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Writing
in English on a Polyglotal Wall:
On Being
an Anglophone Cameroonian Writer
By 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. It was first 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
milieu.
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
who 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 interfunction 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 court legal system sectism, human rights
abuses in all its more 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 all these 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 famous African French ex-colonies and mandates,
continued to actively entertain residual and exclusive
French interests, privileges and prerogatives. This usually
defined in neo-colonial discourse as the French ‘chasse
gardee’or ‘arriere 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 then uncompetitive companies, 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 end pet 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). This
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
neocolonial sentiment that still filter into our discourse.
However, fortunately, with the opening up of Cameroon in the
90s with the advent of the so tagged “liberty laws” coupled
with the relentless vortex of the globalization current,
there has been an exogenous dislocation of the French grip
of the country. English language has gained unprecedented
prestige and learnership as majority Francophones flock and
fill minority Anglophone schools. 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 writeable 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 polyglottal prosperity of Cameroon’s
linguascape. This is why, though writing primarily in
English, there are rampant sprinklings and spicings 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
SMSes, emails, twitters, cyber 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 plurilinguistic
context, to explore and exploit such artistic resources.
Personally, the
plurality of my linguistic landscapes have opened up my
stylistic and content windows to a spectrum that fans out to
a wider consciousness, as indicated above, of
cosmopolitanism. 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. With some hind-view, I come to 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. This at times turns off some readers and critics
find the style as 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.
Coming back the
topics or subjects that form and inform my works. They are
various and varied. Though I have addressed the
aforementioned bigger and collective issues, 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 like 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
various life-beats that animate my contemporaneity; but also
to resist the ‘political’ overkill of our so called
engagement literature, an ‘engagement’ and commitment’ that
has proven more the bane of aesthetic development than as a
boon to the very essence of our literary excellence. That
political content penchant has become 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 a
globalizing age, trying to enracinate 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. SLQ
Wirndzerem G.
Barfee was born on August 1, 1975 in Kumbo, Bui
Division, North West Province of Cameroon. He read Mass
Communication at the University of Jos, Nigeria, holds a BA
in Linguistics and MA in American Literature from the
University of Yaoundé I where he is currently doing his
pre-doctoral DEA with critical interests in eco-criticism
and feminism. A two-time participant of the
British Council/ Lancaster University CROSSING BORDERS
pan-African creative writing program (2004/2006), he had
earlier been a selected participant in the BBC /BRITISH
COUNCIL Environmental Writing Workshop in 1996. He recently,
with a national grant, published a poetry collection,
Bird of the Oracular Verb (Iroko Publishers, 2008). He
also has a passion for songwriting and has written songs in
Lamnso (his native tongue), English and French for two local
artists. A
graduate of the National School of Administration and
Magistracy, specialising in public finance, he works with
the Ministry of Finance, Cameroon.
This essay first appeared in
Palapala Magazine as "English on a
Polyglotal Wall: On Being an Anglophone Cameroonian Writer"
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