When the Plums Are Ripe

by Patrice Nganang

  “I have some of Martha’s mintumbas,” Pouka said, disappearing into the back to get out the manioc cakes.

  To come all this way, only to eat his own wife’s cooking! Um Nyobè burst out laughing. “Don’t you think you’d better get married, huh?”

  Pouka sensed that his friend was on edge because of their unfinished conversation.

  “I just don’t understand,” Um Nyobè continued, “I don’t understand why you made Augustus go back to Edéa.”

  “He’ll wait for you there, ready to be your houseboy,” Pouka snapped.

  “Oh please,” Um Nyobè cut in, really irritated by that insinuation, “leave me and Edéa out of it. You know that my boss is giving me hell. Why are you always trying to change the topic?”

  A good question, because Um Nyobè and Pouka had never really talked through their differences one-on-one.

  “Pouka will never run away from an argument,” the maestro protested, sitting down at the table next to his friend. “It’s just, Um Nyobè, I’m not a speechifier like you.”

  He gently freed a mintumba from its wrapping of leaves, revealing its yellow heart; the room was filled with its juicy smell. He then cut it up into several even-sized pieces.

  “A speechifier?” Um Nyobè repeated, echoing his friend in French. Laughing, he took the piece Pouka offered him. “You should hear yourself speak. ‘Speechifier,’ really!”

  “How about politician? Is that any better?”

  “And you? What does that make you, then? And, Pouka, don’t just say you’re a poet, like always, because this time that’s not going to work, my dear friend. What kind of a person is it who opens his home up to a poor young man, struggling to make his way in life, and then throws him out? What do you call that?”

  “Ah! Because you were there to take care of him, is that what you say now?”

  “The lawyer, don’t you remember?”

  “Um Nyobè, that’s the problem with you. You believe in the justice of men. You want to establish a republic built on justice, you want to be the Saint Just of that republic. You always try to get to the root of things, but you know full well that that republic only recognizes one regime, the regime of terror.”

  “What do you mean, terror?”

  Um Nyobè said the word in French.

  A gust of wind drove the rain into the room. Pouka went to shut the door. The room fell into darkness.

  “Revolutionary terror, my dear friend. Robespierre. Stalin,” he said as he sat back down. “You read the newspapers. So don’t play stupid.”

  “When one forgets the physical reality of the victim, everything is lost,” Um Nyobè declared sententiously. “Even heaven disappears. A world without sacrifice has no heaven.”

  “So who is it who needs the victim?”

  “… And a world without heaven,” Um Nyobè went on, as if Pouka hadn’t said a thing, “that’s the definition of terror, my dear friend.”

  As shadows filled the room, their discussion continued on like that, moving between Bassa and French, with no rhyme or reason, and from philosophy to politics, without transition.

  Pouka got up to turn on the lights. Not surprised that the electricity had gone out—“It’s the rain”—he went nonchalantly to get a hurricane lamp from the back of the house. He returned and placed the lit lamp on the table. In the light’s glow, he saw Um Nyobè in a pensive pose, staring off in the distance. He looked, as he often did, like a man who battles with ideas: forehead lifted, eyes bright, a clenched fist held in front of his face, as if his palm held the fleeting butterfly of one final idea. Pouka hated that pose and quickly broke his friend out of it.

  “What terror?” he repeated. “French history gives us one example.” Standing in front of Um Nyobè, he waved his arms. “Would you prefer German history? Or that of the USSR? For the moment, you are in a weak position, no doubt. The victim, yes, that’s an easy out, but it doesn’t last. You can say that because we were colonized, we are victims. But what you’re forgetting is that the colonized subject is also defined by the system. Like any other victim. The victim is a parasite, despite himself. You can’t get around it, Um Nyobè. You have to start by accepting that.”

  “Accepting what?”

  “Accepting that France is in us.”

  “Ah! And France, then, just what does she accept? Nothing?” Um Nyobè rose and whispered in Pouka’s ear: “My brother, France is a hen that eats her own eggs.”

  A childlike smile lit up his face. He thought he’d scored a point.

  “And the eggs you’re talking about, that’s us, right?”

  “Do you think we’re plums?”

  “Um,” said Pouka, somewhat rattled, “you dream of tossing a few slippery plums under the feet of the French who are here in this country, don’t you?”

  Schadenfreude!

  “Don’t tell me you don’t think about it.”

  “And you, why don’t you tell me what you think?” Um Nyobè retorted. “You hide behind poetry, but never say what you really think. Don’t tell me that it’s because of the French language, because your father, and you know what a thinker he is, he has only ever spoken Bassa. So, in your opinion, Pouka, why doesn’t France accept us? Look at what she’s doing here! France thinks she can come and take away our brothers, just like that, without taking any responsibility, and turn them into tirailleurs; that she can ignore the laws she wrote herself—don’t you remember? Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity—and break the balls of whomever she wants? That’s why she’s at war, isn’t it? To defend her values? So why doesn’t she respect those universal values here, too? Why does she act like such a savage in her own backyard?”

  The rain was coming down so hard the windows were rattling. The roof was shaking with exceptional violence. Um Nyobè had taken the precaution of warning his wife beforehand: he had something serious to settle, but of course he hadn’t given her all the details. He’d find the time to tell her the whole story later, he told himself. The lawyer recommended by Marc had shown him new sides to Augustus’s story, new chapters, new perspectives. He was a union supporter, French—Gaston Donnat was his name—a pacifist who had, like others, chosen life in the colonies to avoid war. Um Nyobè hadn’t yet broached the topic with Pouka, but he was realizing that the war opened up a new field of possibilities for them. He had started to look more closely at the colonists, noting that, especially in these somber times, there were some rabble-rousers hidden among them. Yet Pouka had already spoken to him about Delarue with a certain disdain, as if patting himself on the back because the colonial administration had sent him away.

  “Do you know what your problem is?” Um Nyobè asked.

  “You’ll tell me.”

  “Drop the sarcasm, Pouka. Your problem is that you don’t know which side you’re on.”

  “I don’t think there are sides here, Um Nyobè; the situation is really quite clear. You are talking about liberty, right? Equality, and just like that, you think that it’s France that has best expressed those ideals.”

  “Your inability to imagine yourself without France is surprising. What would Mr. Pouka be without France?”

  “Um,” Pouka replied, visibly shocked by the Mr. Pouka, “you can get married more than once, but none of us will ever be a virgin again.”

  Um Nyobè picked up a piece of mintumba and chewed it slowly.

  “Once colonized,” Pouka went on, “there’s no way to rid yourself of the West. That’s our dilemma. Simply put, the West has occupied our future. As a result, it becomes our heaven. Yet, of all Western countries, France is the one that still represents ideals that matter. You, my friend, are just keeping the illusion going. You and I, we work for France. I won’t say that we’re assimilated, but almost. We are writers. But me, I’m a realist. A poet of reality, if you will. I see the world as it is and sing of it. That’s what I do, nothing more. It’s what I’ve always done.

  “A poet of reality?” Um Nyobè echoed. His intonation transformed the desc
riptor into an insult! “Are you so naïve, my brother? Your reality there, isn’t it reinvented each day? That de Gaulle who is always there, what do you think he is doing with the soldiers he recruits among us? Don’t you see that he’s reinventing reality in Paris? Just consider France. Doesn’t she offer up two versions of her reality? On the one hand, a German version, on the other, I don’t know, maybe French? Or English? Doesn’t she represent what we ourselves are: on the one hand, a former German colony, and on the other, a joint French and English mandate? How many realities do we Cameroonians add up to in the end? Just who are we in reality?”

  “There,” Pouka interrupted, “you sound just like Fritz talking.”

  “Oh, and about Fritz…”

  “Have you heard from him?”

  The two friends fell silent. Um Nyobè suddenly went and opened the door, staring out into the city’s dusk.

  Outside, it had stopped raining.

  Only later did Pouka understand that, on that day, he had forced his friend to reveal himself as the leader he would become for us all.

  For Cameroon.

  Ruben Um Nyobè.

  THE DOMESTIC FRONT HAS ITS OWN CALENDAR, AND THEREFORE ITS OWN STORIES, 1943

  The Poet of Reality

  History is our only witness. But who is history’s witness? What’s more important is being its agent. Our children and grandchildren will judge our turpitude. Stop being indifferent, that’s already one in the win column. Our conscience is as vast as the world, and we know what we are capable of. We are wise to allow those who are turning the world into a fiery pit to dance a little longer on the edge of the volcano they have created, for patience is the virtue of the blessed. We are blessed. Those are the thoughts that ran through Pouka’s mind: “I am a poet of reality.” He proclaimed it proudly; by observing things, he said, he could account for the myriad probabilities of their actualization. That’s what made him the maestro. He was his father’s son, no doubt, M’bangue the geomancer, who had taught him the rules for reading the world and predicting the future. He knew that alexandrine verse is the product of combinations similar to those which, when drawn in the sand, allowed M’bangue to foresee so much without being surprised. That, he believed, was what Um Nyobè didn’t understand, even if his father was a geomancer as well. Pouka knew that divination elaborates every symbol in its system, that each of the signs is a piece in the pandemonium of the future, which is composed of precisely 256 verses. Those, multiplied by the four initial symbols, allow for 65,536 possible verses. Go ask Um Nyobè, or his philosophical mentor Fritz, if in their calculations of Cameroon’s future they were as mathematically precise as M’bangue when he predicted Hitler’s suicide in 1940, and our country’s independence in 1942, or in the alexandrines of Pouka’s collection Hitler; or, the Hydra’s Fall!

  For many Cameroonians, Fritz is a legend, as is Um Nyobè, for that matter—may the spirits protect them both! Yet, with or without geomancy, the maestro was surprised to learn of Fritz and Ngo Bikaï’s divorce, even if he wasn’t surprised by the way their story played out.

  When he arrived in Douala, Fritz first stayed with his brother. He, who’d grown accustomed to a certain opulence, had to adapt to the life of his brother (Fritz had never really respected his brother who worked for the railroad, and who more or less represented for him all the ill born of misguided dreams). Yet there is none hungrier than the man who has once eaten his fill. Fritz’s stay in Douala was soon upended when the train workers rose up in September 1945, pounding on their employers’ doors to ask for better wages. They went so far as to organize a widespread strike, the first in Cameroonian history. Fritz was on the front lines when a colonist’s bullet hit his left eye. His assassins were spared because, so argued their defense, they had only responded to the provocation of “rioters” brandishing banners where Cameroon was spelled German-style, with a K, and in bright red, or that proclaimed CAMEROON IS NO ONE’S COLONY! Fritz, of course, was one of those carrying the banners. He fell along with dozens of other strikers whose lives were all cut short. The Free French administration filed the case away in the ever-thicker dossier it kept on what was left of the pro-German supporters—those who didn’t want to accept defeat—and then promptly forgot about it.

  Ngo Bikaï, for her part, also garnered some attention: one day, she asked the women to come out of their kitchens and bang on their pots and pans at the stroke of noon. They did this for a full month to let Free France know the costs of the war effort she was forcing everyone to bear. The tirailleurs refused to go into homes to put a stop to the loud spectacle. Did the daily concert of empty pots, there in the deepest reaches of the forest, have any effect on Paris? Certainly not. Did de Gaulle hear the din they made? Not likely. Still, all of Edéa burst out chattering as never before when the next order came down: a sexual boycott. The Mother of the Market asked the women to abstain for a week, just one week, to give their men what they wanted only if they committed to the real battle. There again, Free France could do nothing about it. The sex strike got everyone talking. Some men thought it was a joke: in their minds, Ngo Bikaï wanted to pull all the other women into her own situation because she was frustrated. Others talked about turning to the wolowolos or doing things together that women don’t know about. The women threatened to extend the strike for another week, maybe a whole month. Some threatened to strip themselves bare in public, to cast a curse by showing their bare bottoms in the street. Did they go that far? You tell me! It remains that no one was unaffected by this. The bars spread news of the sex strike, and the circuits made sure it went everywhere. That’s how the news reached Yaoundé and its poor neighborhoods in particular. In Briqueterie, notably, it exploded like a pack of matches in a powder keg. Maybe even Martha got caught up in the frenzy that swept through the women in the capital? Regardless, Um Nyobè soon got the transfer he wanted to Edéa. A few months later he was joined by Ouandié, who had finally finished his studies and was teaching somewhere in the country. Was it because Ngo Bikaï’s operation relied on what one might call a tactical deployment of intimacy that it’s not mentioned in any of the history books? Yet it was the start of the Cameroonian Revolution, the one that has not yet borne fruit.

  A Few Words of Thanks and About My Sources

  Nothing grows all by itself. The composition of a book has a story all its own. This novel never could have been written without the existence of a certain number of books and of people—whose fates and dates have been altered. Let me thank them here and ask that those whose lives and words have been changed forgive me. I am thinking, first of all, of the books Louis Marie Pouka: Pionnier de la poésie camerounaise, by Patrice Kayo; and Félix Éboué: Grand commis et loyal serviteur, 1884–1944, by René Maran, one passage of which I have reproduced here. Other significant works include Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs Sénégalais in French West Africa, 1857–1960, by Myron Echenberg; the book of photography Returning Memories: Pier Luigi Remaggi in Axum, 1935–36, edited by Paolo Bertella Farnetti; and the analysis of geomancy in African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design, by Ron Eglash. I will never forget the web pages that also inspired me, nor, of course, the Lerewa Nuu Nguet, the Sultan Njoya’s Book of Love, which was completed on June 5, 1921, in Foumban, one of the first African ars erotica that we know.

  * * *

  My thanks, too, to Laure Pécher—the one and only!—to Pierre Astier, Konrad Tuchscherer, and Kassahun Checole, who gave me access to documentary archives that allowed me to build my historical vision of Cameroon’s present, and also to the brave women of Togo who inspired the novel’s conclusion. May Joseph Fumtim find here the expression of my eternal gratitude to him and to Éditions Ifrikya, which published Patrice Kayo’s book. It helped me understand what it meant in French colonial Africa to be a writer, a civil servant, and, most of all, part of that class of writers in Yaoundé who had the privilege of seeing the most significant episodes of world history play out there in their own courtyards—because they
were aware of it and, especially, because they had the tools to make sense of it. These are the writers: Rémy Gilbert Medou Mvomo; Pierre Eloundou; Ladislas Eloundou; Alima Ouandié; Tchoungui-Ngono; Thomas Ngandjon, aka Job Nganthojeff, who on January 23, 1960, in the neighborhood of Nlongkak, formed a little poetry circle, led by Louis-Marie Pouka and René Philombe, and made Yaoundé into the world literary capital that it is our duty—we the Cameroonian writers of today—to say is still being crushed by the tyranny established in our city in 1940.

  Princeton, 2010–2012

  Translator’s Note

  When the Plums Are Ripe brings alive the buried stories of Cameroon’s participation in World War II, but it is also, perhaps primarily, a novel about language: how the places of contact and friction between languages complicate—at times enriching, at others impeding—communication. From Dog Days to Empreintes de crabe, via elobi, La Chanson du joggeur, and Mount Pleasant, Patrice Nganang’s writing consistently attends to the interplay of speech and script; finding ways to suggest what language obscures was a primary challenge of this project. I hope I have done justice to the many voices, to the many registers of speech, writing, and extra-verbal communication in this novel, and I apologize for any places where my translation stammers.

  This translation came to fruition thanks to the support of many people and institutions. First, my thanks to Patrice, who again entrusted his novel to me, and to Pierre Astier, his agent, who arranged for Farrar, Straus and Giroux to publish it. My thanks, too, to the editorial team at FSG, notably Laird Gallagher, for their support and guidance. My work benefited from the financial support I received from the National Endowment for the Arts, which awarded me a Translation Grant in 2017; the French Voices program of the French Cultural Services, which supports the publication of translations in the United States; and the New College Faculty Development Fund. My colleagues at New College provided support at critical junctures; a special merci to Jocelyn Van Tuyl, for her advice about World War II terminology, and to Elzie McCord, for his help with mathematical formulas. To my friends and siblings and mother, who have always been there when I needed you most: words are not enough, so I’m sending hugs. I am, as always, especially grateful for the voices of my children, Jacob, Miriam, and Ben, who help me to hear the present.