When the Plums Are Ripe

by Patrice Nganang

  It was an exchange of opinions, a brainstorming session, like our Sita used to organize regularly in her courtyard. Nothing had been decided, Ngo Bikaï just said she would think about it. But all too quickly, word of this deferred conversation had reached the military authorities, and they had sent the tirailleurs to sort it out straightaway.

  “Ah,” she said, “my women aren’t doing anything.”

  What Ngo Bikaï hoped, at any rate, was that her women were working to turn Edéa into a sanctuary of morality, in line with her own Catholic faith, but many of them were still attached to “traditional practices,” as she liked to say with a smile. “Our mamas, especially.”

  Still, she recognized that wasn’t really the case. For it was the older women who were busily organizing the tontine that served as their community health insurance! Yet the Mother of the Market’s sense of humor didn’t blind her to the fact that something was clearly wrong if a simple gathering of women led to a group of tirailleurs storming into her courtyard. She said nothing about that, however, and just tried to reassure the three men. Besides, from the backyard her kids’ voices were clamoring for her attention. She started to get anxious and her eyes clouded over with concern. She was caught between her worries—which one of the women was it who had reported what had been said in her living room to the military authorities?—and her responsibilities as a mother who could only imagine what antics her children had gotten up to during this unexpected and long-wished-for moment: a celebration of their own Liberation.

  “I need to be going,” she said, turning back toward the house.

  Was it because of the tone of her voice? The voice of an irritated mother; the voice of the Mother of the Market asserting her authority; the voice of a wealthy woman there in the misery of Edéa; the voice of a woman brazen enough to live decently in times of war; the preemptory voice of a woman who sees her former employee as a perpetual slave; the haughty voice of domination? Ngo Bikaï always wondered just what she had done wrong.

  “Woman, stay right there,” the leader of the tirailleurs ordered.

  His words resonated with an age-old hatred lodged deep in his belly.

  “Don’t you hear the kids in back?” Ngo Bikaï began, trying to find the tone with which she had first greeted them.

  Did the man even have ears? The children’s voices filled the backyard, and any mother—yes, any mother on earth—would have rushed out to check on whatever they’d gotten into, especially since the children she’d left to their own devices were still quite young.

  “Take off your panties.”

  At first Ngo Bikaï thought she had misheard, because he said it in French. But an order like that, even when given in the language of demons, everyone understands. And what happened next, there in the living room of that home filled with love, has no need to be translated, because her cries, her deep cries, took over her whole body. Later, when she tries to find the words to explain to her husband—who for his part wished he understood no language that had words to express the cry she told him about—when she searches for the words to describe the tirailleur she had recognized, but whose name escaped her, good Lord, she will remember the one moment when she really fell apart, when the back door of the house suddenly opened and she saw her small three-year-old come in the living room crying, “Mama!”

  “Go back outside!” she shouted. “Back outside!”

  The child didn’t move.

  “Back outside,” the tirailleur ordered.

  That’s when her husband fell apart. And she did, too. At that point of the story, she would always fall apart, for Ngo Bikaï will never know for sure if it was her child’s eyes or the member of the tirailleur she recognized but couldn’t name, that sent her soul spinning out of control. He was a neighbor—why couldn’t she remember his name? She’d wander through the neighborhood, looking for his house, but each time she knocked on a door, the person who answered knew nothing about him. No one could say who he was, that nameless man, that animal she couldn’t describe without her eyes burning in anger, in pain, in suffering, no—in a rage that strangled her and kept her from speaking, from telling all the sordid details of just what he had done to her. She will go to the military camp and talk about the attack, but there’s the rub, a contingent of tirailleurs had just left for Yaoundé. “And then what?” the white commander asked. “The Free French soldiers are not brutes; are you sure, madam, that it wasn’t thieves? For, you see, we are not the colonial police, oh no! You say they were wearing new shoes, is that it? And what did you say their names were?”

  To think that this happened the very day that Fritz came back from his trip to Douala. Ngo Bikaï was convinced that the three tirailleurs knew her husband wasn’t home, and that her little brother Bilong wasn’t there, either, because, like them, he was a tirailleur.

  “It could only be someone from the neighborhood,” she repeated.

  Fritz gazed at her in silence.

  13

  The Poignant Hymn of the False Hilun

  At that very moment, in far-off Tibesti—although the Mother of the Market couldn’t know this—a second drama that involved her was playing out. You’ll agree with me that it was a good thing, in the end, that Ngo Bikaï wasn’t aware of it. Yes, each place has more than enough suffering of its own. It was Philothée who announced Bilong’s death. His three companions had taken turns watching over him in the clinic. They intentionally ignored military orders and organized shifts so that the boy was never alone. They were more diligent than they had ever been before. Each had his own way of helping the wounded soldier, but they all agreed that there was one prayer that made them clench their fists during the day and grind their teeth at night. Aloga was shaken. Of the five tirailleurs selected for the mission, only Bilong had come back alive from the battlefield, while of the white men who had taken part in the battle, only Lieutenant Colonel d’Ornano had died. Aloga assumed that most of those who died in war were black—contradict him if you will. Colonel Leclerc had made a big announcement about the victory of Free France over the fascists, but the false Hilun just couldn’t get over the racist reality of it all. And that’s what determined what he said in his repeated prayers to the Bassa ancestor, whom he asked to save “our victory.”

  While Philothée was on guard, Bilong opened his eyes wide, took a deep breath, and then froze, as if he were struggling to find some bit of strength left in his body, his mouth open on a silent scream, a scream he never released. Was it the ever-stammering Philothée who screamed in his stead?

  “Bi … Bi…”

  “What?”

  “… Ng…”

  “What?”

  “… Ng…”

  “What?”

  “Ah!”

  When the false Hilun finally understood what his eyes refused to believe, he started to sing. He wanted Charles—not Bilong, although that was one of his many names—to dribble past death as he had done in that battle he’d heard about. Because, he asked, just what is this war that refuses to let a hero die gloriously on the battlefield, only to lay him out on a clinic cot? What kind of a death is that, Aloga asked in his song, and Hebga replied as the Bassa chorus would have—for he knew that song too—asking, what kind of a death is it that tears a child from life and leaves the adults to carry on with their wretched existence? What kind of life, Aloga asked in his song, remains for the living, now that he who in his heart had wanted nothing but love had been torn from it? What kind of a death is this, Hebga asked, that takes a child, a son, from his mother and upends his whole life? What kind of a life is this, all the Bassa tirailleurs asked, that tears them from the forest and throws them away in the desert? Just what kind of death will they find so far from home?

  Such were the questions Aloga asked in his song, his verses echoing off the tents in the camp at Faya-Largeau, filtering in through the windows of men who had given up everything for the liberation of a France that they didn’t even know, men who had abandoned their lovers, wives, mother
s, and sisters, leaving them at the mercy of vultures, only to lose their own lives as they followed paths they had never even imagined. His verses lodged deep within these men frozen by fear, who pissed in their pants and ejaculated in the depths of the dunes as sandstorms spun all around, and who trembled as they thought of the women they’d left back home, of the women they hoped to find in paradise. His poignant verses were lost along the endless trail of these hundreds, no, thousands of men—what am I saying, there were forty thousand of them—who had suddenly left the courtyards of their family homes to answer the call of a black man from the Caribbean, Félix Éboué, and had become something they’d never thought they would: cannon fodder. Aloga’s song retraced the path of these men traveling to their deaths, from the dunes to the steppes, from the steppes to the forest, and maybe even brought some comfort to Nguet, that beauty whose name was on Bilong’s lips at the moment of his death, or to his ever-silent mother, or that woman, that strong woman Ngo Bikaï, the formidable Mother of the Market of Edéa, who, in the silence of the home she shared with her partner, had been raped.

  Aloga was singing the man who’d died too soon.

  14

  History’s Alexandrines

  Pouka was a maestro of alexandrine verses. It wasn’t just the type of poetry he wrote, no, he believed that its pattern of syllables, two times six, was the very essence of poetry—which for him came down to mathematics. His thoughts on the perfect verse should not, however, be set apart from his ideal of perfection. And his thoughts on poetry in general are, of course, an extension of his political cogitations. For him, poetry was the pedestal of life itself, its placenta, if you will. It was an irrefutable formal exploration of the phenomenological principles expressed so prosaically in daily life. The poem was meant to be spoken, recited, unlike those debates where opinions emerged from the disorganized, even chaotic, utterances of multiple voices. Yet the recitation of a poem—he might even say the poem’s dictation, for let’s not forget he had read the Latin classics—the dictation of a poem, then, had meaning only insofar as it was the instantaneous revelation of conclusions best expressed in alexandrines.

  He had at one point established a relationship between poetry and the rifles distributed to the recruits—although since 1915, people in Cameroon had been making do with those muskets used for funerals, and that didn’t require a permit from the administration—because what mattered to him was the principle. This principle was as transparent as a mathematical equation predicting the shape of the country’s future, and therefore it had the poetic flow of an alexandrine. Because you had to admit that there was no precedent for arming the Cameroonian populace. The poet wasn’t thinking just about rifles. He was also thinking about the coupe-coupe, the machetes the Free French had distributed. In short, he thought about weaponry: all the instruments of death that were for him numbers, and for Free France a means to an end. Numbers that figured on de Gaulle’s vast chessboard—he was convinced of it—like points marked out on a writer’s blank page to form words and poems. Like poems, the Gaullist numbers could be used to calculate the limitless combinations of possibilities—among which there was most certainly one that reflected the interests of the Cameroonian people.

  Pouka was used to thinking with words, rather than concepts. That’s why the poem was the perfect place for him to work out his ideas, and French was his language. You see, for him, poetry refused contradictions—they were really the stuff of politics. Rhetoric was for the former what the Socratic method was for the latter, even if each fed off the other, politics sometimes making use of rhetoric—using it to fluster its adversary and not, as does a poet or a Cameroonian soldier fighting for Free France, to celebrate truth. Pouka remembered Um Nyobè and his friends, and a smile spread across his face. What they didn’t really get, he told himself, were history’s alexandrines, in short, the mathematics of politics. How so? Didn’t the masters of rhetoric—take M’bangue, for example—didn’t they compose alexandrines? For what else are proverbs? And geomancy—wasn’t it based on the permutation of signs, like the writing of verse? Pouka called himself a maestro, but that was just the poetic equivalent of his father the seer; as far as he was concerned, versification, like geomancy, was no more than the manipulation of signs.

  As these thoughts ran through his mind, he returned to the poem he was writing, a long poem with twenty-four stanzas, dedicated to those who had died at Murzuk, the title of which, “The Graveyard by the Desert,” was a nod to his own old maestro, Valéry. He started counting syllables again and realized with horror that the third verse of his seventeenth stanza had one too many.

  “Shit!” he said.

  He started again, carefully placing a finger on each syllable to avoid making any mistakes and counting out loud.

  “One two three four five six, pause, one two three four five six.”

  News of the French victory had spread through Yaoundé like a firecracker. Radio Cameroon, the station Leclerc had set up before his departure, went on about it at length. That one story had made up its entire broadcast for more than a week. Between announcements calling on men to “enlist, to reenlist in the colonial forces,” each introduced with the same little melody, the station had analyzed the story, taking it apart bit by bit, amplifying and elaborating on it, at times slowing down and at others racing through, forward and back, and—this is a historic first—discussing it in native languages, in Ewondo, Bulu, Eton, and Bassa, citing the analyses of English newspapers and promising to give later those from the American press, and maybe even more. In short, everyone was talking about it in their offices; the city was puffed up with pride because it had lent its dust to Leclerc’s shoes, and Ongola Palace its offices to his grandeur. Pouka himself was caught up in the fevered excitement. He showed his poem to his new boss, who suggested it be retitled “Poem in Honor of the Heroes of Murzuk.” It seems that when this poem was read—or, as Pouka said, dictated—on the radio, many listeners were moved. Especially since it was read between two military marches, and followed by the famous communiqué on the need for recruits. Alas, in those years Radio Cameroon wasn’t working for posterity, but for propaganda. No copies of Pouka’s poem survived, but obviously that’s not the end of this story.

  15

  News from Edéa

  Reading a poem on Radio Cameroon holds many surprises, as Pouka would learn all too soon. The story of this particular reading lived on for quite some time in Yaoundé’s poor neighborhoods. Two days after the broadcast, a midday message came over the radio summoning him to appear “as soon as possible” at the station’s security post “for a matter of personal concern.” He hurried there right away, and everyone in Madagascar who knew him and had heard the message urged him along, as they should.

  “Boss,” said a pushcart man, “they’re looking for you on the radio.”

  And a day laborer, “Chief, the radio’s calling you.”

  “Tara,” said a tense voice, “my friend, what did you do to make the French look for you?”

  Others simply said, “The radio is looking for you, mola.”

  “Dearie, the radio, did you hear?”

  The whole neighborhood was set into motion, and for what? There in front of the gate of the radio station were Augustus and Xavier, two members of the little poetry circle he had set up in Edéa, sitting on their travel bags. It was soon apparent that they were hard up, and the poet learned that they also needed a place to stay for the night, maybe longer. Pouka wasn’t really surprised; several times cousins and uncles of his had appeared at his door, sometimes arriving late at night, and once even planning to stay for three months. Right then, he was mostly just flattered to hear these two fellows call him “maestro.”

  “Maestro,” said Augustus, giving him a bag full of plums, plums from the village, “we are so happy to see you, maestro!”

  “What luck, maestro.”

  “Thank you, maestro.”

  “You found plums in this season?”

  �
�Aaaah, maestro,” Augustus cut in. Taking advantage of the warm feelings conjured by their unannounced arrival, he continued in French, using the familiar tu: “You have forgotten!”

  The overly familiar form of address did not pass unnoticed by Pouka, but he blamed it on the peasant’s lack of education.

  “It’s plum season all year long in Edéa!”

  The promise of a feast of plums softened his heart, but as they walked away together, Pouka couldn’t keep from asking for news from Edéa.

  “Nothing new, really,” said Xavier, “just France.”

  “France?”

  The poet was stunned. The two explained that they had decided to make their way to Yaoundé without becoming tirailleurs.

  “We’ve come to find ourselves.”

  “Instead of killing people.”

  That wasn’t what Pouka had expected to hear. Clearly, he wasn’t naïve about what was required of tirailleurs—he had dedicated two poems to them already, hadn’t he? But the expression “killing people”—the mission for which they had in fact been recruited by Free France—had never actually been thrown in his face like that.

  “And,” he began, “so just what is it you’ve come to Yaoundé to find?”

  Augustus was the one to answer.

  “Our lives.”

  Xavier nodded.

  “I see. In the end, you’re counting on Maestro Pouka to help you find your way in life here in the capital, is that right?”

  Pouka spoke politely, squelching the sarcasm bubbling up on his lips. He was already beginning to regret having accepted the plums they’d given him, and even more so that he had been flattered when Augustus and Xavier called him “maestro.” That honorific title had serious consequences. For, although Augustus and Xavier were still standing in the street, there was no way out of having them be his guests, unless Pouka was willing to accept the shame of “leaving his brothers outside.” But as I was saying, his two guests really didn’t give a shit about poetry. You could tell from the hungry way they looked at any- and everything that could be eaten in the city; saliva must have been washing down their throats. But the bean fritters that Pouka bought for them tasted too much like those they’d eat at Mininga’s in Edéa, and it only took a few minutes for Pouka to read in their grateful eyes that they would really have preferred to spend a few minutes in the café-bar La Baguette de Paris.