The Cowrie Necklace: A Collection of Poems

Preface

iii Preface As a work of poetry, this book expresses my “overflow of emotions”. It is a portrayal of thoughts that seized me at one point or another and compelled me not to stop until I had penned them down; in other words, liberated them. From that point of view, I am an odd human being because I write at all types of time and in all types of places. I have become so used to these moments of “poetic pregnancy” that I always carry with me a pen and a notebook, even when I am going to the toilet. The Cowrie Necklace is a collection of poems spanning a period of about a year and a half. I wrote the poems whenever the occasion arose. As a poem caught me and took shape within me, the theme or subject matter also began to form itself in me like a foetus in a pregnant woman. This book is the sum total of poems to which I “gave birth” In my poems, I raise issues - some of them controversial. In some cases, I do not provide solutions. That is not unusual because when I write, I hear and listen to some little voice in my head which dictates to me what I should write and when I should write. The voice is so dominant that when I start a poem, I am not sure at the outset how it will end up. Although I may have my own little idea about what I want to recount, in the end things turn out otherwise. The question may be asked as to why I am writing a fifth book of poetry. The answer is that when I write I do not count. Right now I do not know the number of unpublished manuscripts I have. I do not know where all my poetry manuscripts are. I do not even want to know. This is because, whenever I write, the intention is not to publish, although publishing may be the outcome. I just write and satisfy iv nature’s urge to “deliver yet another baby”. The truth of the matter is that each time I finish writing a book, I feel the same kind of relief a woman feels after going through the trauma of child birth. The title of the book, The Cowrie Necklace, is taken from an encounter I had at the Commercial Avenue in Bamenda, with a pretty girl walking towards me wearing cowries as part of her hair-do. In our tradition, only wives of Fons (traditional rulers) wear cowries, to indicate that they are “royal property”. So when I asked this girl and she said she “just wore them”, I thought that was unusual enough to constitute a poem. The poem on her was written on the spot, although she never saw it because she was in a hurry. In fact, in the poem, I call her The Girl in a Hurry. Apart from inspiration from chance encounters, I am also inspired by my personal appreciation of people, places and things. In such a case, I can dedicate a particular poem to a particular person. Such is the case with ‘Time Out’, dedicated to Pamela Abeyie, a colleague of mine at the now defunct West Africa magazine in London. The poem, ‘Equity’, is dedicated to Baron Pienyam Teku, a childhood friend with whom we did holiday jobs at the Pinyin Area Cooperative Union. ‘That which we Treasure’ is dedicated to Ralph Awa, my English Language and English Literature teacher at Sacred Heart College in Bamenda. Mr. Awa demystified poetry for me, especially in Form Three where he dissected and laid bare for us, classical poems such as ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, ‘Snake’, ‘The Journey of the Magi’, and ‘To Autumn’, to name those. Sometimes a poem originates from something I heard someone say. It could be, ‘A Glass of Red Orange’ as was the case with the poem by that name dedicated to Linda, “The Journey Companion” with whom I once travelled from Douala to Buea. On other occasions, when the urge to write a v poem has grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, I have asked someone nearby to give me a short phrase, which I have then used as the first line of a poem done on and for that person. Such is the case with the poem, ‘Life as I...