When the Plums Are Ripe

by Patrice Nganang

  “So what are you going to read?”

  That was the priest’s way of signaling his tacit accord.

  “I’m not sure yet,” Pouka replied, realizing at once that he’d made another mistake. The best way to bring the priest around to his side was to show no hesitation.

  “Claudel, of course,” he began, counting off on his fingers the names from the pantheon of French poetry that he most admired.

  “That’s good,” Father Jean interjected, “he’s not a Communist.”

  Pouka smiled, as if keeping Communist poets out of his anthology was a given that didn’t need to be stipulated.

  “Of course, no Reds.”

  “Especially during wartime,” the priest continued, “when what we all need is faith. And prayers.”

  That same day, a notice posted on the church door invited all who wanted to learn how to write poetry to come to Mininga’s Bar Wednesday morning at 9:00 a.m. The announcement was signed, “Pouka, Writer.”

  9

  The First Meeting

  When Pouka saw the line that had formed in front of Mininga’s Bar on Wednesday morning, he first thought he had gone to the wrong place. Never would he have imagined that poetry would attract so many people. Talking with each of them, however, he quickly realized that many, in fact, hadn’t understood what the meeting was about. Despite the misunderstanding, he didn’t tell everyone to head back home, because he hoped that among these men and women—who were expecting to be hired by the French administration or to take part in a new campaign against sleeping sickness, or who thought Pouka was the manager in charge of a white boss’s household—he’d find some aspiring poets. Some had walked for miles to take their place in line, there in front of Mininga’s Bar.

  It goes without saying that most were illiterate.

  “It’s my fault,” Pouka told himself, slapping his forehead.

  Mininga wasn’t complaining. Her girls had been able to sell a few drinks, and it looked like this would turn into a busy day. As far as the proprietor was concerned, Pouka could have kept the poor devils waiting in the courtyard a little longer—they’d surely soon be falling over from thirst or hunger or whatever.

  “They’ll eat and drink,” she said. “First lunch … and then beer.”

  The Anglophone vendor who set up her stand in front of the bar each morning was thrilled. Never, never had she ever sold so much! After just two trips around, her trays were empty. Pouka, for his part, realized that he should have written his notice in French. That would have drawn a different clientele, more selective, less colorful. He just couldn’t imagine that in these peasants who had torn themselves from grimy bamboo beds that morning slept the poetic craftsmen he wanted to invent. He might as well teach poetry to Pygmies, he thought. Had anyone told him he ought to be a bit more generous, that the missionary school, which had made him who he was today, had begun its work with the same stock, he would have smiled. Ah! Let’s not forget that his time in the city had already planted in him the seeds of an elitism shared, it seems, by all who write verses. Let’s just put down to a bit of early morning frustration how he snapped when faced with the blank gaze of a peasant who really had no idea why he was even there. Then he had to send away a man with runny eyes (he hadn’t dared to ask the man if he had any idea what a poem was), and a woman with a case of chiggers so bad he didn’t even ask her the usual questions. He also needed to explain to all those he sent back to their daily prose why they needed to give up on writing metaphors.

  “Metaphors?” one man asked.

  His eyes expressed a wordless prayer: never had being deprived of metaphors made a man so unhappy.

  The man explained that he knew how to use a screwdriver, to put together an electric circuit, to take apart a car engine and put it back together again.

  “I’m an electrician, a mechanic.”

  He meant “day laborer.”

  “Anything you want, I can do it, boss.”

  He showed his tools: a screwdriver, a hammer, a few electrical components. He dug out of his pocket a letter of recommendation, red with dust and folded in quarters, and unfolded it carefully. It was signed by a white man.

  “By the commander,” he said. “By the commander.”

  Ah yes. If Pouka had better explained in his announcement just what he intended, there certainly would have been fewer people interested, but at least the poet would have had less of a headache. And yet, wasn’t this really what he wanted? Wasn’t this why he had come here and riled people up? Wasn’t he looking for … how should I put it … naïveté?

  When he ran into the priest again the next day, he couldn’t bring himself to say how things had gone.

  “What?”

  “The recruiting.”

  “Oh, you mean the auditions!”

  “I saw quite a lot of people gathered at your place yesterday,” Father Jean remarked, with a touch of jealousy.

  “Yes,” Pouka replied, “there were a lot of people.”

  He didn’t say that, of the hundred or so, only six seemed worth his trouble. Nor did he say that he had begun the first meeting under a shower of curses from those turned away. Did anyone ever take rejection well? The war had let loose along the ragged bush tracks all the manual laborers that the administration’s public work projects usually kept busy. The region was shrouded in a heavy cloak of want, with unemployment the new status quo. The people he sent back home after the audition predicted that the sky would fall on his head. And with good reason! Some stayed in the courtyard of the bar, staring like starving dogs waiting for him to make a move, and shying away as soon as he met their eyes. They probably understood that becoming a poet was an existential question, and didn’t want to see their chance slip away. Or maybe they were on the verge of suicide, chased from their own courtyards by howling children. Neither Mininga nor her girls were able to shoo them away from the bar, despite all the sarcastic comments and snickers such women could come up with.

  “Get out of here!” they said, then added an insult borrowed from German: “Schouain!”

  In the end, Pouka had to give in. He accepted one man, a bearded guy with the face of a priest, who had whispered to him that he was a Hilun, a seer, a man of the word, and had made him laugh with a ridiculous proverb: “Macabo is eaten cooked.” Pouka swore on his father’s name that he’d never seen the man before. And he was sure that the name the guy had given him was fake. For who in Edéa or anywhere in the region didn’t know the local family of Hilun? To win Pouka over, the man had intoned the hymn all Cameroonians know. Because he was worn out after a long day, that song was evocative enough to make Pouka’s heart forget the three years he had spent far away in the city. The song awoke in him happy memories of his childhood. Happy but for that phrase, “Kill him!” He was so swayed by the fraudulent singer’s performance that he realized that sometimes even a badly turned verse can comfort one’s soul. Yet he didn’t tell the singer with the limping but effective tongue that he’d accept him into the poetry circle right away, for there was still something about the man that turned his stomach, making it impossible to take him seriously. What was it?

  When he asked him to recite the epic tale of the Bassa people, a classic of the spoken word, the man couldn’t go beyond the introduction. And he recited even that with hesitation, searching for words, misplacing the stresses, and starting over when he saw people smirking. Still, these gaffes didn’t disqualify him. This was a meaningless test, really, for what Pouka wanted to teach in the village was French poetry, not the thousand verses of the Bassa masterpiece. The man was older than the five others Pouka had already accepted, but his face was still childlike. An unbelievable joy filled his eyes as he struggled with the words, and it soared up and shook the treetops when Pouka told him he could stay. The man jumped from side to side, thanking the heavens and dancing through the courtyard. From what Pouka could gather, he was a school dropout who had abandoned his wife and kids back home. The others Pouka had accepted were all for
mer students who missed being in a classroom. Some of them were older, yes, and more muscular than your average high schooler, but they were still hankering for rhymes.

  “That guy is crazy,” Mininga said. “So you’re taking the mentally ill in that tontine of yours?”

  She always called the little poetry circle a tontine. When everyone had gathered around for the first meeting, Pouka understood why schoolteachers in the city always asked their students to wear a uniform. Because there was no more extraordinary group than this one: a pandemonium of defrocked peasants, yes, a real conspiracy of thugs.

  “I guess I’m the crazy one,” he said out loud.

  Surprisingly, that thought gave him some comfort. That’s what he’d really been looking for when he came back to the village, wasn’t it? Just when the whole world was going crazy. At least, that’s what it seemed.

  10

  Let’s Talk About Poetry!

  For the world really had gone crazy. But not Edéa. Obviously not Edéa. Here those recruited by the word showed up at eight o’clock, setting down at the bar door the tools they would use out in the field or in the bush: a machete, an ax, a hoe, what else…? They wiped their hands on their pants, or their pagne, and sat down quietly. It was still dark, the sun wasn’t really up yet. For these country folk, this was not a punishment. Not for Pouka, either, who had been transformed by the missionary school but was still as punctual as a villager. At first they all sat there silently, their uncertainty palpable. In silence, each wondered just why he was there. Even if none of them had written a line, they were already caught up in the age-old tradition whereby each poet is the slave of the other, or else his mortal enemy.

  “Welcome to our little poetry circle,” Pouka said.

  He smiled, as if he had said “petit séminaire,” as the Catholic high school was called. He looked over his shoulder at Mininga’s girls where they stood planted, all so curious, especially the woman who sold grilled plantains, who was clearly hoping for another day full of sales. He wasted no time explaining to the chosen what a circle was, nor what this one, which he termed “little,” would do. Those are obvious things that poets only talk about among themselves. If one day a poet suddenly tells you that he doesn’t share Lautréamont’s opinion on rhyme, don’t ask who Lautréamont is, or what his opinion on rhyme was, or in what context or in what book he formulated his thoughts, or, even, why the person who spoke doesn’t have his own opinion about rhyme. Pouka took all of this for granted and forged ahead, relying on the givens shamelessly and without making any excuses. It was up to his interlocutors to get used to it. He was there because of his conviction—one acquired during his stint teaching Latin and music—that he needed to lift these people up. Wasn’t not explaining his references the best way to lift up his students? Ah, there he was lucky: in those days education was so esteemed in the region that you could cover up the biggest bluff imaginable in pedantic phraseology.

  Yet Pouka soon realized that for all the members of his poetry circle, however small it was, their meetings were just another version of the open-air school under the village tree. What had he expected? He was reliving the horrible experience of the art critic who spends his days correcting spelling and grammar mistakes. Yet this was what had to be done to bring about the birth of Cameroonian poetry! To contribute to the evolution of his village, as colonial wisdom would have it. When he asked everyone to introduce themselves, a deathly pall fell over the bar. It wasn’t like he had asked anyone to stand and recite a poem! Much less to read a poem of their own. He called on his first disciple, who spoke not in French, but in Bassa. That’s when Pouka realized what had escaped him the day before, when everyone had lined up with his best French on his lips, so eager at the thought of being chosen, in the same way that we put on our Sunday best to go to mass. Yes, the truth finally dawned on Pouka: the group was comprised of illiterates. Before he could teach them to write alexandrines, he’d have to teach them the alphabet!

  This would be no small task. The next day one member of the group didn’t show up. Pouka had only a vague recollection of his face, but could clearly recall his buckteeth, which made his smile something to remember. Five others were there. What made Pouka smile was that the young guy who looked like a pickpocket had come back. He had just hit puberty; his name was Bilong. The day before, he hesitated to introduce himself, but after being asked several times, he had finally taken the floor with a cocky swagger. He really enjoyed talking about himself, emphasizing his heroic deeds and the legendary story of his birth, stories that were news to everyone there. He looked intently at each face around him, inscribing his words on their silence. He seemed quite taken with himself, or rather lost in the ether of his own praise, which made everyone laugh. Obviously, he was the opposite of what Pouka expected from a villager, but he didn’t try to bring him down a notch, as he would have before, when he was teaching at the Catholic school. During the break Pouka listened to the Narcissus telling the rest of his tale to Mininga’s girls, who burst out laughing, too. They scurried away as soon as they saw the teacher-poet approaching, whispering among themselves as the young devil rejoined the group of future poets. He made no apologies.

  But you, at least, Pouka thought about Bilong, you’ll stick with it, right?

  Things moved quite quickly from there. On the morning of the third day, when Pouka arrived to set up, there at the bar was Bilong, ready to greet him. The young man did nothing to hide the fact that he’d spent the night there—he practically zipped up his pants in front of him. No doubt that’s when Pouka realized that with this little poetry circle he’d created in Edéa, the alphabet and grammar mistakes would be the least of his worries. But it was already too late to turn back.

  * * *

  His three friends said he was crazy, Um Nyobè first of all. When Pouka told them about the ups and downs of his poetry class, he focused on the comic side of things—it was the only way to save face. Caught up by a laugh he just couldn’t stifle, he described for them the blank face—“I mean, really, really blank”—of that peasant who didn’t even know how to write his own name, but whom he hoped to teach the rules of prosopopoeia. He wasn’t talking about Bilong, of course, but the guy with the beard. His friends didn’t even let him finish his story.

  They were all at Fritz’s house again—a repeat that spoiled the routine that had them meeting up at a different place each time since they’d come back to the village. Pouka wasn’t a good storyteller—that’s for sure. It wasn’t just that he’d drowned his own tale in his own burst of laughter; he had taken all the zing out of the story of his poetic adventure in Bassa land. It was Fritz—who else?—who called him out.

  “Prosopopoeia?” he exclaimed, unable to cover up his own ignorance as he tripped over that dirty French word. “What is that?”

  He leaned back in his seat, waiting for the explanation. The friends all stared at each other. “What does it matter?” the offended poet asked them. “What does it matter if I teach the peasants to drink Calvados or the basics of poetry?”

  He didn’t need to say anything else.

  “Calvados?”

  That’s when Um Nyobè delivered his diagnosis: Pouka was certifiably insane.

  As for Hebga, he just muttered, “You’re joking.” He was really stunned. And each of the friends, especially those who had never left Edéa, imagined the life of decadence … no, sheer depravity … that their childhood friend led in the city.

  “What do you think?”

  Hebga left the question hanging, but his eyes spelled out the remainder of his painful interrogation. He slunk back in the sofa and shook his head. He saw Pouka avoiding his gaze, and for the first time he felt clearly that his cousin was ashamed of him. Of all the guys in the group, he was the one who’d had nothing to do with the white men. He was the woodcutter. Never had he imagined that that word could be an insult. And yet, it was Pouka—Pouka!—who had made him feel its sting … To reclaim the attention he had lost, and erase the man
y misunderstandings caused by his tale, Pouka had to recount the enthusiastic response his announcement had received, the hundred people who had shown up the day before.

  “Pouka never would have believed it, either,” he added, puffing out his chest and looking left and right. “Ah yes, dear friends, Pouka would never have believed that the folks around here were so hungry for poetry.”

  “Poetry?”

  “Work, you mean work.”

  That was Fritz, chiming in as he opened a beer.

  “My dear friend,” Um Nyobè began, shaking his head, “don’t you think this country has already worked too hard since the white men arrived? You’ve heard of forced labor? Slavery?”

  His rough voice underscored the horror of each of the terms: “white men,” “forced labor,” “slavery.”

  “Unless you want to start colonization all over again…”

  And with that, they were back at it.

  “You know very well what I’m trying to do, Um,” Pouka began.

  Um Nyobè smiled. Pouka only called him that when he was irritated by him. He wanted to make clear how aggravated he was.

  “No, my brother,” Um Nyobè replied without losing his smile, “don’t tell me that you, too, are talking about the war effort.”

  He said “war effort” in French. He had the habit of smiling when he unleashed his harshest criticisms. Happily, his sarcasm was broken by the children who came running and shouting through the living room, bumping into chairs, almost knocking over the bottles. Immediately Fritz became the father he was, giving orders here, cajoling over there, scolding.

  “You shouldn’t play in the living room,” he shouted, and then, “Bikaï!”