By Bate Besong
Alobwed' Epie. The Death Certificate. Yaounde: Editions CLE, 2004. 308p [ISBN 9956090050]
Writing is very much a political activity. Any kind of writing, any novel, especially in our situation, becomes very much a political action. And I do not buy the idea that there is a separation between politics, public life, public themes, public concerns, and an individual’s artistic concern. I do not see the difference.
CHINUA ACHEBE (Africa Notes, September/October 2005)
The Death Certificate discards the universal for the immediate and local and perceives Cameroonians as mainly responsible for their problems. There are suggestions everywhere of avarice, megalomania, brutality, squalor, kleptomania and necrophilia. The economic situation is drearily familiar.
For, Alobwed’ Epie’s novel transcribes the Fanonian hypotheses that when you examine at close quarters the continuous rot, it is evident that what parcels out the Cameroonian irrational is to begin with the fact of belonging or not belonging to a given province, a given colonial language.
In the postcolonial necropolis therefore economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are powerful and rich because you come from the “First and Second Province,” you are from “The First and Second Province” because you are powerful and rich.
Besides, you are a prankster, gangster and psychotic tyrant.
In the guise of a messiah
The setting of Alobwed’ Epie’s novel is a reflection of the audience consciousness, and a new radicalism in Cameroon literature which sees the nation as the melting pot of the ideological, or artistic imprimatur.
The particularized setting has the advantage of fictional intensity and directness.
Characters define themselves by the way they handle conflict. An obvious test of fiction then is that the motives and actions of the characters are rendered coherent.
The Death Certificate looks back past tradition of the bourgeois novel thereby scrapping off many layers of formality and convention in order to recover the functional roots of African Literature as a conserver of populist culture.
The total life-force of Ngomboku, Kupe Mwanengouba mythic landscape is encoded, into Alobwed’ Epie’s art; with tremendous enthusiasm, resourcefulness and ingenuity. The novel of the past was no longer relevant to the problems of the present and thus new forms have been kilned to match the challenges and aspirations unique to a setting which has been degraded by kleptocratic rule and is beholden to multinational petroleum companies to such an extent that it is no longer a government at all in the conventional sense.
This is fiction then that indirectly inveighs against the Aristotelian artists with their sympathy for the nobility and their seeming conspiracy in frustrating the interest of the Cameroonian masses.
The function of the novelist is therefore that of the exorcist and at times he is one and the same person.
The Death Certificate is replete with irony an effective device that the author uses for promoting moral judgment and manipulating point of view. The novelist achieves verisimilitude by keeping his eyes firmly on the details. References, symbolism, historical allusion, images and mnemonic devices are reciprocally specific and relevant. It is salutary for an African novelist to draw his fictional material from the African folk repertory. Besides, the political theme is so obtrusive.
The Death Certificate is new fiction with old ideas, values, and tastes changing to new ones. The shift in fictional material and subject matter has a corresponding stylistic turn.
Alobwed’Epie’s novelistic skill lies in his versatility. His fictional power rests on sarcasm, insult, allusion, exaggerated use of event, real or fictional and a sharp wit.
The Cameroonian Irrational
The experience of Cameroonians ruling themselves is unpleasant and disappointing. Re-Unification and New Deal governance has been rife with forms of corruption and political factionalization, which have not allowed for the anticipated economic growth at the expiration of the Ahmadou Ahidjo-led first republic.
Alobwed’ Epie’s The Death Certificate opens up innovative ways of analyzing tribal oligarchies in a post colony since it also confirms Arnoldian scholarship that harsh coercion ‘work in tandem with a consent that was part voluntary, part contrived’ [Arnold 1994:133].
The socio-economic and political orientation of the novel indirectly expresses the public mistrust of and disaffection with political abstractions and diversionary measures of the elites of the fictional Ewawa nation-state.
There may be an element of hyperbole or exaggeration here, but we do know that it is for reasons such as these that the Cameroonian New Deal Second Republic has twice been the target of Transparency International as the most corrupt regime in contemporary times.
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