Letter to Tita (Volume 1)

Jeanne Marie Rosette Abou'Ou

Description

Letter to Tita is a concentrate of wisdom that lets out important information on the wealth of the dying African cultural heritage. This first volume conveys a nostalgic description of a daily atmosphere of Zilan-village, "that large village buried away in the equatorial forest", before the intrusion of foreign habits and customs, "at that time" when nature and man still lived in mutualism.

Découvrez toute la collection Harmattan Cameroun !

Sujets

• Romans
• Littérature
• Nouvelles
• Harmattan Littérature

Informations

• Publié par: L'Harmattan
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 23
• EAN13: 9782296531536
• Langue: Français
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 8 Mo

Extrait

Jeanne Marie Rosette Abou’ou

Letter to Tita

Volume 1

Prefaces by Jacques Fame Ndongo and Jacques Philippe Tsala Tsala

Lettres camerounaises

Letter to Tita

Lettres camerounaises Collection dirigée par Gérard-Marie Messina La collectionLettres camerounaises présente l’avantage du positionnement international d’une parole autochtone camerounaise miraculeusement entendue de tous, par le moyen d’un dialogue dynamique entre la culture regardante – celle du Nord – et la culture regardée – celle du Sud, qui devient de plus en plus regardante. Pour une meilleure perception et une gestion plus efficace des richesses culturelles du terroir véhiculées dans un rendu littéraire propre, la collectionLettres camerounaises s’intéresse particulièrement à tout ce qui relève des œuvres de l’esprit en matière de littérature. Il s’agit de la fiction littéraire dans ses multiples formes : poésie, roman, théâtre, nouvelles, etc. Parce que la littérature se veut le reflet de l’identité des peuples, elle alimente la conception de la vision stratégique. Déjà parus Eugène Abel NTOH,Tempête sur le cocotier, 2013. Grégoire NGUEDI,Coup de foudre à Bouraka, 2013. Careen PILO,Quand l’espoir se réveille…,2013. Josué Delamour FOUMANE FOUMANE,La récompense d’un arriviste, 2013. Benoît NDI,La Rose de Jérusalem, 2013. Martial ATEBA NOMO,L’adopté, 2013. Larmahi ZAMEDJO,Les hommes rompent le silence, 2012. Camille NKOA ATENGA,Jalousie de femmes et complicités coupables, 2012. Raviel KARMADY,Chasse-mouches, 2012. Moïse FEUNKAM TALLA,Lettres à une génération sacrifiée, 2012. Joseph Franck BONNY,Nébuleuse de larmes, 2012. Émile ESSONO TSIMI,Le métier d’aimer, 2012.

Jeanne Marie Rosette Abou’ou Letter to Tita

Volume 1

Translated from French by Maurice Ngompe

Prefaces by Jacques Fame Ndongo and Jacques Philippe Tsala Tsala

© L’Harmattan, 2013 5-7, rue de l’Ecole-Polytechnique, 75005 Paris http://www.librairieharmattan.com [e-mail] [e-mail] ISBN : 978-2-343-00482-2 EAN : 9782343004822

Preface

of Jacques FAME NDONGO

In the preface ofNouveaux contes d'AmadouKOUMBA by Birago Diop, Léopold Sedar Senghor writes :« Everything lives, everything posseses a soul. »The enticing letter to Tita by Jeanne Marie Rosette Abou'ou illustrates that animism, an essential characteristic of African literature. In the first volume, Edima reveals :

« Our beloved Tita was the guarantor of tradition... He was regularly found talking to a tree, to water, to stars, to the sun or to an animal. »

In this recreation of the world using the imaginary of writing, realism and naturalism combine with autobiography. In the second volume that you are going to read, the general picture that is drawn under the pen of this young novelist is that of a forest with huts, rivers, a countryside path and agricultural activities. By pushing the evocation further, a wild splendour whose sight is the source of amazement and wonder emerges from the slopes of a mountain. A morning breeze crosses the reader by making him breathe in a virginal flower. Melancholic and soft rains make a deep and delicious smell of wet land rise. People sleep under the caress of tree leaves whose shadow dives into the bottom of the dormant water of a river that rocks you.

Not far from that mirror that flows, a spring gets colder at the touch of rocks, twigs and roots. But before continuing to accompany and restitute the springing of this poetic sensitivity, what is the subject inLetter to Tita ?Here is the story.

Edima, son of Monetita and grandson of Tita has had enough. He resorts to writing to release himself, a kind of epistolary therapy. People who have died, especially Tita, should know that everything has changed in the village, that traditional values, symbols of nobility of the equatorial forest

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that the latter never stopped perpetuating are growing weak to the advantage of an uncontrollable wave of iconoclastic behaviours.

The author paints all those realities with a relief and an observation truth that puts it up, full of life, before the curiosity of the reader. To this colourful realism, her rich imagination comes to mingle with all the games of the most unrestrained fancy. It is this merging of realism and fancy that makes the charm of this stirring story.

It cheerfully trangresses the real through words that come from the abstraction of the lexicon and that come out the flatness of the images of the dictionary to enter into the palpable universe of beings and things where the sign is no longer arbitrary and refers to its own concreteness.

This nostalgic shimmering portrait on the life and changes of Zilan, a small yardstick village in which everything is transformed to the beat of a modernity that, with violence, knocks at the door of animal autonomy, almost vegetable of those inhabitants and that compel recognition to the detriment of a modus vivendi whose values fade.

Mothers of children in Zilan,Edima writes,no longer know how to use gorilla's bones against fractures, they no longer fasten ropes with pearls on children's hips in order to prevent sicknesses, neither even grind kitchen charcoal to cure children's stomach aches. But if Jeanne Marie Rosette Abou'ou escapes from the explanations which often confine the writer in the yoke of some definitions, what can justify well the great presence of African tradition in her beautiful novel ? And why can we talk about her fascination for her maternal culture ? In another preface, this time the one of a catalogue of exhibitions of Matisse - Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire

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compares Matisse to a burst orange. That fruit metaphore applies perfectly to Jeanne Marie Rosette Abou'ou. In her bursting, each drop of the sap of the novelist attemps to reach her cultural and traditional origins, on the sides of South Cameroon Region, between the Dja and the Lobo, between the Lobe and the Lokoundje, between the Mvila and the Ntem.

And if one can guess the passion of this young novelist for culture, we don't know her cultural passion inLetter to Tita. Of course, there are heads and tails, tradition an modernity. There is especially the praising of tradition that embalms the words of her thought. We shall see how, under the form of a letter, she looks for the truth in a past, more or less far to present it to the reader today.

Through a victorious liveliness of spirit and a dominant imagination, her book communicates a personal experience that subsumes all the others which are the same. The sonority of the style uses the impressions of the reader in order to affect him. The genius that dwells in and filters the flow of inspiration of the writer seems to evoke her life.

This repertoire correspondance is therefore going to serve as pretext to the writer to describe, with vehement dexterity, the devastations of modernism in an ambiguous picture that puts in parallel two eras : the traditional era of Tita and the modern era of Edima. Everything is kept turning over : marriage, sex equality, religion, incest, funerals...

like Honoré de Balzac and Emile Zola, Jeanne Marie Rosette Abou'ou depicts the society of her time through the damages of globalization that incline her pen towards commitment, thus denouncing the absurdity of the dangers of modernity on traditions. A modernity that comes to give to her memories a dramatic and melancholic echo. Her story speaks in praise of the greatness of traditions. Christian values are not left out in the damages, in the image of the old

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