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Mount Pleasant

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Conversations One August Afternoon

She was already a boy, Sara was, when she arrived at Mount Pleasant, the royal residence in exile. That is the simple truth of it. She was only nine years old, and yet she had been offered to Njoya, the sultan, when he arrived in Yaoundé. Offered as a sign of friendship, "friendship and brotherhood." The paramount chief of the Ewondo, Charles Atangana had convinced the monarch to leave Bamum land and take up residence in the French protectorate's capital. The least he could do was to make his guest's stay comfortable; custom required no less — ah, yes, our famous customs!

It was the dry season; according to the calendar, the year was 1931. The trees said it was August, even if the day was clothed in the colors of refusal: Sara's refusal (she was called Sara ever since a Catholic priest had miswritten her actual name, Sala) because she did not want to leave her mother. The sultan's refusal, for he did not understand how coming to the heart of the region under French control would lessen their mistrust of him, evident ever since his difference of opinion with their local representatives some ten years before in Foumban.

"Isn't that just stepping on the snake's tail?" Njoya had asked one day when his friend pushed him for an answer.

"What can I say?" Charles Atangana replied, playing distractedly with his bowler hat. "It's just a change of scenery."

Like Njoya, he knew that if the French feared them, it wasn't for their words or their power, but for the good relationship they had enjoyed with the former German colonizers.

"Don't you know that France is a very jealous woman?" the chief added. "And with all your wives —"

"And what about you," the sultan interrupted with a sly smile. "You have only one wife, and yet ..."

What could Charles Atangana say to that? He and Njoya still bore the scars of events from before the war, traces they could not erase. "I'm like a woman, and the whites are like men," Njoya had written in the Saa'ngam, his memoirs. "What can I do except obey?" He was referring to the English, who had come before, but it was the French who, by ordering his banishment, had left him without a voice; yes, without a voice. And yet that's just how Sara felt, too: without a voice. For very different reasons, of course. She had uttered her last words the night of her departure. Her mother hadn't given her a moment to rest after waking her, and Sara's whispers had been lost in the night, muffled by the bamboo frame of her bed, which bore the marks of all the times she gnawed on it in silence.

That same morning, the house had awoken to the sound of her mother's hollow voice crying out in a nightmare. The little girl's pale face was a blank that no one wanted to look at too closely. Especially not her mother, a sensible peasant who the previous night had made her peace and furtively wiped away her tears. Not this mother who had mortified her own flesh for days on end after accepting her daughter's bitter fate, for she had seen men cut the knot of women's destiny many times before. So she pulled a pagne tightly around her waist, girding herself to speak as the inescapable shadow in which her daughter would now live closed in around them. Uncle Owona, the girl's godfather, kept quiet. He had wished so hard to put this moment of pain behind him that he had nothing else to say. He knew it was his fault, and that was enough.

As for Carl, Sara's brother, he was too young, so no adult found it necessary to explain to him why he would now have to spend his days without his sister.

And what about Sara? She had been informed of her "good fortune" — yes, that's how her mother put it — her good fortune to answer the call of destiny, even though she was still a child.

"If I were you," her mother added, "I'd be happy."

Happy? That's the question that sounded in the mute child's head as her eyes scanned the silent room, trying to understand the flutterings of her misfortune.

"I would have danced."

Danced?

No, Sara couldn't dance, even if her mother sketched a few steps and started to sing a familiar song, a lullaby that swaddled her warmly in her praise names.

"Daughter of the panther," said the song.

"Child of the river," it added.

"Flower of the night."

"Mother of groundnuts."

For this rustic woman, singing was a way to calm her burning tears. Yet she knew it was useless to hide from her daughter the truth of the woman's life that was about to begin for her. Later, much later, Sara would hear her mother's voice calling for her in songs of praise. Sometimes she'd hear other voices calling for her in the night, voices both familiar and unknown. She'd hear the syllables of her name ricochet off Yaoundé's seven hills and then roll through the mud of the valley before they were lost in the heart of the rain, in the joyous laughter of the girls her age. Sometimes it would be the voice of her younger brother, whom she would see only once more after that morning. Her brother, who, although just eight years old, already held the gourd of arki — excuse me, I mean alcohol — between his legs, and called her "woman," as if he were a husband calling for his wife.

Of course Sara would also hear the gruff voice of Njoya calling for her from the depths of his deathbed, calling for her, much to the stupefaction of the six hundred and eighty royal wives. Oh, Sara would hear all of these voices spreading out endlessly over the green hills of the part of town known as Nsimeyong; she would hear these cries, these calls, these shouts, these songs of destiny. For her story is, in truth, a song: a song so poignant and so profound that it can find its echo only in the silence of the father, who, on the day of her departure, was himself absent. All her life Sara would search for the voice of this father — all her life long. The solid voice of this unknown father, she would catch hints of it even in the echo of dogs barking impatiently or in the nocturnal yowling of cats.

I'll come back to this later in detail.

When I met her, all she remembered of the sultan were his eyes. How could she forget them? Njoya's face was as captivating as an abyss, she confessed.

"An abyss?"

"Yes."

"How?"

"You would have thought he could swallow a soul."

She smiled. Though Sara was ninety, she still revealed traces of the child she had been at nine: she was astonished. I asked her if she had ever looked at herself before in the mirror.

"No," she replied. "How could I have?"

I couldn't believe that it was through Njoya's eyes that she had seen herself for the first time.

"No," she corrected me. "The chief's."

Who she meant was Charles Atangana.

The Abduction of Someone Else's Daughter

Because the paramount chief's envoys had arrived too soon, Sara's mother made them wait. They had the threatening look of men on a mission. One of them, his chest and back covered with thick hair, was wearing the cap of a colonial soldier. A purple pagne was tied around his hips in a flowery knot that hung loosely at his side. His demeanor was that of a colonial guard or a swindler, maybe both.

It was he who demanded "the girl."

"She's not going to run away," Sara's mother snapped back, exasperated.

The man turned to his companions, who burst out laughing.

"We know," said the swindler-guard after a pause. "We know."

His men signaled their agreement with one voice.

"We know."

"Yes, we know."

Sara's mother gave them something to drink and eat, and they sat down in the dusty courtyard. They smoked cigarettes and told dirty jokes that only they found funny. Their leader, the man with the cap, made no effort to hide his impatience. Three times he asked Sara's mother, and three times she replied: her daughter wasn't ready yet. The fourth time, the man got mad.

"We must leave," he said, pulling his pagne more tightly around him, as if girding himself for a fight.

"We must ..."

"Leave."

"Please, just five more minutes," Sara's mother implored. "Just five more minutes, please."

The man stuck his fingers in his ears and gestured to his companions, who all rose, dusted off their behinds, and stretched their legs. A couple of them spit on the ground. The seconds ticked by; the men were well aware that a mother's love could force a chief to wait forever on the road of lost time.

"Woman!" the man in the cap exploded, raising the back of his hand. "We do not have the time."

"Just two more minutes," Sara's mother begged.

But the man knew that the paramount chief would turn a deaf ear to a request for even one more minute.

"We need to take the girl," the guard continued, scanning the dark entryway of the house.

He emphasized the word "girl" as he scratched his testicles through his pagne. His men, standing behind him and looking on with approval, repeated "Yes" in unison.

"The girl."

"Yes, the girl."

"And then what?" her mother shot back suddenly.

"The sultan is waiting too," the man in the cap replied, as if that made all the difference.

He swallowed his spit; the mother's rather violent retort had unsettled him.

"Yes," his men insisted, "the sultan is waiting, too."

"He is waiting."

"Too."

The comedy they played out failed to mask their fear of making Njoya or the chief wait.

"One minute, that's too much for you?" Sara's mother shouted. "My God, don't you have any children? What do you want from me? To hand over my child just like that? What kind of men are you?"

The unexpected burst of violence from the woman made them fall silent. The chief's men looked around at one another.

"Are you animals?" she continued.

She stood with her fists on her hips as her mouth spit bile. She called the man with the cap a slaver, the shame of all the Ewondo, assassin, son of a rat. She let loose with a whole dictionary full of vile names, but his companions stopped her before she reached the end of her foul-smelling litany. They knew that the mouth of an Ewondo woman can cut as sharply as a colonial soldier's whip. One of them headed into the house and came back out running, with Sara hoisted on his shoulder and crying for help. The chaos of this abduction was brutal, but the chief's men managed to carry it off.

Later Sara would remember that of all the men who came running at her cries, only her uncle held back her mother's arms, pleading with her to let things run their course.

"This is life," he said. "It's just life."

Maybe Uncle Owona knew that a mother's pain is a door no man wants to leave open for too long.

"What he didn't know," Sara added, "is that I would never see him alive again."

Her face clouded over. On that day she understood that if she wanted to escape from her captive body, she needed to become someone else. Why did she decide to tell me her story? I would learn that soon enough.

* * *

Several years ago, when I returned home to do some research, a writer friend of mine told me that I should go see a house he had heard about. We drove along toward Nsimeyong, losing ourselves on all the endless tracks. The quarter had nothing to show me — just the familiar faces of a city weaned off its own future and suffocating in the dry season, where young girls bet their future on the Internet, on the chance of flying off to meet some hypothetical "white man," and where young men quickly ran over when I beckoned because I had the look of someone newly arrived.

When I mentioned the sultan's name, a dozen faces suddenly appeared around me, each of them swearing that they bore his name, were his direct descendants. There are, as I already knew, as many Njoyas in Cameroon as there are leaves on a tree. In fact, in this neighborhood, there were an equally limitless number of Atanganas. Yet none of these proud namesakes could tell me where to find the place I was looking for. My friend had been quite clear: the site contained the ruins of a vibrant community of artists that had flourished in the 1930s on a vast tract of land perched on the summit of Nsimeyong, where the Sultan Njoya had lived in exile. It was known as Mount Pleasant.

One voice rose up from the group of agitated and bewildered young people: "I know what you're looking for."

The one who had spoken had big eyes and an ironic smile. His name, I'd soon learn, was Arouna, and before long I'd discover, too, the rapacious breadth of his dreams. His dreams were quite simple, really: "The United States, since France is done for." And of course he hoped that I would reward his efforts by helping him get a green card — that is if I didn't just marry him to speed up the emigration process. For the moment the scope of our conversation was narrow, since he had raised my hopes ...

"You're looking for the doyenne, right?"

"The doyenne?"

... only to dash them right away.

"The thing is, she's mute."

"If I could just meet her ..."

"She doesn't talk to strangers."

"Or even see where she lives."

I knew that this roundabout conversation was a way for Arouna to raise the price on the information he had. The confidence of his voice imposed silence on those around him. He became my guide by default and, at the same time, the voice of the young people of Nsimeyong. It was he who led me into the courtyard of a house built of clay and introduced me to an old mama.

And that is how I met Sara, the doyenne of the neighborhood, as Arouna put it, meaning that she was the eldest person in the community. Sara didn't contradict him — on the contrary.

"It's just," she said, weighing each of her words carefully, "that the house she's looking for burned down a long time ago."

Shocked, Arouna and his friends exclaimed that they thought she was mute. They explained that the old mama hadn't spoken for some "eighty years," and they wanted to know what I had said to untie her tongue. My desire to know what had sealed the lips of this venerable woman was fanned as much by the length of her silence as by the fire that had brought down the artists' residence. Only two bricks of Mount Pleasant remained, but after this first visit I hoped that Sara, who had finally found her voice, might know how to shape words strong enough to replace the walls that hadn't survived the deaths of their builders. As it turns out, she had another story to tell.

The Face of Sara, the Old Woman

It wasn't the astounding reappearance of Sara's voice, but rather the look on her face that made me put aside my research into the origins of Cameroonian nationalism to listen to the doyenne's stories. Who could have known that from her very first words, I would be caught up in the net of her testimony and that it would take me weeks, months even, to sort it all out? And who could have known that by the time we were finished, she would give me the key to understanding the very period I had come back to Cameroon to research? Clearly not Arouna. No — especially not him. If he were to see me out of breath and struggling, like a catfish caught in a net, he'd probably laugh! And caught I was: getting Sara to keep telling her story from where she'd left off the night before was no small task.

When I came by the next day, her scrunched-up eyes made it clear that she had nothing more to tell me. Faced with her exasperated brow — so typical of the women where we're from — I didn't push it. I just sat down on a bench and offered myself up to her silence. It was simple: Sara was a monument. Even sewn tight, her mouth was an event. Her eyes didn't show their age. Like two bright lamps, they lit a pathway through the wrinkles of her sagging skin. Only her hands seemed to have been dried out by the years, a network of sinuous blue veins popping up beneath their cracked skin.

Overwhelmed by life's floodwaters, Sara was sitting on the ground, wrapped in her kaba ngondo, the loose-fitting robe often worn by women in Yaoundé, with a red scarf wound tightly around her head, her feet crossed in front of her. She sniffed softly at her tobacco and occasionally looked up to toss a few grains of corn to her hens, who eagerly picked at them. From time to time she cleared her throat and spit into the distance.

I realized that she loved chewing tobacco, and so I brought her a good supply, which she didn't refuse. She stuck out her tongue and put a pinch on it, then opened her eyes wide with youthful pleasure.

"It comes from Virginia," I told her, "from the United States."

Arouna had already told her that I came from "America," so I was only repeating what she already knew.

Oh, every day I would find Sara in this position, her favorite: dressed in a kaba ngondo, a different color each time, her head covered in a scarf of yellow, blue, or red. Soon she took root in my mind as distinctly as the statue of Charles Atangana in Yaoundé, or the one of Njoya that stands in Foumban, in the western part of the country, marking the spot in the center of the city where once a large baobab grew. With one short phrase she had revealed herself to me: living proof of a forgotten time. For Sara's body — a castle of a thousand hushed voices washed up on the shores of time — spoke even when she remained silent. There in the middle of her courtyard, even in her moments of quiet, she told me that each of us carries on our shoulders the whole of the age in which we live. The gift of time is memory, yet Sara seemed instead to live in expectation. In expectation of what? I'd learn that soon enough.

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Excerpted from Mount Pleasant by Patrice Nganang, Amy Baram Reid. Copyright © 2011 Éditions Philippe Rey. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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