Description
Through the lens of the Beba experience, this short-story collection delves into the weight of history and memory, charting the restless space between the ancestors’ home and the distant lands of the diaspora. Spanning rural, urban, and transnational landscapes, the stories document the Cameroonian experience against a backdrop of natural disasters, deep-seated ethnic and social friction, political repression and civil war. The Prologue serves as a thematic foundation, using “Mourning . . . in distant lands” to introduce the twin burdens of grief and physical separation driving a narrative arc that spans the legacy of colonialism and the current tragedies of the Anglophone Crisis and Coffin Revolution. Bookending the collection, “Woman of the Lake” and “Dear Citizens of the USA” look back at the 1986 Lake Nyos Disaster and the 2014 Ebola pandemic, respectively, to reflect on the intertwined burdens of history and global politics and serve as thematic anchors, examining how the weight of history and the complexities of international politics shape Cameroonian lives. By framing the collection with stories about these natural disasters, the author highlights the persistent influence of history and global politics on the African experience.
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Contents
Prologue ix
A Hunter’s Tale 1
Woman of the Lake 8
Plantain Leaf Baby 41
Land of My Dreams 60
Lockdown 79
Ode to Guanajuato 108
Dear Citizens of the USA 126
About the author 141
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Reviews
“In Woman of the Lake, Makuchi dances flawlessly between the idea of “home” and the ways that it fails to remain as it was when we left it. She takes readers on journeys of memory and mourning, to Cameroon and beyond, to war, to lost ways of being, to Diasporas far from home, to places where—as she writes—“comfort and chaos” are “strangely kindred.” This collection is a magnum opus that lingers long after the last page is turned.”
— Dr. Sheila Smith McKoy, award‑winning poet, fiction writer, and filmmaker; recipient of the 2020 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Prize and the 2025 Teaching Literature Award; Pulitzer and Pushcart Prize nominee.
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Makuchi takes the reader leisurely into her volume of short stories, and once there, unravels the folklore of her Anglophone Cameroonian people. She moves into modern Cameroonian society with the political division between Anglophone and Francophone sides, the “lockdown,” traditional worship and Christianity, and the immigrant’s cultural identity in the USA. The stories not only entertain but also teach lessons through the exploration of African spirituality and Western science on the explosion of gas from Lake Nyos in the mid-1980s. There is often in each story a conflict, and the strongest ones are between traditionalists and scientists; two sisters, one living in Douala, the economic capital of Cameroon, and the other desperately in the secessionist Anglophone side; and between two brothers, the senior a traditionalist and his junior a Christian. One cannot read the book without being struck by the beauty of the description of both “Woman of the Lake” and “Plantain Leaf Baby.” In the latter story, the storyteller presents so well a woman in labor, who delivers her baby in a traditional environment on her own, as if recounting a personal experience. Fonki and his mother in “Lockdown” live where young men have been cannibalized by the civil war. Proverbs and other wise sayings, poetry, and other devices make this short story collection an engaging work. It surely expands one’s consciousness with many things to remember about the culture of the writer’s society.
—Tanure Ojaide, poet, writer, and Frank Porter Graham Professor of Africana Studies, The University of North Carolina, Charlotte
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