Reviewer: Peter Wuteh Vakunta, Ph.D.
By titling his poem of lamentation Elobi, Nganang makes a declaration as rich and complex as it is varied in its implications; "Elobi" is not just a neighborhood in the capital city of Yaoundé; it is also the personification of abject poverty in the midst of abundance. Elobi is the specifically Cameroonian way of referring to the wet, swampy areas that surround riverbanks. Elobi is a designation of where the slums are, and where the poor live. Against this backdrop, it is not surprising then that Nganang’s poem touches on virtually every aspect of the decadent polity code-named Cameroon. Yaoundé, however, is only the runway from which the poet's imaginative flight takes off as before long he is briefly reviewing Cameroon as a geographical expression, a nation state, albeit in a shambles which he christens “the republic of clowns”(p.1). Nganang’s immediate concern is to delineate the dichotomy between the silence of speech and the speech of silence (p.1). This antithetical parallelism is not used fortuitously as it prefigures the poet’s bull’s eye, namely the macabre silence that engenders the illusion of freedom in a country where speaking truth to power is anathema.
Thus, Nganang’s Elobi is the poetization of political simulacrum where modern judases…usher in the silence of slow death (p.1).By this token, Elobi is the poet’s attempt to underscore the ramifications of lexical hollowness in his land of birth. As he puts it, “…my words have lost the meanings of their definition.”(p.4) Elobi is an eerie poem wherein scatology thrives and serves as a lethal weapon of combat in the hands of a disenchanted son of the soil who recalls his childhood with melancholy and dystopia: “I was born there… in the neighborhood of pit latrines /I spent my childhood forged by dreams of distance…where the city dumps its garbage/ its corpses…” (p.6). Notice that scatology is ubiquitous in Elobi, the more so because it serves as a leitmotiv for the moral decadence that characterizes the wheeling and dealing orchestrated by ruling class, political nitwits whose stock-in-trade is to serve as stimuli for “the confirmation of eternal damnation.”(p.8) Some references to scatology in Elobi paint a rather bleak picture of the fate of the lost generation of Cameroonians who find themselves besmeared with their own “shit “… in which the pit latrine is testimony of the crime of the ex-virgin...”(p.17). Eventually, the poet shifts his radar from the neighborhood of Elobi to Obili, another neighborhood in Yaoundé where inhabitants “believe in the shit/scarf down the shit, bath in the shit” and “become beshitted…” (18). Images like “the rotten twat of a positive prostitute” with “a flaccid buttock/ breasts/wet napkins/ eternal debauchery/ speaks volumes about the daily grime and crime prevalent not only in these precincts but also throughout the Republic of Cameroon. Nganang’s predilection for scatology may shock readers unfamiliar with the mess that is prevalent in Cameroon. However, informed readers would easily connect the dots.
It is noteworthy that recourse to scatology is akin to the portrayal of grime, crime and rape when the poet chants his telltale dirge, “… but the lake slackens/obstinately its version of thorns/ of mud/its garbage in this hour of crime.”(p.17) The portrayal of Yaoundé, Cameroon’s seat of government as a city of grime and crime paints a rather gloomy picture of Cameroon as a nation-state. Frustrated by the spoliation of his homeland, the poet calls for what French people would describe as le crime de lèse-majesté [lese-majesty or crime against the crown] as he wonders aloud “but who will stop this straying/ who-who/ but who will fire the final shot/ no one responds” (p.19) It does not take much wit to see that the poet is actually calling for the assassination of the Head of State in Cameroon. He puts the blame on the rank and rife in Cameroon whom he describes as cowardly (p.18).
Elobi is Nganang’s poetic lamentation. The poet berates the moral decadence, corruption, nepotism, ethnocentrism, physical deterioration and the sentimental despondency that feed the Cameroonian wretched of the earth, to borrow words from Franz Fanon (1961). Nganang’s frustration is discernible in his chant of hopelessness: “but we are/ condemned for life/ the chant is born of a swallowed scream/ of speech diluted/ in beads of tears/ dried by masculine modesty/ true speech retreated to the borders/ of withdrawal… on this night of death…”(p.20) Nganang does not stop at calling names; he actually calls for a regime change in Cameroon(p.23) as he bemoans the fate of Cameroon’s beasts of no nation, to borrow words from Bate Besong, another illustrious son of the soil: “ We are/ children of rape/ born to a curse in our mouths/ tardy citizens/ too silenced to have any more to say/ too killed to have any more to live/ we are children of the violence/ dead without having dared to live/ eternal corpses/ unwieldy corpses/ who throw themselves upon it/ we are children of the disenchantment.”(p.24)
To convey his nagging and sometimes disturbingly tragic message, Nganang addresses the Cameroonian society as a whole, from the wolowoss (whores) to political party leaders. This is the stock-in-trade of a poet overwhelmed by the man-made problems besieging his fatherland: from the lack of potable water in parts of Cameroon, through fraud committed by the head of state and his acolytes: “come out from the garbage can there/ from the water/ noting but water/ filthy inundation… marks this kingdom of refuse…”(p.27) In a song he christens 'the credo of galimpeiro' (p.30),the poet lambastes the necromancy that has become a governmental modus operandi in Cameroon: “ this is the terrorist credo/ hunted by/all the police forces but lover/ of the shanty towns/who/celebrates his crowns of skull/ with a cup of blood/with a dream/passionate as a jesus-christ.”(p.30)
In Nganang’s versification, music plays the pivotal role of naming the nameless as seen in these verses: “History repeats itself/Cameroon Tribune/ i am not the son of the ephemeral/who succeeds the ephemeral/ the street without name/the street robbed of its name.”(p.11). To put it succinctly, music enables the poet to utter the unutterable ;to write against the grain: “tcham tacham/ tchamassi of decomposition/ of head choppers/ on the road/and the opponents/belly-heavy/ball of dust/of rags/of flies…/tcham/ tcham/tchamassi the party of bandits…/ this is the hideous one’s credo/whom the city/wants to do without/ but who bursts with laughter/ at his condemnation/ by the juries of the good cause/with a dream/terrible as a living-dead.”(p.30)
In a nutshell, Nganang’s Elobi spans decades of Cameroonian history and geographic space. It adumbrates a myriad of themes critical to the Cameroonian raison d’être. The poet’s diction is simple in the most part, yielding forth a poem that is largely accessible. Nganang's verbal brilliance, linguistic jugglery and clever display of scenes makes this poetic anthology a particularly appealing book to read.
About the reviewer
Professor Peter Wuteh Vakunta teaches at the United States Department of Defense Language Institute in Monterey-California
Comments