Gods and Soldiers (16 page)

There was something feverish about the days after Obi's death, something malarial, something so numbingly fast that it left me free to not feel. Even Obi's burial in the backyard was fast, although Papa spent hours fashioning a cross from old wood. After the neighbors and Father Damian and the crying children dispersed, Mama called the cross
shabby
and kicked it, broke it, flung the wood away.

Papa stopped going to the War Research Directorate and dropped his patriotic tie into the pit latrine, and day after day, week after week, we sat in front of our room—Papa, Mama and me—staring at the yard. The morning a woman from down the street dashed into our yard, I did not look up, until I heard her shouting. She was waving a green branch. Such a brilliant, wet-looking green. I wondered where she got that, the plants and trees around were scorched by January's harmattan sun, blown bare by the dusty winds. The earth was sallow.

The war is lost, Papa said. He didn't need to say it though, we already knew. We knew when Obi died. The neighbors were packing in a hurry, to go into the smaller villages because we had heard the Federal soldiers were coming with truckloads of whips. We got up to pack. It struck me how little we had, as we packed, and how we had stopped noticing how little we had.

The Igbo say that when a man falls, it is his god who has pushed him down.

Nnamdi clutched my hand too tight at our wedding. He did everything with extra effort now, as if he was compensating for his amputated left arm, as if he was shielding his shame. Papa took photos, telling me to smile wider, telling Nnamdi not to slouch. But Papa slouched, himself, he had slouched since the war ended, since the bank gave him fifty Nigerian pounds for all the money he had in Biafra. And he had lost his house—our house with the marble staircase—because it was declared abandoned property and now a civil servant lived there, a woman who had threatened Mama with a fierce dog when Mama defied Papa and went to see her beloved house. All she wanted was our china and our radiogram, she told the woman. But the woman whistled for the dog.

“Wait,” Mama said to Papa, and came over to fix my hat. She had made my wedding dress and sewn sequins onto a secondhand hat. After the wedding, we had pastries in a café and as we ate, Papa told me about the wedding cake he used to dream about for me, a pink multi-layered cake, so tall it would shield my face and Nnamdi's face and the cake-cutting photo would capture only the groomsman's face, only Obi's face.

I envied Papa, that he could talk about Obi like that. It was the year Obi would have turned seventeen, the year Nigeria changed from driving on the left hand side of the road to the right. We were Nigerians again.

THE SENGHOR COMPLEX

I AM NOT a negro and I was never one. Whether it is written with or without a capital. The first time I heard the word used in relation to myself, I was twenty years old, and it was by then too late to become one. At the time I was in Germany. I was crossing the street, rushing a little, and bumped into a young man who threw out, “Neger.” This was in Saarbrücken. I remember, rather than being dumbfounded, I was merely surprised. I didn't know the word had been addressed to me. I recount the episode here because Senghor, as we know from Jahn, translated Negritude into German as
Negersein
—the fact of being negro. Black, I was not that either until too late, and it too involved Germany, even though it was finally and especially the United States that taught me what black signifies. One could say that Senghor followed in his own way the path that I have just traced: the encounter with Germany, then the staggering discovery of African American texts, in particular the anthology
The New Negro
(1925), the impact of which on Senghor's own
Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre
(1948) has not yet been adequately told. One method of verification: when I look in the mirror, I don't see a black. Cameroonian, yes, that I am and will remain. I have defined myself as that since childhood, and even today, adult, and having lived on three continents, I always return to what is for me a simple fact—as well as a passport—despite it not being a commitment. There is a bit of a habit of giving all Africans the same history, whether they be Congolese, Nigerian, Senegalese, or Ghanaian, and regardless of their ages. The tendency is perhaps the reason why these defining preliminaries are important. That it be clear then: I never learned at school that my ancestors were Gaulois, but in fact quite the opposite; from very early on, I was made to feel the history of Cameroon in my body: my ancestors were Bamileké
¹
—and that I was therefore “Bamileké,” a “bams,” “bami,” “gros bami,” “ngrafi,” “cochon,” “maquisard,” “bosniaque,” that I was one of “those people,” as one still says today in Cameroon. I did not read
Mamadou et Bineta
at school, even if, from my father, who taught me to write, I had a CMII workbook for practicing French. A workbook I never used because the reading passages were “too hard,” and did not help me resolve my own simple grammar problems. In short, the books I read at school, those that have stayed in my memory, had titles more along the lines of
Afrique mon Afrique
and
J'aime mon pays, le Cameroun.
It is simply that I was born in 1970, that symbolic year. And, according to my country's, Cameroon's, current statistics, more than half the population was born after 1970, that is to say, ten years after independence, and shares therefore, more or less, my past, and will perhaps understand the issues that I would like to articulate here.

 

It is that, for me, Senghor was always very complex. Perhaps because I never read him at school, but instead listened to him declaim his poems on the radio, especially his famous “Prière aux masques” and “Femme noire,” in that sandy voice that still gives me goose flesh. During the same period, I listened to Rabemananjara, the last word of whose poem “Madagascar” is engraved in my memory, a horse's trot still reverberating in my ears: “Ma-da-gas-car.” The slow fall of a ping-pong ball. The reason is simple: radio broadcasting in Cameroon having few sound-tracks, the station would broadcast the few poems in its archives, then broadcast them, and broadcast them again. At five o'clock each evening, the national station. Even if his orchestral voice haunts me for a long time to come, Senghor will still appear complex to me. Perhaps because his collection of poems,
Poèmes,
published by Éditions du Seuil, is the first book that I bought with my own money, my economy of several weeks, augmented by my father so that I could reach the necessary sum of 1470 francs CFA. I bought Senghor of my own free will at the bookstore of Éditions Clé in Yaoundé in 1987—I know the date because I had by then bought a series of books, including Frantz Fanon's
Les Damnés de la terre
and
Peau noire, masques blancs;
and my then-teacher and mentor who later became my reader, Dassi Fosso, had advised me to write the date of purchase on the book's first page. Instead of writing the date, I drew the head of the Senegalese poet. Unlike my encounters with Césaire, whom we had read over and over in Lycée—
Une Tempête
in second year,
Cahier d'un retour au pays natal
in first, and
La Tragédie du roi Christophe
in terminale—Senghor was for me a private discovery. I discovered him because of his radio-broadcast voice, and between 1986 and 1988, I read my poems on the radio. So I sought out Senghor. Today, still, opening
Poèmes,
I realize that at that time, I always emphasized his postscript to Éthiopiques—“As the manatees drink at the source,” especially the last two paragraphs, which I underlined a lot in pencil. The underlining does not surprise me, because these two paragraphs begin with this, “We have thus arrived at the last question: the diction of the poem.” I underlined especially the sentences “This poem is a jazz score in which the performance is as important as the text,” “Thus poems can be recited—I don't say declaimed—chanted or sang,” and “The poem is not finished until it is made to chant, to be speech and music at once.”
²
Rather practical reading, I would say, for a budding poet who, in a classic, looked for phrases like those of Rilke's
Letters to a Young Poet;
useful reading for a young writer to whom the poetry of the spoken word had been revealed by the radio, but to whom no one had ever given a practical handbook. During those formative years, did I ever read Senghor in any way other than poetic? I don't believe so.

 

Regarding writers of my generation, I usually say that Senghor is everyone's grandfather; certainly this signifies that he is not my father, be-causeafter all it is I who “sought out” him, to emphasize Ralph Ellison's term,
³
but above all, it means I always sought in Senghor's work “the architecture of the poem,” the workmanship of poetic speech. And it is precisely here that Senghor's writing is rich, very few African writers having reflected so continuously, alongside their writing, upon the instruments of their writing. Faced with the masterly tomes of his reflections,
Liberté I, II, III,
etc., criticism establishes distinctions of importance, rickety stairs which set the poet against the president, the essayist against the poet, the theoretician of “African Socialism” against that of the “francophonie”; however, most of the time, happily, criticism does not divide his poetry into phases, the poet having begun to publish only quite late in life, after thirty. For me, however, all these aspects come together in a kind of edifice—thus in a complex—that intrigues and fascinates me, but does not evoke in me the repulsion that propelled Mongo Beti to write in all seriousness in “Conseils à un jeune écrivain francophone” (Advice for a Young Francophone Writer): “I swear, without the least confusion, that I do not read the works of this ex-president-poet; whatever I say about him, is what friends have told me.”
⁴
I am a reader of Senghor, an observer of his complex, and when as an adult writer I passed from the diction of his writing to its meaning, from its meter to the labyrinth of his words, it became clear to me that the architecture of his poetry falls along four easily marked axes, all of which are obliterated before the simple fact that I am Cameroonian, that I am Bamileké, as I mentioned at the beginning. The axes are these: first of all, identity as an analytical category; self-definition within a binary relationship which places the subject in opposition to the object; an evasion of the political paradox; and, finally, a relationship of too great an intimacy with Gaullism—I mean Gaullism and not France. I will analyze these four axes—that of logic, that of
épistèmè
(in the Foucaultian sense), that of ethics, and that of politics—step by step, gaze always fixed on our own violent times—before I draw conclusions, primarily through my relations, of which I have already named two—those relations whom I did not seek out, but who were givens on my path. Next, I will speak from the tradition in which these axes have situated Cameroon, the place from which I choose both to write about this country and to read Senghor.