“Night has become more than a moment in time. It is duration, space, the colour of ages to come…”: Leonora Miano’s “Season of the Shadow”

“The clan lived as if it had given birth to itself. Terrorized by violence, it ritualized and regulated it, so as to resolve conflict with words. Mukano embodied this philosophy to perfection. Did he do wrong?”

 

Over three and a half centuries, white Europeans transported more than 12.5 million enslaved Africans to the Americas, in a brutal seafaring voyage called “the middle passage.” More than two million died on the voyage, with many others perishing during the march from the interiors to the coasts. The Middle Passage has been depicted in literature, perhaps most famously in Maryse Conde’s Segu. But the industrial scale of the colonial slave trade would never have been possible without the active collusion of  some powerful African leaders themselves – an issue that, for obvious reasons, remains sensitive even today. And it is that piece of history that it is at the heart of Leonora Miano’s Season of the Shadow, a novel set in present-day Cameroon, at the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade.

After a great fire runs through their village, the Mulongo Clan discovers that twelve young men from the tribe have disappeared. To the Mulongo, who live within themselves and have abjured violence in favour of “resolving conflicts with words”, the disappearances are bewildering and inexplicable. And so begins a long quest to discover the fate of the lost young men, a quest that takes the Mulongo, led by their Chief Mukano, to the neighbouring queendom of the Bwele, and into the jaws of the creeping slave trade. At its climax, the story branches into three parts: Chief Mukano’s search for the lost men, the fate of the villagers who stay behind to wait, unmindful of the peril they are in, and the journey of Eyabem one of the bereft mothers, searching for her son through the Bwele queendom and all the way to the murderous coast. And each of these narrative threads finally come together to reveal how the Mulongo have been caught in the crosshairs of a newly-ruthless world:

Now she knows that the shadow that hovered over the hut of the women whose sons went missing is hovering over the world. The shadow drives communities to conflict, pushes people to flee their native lands. Once time will have gone by and moons will have followed on moons, who will retain the memory of all these displacements? In Bebayedi, yet-unborn generations will learn that their ancestors had to run away to save themselves from predators. They will learn why these huts are built over streams. They will be told: Madness took hold of the world but some people refused to live in darkness. You are the descendants of the people who said no to the shadow. (p. 138 – 9)

At one level, Season of the Shadow is a simple and oft-repeated story of the disintegration of an indigenous culture upon first contact. This story has its more famous versions – predictably, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between come to mind – although, of course, every fresh retelling brings with it its own unique heartbreak. But there is something more here: while colonialism and the colonial slave trade provide the backdrop to the novel, Season of the Shadow is not about colonialism. It is not even about the conflict between indigenous cultures and the militant spread of Islam within parts of the African content (which was explored in Segu). In Season of the Shadow, it is neighbour who falls upon neighbour, destroying and enslaving for the benefit of the European slave traders. And so, as far as the grand narrative is concerned, Season of the Shadow complicates matters, showing us with great clarity that the moral world is rarely a binary between colonisers and colonised, oppressors and the oppressed, and good and evil.  

But beyond that, the power of Season of the Shadow lies in the universality of its story: the loss of innocence, the grief of loss, the admirable wilfulness to hold on to something in the teeth of an altered world, that incontestable core of human dignity in the face of every humiliation imaginable, and more than anything else, the refusal to die, at a moment when living no longer seems worthwhile:

The women say that you cannot dispossess people of what they have received, learnt, experienced. They themselves could not do so, even if they wanted to. Human beings are not empty calabashes. The ancestors are here. They float over bodies that embrace. They sing when lovers cry out in unison. They wait at the threshold of a hut where a woman is in labour. They are in the cry, the babble of newborns … children grow up, learn the words of the earth, but the bond with the realms of the spirit lives on. The ancestors are here and they are not a confinement. They conceived a world. This is their most precious legacy: the obligation to invent in order to survive. (p. 235 – 6)

After finishing Season of the Shadow, perhaps what lingers longest in memory is its depiction of the Mulongo people: an ethical system and a world-view that substitutes violence with words, an origin myth centred around a pioneering woman founder, and a self-contained cosmology and way of life, all of which seems so alien and out of step with the world, that its ultimate destruction appears as a tragic inevitability, like the slow decay and death of a language in a newly-conquered territory. But at the very end, there remains a seed of hope that memory will triumph against forgetting, and that that the “intransigence of reality” will yield to the “plasticity of language”; because, as the Mulongo always say, “May we know how to welcome the day when it comes. The night too.” (p. 237)

“My body is an archive”: Patrice Nganang’s “Mount Pleasant”

“If the invention of a writing system was due to his will to give form to the world’s multiple voices – much as he had done with the Shumum language, drawing on the other languages spoken around him – his grudging memory, his trembling hands, and his feeble body had taught him that now, in his chambers in Mount Pleasant, he had reached the end of a long path.”

In his memoir, There was a Country, Chinua Achebe writes about Amos Tutuela’s famous novel, The Palm-Wine Drinkard: “there is no attempt to draw a line between what is permissible and what is not, what is possible and what is not possible, what is new and what is old.” This sense – that the borders of what constitutes reality are simply more fluid and permeable than we are trained to imagine – is at the heart of Patrice Nganang’s sprawling novel about colonialism and nationalism in early-20th century Cameroon, Mount Pleasant. Anchored around two real-life characters in Cameroonian history – King Ibrahim Njoya and Paramount Chief Charles Atangana – and a series of real-life events, such as the successive colonisation of Cameroon by the Germans, the British, and the French – Mount Pleasant is nonetheless far more imaginative than historical, and bordering – on occasion – magical realism.

Mount Pleasant is woven out of multiple storylines, framed within a dialogue between the narrator, young, American-born Cameroonian-descended anthropologist, and Sara, one of the last living links between the present, and the late-colonial history of Cameroon in the 1930s. The narrator’s fragmented academic knowledge of Cameroonian history runs up against Sara’s living memory (“Archive? My body is an archive…”), throwing up all those eternal questions about the nature of historical truth, the distortion of the colonial lens, the (un)equal and opposite distortion of nationalism, and the insufficiency of language (“Where should I put my trust? In the capricious memory of an old lady or in the colonial archives?)

Within the dialogue itself, numerous themes emerge, composed out of the combined and sometimes contradictory knowledge of the two interlocutors: there is the eponymous Mount Pleasant, built into a “house of words” and a house of stories by King Njoya, who was exiled there by the French (“Njoya’s home became a compendium of humorous and serious tales, the site of a storytelling competition that went on from morning to night…”); there is Njoya’s prior time in his capital at Foumban, attempting to negotiate his way through successive colonial powers while maintaining a precarious hold on his waning authority – even to the extent of selling out an incipient nationalist movement, and seeing its leaders put to death; and there is Joseph Ngono, brought up and educated abroad in Germany to be a good native middleman, but who is transformed into a rebel and a nationalist after a chance encounter with German racists. Anchoring the novel is Nebu, a brilliant and troubled sculptor who, we are told right at the beginning of the book, dies in painful circumstances. Nebu’s talent is shaped around the trauma of his early childhood, where art is the only means of escape:

“Nebu learnt a lot by listening when he couldn’t respond. It taught him to control his rage. Taught him to keep it, like burning metal, at a safe distance from his body and his eyes. Taught him to strike it with a hammer, striking, striking, and striking again until it grew malleable, until it took on the shape he wanted to give it: flat like a knife, oval like a bird’s body, triangular like a lion’s head. It taught him to heat up his rage, to dilute his rage, to polish his rage, to file it yes, to file it down and wipe it clean, like the metals he worked with. And Nebu polished his rage, blowing on his overheated fingers, blowing on his heart to keep it from exploding, blowing on the embers of his incandescent soul. Art is an antidote to madness.”

In a certain sense, the blocked avenues and barricaded paths that consistently prevent Nebu from realising his potential – and which ultimately lead to his death – seem like a metaphor for the soul of the individual under the suffocating grip of colonialism. Nebu’s struggle is mirrored by the struggle of King Njoya, of whom we are told – in perhaps the closest direct indictment of colonialism that Nganang allows himself the indulgence of:

“He wanted to own the world… without being owned by it?”

“To speak of the world…”

“… without being spoken for by it.”

Njoya himself is the other anchor of Mount Pleasant. His endeavour to create a written script out of oral language becomes his one chance at retaining control, his one sphere of influence into which the colonisers have not and cannot penetrate:

“Njoya realized that his experiments with pictograms and phonemes, with syllabograms and words, with tales and histories, with lives and dreams – all those experiments that had led him from anecdotes to a printing press had been possible only because, from the very start, he had given up when confronted by History’s forces.”

Writing about the Indian colonial experience, historians have observed how the home came to be seen as a realm of spiritual retreat, the one space in which the militarily and politically conquered Indians remained sovereign and self-determining (with all its attendant problems). For Njoya, that sovereign space is language, especially in the moment of his final, physical decline:

“If writing reinscribes life on earth in furtive blots of ink, Njoya’s battle against the forces that had defeated his body was waged primarily on the surface of a slate, by means of pictograms he hoped would bear fruit… If the invention of a writing system was due to his will to give form to the world’s multiple voices – much as he had done with the Shumum language, drawing on the other languages spoken around him – his grudging memory, his trembling hands, and his feeble body had taught him that now, in his chambers in Mount Pleasant, he had reached the end of a long path.”

History tells us, though, that Njoya’s efforts were doomed to failure, especially after the French invalidated the curriculum in all his schools (an incident briefly adverted to in the novel); his language died along with him, until efforts in the mid-2000s to resurrect it (although perhaps as no more than a museum piece). And it is that death that is, in turn, mirrored in the death of Nebu, who cannot – despite all his efforts – breathe life into the sculpture of his lost love:

“For death is the limit of art, isn’t it? Yet how could people have thought about suicide? And why should they have? After all, and here the French officials and their adversaries in Foumban would certainly agree, a Bamum man simply couldn’t kill himself for a reason like that.”

The characters in Mount Pleasant, ultimately, realise that happiness is open to them only if they narrow their aspirations and their world, if – in the words of Ghassan Kanafani – they make their worlds smaller “to fill it with happiness“. And it is Joseph Ngono who realises that “it is impossible to know the actual price of happiness and to remain happy” – or at least, in a land where every attempt at self-assertion faces the barrel of a gun.

Haunted by the physical, mental, and moral shackles of colonial rule, and searching for a liberation that yet has no vocabulary to speak its name (only at the end of the novel do we see a crowd “demanding nothing less than equality and freedom“), the characters of Mount Pleasant are suffocated in by a world that will soon die, before they can be rescued by another that is struggling to be born. The historical moment that Nganang captures is similar (or just prior to) the historical moment of Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk or Latifa al-Zayyat’s The Open Door (Egypt), Aamin Maalouf’s Samarkand (Iran), and Yuri Trifonov’s The Impatient Ones (Russia). The voice and setting, of course, is Nganang’s own.