Literary Corner

Eunice Ngongkum's Verbal Frescoes of the New Deal Clime of Gloom*
The exigencies of historiography demands objective recounts of the birth and evolution of the forces, and titanic figures whose destinies shape societies.

With such pretensions history seeks to produce meta-narratives that foreground the dynamics of society's macro-variables. Re-presenting the march of the society from the view point of the individual; dwelling on the fate of the common man, tossed about like a reed in the tides that rock and move society, the historian is wont to eschew.

Thus if we want to feel the pulse of late medieval life, we would better thumb through Chaucer's recreations in The Canterbury Tales, or Hugo's spirited romantic reconstructions in Notre~Dame de Paris.

Equally, Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God would much edify us on the tempo and spirit of the Igbo society around the pivotal moment of their first contacts with the West than most missionary and colonial office accounts that would provide raw material for such ideologically slanted works as his District Commissioner's projected The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.

And very much like Chaucer who uses the strategy of the coincidental convention of diverse pilgrims at an inn to recreate late medieval life in all its colour, Ngongkum in Manna of a Life and Other Short Stories effects a sweep of the Cameroonian society at the twilight of the third millennium, the years of the ebbs of post-independence dystopia, crystallised in the much tambourined Renouveau.

Thus the thematic motif that ties together her compacted narratives is misery for a populace, pauperised by the unbridled obscenities of a vision-voided leadership.

Manna of a Life and Other Short Stories  (Éditions CLÉ, 2007, 116 pp) then are ten verbal frescoes that capture the breadth and pulse of the life of the average Cameroonian in the New Deal era, from the rustic folk eking out their existence in this hope-voided clime, to the melting pot that is the capital, Yaounde, that paradigm of the morally bankrupt country, where saints, conmen and the kleptomanic Mammonites of the Renouveau coalesce to produce a sordid world where spirited juvenile dreams end in calamity; where post-independence dystopia is engraved in the social topography of  the city, where glorified Renouveau robbers of state money:

Walked the streets in broad daylight and nothing was done to them. In some instances they were hailed as best managers and given juicier positions where they could demonstrate recognised heroism … (75 - 76)

In the stories Eunice Ngongkum foregrounds contemporary relevant and ideologically pointed themes. There is the lamentable fate of public servants in the tragedy of Claude Edzengue in Manna of a Life Time, who is lured by hollow promises of millions for voluntary retirees to abandon his Grade One teaching position and ultimately meet tragedy as an illicit petrol dealer in the Ntanfoulan fuel-train disaster.

There is the sombre side of city life, the deceptions of youths chasing the passion of love in Monsigneur and Petite Amie. There is the AIDS pandemic in the story of Akiy Mua Abeng in The Last Journey and in the strange money magnet and purveyor of death in Formidable Foe, who comes to wreck havoc on the Naiseh womenfolk.

There is the football industry with its corruption, frustrations and misery for talented youths and their families in Football Fever, then there is the Afro-exodus, the bush-falling syndrome in Mua Mbih's stage-managed political persecution and consequent flight to the US in The Visa, and Libih's obsession with flying out of the country which ends in calamity in Obsession.

But all is not lost in this gloomy world, for Ngongkum also celebrates the assertive evolution of woman, that resilient and often forgotten actor in the social drama of depraved societies. The woman here is metamorphosing in the heat of the crisis, from her oft-marginalised position to an enterprising actor in the social scene.

If we behold the woman in her classical role as mother and nurse of body and mind, very often reaping but frustration in the end in The Last Journey and Adamou Ismanou, we also see the other facet of woman as socially mobile in the array of professional female characters fighting hard to bring up their children.

We equally see the woman as industrious initiator of viable financial and social projects in the face of a collapsing banking sector, ruined by the thieving hands of New Deal government officials. It is thus that we have the Advocate Sisters' Social Group set up by twenty diverse professional women, and which in a short space of time is already reaping twice the amount of the initial share capital in the form of interests.

The short story form not giving much room for elaborate weaving of complex narrative structures, Ngongkum works for the most part on straight linear plots, closing most of the stories with skilful deployment of suspense.

Her language and the tone in general might not clearly manifest signs of Soyinka's resistance aesthetic that when confronted with culpable power, the writer must elicit a language that appropriates its obscenities and flings them back unto its face, but the ideological drift of Ngongkum's short stories nevertheless shows her as a craftsperson with a conviction that verbal art, in helping to align attitudes, could be a potent ingredient for a liberation therapy from obscene power.

* Dr Eunice Ngongkum teaches at the Department of African Literature, University of Yaounde I.Kikefomo wan-Mbula

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Comments

[Clear]

While not making light of the historical oppression that women have undergone, especially in Africa, I still wonder what Eunice would make of the thieving and corrupting women who not only push their husbands to unspeakalbe corruption that contributes to the destruction of Cameroon but actively promote such corruption themselves. Women may be victims of the system but many of them in high places (in parliament, for example) are perpetrators of the death that is gripping the society. (I can name names but will not do that for now.) Women as sign of hope? I doubt it. I think romantic ideas of womanhood need to be challenged even in art. Eunice has to go back to work.

[Sinibaldi]

I give you the sound...

In the darkness,
and when a soft
wind arrives near
a magic lantern,
you call me
like a glittering eye
in the skill of
a wisdom, you touch
a desire, and then,
in my heart, a delicate
voice discovers a
fate: you claim
the atmosphere, I
give the sound.....

Francesco Sinibaldi

[Dr. Mills]

Where can this book be purchased? I would like to include it in a university course.