DEARTH AND DEATH: THE GROWING LACUNA IN
CAMEROON ANGLOPHONE LITERARY CRITICISM AND DEBATE
Wirndzerem G. Barfee*
"It is to subsume and
transcend the instant; to open vast horizons of the not-yet, [to me that
is] the function of cultural criticism and of critical theory because art
cannot thrive in the absence of a strong critical theory tradition" Achille Mbembe
Of late there has been
increasing reason to fear that the aberrant is happening in present Anglophone
Cameroon literary landscape. This pathology finds unsettling symptoms in the
expanding lacuna of silence that is settling our critical space. There is a growing
apathy towards our own literary productions, and it is characterized by a
shouting and disturbing absence of criticism, reviews and debate on the recent
works by new and old authors.
Apart from some one or two sporadic symposia and the
functional publications, all executed in the restricted confines of the
academia; there has been a serious decline in the erstwhile dynamic quotidian
and popular animation of our literary culture through the active use of the
mass media and cyber opportunities that presently exist for such noble purposes
toward our arts. The great past seems to have fallen into ruins that now merely
creep up but as faint silhouettes of nostalgic phantoms.
I mean that gone are those ionized and lionized days when
our writers, critics, literary professionals and wo/men of culture in general,
held court in well-followed newspaper columns, had appetizing debates on TV,
and regularly intervened and participated in literary radio programs. Dead are
those days when their media interventions would be both the grist of street
conversation mills and the kola with which beer was boozed with in quarter
bars. You would not believe those days existed, but recent publications
lamenting the late Bate Besong by Kangsen Feka in PalaPala magazine and Canute
Tangwa on his web-blog, remain poignant testimonies and recalls of such
glorious days, now lost.
Days, back in the 80s, when the then young and audacious
literary wolf in the skin of Nkemngong Nkengasong could unsheathe his honed
critical phalanx and brandish it against the ostensibly untouchable veteran and
pioneer, Sankie Maimo, in long running sequels in Cameroon Tribune. Sequels of
defiance and debate heated white-hot until Sankie, with all his pioneer complex
and hubris roused and rattled, was provoked to pen his literary bravura as his
definite response to the young, brave and irreverent critic. Again, who will
also forget Bate Besong’s several critical outings and particularly his one
time literary bout with Azore Opio? There are many others, not necessarily
confrontational, that marked our literary history unforgettably. But today the
aberrant seems to have crept in with the dark spreading sea of tentacular
obscurities that drowns our literary landscape in depths of distributing
critical silences and indifferences.
It is not the publication of a work that creates a
literary event, it is publicizing it through critical debates, that transforms
it into a canon (postmodern meta-narrative debates aside), or not. A work does
not exist until it is read; but I will hasten to add that the read work does
not live until it is criticized. In some cases of serious reading, critics and
criticism make and revive books; hence there are few or no sustainable works
without critics and criticism. Criticism does not only fertilize writing and
reading, it informs and reforms reading and writing. Critiques and criticisms
that are supposed to enrich our literary patrimony through animated critical
involvement that erects their visibility, sustains their dynamic vitality
(giving them critical life) and their author’s growth – have had their response
and responsiveness trickled down to draughts that now wreak a drought!
Productions are being left to cake dust and rust on bookshelves, and gather
moss and moisture in the authors’ drawers.
Something sterile is happening. It is called critical
apathy. And we the literati stand indicted for this degenerate silence. If not
what explains the fact that with the existence of so many newspapers and
internet magazines, we have carefully and curiously chosen the camp of silence
and indifference towards the productions that abound, a harvest that we loudly
trumpet as bountiful, yet we are unmoved by the critical stirrings of
dissecting the “beautiful” (or not) in that “bountiful” literary crop.
Or as Canute Tangwa poignantly lamented, has Bate Besong
gone away with the prompt and incisive review of fellow Cameroonian writers?
Who does not remember paying that eager visit to his web-blog and stumbling
upon his fresh critical review of Kangsen Feka Wakai and Simon Mol as new
voices of another generation? Heretofore, how many of us had a literary inkling
about these nascent diasporic voices? It remains thanks to BB’s active and open
critical tastes and quests that introduced us to them critically – and mark
you, with them his was not a tender and complacent critical caress solely. He
incised with his critical scalpel where he thought rightly or wrongly to have
found the artistic hernia.
The essence is about opening dedicated critical debates
about the manner and matter of our literature in order to crystallize a
sustainable and enviable literary pedigree and heritage. And nobody, or no
group of people, other than equitable, candid, altruist and vocational (not
synonymous with careerist professionals) critics are best and squarely suited
to undertake the exulting and exalted definition and construction of such
canonical heritage. But it seems with the passing away of BB, we have abandoned
the daunting imperatives of this home game to only a fistful of diligent
practitioners in the vast and seething pond of our literary profession, one
that tragically seems to remain the proverbial big sea without crocodiles!
Count them on the fingers of your hands: Shadrack Ambanasom, Dibussi Tande,
Nalova Lyonga, Nkemngong Nkengasong, Ashuntangtang Joyce, Mwalimu George
Ngwane, Francis Nyamnjoh…and the list starts thinning out! I mean those who, if
challenged instantly, can name and say a paragraph, off the cuff, about any –
say just five – new and published under-40 Anglophone Cameroonian writers.
Or is it not curious enough at this material moment, that
the most active and present literary critic/literary journalist of Anglophone
Cameroon writing is the eclectic and versatile Dibussi Tande, whose currency in
matters of our local literature goads me to ask: what are we doing here at home
about the literary on-goings just inches away from our nostrils? For when the
young (and prolific) Labang Oscar publishes, This Is Bonamoussadi!, and its fist review pops up in the USA, who
signs it…Dibussi!
You get what I mean. It later appears in Cameroon Tribune
reviewed by a journalist, and only a journalist, of course. And again: why is
it that he is the first to interview Ashutangtang Joyce following the
publication of her latest critical book-length work, a landmark study on
Anglophone Cameroon literary production and dissemination? And why has no
critical review penned by local literary scholars – to the best of my knowledge
– appeared on the domestic media market? You still get what I mean.
How many months have passed since the ground-breaking
anthology of Anglophone literature, The Spirit Machine and Other Stories (CCC
Press, 2009) hit the virtual/cyber stands and yet no review, no interview, no
news on the product – I mean on the local literary landscape? Same goes for the
most recent spate of Editions Cle Anglophone books whose invisibilities were mostly
averted – Lord have mercy, by narrow syllabus inclusions.
But tell me: apart from this pedagogic mainstreaming,
what critical output has enriched these productions? How many in our local
literary profession know about Langaa Publishing? How many have visited its
titles on the African Book Collective website? How many yet have heard of and
visitedwww.palapalamagazine.com, http://anglocamlit.blogspot.com,
Dibussi’s blog. Bate Besong’s, George Ngwane’s etc. Really, and without the
undue embracing of gratuitous alarmism and cynicism, it must be confessed that
our critical heritage is being cast into fossilizing apathies. And it troubles
the conscious and the conscientious. For even when copies are distributed free
of charge, a journalistic review or criticism is still hard to come by. And the
ideological verity is: no one is going to sing our victories or dirges for us.
Our critics must, or be condemned to the historical garbage heap of absentees,
the uncommitted, the sham and the intellectually slothful.
The indictment hypothesized in the above last lines may
sound inconsiderate, but being an avid follower of what is going on in most
Anglophone literary spheres around African, especially in Nigeria, Ghana,
Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, etc, I have realized that the
literary communities of these sphere have copiously appropriated the cyber
opportunities in making innovative and extensive use of the internet’s
flexibility, instantaneity, reactivity, accessibility and cost effectiveness to
keep their creative and critical heritage booming. By this I mean their
piloting, pioneering and steering of web-blogs and websites like
Africanwriting.com, Africanwriters.com, Wasafiri, Kwani?, PONAL, Sentinel
Poetry, 123Next.com, Sable magazine, Chimerunga, amongst many other on-line
literary sites and events, have attained hard-currency standards.
No wonder, their writers – improved by the constant and
non-complacent cross-fertilization between their creativity and the criticisms
of these literary cafes and rendezvous – are overwhelmingly garnering all
available literary prizes around the continent and beyond. Talk about the
Chimanda Adiches, Chris Abanis, Helon Habilas, Brian Chikwavas, Tolu
Ogunlesis…the constellation is infinte! Their roll call at the Booker, Caine,
Commonwealth, Orange and countless other prizes is a resounding present!
And that is the very reason we are not doing the same.
Our works are fallowing out there in our tiny provincial and parochial literary
farms. There is a stark absence of literary debates and events around the works
to stir them alive and kicking! And this fact drives me to memories of the
Crossing Borders project which later evolved to a restricted Radiophonics
spin-off project, retaining the serious writing countries, with the less
serious countries shunned – I suspect, and without malice! Of that C.B. project
I remember well that while we in Cameroon were busy with our sterile individual
creative insularity, our colleagues in East Africa, especially Uganda, had
constituted themselves to eventful groups that meet regularly at literary
cafe’s to share their creative experiences through readings and critiques. Some
thing we could have emulated: like looking for a space where, in a fortnightly
or monthly routine, we could read and critique our works over a cold beer or
‘minerals’! Or create or affiliate, by active presence and participation in,
already extant and relevant e-magazines or journals. I guess that would have
made, and still can make a decent and fertile literary tribe out of our present
stupor and apathy.
As it is known and reiterated, the worst thing to happen
to a writer and his/her works is to let them fallow and wilt in deserts of
silence and apathy. It is a dramatic condition when one’s muse is shouting down
empty halls and vacuous corridors and hearing your own voice echo back hollow
silences and indifferences.
This is a condition that insinuates qualms fore-worded in
my Bird of the Oracular Verb (Iroko Publishers, 2008) as that phobic “complex
(in) formed by the hydro-headed, the menace of creative alienation…the
devastating ambiance of indifference, silence and absence that (the writer’s)
production fallows (or worse still, withers) in. These are terrifying
conditions of the annihilation of memory and consciousness that beat even the
most corrosive forms of coerced institutional censorship imaginable.”
So, by this I mean that our critical apathy is tantamount
to a treacherous complicity that insidiously and unwittingly abets an obnoxious
breed of censorship imposed by this endemic critical coma. This critical
unresponsiveness represents a culturally uncivil irresponsibility that carries
microbes of our collective intellectual and cultural hibernation, indolence,
indigence and decadence – a state of affairs that will certainly leave us with
a literary cretinism that enters no qualitative literary emporium, except the
decreed markets of mediocre school syllabi walled within the three lines of our
national triangle.
That truth wins good purchase, for no harvest of good
writers germinate out of an uncritical farm. In other words, there is no
sustainable creative heritage without an active and critical heritage. The two
are Siamese twins that synergistically evolve a literary heritage of sterling
pedigree. We cannot have a culture exclusively of writers who only seek to be
seen and heard, and not be read. By read I mean critical readings whose
purposes and ultimate outcomes reside in a continuous quest, not only for
comprehension of the textually analytic fact, but also for the perfection of
texture and form.
The dignity of the critical vocation lies in its
ethico-aesthetic authority that ‘prerogates’ the sanction and promotion of our
creative values and valuation, ones without which our creativity will, for a
large part remain without compass, an inarticulate enterprise that runs the
huge risk of declining into the parochial mediocrity hinged on unmirrored and
uncompared sessions of ego-massage and ego-masturbation –where a cat will
always believe itself a king of felines because the critic has not faced it
with the lair of weightier wild cats!
A writer writes (into) a tradition, a critic defines the
tradition. So worthy of emphasis is the fact that without the dignified and
canonizing vocation of our own critics, we will be left at the mercy of the
makers of other (’s) canons and icons. T.S. Eliot in his milestone treatise, Tradition and the Individual Talent,
validates the fact that “Every nation, every race, have not only its own
creative (mind), but its own critical turn of mind.”
The values of our culture and the valuation of our
creative outputs should be defined and refined by our critics first. Needless
asking why: it is they who should be better positioned to master and measure
the nuances and intricacies, delicacies and aesthetic patterns of our culture
and cosmos. By so doing their profession will evolve the autonomous matrices of
our very own canon formation! In line with creating our own canons and
paradigms for evaluating our artistic productions – our own criticism will
produce literary historians whose critical enterprise significantly complements
that of our cultural history by collapsing text /context dualisms (and
opposition) through their constant re-textualization of our history. This new
historicist textual parallelism and competition achieves an osmotic and
cross-pollinating dialectic. This condition of creative and critical symbiosis
and synergy characterizes a dynamic literary holism.
This process ultimately will engender articulate models
and consequently a consistent and vibrant heritage that will shape the unique
frames of our common cultural identity. An identity that offers our generations
to come, traditions of solid references and coordinates through which they can
map, establish and bequeath the imprimatur of their own sustainable genius. But
if we continue this uncritical recidivism, this creative and critical
irresponsibility; history will record our generations on the blank pages of its
books.
As Eliot concludes, “criticism is as inevitable as
breathing.” So, doesn’t our growing critical barrenness and atrophy spell our
breathlessness which equals – quality wise – our moribund literature, our death?
The answer is imperative: our critical revival is a moral responsibility; we
must assume it now or choose the abyss of literary perdition and oblivion.
*
WGB
is the author of the poetry collection Bird of the Oracular Verb and a
frequent contributor.
Source: www.palapalamagazine.com
Source: www.palapalamagazine.com