cours’: meaning their exclusive ‘hunting grounds’ or ‘backyards’. Through this unholy arrangement, the neo-colonial power has maintained unpopular governments in power and toppled popular ones, negotiated unfair contracts for their monopolies, ensured preferential trade deals, monetary appendages, imposition and promotion of French cultural industry and with the huge psychological and windfalls fathomable, maintained military bases to safeguard their puppet African dictators, amongst other aspects of their continued entrenchment and influence. (All these are well elaborated and documented by Xavier Verschave’s book series in www.survie.com).
Such circumstances cannot keep the Cameroonian, and especially the Anglophone writer that I am indifferent. The continued encroachment and occupation of French interest and influence in Cameroon automatically and proportionally indicate the erosion and domination of Anglophone position(s) and values. So this is why in our writing, mine inclusive, there is still this hang-over of the anti-colonial, to be more precise anti neo-colonial sentiment that still filter into our discourse.
However, and fortunately so, with the opening up of Cameroon in the 90s and the advent of the so tagged “liberty laws” coupled with the relentless vortex of globalization, there has been an exogenous dislocation of the French grip of the country. English language has gained unprecedented prestige as majority Francophones flock and fill minority Anglophone schools in a curious paradox of reverse assimilation? Theses are interesting and fortuitous trends whose drama an observant writer cannot fail to record in his works, one way or the other, as seen in my story “Jury of the Corrupt” (CCCPress, 2009)
These content issues, as it has been said, can relatively be indicated as a constant of sorts; but it is the individual style of addressing all the writable issues that marks writers from writers. Shifting away from content matters to the handling and choice of content brings me to the individual distinctions that inform my style and focus as a Cameroonian writing in English (which is my first official/literate language).
Stylistically, especially in poetry and the short story, I have always espoused the exploration of all the handy languages of common communication that characterizes the vibrant and ambient polyglot of Cameroon’s lingua-scape. This is why, though writing primarily in English, there are rampant sprinklings and spicing of French, Camfranglais, Pidgin English and Lamnso (my mother tongue) in the writings. This moves from transliterations to the manipulation of written language as conditioned by new hi-tech tools of communication for example the language of SMS, email, twitter, social-networking and hip-hop, amongst others.
These linguistic specificities are exciting material for the linguistic manipulation by a writer’ to achieve given aesthetics. And I significantly avail myself of these aesthetic opportunities in my short stories such as “Shifts on the Red Ass Climb”, “Jury of the Corrupt” “Across the River of Time” etc. They also provide an opportune instrument and circumstance for a writer to record and showcase a cultural statement of his times and space – it photographs portions of the spontaneous spirit of his social contemporaneity. That is why I am fascinated as a writer coming from such an auspicious multi-linguistic context, to explore and exploit such artistic resources.
Personally, the plurality of my linguistic landscape has opened up my creative window to a spectrum that fans out to a wider consciousness. As an individual writer, my first hand access to both English and French literatures and a closer contact with cultures that use these languages predominantly, have all introduced me to a wide range of influences that inform the eclectic cosmopolitanism of my tropes and topics.
In hindsight, I have come realize why my first collection of poetry was rejected in 2006 by our leading local publisher as “un-Cameroonian”. My writing did not quite fit the stereotype. Even when treating or engaging the quotidian, pedestrian or demotic of topics, I try to do it from a penetrative philosophical or polemical tangent, which at times might turn off certain readers, meanwhile critics find the style recondite and convolute. Nevertheless, I have always topped my purpose with the sacrosanct consideration and duty of not writing insincere and bogus puzzles. Rather I strive not to underrate the intelligence of a diligent audience. My writing, especially poetry taps much in style from the symbolic and imagist school, while the approach, as already indicated, is philosophical and polemical. The comic, humorous, sarcastic poetry – I do love it; but it is not yet my forte, though I am working on it.
Though I have addressed the aforementioned bigger and collective issues that form and inform my works, I have also been on an importunate quest to pick those quotidian and pedestrian sparks that we ignite spontaneously , but yet are inhibited from committing them to written poetry. These are not the monotonous diets of epic colonial or neo-colonial struggles anymore, not those great wars and endemic woes. But those micro-instants and epiphanies within the macro-designs that animate our ‘smaller’ lives and consequently, with some welcome respite, the ‘smaller’ poetry I am questing for. For instance, issues of private lust and concupiscence in some of my poems are voyeuristic “She Loves It So”: (That heart beating in your tight blue jeans/Do you count the hundred heart-aches/You leave behind you under your fleeting shoes/When you walk down these sheets?), the heartbreak “Heartsnatcher”:(You burgled my chest/ And stole my heart/… Since you’ve been gone,/ I’ve been living borrowed beats;/ Tell Me when you’ll be back/Because I’ve get real need for those ventricles); the orgasmic “Concupiscence of Eclipses”: (There is a cosmic hunger in the sky/As bodies of discs rise fevered by seasons of interplantetary desire… Then the steady copulation of cosmic discs/ Till spasmic of embrace night against light/Spells orgasmic totality with sudden twilight:/We witness full lid attained). I have also addressed bedroom questions of phallic ‘disappointments’ and ‘disgrace’, such as in-erection, then frustrations and anxieties such as allergy to preservatives in poems like “Sheath Fatigue” (Before – inside his loin, factory of groin – /There was a storm-machine blowing wind bags and sails/But now the feel of latex sags the sacs…The plastic foil between barks defeats the osmosis/And a mortified tool remains a limp thing /Long-prompted by waiting hands in vain,/. And she curses: you are no man, at all!); issues of amnesia (in the “Consciousness of Loss” and “Disease”; reconciliation of arts and science (in “Marvels”); fashion and consumerism (in “Parades”); illusion and disillusionment (in “Rides” “Star Gazer” and “As you Stood there Wearing those Earrings”); suicides (“Suicidal Typologies” and “Lunacy”); addictions (in “Dayscare”); (im)migration and exile (in “Asylum”, “Pilgrim Hearts”, “Arid Nights”).
These sample choices of topics, amongst others, indicate an attempt to depart not only in content but in stylistic approach in handling the rhythms that animate my contemporaneity; but also to resist the ‘political’ overkill of our so called engagement literature, an ‘engagement’ and commitment’ that has proven to be a bane of aesthetic development than a boon to the very essence of our literary excellence, and a ready alibi for mediocrity, pamphleteerism and stark propagandism—good only for editorials—at their best. Needless to say: not that politics be absent, not that; but I prefer to put the search for its aesthetic and timeless impact above and before the immediate functionality of its pressing content. For instance, Shelley’s political and moral Ozymandias is good for all the times not mainly for the message, but above all for the agency and impact of its aesthetic rhetoric.
These considerations have really guided and mapped my departure from the some previous generations of our writers, a departure rooted in the local and personal while climbing the osmotic and connecting trunk to foliage into the cosmopolitan. This is the consciousness of a writer growing and writing in this age, trying to enkindle local experiences and memory while at same time negotiating the ineluctability of global influences and values. This, I guess has been correspondingly said in the forward to my “Bird of the Oracular Verb” that my writing is:
informed and formed by reflections cast by a mosaic of poetic consciousness(es) engendered by the cosmopolitan eclecticism of the poet’s panoply of spatial and temporal experiences, new complexes casting new paradigmatic prisms through which the 21st century African writer (conscious of the alienating risks and possibilities) is renegotiating, redefining and repositioning his experience and identity in the dynamic dialectic of the globalizing vortex.
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