Mount Pleasant (48 page)

Authors: Patrice Nganang

BOOK: Mount Pleasant

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Â â¦ and thenâdo you understand?âI became the sultan's wife.

This novel places onstage very well-educated Cameroonians and Africans: true citizens of the world, in fact. If it is anachronistic to imagine that Seneca had received a doctorate, a certain level of erudition is certainly necessary to understand his writing. Owing to the twists of African history, however, the writer of this novelâwho was educated and has published books in French, English, and Germanâhad to come to terms with his own illiteracy when he discovered Njoya's library: a library that is open in the city where the writer was born, YaoundÃ©, and which holds the very heart of Cameroonian and African literature, even if it has been erased from their contemporary literatures. To enter into conversation with this library's world of pictograms, phonemes, words, letters, and books, to bring the Lewa and Akauku alphabets back to life, and to be faithful to fiction's truth, I needed to change the destinies of many characters and many dates as well. May the descendants of these illustrious characters understand and forgive me!

The books used in the preparation of this novel are too numerous to be cited here, for this is not a history dissertation, but a work of imagination. That said, Tardits's
Le Royaume bamoum
;
L'Ãcriture des Bamoum
by Dugast and Jeffreys;
Die Bamum-Schrift
by Schmitt; Delafosse's article on Njoya's secret royal language, as well as Geary's pictographic research, especially her
Mandu Yenu: Bilder aus Bamum
, which she published with Ndam Njoya; Tuchscherer's research; and
Les Dessins bamoum
, in which one can see Ibrahim's drawings, were all troves of information. The digitized colonial archives of the University of Frankfurt and the University of Southern California, the German cinematographic archives in Berlin, and the Centre national de la cinÃ©matographie in Paris, as well as various websites, allowed me to see what the world I was searching for could be. It was all brought to life by a photographic exhibit put together by the students in my course Tropical Germany, at Vassar College in the United States.

I will never be able to thank Barbara Koennecker enough for having insisted on the idea of Njoya; Chris Abani, for having facilitated certain things; Nyasha Bakare, for having traversed the hallways of the writing of this text, first in English, in a manuscript she patiently read, and then in French. My thanks, as well, to Konrad Tuchscherer, for his truly unique enthusiasm, his historical knowledge, which he so generously put at my disposal, and for providing the prints of Lewa writing that I use in the text and those of Akauku writing found at the start of each sectionâwriting systems on which he worked with Nji Oumarou Nchare and Jason Glary. Finally, Laure PÃ©cher! You were the one who really believed in this project!

This is a book about books, and so an homage to all of Africa's ancient libraries, its forgotten hagiographers, and especially those who worked in obscurity during the long era that is described so poorly by the term “colonialism.” But it is, above all, an homage to a unique book, a marvelous collection of memories, that was begun in Foumban around 1908, its final version completed on Monday, June 19, 1921, in Mantoum, Cameroon: Sultan Njoya's
Saa'ngam
.

Baltimore, 2006âPrinceton, 2015

Translator's Note

Translation is necessarily an exchange between languages, times, and individuals; this project has been possible only because of the generosity of those who helped me follow the conversations of Sara and Bertha to their enchanting conclusion. I want to express my immense respect for
Patrice Nganang
; his combination of aesthetics and engaged ethics is inspiring. I first learned of Njoya and his library when Patrice gave a talk at New College of Florida in 2007; thank you, Patrice, for this opportunity to explore the pathways of Mount Pleasant and the ambiance of Njoya's court. Chris Richards and Miranda Popkey of FSG were tremendous supports through the editing process; my thanks to them for their patience and their eloquent advice. Hector Kamden Fonkoua, of the University of Bayreuth, kindly responded to my questions about Cameroonian idioms and forms of address. Caroline Reed and Theresa Burress of the Jane Bancroft Cook Library helped locate sources for quotations in the novel. A grant from the New College of Florida Faculty Development Fund allowed me to focus on this project in the summer of 2014. Any errors in the translation are certainly mine, but I give my thanks to those who helped me in my efforts to reflect the novel's scope and its love of words.

Mount Pleasant
is primarily a novel about interpersonal connectionsâconnections through stories and art, language, love, and home. I am so grateful for the love and support of my family: for my husband, Uzi Baram, and our children, Jacob, Miriam, and Ben.

ALSO BY
PATRICE NGANANG

FICTION

Dog Days

POETRY

Elobi

A Note About the Author and the Translator

Patrice Nganang
was born in Cameroon and is a novelist, a poet, and an essayist. His novel
Dog Days
(
Temps de chien
) received the Prix littÃ©raire Marguerite Yourcenar and the Grand prix littÃ©raire d'Afrique noire. He is also the author of
La Joie de vivre
and
L'Invention d'un beau regard
. He teaches comparative literature at Stony Brook University. You can sign up for email updates
here
.

Amy Baram Reid is a professor of French language and literature at New College of Florida. Her previous translations include
Patrice Nganang
's
Dog Days
and VÃ©ronique Tadjo's
Far from My Father
.

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