Mount Pleasant
Page 36
Blessed are those who understood, in the flames of 1914, whether in Foumban or in Berlin, that they were entering not civilization’s great house, but the corridors of mass murder. The millions who died in the trenches and on the battlefields of that world war left behind other souls, both black and white, forever wounded. Blessed, too, are those who in 1933, whether in Yaoundé or Paris, in Foumban or Berlin, had sufficiently clear vision to predict that their future was conjuring a huge furnace, much larger than the one from which they had just escaped. Those few, the chosen people of a story of madness, be they Njoya, Ngono, Atangana, or Bertha, knew that they were poised between two worlds, and not the two worlds evoked by history books, no. After listening to their tales, I can say that they were caught between a truly bleak present and a future bleaker still. That opaque fate, they shared it with the colonizers who had come into their cities and into their lives, whether they be Wuhrmann or Father Vogt, Prestat, Göhring, or Hirtler; but alas! they found no language sufficiently humane to relate their shared fate. Whatever the case may be, as they entered such an uncertain future, waking up in the ruins of their destroyed homes, holding in their hands the rare instruments they had invented—alphabets, pictograms, drawings, reports, books, statues, etc.—with which they sought to transform their fears and their dreams into figurines of lives, they were touched by the fire that hardens the bricks of the present. Their story is the flesh of our quivering earth.
I left Cameroon before Sara told me what happened after she’d been plucked bare in the Golden Car, right in the middle of town. I left Yaoundé with Nebu’s story more or less complete in my mind, but with Sara’s only just beginning. The young men of Nsimeyong accompanied me to the airport. They, too, carried the story of the old mama in their bellies, and I had seen for myself how much it had changed their lives. Arouna told me he had decided not to marry me after all. That made me burst out laughing, for we had become friends.
“Didn’t I tell you I already have a husband?” I asked him.
It was his turn to laugh.
“You too, you are a labyrinth,” he answered, disappointed that I hadn’t told him this at the outset.
“You never asked me,” I reproached him.
“You haven’t even told us your story,” he suddenly remarked.
“You never asked me that, either.”
“Is he American?”
“Who?”
“Your husband.”
“Well…”
Two months after I got back to the United States, I found an envelope from Cameroon in my mailbox, an envelope covered with stamps. It held two letters, one of which was an extremely beautiful text written in Njoya’s Lewa pictograms, and the second was a letter in French signed by all my friends in Nsimeyong. I started with the letter from my friends because it was easier to read. They told me that Sara was dead. The whole neighborhood had buried her with dignity, according to Bamum customs, even though she was Ewondo. But they also told me that Nsimeyong had decided to build a memorial in her honor, to transform the two stones that remained from Mount Pleasant into that house of which she had been the last surviving memory. By doing so, the letter informed me, the poor neighborhood hoped to “attract tourists.” Even in the dust that collective letter brought from far away, I could smell one of Arouna’s financial schemes.
But the letter went on to tell me that Sara had been given a burial befitting the neighborhood doyenne she was. And here I had tears in my eyes. I suddenly saw her again, surrounded by hens in her courtyard in Yaoundé, sitting with her feet crossed; I saw her take a pinch of tobacco and swallow her sneezes so she could tell me the story of her life. I even felt the warmth of her fingers transforming my head of hair into that old-fashioned style that made her laugh and thrilled me to no end because it was the revelation of her life. I still felt her breath on my shoulder when she was braiding my hair, and I recalled how Sara pulled me toward her, whispering in my ears the most astonishing—or really the most unbelievable—bits of her story, safe from the indiscreet ears of the neighborhood and my friends. I saw Sara braiding my hair, grabbing my head, section by section, and keeping my whole mind alert. I was transported and, at the same time, submerged by the sky of that unending reminder she had inscribed on my head in the structured beauty of a cornrow braid (which had made many black women in the United States stop me on the street to ask who had done my hair). I ran to the bathroom, looked in the mirror, and there behind me I saw Sara, winking conspiratorially. I closed my eyes and kept looking at her. This time she smiled.
“What do you know?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I replied.
“Always nothing, always nothing,” she repeated, laughing and holding a pinch of tobacco in front of her nose. “Don’t you learn history where you come from?”
She meant “in the United States.”
How to answer? Sara! Ah, Sara!
Her voice was still in my ears, her voice that had told me the most incredible stories in the simplest way; still, I couldn’t hold back my tears when I translated her letter. It was the story of her life in Njoya’s chambers after her public revelation. And she told of this new life with details I wouldn’t have thought possible, with an honesty that, I finally understood, was her way of finishing with the House of Spirits that Mount Pleasant had in fact always been for her. But her letter ended with a sentence that made me fall right down:
… and then—do you understand?—I became the sultan’s wife.
Acknowledgments and Sources
This novel places onstage very well-educated Cameroonians and Africans: true citizens of the world, in fact. If it is anachronistic to imagine that Seneca had received a doctorate, a certain level of erudition is certainly necessary to understand his writing. Owing to the twists of African history, however, the writer of this novel—who was educated and has published books in French, English, and German—had to come to terms with his own illiteracy when he discovered Njoya’s library: a library that is open in the city where the writer was born, Yaoundé, and which holds the very heart of Cameroonian and African literature, even if it has been erased from their contemporary literatures. To enter into conversation with this library’s world of pictograms, phonemes, words, letters, and books, to bring the Lewa and Akauku alphabets back to life, and to be faithful to fiction’s truth, I needed to change the destinies of many characters and many dates as well. May the descendants of these illustrious characters understand and forgive me!
The books used in the preparation of this novel are too numerous to be cited here, for this is not a history dissertation, but a work of imagination. That said, Tardits’s Le Royaume bamoum; L’Écriture des Bamoum by Dugast and Jeffreys; Die Bamum-Schrift by Schmitt; Delafosse’s article on Njoya’s secret royal language, as well as Geary’s pictographic research, especially her Mandu Yenu: Bilder aus Bamum, which she published with Ndam Njoya; Tuchscherer’s research; and Les Dessins bamoum, in which one can see Ibrahim’s drawings, were all troves of information. The digitized colonial archives of the University of Frankfurt and the University of Southern California, the German cinematographic archives in Berlin, and the Centre national de la cinématographie in Paris, as well as various websites, allowed me to see what the world I was searching for could be. It was all brought to life by a photographic exhibit put together by the students in my course Tropical Germany, at Vassar College in the United States.
I will never be able to thank Barbara Koennecker enough for having insisted on the idea of Njoya; Chris Abani, for having facilitated certain things; Nyasha Bakare, for having traversed the hallways of the writing of this text, first in English, in a manuscript she patiently read, and then in French. My thanks, as well, to Konrad Tuchscherer, for his truly unique enthusiasm, his historical knowledge, which he so generously put at my disposal, and for providing the prints of Lewa writing that I use in the text and those of Akauku writing found at the start of each section—writing systems on which he worked with Nji Oumarou Nchare and Jaso
n Glary. Finally, Laure Pécher! You were the one who really believed in this project!
This is a book about books, and so an homage to all of Africa’s ancient libraries, its forgotten hagiographers, and especially those who worked in obscurity during the long era that is described so poorly by the term “colonialism.” But it is, above all, an homage to a unique book, a marvelous collection of memories, that was begun in Foumban around 1908, its final version completed on Monday, June 19, 1921, in Mantoum, Cameroon: Sultan Njoya’s Saa’ngam.
Baltimore, 2006–Princeton, 2015
Translator’s Note
Translation is necessarily an exchange between languages, times, and individuals; this project has been possible only because of the generosity of those who helped me follow the conversations of Sara and Bertha to their enchanting conclusion. I want to express my immense respect for Patrice Nganang; his combination of aesthetics and engaged ethics is inspiring. I first learned of Njoya and his library when Patrice gave a talk at New College of Florida in 2007; thank you, Patrice, for this opportunity to explore the pathways of Mount Pleasant and the ambiance of Njoya’s court. Chris Richards and Miranda Popkey of FSG were tremendous supports through the editing process; my thanks to them for their patience and their eloquent advice. Hector Kamden Fonkoua, of the University of Bayreuth, kindly responded to my questions about Cameroonian idioms and forms of address. Caroline Reed and Theresa Burress of the Jane Bancroft Cook Library helped locate sources for quotations in the novel. A grant from the New College of Florida Faculty Development Fund allowed me to focus on this project in the summer of 2014. Any errors in the translation are certainly mine, but I give my thanks to those who helped me in my efforts to reflect the novel’s scope and its love of words.
Mount Pleasant is primarily a novel about interpersonal connections—connections through stories and art, language, love, and home. I am so grateful for the love and support of my family: for my husband, Uzi Baram, and our children, Jacob, Miriam, and Ben.
ALSO BY PATRICE NGANANG
FICTION
Dog Days
POETRY
Elobi
A Note About the Author and the Translator
Patrice Nganang was born in Cameroon and is a novelist, a poet, and an essayist. His novel Dog Days (Temps de chien) received the Prix littéraire Marguerite Yourcenar and the Grand prix littéraire d’Afrique noire. He is also the author of La Joie de vivre and L’Invention d’un beau regard. He teaches comparative literature at Stony Brook University. You can sign up for email updates here.
Amy Baram Reid is a professor of French language and literature at New College of Florida. Her previous translations include Patrice Nganang’s Dog Days and Véronique Tadjo’s Far from My Father.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Map
A Few Notes on Cameroon’s History
Epigraph
Sara and Bertha
1. Conversations One August Afternoon
2. The Abduction of Someone Else’s Daughter
3. The Face of Sara, the Old Woman
4. Sara’s Eyes Are a Tale That Begins with a Question
5. Bertha and Her Shadow
6. Bertha’s Shame
7. A Mean Woman
8. Girl-Boy
9. The Labyrinths of Childhood
10. Symphony of a Colonial City
11. What a Man!
12. The Primer of Love
13. A Hell of a Car!
14. Friendship’s Twisted Secrets
15. Talking About Hell …
16. The Song of the Red Earth
17. Red Is the Western Soil
18. A Decidedly Scattered Story
19. What Begins in Foumban Ends in Foumban
Ngutane and Ngono
1. Sara’s Memory
2. Time Regained When You Least Expect It
3. A Sultan’s Smile Can Change the Face of the World
4. Black in Berlin
5. Love’s Apprenticeship
6. The Temptation of the Final Solution
7. The Art of Being a Sultan
8. Coincidences Here and There
9. What Else?
10. Even the Animals …
11. Coffee and Cake on a Hot Afternoon in Berlin
12. Arabesques of Times Gone By
Nebu and Ngungure
1. The Artist Revealed
2. Let’s Talk About the Devil …
3. The Depths of Friendship
4. Workshop Conversations
5. Getting Back to Ngutane and Bertha
6. The Audacity of an Apprentice Before His Master
7. The Palace of All Possible Dreams
8. A Colony, Postwar
9. The Sultan’s Soul Is an Open Book, Written in a Mysterious Alphabet
10. The Strident Echo of Names and Deeds
11. Are the French So Very Different from the Germans?
12. The Mathematics of a Woman’s Body
13. A Man Revealed in a Burst of Laughter
14. The Survey of Pain
15. A Woman Is a City, Unself-conscious
16. The French Officer’s Mistake
17. The Audacity of the Flesh
18. The Newborn’s Mirth, and So On
Njoya and Mose
1. In History’s Chattering Poor Neighborhoods
2. In Yaoundé, Rain Is No One’s Friend
3. The Limits of Anti-French Sentiment
4. All Roads Lead to Foumban
5. The Writer’s Creation
6. Mose Yeyap’s Manifesto
7. How Can One Be Both Black and Fascist?
8. Judgment Day
9. The Virtues of a Drawing Well Done
10. The Sultan’s Calculations
11. The Awakening of the Artist in Pain
12. Artists in Politics
13. Who Killed the Artist?
14. The Equation of an Assassination
15. The Multiple Faces of Powerlessness
16. The Smoker’s Conversations with His Solitary Cigarette
17. The Cocoa Tree of the Mysterious Path
18. The Cocoa Spirit
19. Sublime Reveries on a Tour Through the City
20. The Surprising Blindness of the Polygamous
Epilogue
Untitled
Acknowledgments and Sources
Translator’s Note
Frontispiece
Also by Patrice Nganang
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2011 by Éditions Philippe Rey
Translation copyright © 2016 by Amy Baram Reid
All rights reserved
Originally published in French in 2011 by Éditions Philippe Rey, France, as Mont Plaisant
English translation published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2016
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Nganang, Alain Patrice.|Reid, Amy Baram, 1964– translator.
Title: Mount Pleasant: a novel / Patrice Nganang; translated by Amy Reid.
Other titles: Mont Plaisant. English
Description: New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015035418|ISBN 9780374213855 (hardback)|ISBN 9780374713089 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Cameroon—Colonization—History—20th century—Fiction.|France—Colonies—Cameroon—History—Fic
tion.|BISAC: FICTION / Literary.|FICTION / Historical.|GSAFD: Historical fiction
Classification: LCC PQ3989.2.N4623 M6613 2016|DDC 843/.92—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015035418
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