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Chapter Five Women and Sexuality If the novelists discussed in Chapter Four are generally pre-occupied with the dark underbelly of the Cameroonian society, those in this chapter are concerned with women, particularly with hetero-sexual intimacy between a man and a woman, a relationship that, as will be seen below, often gives rise to scandalous sexual behaviour. In some cases the price to pay for sexual irresponsibility is high, indeed. The first Cameroonian to publish a major novel in English, Mbella Sonne Dipoko, is unique among Anglophone writers in the sense that unlike many of his compatriots who make their creative debut with the novelistic art form by first casting a romantic gaze at their pristine, traditional past, he eschews obsession with cultural documentation, thematizing, instead, sexual gratification. Whether the story is set in France, as his first novel A Few Nights and Days (1970) is, or in Cameroon, as the second Because of Women (1970) is, Dipoko is hugely fascinated with the subject of the erotic relationship between a man and a woman. Indeed, his novels resonate with sex and would mean much less outside the sexual context. A Few Nights and Days1 , to be simply referred to hereafter as A Few Nights, deals with young people who fall in love in Paris where they live, work and study. There is Doumbe a Cameroonian, who is in love with a French girl, Thérèse, on the one hand, and, on the other, Laurent, a French boy in love with Bibi, a Swedish girl. Doumbe and Thérèse are seriously preparing to get married, but Thérèse’s bourgeois father, M. Jacques Vaele, is so strongly opposed to the engagement that his disappointed daughter ends up committing suicide. An important theme emerging from the text is thus the racial barrier to true love, for it is hard for M. Vaele to digest the idea that his daughter and sole child is eager to get married to a black African and to live in Africa. But an even more important theme is Doumbe’s pre-occupation with sexual pleasure from women in general, a subject he intends to make the central concern of his future writing: After Thérèse and Bibi, there was Ndome. But with her it was a return. I became involved with the three of them. It was risky. But I was going to write. I had to live, and the pleasure which women gave, their life, was the very depth of existence. I liked women. I shall write and immortalize their names: Thérèse, Bibi, Ndome, and those who had been before them, and those who will come after (65). 114 The Cameroonian Novel of English Expression: An Introduction Promiscuity necessarily breeds infidelity, a lifestyle that defines the behaviour of the young people in love. Doumbe is a kind of sexual scoundrel, a libertine in love with Thérèse but who entertains no qualms sleeping with her best friend, Bibi. Laurent is in love with Bibi but also makes a pass at Thérèse, her confidant. On her part Bibi is not at all bothered by her conscience when she dates Doumbe even as she knows that she is in love with Laurent, Doumbe’s crony. In this city game of loose sexual comportment, the faithful Thérèse stands out as the only naïve lover and greatest victim of treachery in love. These young people’s world is more or less a middle class one of relatively comfortable living, sustained by material monetary supplies, in the case of Thérèse, from lucrative capitalist investments in far away Ivory Coast where her father has a chain of businesses, or, in that of Doumbe, from the hard sweat of his peasant parents back home in Cameroon. Their lives gravitate around books, lecture-halls, dance-halls, cafés, bars and dates, conditions conducive to flirtation and falling in or out of love. A tale constructed from a single dominant focalization, Doumbe’s, A Few Nights is a readable, lyrical narrative that is difficult for the reader to drop until he has reached the end. Through the agency of the focalizer, the author then brings in the dramatic dimension wherein he introduces the other characters to expose their feelings, emotions and thoughts. On the whole the characters are realistically constructed, and the dialogues beautifully realized. Though scripted in English the text’s original medium is French, the dominant language of...

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