Cameroonian academic and author of Dog Days, Patrice Nganang, says social media has led to his transformation as a writer: ‘Social media led to my imprisonment, helped me free a few hundred people from jail, build schools and bridges, and feed incarcerated individuals. Simply put, it made me the writer I always dreamed of becoming.’
First Draft is our interview column, featuring authors and other prominent figures on books, reading, and writing.
Our questions are italicized.
What books or kinds of books did you read growing up?
I am currently writing my childhood memoir, so I have a clear recollection of my reading list as a child: Alphonse Daudet’s Le Petit Chose and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which literally made me weep. The crossing of the Ohio river, with slavers hunting poor Eliza and her kid. Snif. I also read Richard Wright’s Black Boy. That’s when I was thirteen. And these are not books we read at school. I bought them myself, with my own pocket money, on the street. In Yaoundé, we call that it poteau bookshop, that is, used books. Because my dad was a bookbinder, I grew up with a cult of books.
In your earliest days as a literature student, what books were foundational to your study and research?
The thing is, I studied German at the university in Yaoundé. The writer I came back to again and again was Bertolt Brecht. First, because his sentences were very easy to understand. With Brecht I came to understand that simplicity is methodically crafted. He wrote for workers and peasants, see? And workers and peasants would not understand complex sentences, he thought. To me, it was a jewel, as I could easily read his books in German, without having to wrestle with the complex German sentence structure, nor with a dictionary.
What’s the last thing you read that changed your mind about something?
I would say the social media. It did not only change my mind completely, but it also made me become a different writer, a writer different than the one I was before, as I started writing on a laptop in 1995. Social media made me land in jail, helped me free a few hundred from jail, build schools and bridges, and feed a few incarcerated individuals. Simply put, it made me become the writer I always dreamed about.
When I disagree with a book, it simply slips out of my hands. I stop reading it without even noticing it, and it slips out of my mind.
What is the last book/text you disagreed with, and why?
Hum. I fear your question, o. The thing is, when I disagree with a book, it simply slips out of my hands. I stop reading it, without even noticing it, and it therefore slips out of my mind. I would not remember it, because such books would tend to be bores to me. There are a few mindsets out there I simply disagree with. The racist mindset, the zealot mindset, the coward mindset, the hypocrite mindset, the greedy mindset. I tend not to touch books that are produced by such mindsets. For instance, I would not buy the things that on the street talk about the devil or so. They slip out of my grip. I therefore spare the time of disagreement to do something I think is more productive. But I know the people I disagree with. The first on the list is the dictator of Cameroon, second is his cohort. These are my enemies. To be a writer, you need an enemy.
What is your writing process: edit as you write or draft first, then edit?
Normally I write a first draft and spend years editing it. From two to five or even eight years.
Your novel, Dog Days, received the Prix Marguerite Yourcenar in 2001 and the Grand Prix littéraire d’Afrique noire in 2002. What was your process for writing this book?
1997, I remember very well. I was living in Germany and was writing my dissertation at the same time as I was writing it. Dissertation in German, novel in French. It was a sort of comic relief from writing about Brecht and Wole Soyinka. And the tone of the book shows it a little bit. I wanted to let it go, and I wrote the book that way. It started with the first sentence, and the first paragraph, and the first page. And then I told to myself, I won’t write more than a page per day, and kept my promise as long as I could. One page a day. And then, when the writing flow became too intense, it was one section a day. The first version of the book was rejected, because it was too raw. The dog was going all over the place, probably. The published version is the second one. I re-read and re-wrote the whole thing, now knowing the conclusion, because the first version did not really know where the dog was going. The last part of the published book is shorter because I now knew where I wanted the book to go, and to get there, I remember adding a few secondary characters, particularly the boy Taku. I wasn’t particularly happy with the editing of my first book, and thus I sent my Dog Days manuscript to an independent proofreader. I paid him 300 Marks, I remember. A French guy who worked at the French institute in Berlin. He read it, we met at a café, and he told me he had nothing to edit out of the book. I thought he was joking, and indeed, the book was published the way I had written it.
Looking back, what’s one thing you might revise/do differently if you were to write it again?
I removed the footnotes when it was republished in France. My French editor had asked me to add footnotes, as she felt people may not understand the Cameroonian slang, and my opinion was, and is that people tend to go with the flow. I’ve now published the second book of what I understand as the Mboudjak series and did just that. No footnotes. These are books that present a particular time in Cameroonian history, this endless time when we are ruled by the same man called Paul Biya. It’s now more than forty years, and there is a need to have a chronicle from the bellow of our people, of a time during which the Soviet Union collapsed, the Twin Towers collapsed, Afghanistan was occupied and freed, and we are still under the rule of one man. It must be written down, for it not to totally be wasted like the lives of Cameroonian people. And the dog plays the function of a stenographer of our time. That is the vision I had when I went and did the second edit of Dog Days. It is not a doggy book, but a chronicle of the present time, that itself has many discontinuities.
How did your approach to writing change while working on your novel, Mount Pleasant?
Mount pleasant is a totally different mindset. It is as if that book is written by a person totally different from the one who wrote Dog Days. See, Dog Days is playful, and Mount Pleasant is serious. Dog Days is written partly in the Cameroonian vernacular, that is, the street language of Yaoundé, camfranglais, Mount Pleasant in plain English. It is my first book I wrote in English. I then translated it into French. Only one chapter of the previous English version is published, in Granta. With Mount Pleasant, I wanted to do something completely different from the novels I had written so far, something coming from a totally different planet. With Mount Pleasant, I wanted a German attitude in my novel, I wanted to go serious in fiction, deep. And it included research in archives, the way I would have done for a scholarly dissertation. It also included a work on the philosophical underpinning of arts, a composition of the book’s architecture, and of course, a switch of the social class. My first novels were based in what can be called popular neighbourhoods, and Mount Pleasant is set in the Cameroonian ruling class, albeit of the past, and of the colonial years.
As we speak, there is a genocide in Cameroon. Cameroon is supposed to be bilingual, yet our Francophone government is murdering and has murdered thousands of Anglophones.
And what’s one thing about the reactions to the book that surprised you?
Everything. I still think Mount Pleasant absolutely changed the way I perceive the readers and publishers of books written by Africans. I am honestly still working through it all, because it is quite tectonic to me. My agent sent the manuscript to 44 publishers, and they all rejected it. One even went as far as signing the contract, paying me an advance, advertising the book cover everywhere and then retracting it, and asking me to keep the money. Phoebus, yes, they paid me and never published the book, and said, keep the money. Who does that?! It was crushing. But the more I think about it, the more it appears to me that publishers of books written by Africans had always worked under the wrong assumption of who the readers are. In fact, the assumption was that readers want to be entertained, viewing Africa as a place where white people might go on holidays and Africans there are likely to meet at parties, on the street, as hustlers and crooks, next-door dictators and thugs, clowns and child soldiers, but never in universities, let alone as university professors in Berlin during the twenties, or as strategists and tacticians of world wars! There is a new person in me that started writing with Mount Pleasant, it is the writer I am today. There is no going back.
As an author whose primary audience is francophone, what something interesting you’ve noticed between your francophone and non-francophone audiences?
This is a very difficult question to answer for me because as we speak, there is a genocide in Cameroon. Cameroon is supposed to be bilingual, yet our Francophone government is murdering and has murdered thousands of Anglophones. It is sad it is not in the news anymore, but my writing, my whole writing is located at this intersection. I was expelled from Cameroon because of it and cannot return home yet because of it. I see the junction you present there as a battlefield, with hundreds of documented rapes, burned villages, executed civilians, beheadings, bodies of combatants displayed at crossroads in villages for the public show by the Francophone military, a few million Anglophone people displaced, you name it. A bloody civil war. Or rather, the First World War still being fought in our midst.
You’re a professor of comparative literature at Stony Brook University, New York. What books do you recommend to students who take your class?
You know, I teach from undergraduate to post-graduate levels. And since my background is German studies, I taught and still read German books in German. I am currently reading Jenny Erpenbeck oeuvre, French books in French, and of course, English books in English. I would say, don’t limit yourself, as that is the way I am as well. But I would suggest, and always do, that students read outside of their area of training. I come out of a year during which I immersed myself in books about the politics of sanctions. I am looking forward to reading books on coding. I advise my students to do the same. Be curious.
And what’s a book every African student should read before leaving university?
There is no such book, but your parents. Make sure to have their history in detail, your dad’s and your mum’s. Even for selfish reasons, such as writing your memoir later or their biographies, which are truly lacking in Africa. Talk to your parents, know them. In Europe, there used to be a book called the family novel, le roman familial, which was written in the family, mostly by the mother, and passed down, with all the details of everyone’s lives narrated. A subgenre of the roman familial is the personal diary. African families need family novels, Africans need diaries, badly. And since universities are places where you essentially learn archiving methods, why not apply it on yourself?
What is the most meaningful piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?
Please, talk to your mum and dad.
African families need family novels, Africans need diaries, badly. And since universities are places where you essentially learn archiving methods, why not apply it on yourself?
And what advice would you give to young authors in Africa and the African Diaspora?
I think current African writers are not attuned to the shifts in grand narratives, and certainly not to the developments in theory. More and more young writers hate theory. I hear Chimamanda Adichie turning against postcolonial studies. Now that is unfortunate, even if it is a consequence of creative writing as a discipline. Compare the writers of today with Soyinka and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, when they were our age! Ngũgĩ’s Decolonizing the Mind is unbeatable. Soyinka’s Myth, Literature and the African World as well. No motivational stuff here. The house of theory they built is left vacant. Same with commitment. It is true, some young African writers understand the defence of causes as still necessary, but they do that in interviews or op-eds written on demand, and not in the form of personal or life commitments. Yet even there, there is so much to do. Look for instance how an awareness of the issue of mass incarceration can punctuate the narrative of the United States that looms so large in young writer’s tales of immigration. Or how African independence struggles can map out the renewed interest in Westlessness. The current multipolarity of the world is strangely moot amongst African writers, and yet it is the issue of our time. Our mental domesticity is disheartening. Our writers need to travel mentally and understand that there is not that much left to tell when the story of a Black life goes from Lagos to New York or back. That story, whatever its inventiveness, is more than 400 years old. Yet, our world is multipolar, which remains something to explore.
Which three books on Cameroon should everyone be reading at this moment?
I have read good books by Cameroonian authors Leonora Miano, Max Lobe, Hemley Boum, Djaili Amadou Amal, and Imbolo Mbue. I recommend their works if you are interested in reading about Cameroon.
You grew up in Yaoundé, Cameroon, before going on to study in Germany. What memory from your hometown do you cherish the most?
Each of my books answer that question differently. Because Cameroon was colonized by the Germans, and then split between the British and the French, the world powers all had an imprint in Yaoundé, in a way or another. Consequently, all the major conflicts of the world of before the dominance of the United States were neighbourhood affairs to us. All my books are only about Yaoundé, and the interplay of all that. In speech patterns, in people’s relation to each other, in people’s dress codes, and even in the naming of the city. I map out Yaoundé neighbourhood by neighbourhood, because my memory of Yaoundé is the history of the twentieth century summarized in one single African spot, a spot that happens to be at the exact centre of the African map. Check it out.
I think current African writers are not attuned to the shifts in grand narratives, and certainly not to the developments in theory. More and more young writers hate theory.
Who are the Cameroonian authors you’re most excited about today (and why?)
I give current Cameroonian writers their share, but I tend to breathe life. Courage, courage, and courage is what makes me dream. I am very excited about what the English-speaking Cameroonians are doing. Many are activists still, are still quite traumatized, and the writing that comes from their decades of struggles hasn’t reached the shores of the publishing world, truly. The Amba boys are honestly my inspiration, as they are the ones who showed me that writing comes from a place of danger and struggle. Some writers follow that impulse. Take Kangsen Wakai, for example.
What’s the last great book someone recommended to you?
I honestly read way too many books to remember. I prefer acts of courage, though.
What is your favourite topic to write or read about these days?
Always Yaoundé. I have been doing it for more than thirty years now, and because of the social media, ‘Facebooking’ with my Yaoundé followers is something I do daily. It is my elixir. It gives me energy. It keeps my vocabulary afresh. And writing is done with words. That is my running archive.
And what topic do you wish more authors were writing about these days?
I think there are enough writers coming from US creative writing programs already. It is true, one should not complain, because being accepted is not a given. A writer needs to make a living. But writing out of a library is a dead as the Western hegemonic pretence. There is so much to tell. Go out there and experience the world and write about it. I also think African writers should do more research before writing a book. The myth of the first book is overrated. Go in archives, read archival documents, do research on the topics you are interested in, before writing about them. Yes, hire an assistant to help you conduct interviews in the African languages you do not understand. Your mother tongue is not the world doxa, and your tribe is not Africa. I am not a metonym of you. It does not help when Africans transport stereotypes about other Africans, out of ignorance. I am very saddened when I read what mainstream Anglophone writers write in their books about Francophones, and vice versa. I always ask myself; how would they feel if a white person did that? Do some fact-checking, merde! And my personal dig to Nigerian authors, read something beyond Camara Laye and Mongo Beti.
There is so much to tell. Go out there and experience the world and write about it. I also think African writers should do more research before writing a book.
What are you currently working on?
I am currently working on a memoir of childhood. It is currently out of my hands, and in those of my editor, slated to be published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.
Question from Fareda Banda: What is your mother’s favourite book? (My mum loves Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter)
My mother did not read books, but my father did. He gave me Engelbert Mveng’s History of Cameroon.
Bonus: Please suggest a question for a future author’s First Draft
What is the most gratifying thing you did in your life, to yourself or to others, that you would be happy to talk about?
Who do you think we should interview next?
I am a great fan of Stella Nyanzi, from Uganda. I think you should interview her; she has a life story to tell⎈
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