MARCEL KEMADJOU NJANKE (Cameroon, 1970)
Peace
A fine day has come
A day as brilliant
As the royal sun of the dawns
A great day
A great day filled with gold
A great day
A great day decorated with love.
Animosity is stricken from the earth
Coloured with pure joy
And the hell of hatred is flooded
With fraternity.
Sorrow has no school-benches
In the gigantic school of life
Ant the earth plays cheerfully
The enchanting hop-push of races:
Peace!
This word has disappeared from dictionaries
And from lexicons of worldwide Orders
And reign in the hearts of all
As master of all the instincts:
Paix!
You run along with children
Honey of their multiplied vitality
The skies moved to tears
Turn frontiers into rainbows:
Shanti!
With their one hundred and forty-four thousand voices
Coming at your sublime rendez-vous
Billions sing your hymns
And even stones bath in this choir:
Amahoro!
The guns and their tah rah tah tah
Revealed your lullabies O divine lover
The Vatican beatifies the yogi
And the mahometan eats with the heathen:
Lapè!
Misery and his sailors have sunk
Neighbours look into each other eyes
The days are furrowed with harmony
And hands raise up bunches of fakang *
Kam! Kam! Kam!
* House plant symbol of peace in west Cameroon.
Translation by Marcel Kemadjou Njanke
Marcel Kemadjou Njanke was born in Douala, Cameroon on December 6,
1970. After his unfinished studies of law, he dedicated himself to the resale
of harberdashery. He had always considered writing as a lost of time despite
her sisters invitations who found in him a certain talent. Motivated by her,
he participated in a contest and won the prize of the young Central African poetry
in 1994. After this he started publishing, Cries
of the Soul, a selection of poems published in 1997 and followed by The
Blue Beggar (short novel) in 2000. In 2003 he published Poto-poto blues (poems)
and in 2005, The
Room of Crayon, a collection of texts. He lives in Douala and there he leads
Open Book, an association for the promotion of the book and the reading. What
draws the attention in his poetry is the stretch union with music that favors
a kind of writing abundant in images, simple, dense, lively and happy. Generally,
its a committed poetry that develops issues referred to the pauperization of
his country, to liberty and going through segregationism of the new western laws
about immigration, the political hypocrisy, all this seen from the streets side
point of view. He then ues word playing, the language of the streets and sometimes
what in his country is called the camfranglish that is a mixture of Cameroonese,
English and French. His poems reflect a vast culture always trying not to fall
in the specialized language of erudition. For him, poetry must use a language
as universal as that of music so that the message it brings can be captured spontaneously
by the one who hears or reads it. Consequently, numerous repetitions are noticed
and they have the enchanting value of proverbs.
