Bate Besong: Is his Poetry Too Difficult for Cameroonians?

By Shadrach A. Ambanasom

African Literature Association (ALA) Bulletin. Vol. 28(3/4), Summer/Fall 2000

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Bate Besong is the most paradoxical Anglophone Cameroonian writer today in the sense that his work attracts and repels readers at one and the same time. While his poetry is relatively opaque, he nevertheless remains popular, and while his themes entice readers, his style alienates them. Even some dons are ill at ease with his jazzy, abrasive style. Yet among university students there is no literature lecturer more popular than Bate Besong, an erudite iconoclast with an exceptional range of vocabulary power. 

The presence at any public lecture of this passionate social critic and bête noire of the ruling class is a crowd-puller.  This curious love-hate attitude towards Bate Besong by the Cameroonian public can be explained only in terms of the fact that, somehow, controversial figures remain very interesting people indeed.

According to Bate Besong (1993:18) the Cameroonian creative writer’s art should ‘become a fighting literature, he can write works which are artistically profound and politically correct: he can write works of indictment and works that show how his world is and could be.’  This quoted expression is an apt description of the distinctive character of most of Bate Besong’s own poetry, or imaginative writing in general, for that matter; for it is impossible to understand the bulk of his poetic output outside this militant commitment.  In his selected poems with the cryptic title of Just above Cameroon (1998), Bate Besong reveals himself as a firebrand poet irrevocably committed to the fierce denunciation of economic exploitation, political mismanagement and dictatorial gangsterism.  Like his drama Bate Besong’s poetry is manifestly concerned with public misdeeds and constantly pre-occupied with the practice of bad governance.  These are the major public themes that dominate his poetry in addition to such private concerns as love and death.

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African Literature Association (ALA) Bulletin. Vol. 28(3/4), Summer/Fall 2000

Comments

[Afeseh Ngwa Hilary.]

Not too difficult to me, Only challenging and brain racking. It piques my curiosity and invites my mental energy.

[dango tumma]

bate himsel would repel the appelation o cameronian, he is not, truly he is southern cameroonian, a nation o 7m, 3 times bigger than gabon or equatorial guinea.

[Dr. Peter Vakunta]

Besong takes advantage of poetic license to create his own words.However,his neologisms are not gratuitous.New words enable him to appropriate the English Language; he fashions out new English words which are at once universal and able to carry his peculiar African experience. But BB’s English is still “in full communion with its ancestral home though altered to suit its new African surroundings,” to borrow words from Chinua Achebe (Morning Yet, 61).