Crying in Hiccoughs

Introduction

vii Introduction Celebrations marking African countries’ independence were hardly over when the crackle of gunfire and blasts of bombs deafened the enraptured participants and set them fleeing helter-skelter to havens across the seas – the lands of the castigated colonialists. Those who could/cannot flee the carnage but survive(d) miraculously were/are made to incessantly celebrate new victories : but what victories? What victories do the battered, despoiled and estranged victims celebrate? Is wallowing in ignorance, alcohol, and constantly fleeing from warfronts the prize of independence? Do vain promises makeup for the lost glory? Bate Besong, had caught the spirit of Alobwed’Epie’s political works when in an article in Eden newspaper 20 Febuary 2006, said, “The Death Certificate discards the universal for the immediate and local and perceives Cameroonians as mainly responsible for their problems. There are suggestions everywhere of avarice, megalomania, brutality, squalor, kleptomania and necrophilia. The economic situation is drearily familiar. For, Alobwed’Epie’s novel transcribes the Fanonian hypotheses that when you examine at close quarters the continuous rot; it is evident that what parcels out the Cameroonian irrational is to begin with the fact of belonging or not belonging to a given province…” Put in these perspectives, really what parcels out the Cameroonian and African irrational is to begin with the fact of belonging or not belonging to the military and the clan in power. And once that god headedness is established, the person becomes “a prankster, gangster and psychotic tyrant in the guise of a messiah…” Crying in Hiccoughs uses the rear mirror technique to capture the farce and present it in real day to day language – the language of the downtrodden. Simple as the language may viii seem to be, it is rife with versatility, insult and mind provoking imagery all aimed at watering the venom of revolution, in veiled virgins of pregnant minutes. ...