Description
Litany of a Foreign Wife, Nnane Ntube’s beautifully crafted debut collection of poetry projects images of a society marked by instability, feelings of homelessness, disorientation, oppression and neglect. Through her storytelling style of poetry, she interrogates humanity’s existence in a context where life’s meanings are gradually fading and absurdities are becoming the order of the day. The poems are adorned with the faculties of sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch which trigger fear, insecurity, frustration, complaints and escape, thus provoking the longing for hope, home, love and peace.
Praise for “Litany of a Foreign Wife”
Nnane Ntube’s Litany of a Foreign Wife is couched with anticipation, dread, apprehension and violence. Her poems are characterized by hints, deduction, suggestion, and implication. Sometimes her poems are couched with connotation and denotation, but most often with dismay and cruelty that will make the reader’s heart beat with trepidation. The diversity of Nnane’s imagery is extensive; her diction is far-reaching. Litany of a Foreign Wife is indeed a perplexing work of art, but it remains a veritable gem of artistic imagination that perplexes the reader. Nnane’s personae leave the reader with clues that must be unravelled, riddles that must be solved, and enigmas that must be deciphered before the final meaning of each poem is revealed. Her persona (in each of her poems) is at times direct, but most often evasive and searching for a place or someone to lean on. The entire collection is replete with suggestion and evocation that hint at enigmas within each poem in whose matrix the subject matter of the poem must be found.
— Babila Mutia, Professor of African Literature and Creative Writing, École Normale Supérieure, University of Yaounde I
Yocep –
A captivating collection with a simple diction that captures local images in the most simplistic way to decry situations of conflicts, human rights abuses, discrimination, etc., that leave untold consequences.
Danielle EYANGO, author of Le parfum de ma mère –
💓 My note on reading Litany of a foreign wife, a collection of poems by Nnane Ntube.
… The least one can say is that Nnane’s poetry is very manly… I can say dynamic, but it can’t transpire the ferocity, boldness, and even sexual rythm of her poetry…
” … I am caressed by the careless hands of fear
I am romanced by the rough fingers of hatred
My brother’s blood is now cooking oil
My husband’s body, chicken for supper
… Butcher me with your eyes,
Slaughter me with your words,
I shall kiss your weapons and take them to bed
I shall remove the man in them
And make them eunuchs
Your brutality shall impregnate me,
And i shall give birth to warriors…”
… Do you see those traditional african fights or traditional dances…? Do you feel the libido in the rough beauty of those sweating bodies…? Do you feel the struggle and pain, or emotions, that very libido increases…? If you do, then you see, then you feel Nnane’s poetry.
For, she is a HE crying with the heart of a SHE, while spitting words of a HE. Nnane is androgynously delicious reading.
Her poetry happens to be very much and deeply influenced, by the war in the NOSO region, and pain of our anglophone brothers and sisters… Which i find very normal. The poet is not some kind of coward-dreamer living far away from reality… He is a griot singing loud to God, the tears of the world he lives in.
I love the eclectic sound of Nnane’s writing. She roars like an injured lion, spitting on your face wounds from her woomb… Then, there she is, dancing on some kind of negro blues, that particular melancholic rythm African American started right from the cotton fields… Actually, my favorite poem is drowned in that negro blues’ melancholy.
With that poem, Nnane broke in, without permission, in the very narrow and secret garden of my favorite poets of all time. The poem is”Knock ( the sound that kills many)”, however Nnane did not bother to knock at the door of my garden before coming in. She broke in. Like a burglar in the night.
I do celebrate talents when they are still very much alive. You need to read Nnane Ntube’s Litany of a foreign wife. The girl is a genius. As simple as that. 💓
Danielle EYANGO,
Author of collection of poems Le parfum de ma mère
Sigeh Leonard Lenjo –
In her début poetry collection Nnane Ntube successfully craft themes of socio-political protest with esthetic wit to explore, satirize, and lampoon the economic, cultural, political and social statement that strangles governance in Cameroon. “Litany of a foreign wife” is both the societal boil (cultural turmoil) of an ill governed society, and the psychological instability that has injured the mind of the the deprived and marginalized citizenship. Her topics are equivocal of the stalemate in which her society finds itself. Yet the poet imploys mock satire to disguise the guilty and water- down the gravity of this social barbarism. This satire against political ill governance is evident in “Dance now to Dance no More” and “Let Another Song”. The peot decries inertia, corruption, marginalization, violence, rape, incest, culminating into, and culminated by war.
In the light of the pioneers of Cameroon literature in English, starting with Sanki Máimo, Mbella Sonne Dipoko, just to name this two, the poet/activist rallies her mental and artistic energy to fight against social injustice. Nnane is not a square peg in a square hole, for she bridges some of the conventions indebted to her literary ancestry, with post modern concerns that go a long way to appeal for a global audience.
Her poetry is an emerging voice to reckon with. Through her poems the veil of injustice over the Cameroonian society is unveiled.