Perspectives on Written Cameroon Literature in English

20. Alobwed’Epie, The Lady With A BeardYaoundé: Editions CLE, 2005.

303 20 Alobwed’Epie, , The Lady With A Beard, Yaoundé: Editions CLE, 2005. Barely under a year when he breezed his way onto the Anglophone Cameroon literary scene with his celebrated novel, The Death Certificate (November 2004), here struts Alobwed’Epie once more, and in no less a flourish, with another imaginative work bearing an even more catchy title, The Lady with a Beard, a novel that further enriches our literary landscape. The text portrays another side of the author, underscoring how it is sometimes risky to pass a definitive judgement on an artist based on a single imaginative work. If, ideologically speaking, Alobwed’Epie’s previous novel projects visionary radicalism, the present one evinces liberal humanism, both of which tendencies, in my humble opinion, should be accommodated within our imaginative writing that cannot be confined to a monolithic matrix of values. Set in the mid 1950s within the Bakossi cultural heartland in the South West Province, The Lady with a Beard is the intriguing story of Emade, the initially extraordinary and charismatic female character from whose name the novel derives its title. A widow for long at loggerheads with the men of her village because she has refused to ‘become an elephant killed at the cross-roads’ (116), Emade is, as a result, derogatorily nicknamed, ‘The Lady with a Beard’, an epithet that incidentally fits her temperament and which she accepts with equanimity. At the centre of Alobwed’Epie’s narrative, Emade is endowed with full subjectivity as well as an arrogant and contemptuous discourse, particularly towards the men and Inferior Others. Hers is a counter discourse confronting the 304 hegemony of patriarchy. She defies the men and women of Atieg and Muabag. In many ways she comports herself like a ‘malewoman’ as she accomplishes several manly tasks even better than the men themselves. Through various rituals related to marriage, birth and death, involving song, recitation, invocation, narration and, above all drum communication, Emades proves herself an adept of her culture. However, her expert oral performances and other feats, which invariably put her on a collision course with the men whose prerogatives she arrogates to herself, are controversial, giving rise to rather mixed reactions: admiration as well as criticism. The Lady with a beard holds men in great contempt and debunks time-honoured ideas of male chauvinism. She subverts the prevailing gender hierarchy, standing it more or less on its head; she thus reverses the familiar gender allegory of man/woman, into woman/man, thus “holding the world by the neck” (117). In her feminist challenge of patriarchal authority, Emade stands virtually alone in the whole of Mbuogmut Clan; even her dearest sister, Ahone, is opposed to Emade’s extremist feminism that threatens to undo her. Paradoxically, Emade’s intimate attachment to her culture, in a way, becomes her bane; for it is her strong belief in superstition, as she seeks the help of diviner priests and ‘protection’ for herself and her lone daughter, Ntube, that proves, in the end, that Emade is only an ordinary woman, after all. Confronted with traditional situations that seriously threaten her life and that of her beloved child, Emade behaves in a way that shows she is, after everything, only a timorous and fearful mother, seeking protection like any other human being; she thus acts in a manner that betrays her as ‘a cockroach with a mane seeking refuge elsewhere’ (104). Therefore, in Emade Alobwed’Epie first builds up an admirable female character and then cuts her down to size; he constructs a heroine who deconstructs patriarchy only to be deflated herself at the end of the novel. His text purportedly 305 sets out to foreground the woman. It initially valorizes her but then discredits her at the end; it places her on the pedestal but then pulls the rug from under her feet, indicating the failure of a woman who once posed as a ‘malewoman’. Towards the end of the novel, Emade discovers to her chagrin that even in the domain of divination certain powers and abilities are available only to priests and not to priestesses. Very much against her wish and when she cannot undo what has been done, it dawns on Emade that her puzzle has been solved by a mere male, palm-wine tapper as “she moved away in humiliation” (117). Ultimately, then, the author thematizes the limitation of the woman, despite her occasional knack for rising...