Can you separate a tree from its roots? Whether it is an oak, an olive tree or a baobab, the exercise is perilous, perhaps even impossible.
This is a bit what the Franco-Cameroonian novelist Hemley Boum tells us in her latest book, visiting Montreal as part of the Blue Metropolis literary festival. In The fisherman’s dreamhis fifth novel, a fisherman sees his way of life turned upside down by the greed of a local logging company.
A story of ocean and dispossession, freedom and exile, gripping and embodied, which extends its influence over several generations.
Following in the footsteps of the Nigerians Ben Okri and Chinua Achebe, it is the clash between tradition and modernity, the evocation of a changing Cameroon, which seems to particularly interest the writer. Themes that were also found in The days come and passhis previous novel.
“The shock happened a long time ago,” Hemley Boum confided on the phone a few days ago, from his home in the Paris region. “What interests me, in fact, are changes in society, how people experience them, how they influence everyday life. »
Even more, Hemley Boum says she is fascinated by the repercussions of these changes on society. Effects which, like the “aftershocks” recorded after an earthquake, can sometimes be felt over several generations. “There can be an impact on the way of creating a family, of building bonds, the way of envisioning the future and projecting oneself, of experiencing progress, all these things. »
The world resists dreamers
In Campo, on the coast of Cameroon, a small fisherman and his family find themselves trapped in credit and debt: fridge, motorcycle, modern furniture. The arrival of trawlers, leading to a fall in fish prices, will push him into bankruptcy. The novel projects us years later, into a working-class district of Douala. Zacharias, known as Petit Pa’, navigates between school and his “brothel mom”, his prostitute and alcoholic mother. A serious and gifted child, despite the pitfalls, at the age of 18, he realized his dream of studying in France. Left as if he had slammed a door behind him, summarizes Hemley Boum.
Twenty years later, having become a clinical psychologist in Paris, suddenly no longer knowing whether he was alive or dead, he felt the need to “settle accounts with the past” and untie the knots that were beginning to unravel. suffocate him.
The shock is also found in the hearts of the characters, themselves sometimes torn between their duties and their own aspirations. This is the case of Zacharias, prisoner of his inner conflicts. “Life is not easy for dreamers,” believes Hemley Boum. For the community, the dreamers represent a danger. They call into question what is acquired, established, what ensures the sustainability and security of everyone. » And in a way, the world resists dreamers.
Zach’s conflict has its origins in the dispossession of which his grandfather was the victim. The reader, here, is one step ahead of the protagonist, who ignores his family’s history and never questions his past.
We see him struggle, already knowing everything about his story. “It also carries a legacy of love and resistance. And neither of one nor the other is he conscious. He doesn’t know where he comes from. Having no idea of your past does not prevent transmission, like a sort of archiving of things that you carry without knowing it. »
“I tend to think,” continues Hemley Boum, “that we are the only species that walks around with its roots. We bring them with us wherever we go. We never completely reinvent ourselves, even if we have a deep desire to do so. The further we go, the more we realize, deep down, that there is not another life, another skin, another self. »
And exile, according to Hemley Boum, is not necessarily a source of conflict. “Exile carries a dream, it carries the desire for something else, for somewhere else. And it always carries hope anyway. But there is a difference between travelers. Those who leave of their own free will know that they can come back whenever they want. What characterizes exile is that we do not know if and when we will return. »
A numerous periphery
Born in 1973 in Douala, the economic capital of Cameroon, on the edge of the Atlantic, Hemley Boum, for her part, has not strictly speaking experienced exile. After studying anthropology in Yaoundé and foreign trade and marketing in Lille, in the north of France, she worked in several countries on the African continent, before choosing to settle in France.
And this, because of the “contradictions” that inhabit it, constitutes a real wealth in the eyes of the writer. “It gives you a look from a periphery. I don’t know if the world has a center, but whatever it is, the periphery is huge. There are very many of us, even more numerous, who live on the periphery, telling plural stories that do not fit into the national novel and writing singular stories in the hope that they embrace other singularities. »
“I think that our lives are also eminently romantic,” continues Hemley Boum, evoking the entire African continent, “and I also really wanted to tell them, and that they exist in literature like the stories that I read when I I was a child. »
And that’s what she’s been doing ever since. The clan of women (L’Harmattan, 2010), which addressed the question of polygamy in an African village at the beginning of the 20th centurye century, quickly followed by If to love, The resistance fighters (La Cheminante, 2012 and 2015) and The days come and pass (Gallimard, 2019), which brought together three generations of women facing the contemporary history of Cameroon.
In his own way, Hemley Boum has chosen to bring the periphery to life and make it heard for us. A country of 28 million inhabitants where there are 309 languages, Cameroon has two official languages, a legacy of European colonization: French and English – an asymmetrical institutional bilingualism which has been the source of sometimes violent linguistic clashes in over the last few years.
Thus, we are not surprised to occasionally find in the dialogue passages in “camfranglais”, a mixture of French, English and Douala slang, such as: “Guys, we’re talking about the rounds we go se falla, let’s find each other…” Or “school is for you like that”.
In The fisherman’s dreamjust as in other of his novels where they occupy a particular place, women are the pillars of the family and society, true models.
“I am often told that I write feminist novels. I agree, admits the novelist. But I think what is striking, perhaps, is that I am describing women who are “total subjects”. They are fully in their lives. » They make mistakes, have loves, have sorrows, are joyful or sensual.
“They make decisions for which they pay the price, but they are subject. And the women I grew up with, adds Hemley Boum, they are like that. »