By Bate Besong, Ph.D
Forthcoming: Inter’Actuel, 2006 (ed) Professor Robert Fotsing Mangoua, Universite de Dschang, Cameroon.
Abstract
Anglophone Cameroon poetry, just as its dramaturgy and prose fiction counterparts, is a product of two distinct soci-aesthetic forces: the received traditionalist aesthetic practices and the aesthetics overdetermined by the nuances of Re-unification. The research seeks to correctly apprehend the artistic focus and ideological primogeniture of Anglophone exile poetry from an ideo-aesthetic perspective since, in the main, a study of Simon Mol (2002, 2004) and Kangsen Feka Wakai (2006)cannot be separated from the socio-historical,socio-political and socio-cultural contexts of “horizontal colonialism” [Doh 1993:]
Poetry then is the way in which the mythmaker relates to the political and economic conditions of his society as a means of communicating shared experiences. Modern African Literature is responsive to the laws of dialectics and is , in the long run, dependent on the very social formation of socio-economic system that engenders it.(Amuta,1988). Although Mol and Wakai’s individual contribution confirm the assertion that new historical phases and epochs generate impetus from where “revolutionary poetry finds substantial ideo-aesthetics basis of expression” [Udenta, 2001], their poetry however, is not without pitfalls.
Feka Wakai’s effusive sentimentality and excessive bohemianism could, on a careful reading, be explained away as the result of his relative youth, he can however not escape censure for his modernist abstractions, and fragmentation; his angst-filled, petty-elitist Texan-induced ideological worldview. Mol’s quasi-mystical exploration of Bakweri Ifasa Moto ontology and cosmological system, his bogus romanticism of Polish colouration, which has sometimes led to his ahistorical apprehension of the post-Re-unification social dynamics and process of revolutionary transformation, often attenuates his image imperatives and sources of signification, thereby depriving his pantheon of aesthetic edification and intensity.
On the whole, a comparative study of Mol and Wakai’s exile verse reveals a homology of vision, similar political sentiments, tinged, with the indomitable resilience of the poet driven from a contested homeland into exile. The ability to harness the problematic dialectic is what gives post-Re-unification anglophone Cameroon exile poetry its vitality, its illuminating cogency, and social relevance.(See Fandio on Besong, 2004).
BB's foray once more into the critical enterprise of Cameroon Anglophone literature remains a lofty and laudable orientation calling for our literati to start reconsidering the crucial interrogations whipped up by Fonlonian ABBIA's souciance over the paucity of Cameroon Anglophone literature, that was two decades back. The capital pertinence of identity vector and voice an instrument of negotiating space and power has never been more urgent than now that the ANGLOPHONE PROBLEM/QUESTION is crashing into mainstream Cameroon power debate! A body of cogent,constructive,dynamic,eclectic,transversal,unbiased and intellectually honest body of literary criticism that is both locally consumable and rewarding; while at same time is qualitatively and influentially exportable (marketing our common causes). Until this orientation of combining 50/50 the two CRs (my coinage)that is CReativity and CRiticism our productions will forever bear the degrading stamps of mediocrity and self-encomium!A compassless literature of ego masturbation and massage!
Posted by: wirndzerem gideon barfee | March 01, 2007 at 01:20 PM