The Radio and Other Stories: A Review
By El Maarouf Driss Moulay
G is a young man from Cameroon, who leaves his distant village in the northwestern part of Cameroon to do a PhD in a small Bavarian town in Germany. G’s crossing soon turns into a profound ontological interaction with small things, from shoe polish to a radio ‘helplessly pressed to the corner by a mound of books’. G is not insensible to the big matters, big struggles and big narratives of the world, but his commitment to small stories and histories is a commitment to the footnotes of the social text that gets often relegated to the margin of the page, yet which gives the best insight into the text’s meaning. G manipulates historical, spatial and social diminutive keyholes to unlatch unto vast and never-ending theatres of wisdom that are not less extraordinary than the open-sesame countersign Ali Baba manipulates to liberate a cavern from its endless treasures.
G’s meticulous eye travels nimbly past random everyday situations, carefully examining a market incident here, a barbershop space there, a librarian’s memory elsewhere, formulating accounts that paint African and European everyday landscapes in a beautiful language which is, just like life, is at times comical and at times deeply solemn. G does all of the foregoing without failing to construct multiple depths, academic and literary, for even the tiniest nuts and bolts out there. G’s is an intellectual and existential predicament shrouded in feathered details, emulating the Cameroonian dancer in G’s village that performs behind a mabuh mask, and who, as he dances, raises questions on identity, human rights, peace/war, and, above all, life and death. G, indeed, crafts a perplexingly convoluted account on being and not being, ‘even before meeting Hamlet’. He recounts electrifying stories on departures and arrivals, on dreams sent as envoys yet which either reach their destination or get lost halfway. The first scene shows G leaving his old apartment in the small town of Bayreuth for a new, bigger apartment. Later we realize his mythology is bigger than a Ghana-must-go bag, carrying a nomenclature of possible and impossible departures, arrivals, and declined tickets, starring travelers fighting their way forward and, alas, ‘boat riders reaching the coast’. G speaks like the radio you must not turn off not only because it carries with the floating waves the news and the stories of the world you (don’t) know, but because it raises questions about life and death, sorrow and joy, pain and bliss, that will stay unanswerable as they are pressing, as far as the world’s flowing skirts runneth. G’s quest is less about finding answers, more about asking questions, that will, and surely will be asked in ebbing todays and flowing tomorrows, in permanent heres and cancellable elsewheres.
The story attains a marvelous feat, with G’s voice harkening back and forth between home and away, through different passages that many times end in loss, passages that are punctuated with multiple deaths, private and public, spiritual and worldly. The book delivers a modern saga that feels enormously epic, making the reader thirstier than ever to peruse it time and time again.
G’s account is situated at the boundary between fiction and reality, deeply philosophical at times, acutely empirical at others, throbbing in comical colors and morbid airs. G offers the witty but sad, super-candid but devastating, all-true-but fantastic account of a man who sought to get a PhD but ended up in a journey of self-exploration, psychological reconciliation, revival of lost dreams, and reconnection with roots and local people. G ruminates struggles happening in the farthest corners of the earth, daydreaming about what the world would be like in the absence of so much killing and violence. And he then immediately begins to embroider a portrait of several deaths (between Africa, Europe, and America) that have had an immense impact on his life and that of his closest family members. Instead of dwelling on the glorious stations of his life, G rolls up his sleeves and fixates his attention on well-adjusted lenses, critical and sympathetic, covering thus the extreme south shores of a neglected everydayness. G’s brilliance resides in his power to craft a travel machine out of seemingly insignificant possessions and conditions. People who meet G may well want to believe they know G, and G himself may well want to feel he knows himself, but none of them, not even the readers of G, will be able to flaunt the same amount of confidence of knowing self fifty yards deep into this thousand-miles book. This book is fraught with dangerous depths, menacing walks and spectacular escape routes. You will think that the author unconsciously indulges a jargon of nomadism, throwing a series of passages, pathways, roads, short cuts all over the place until you realize that by reading along you have not only literally crossed these passages, but also helped produce what seems to be a sinister theory of death. In the midst of this realization, something magical happens. G will then have you walk back on them to come to the other deeper realization that these beaten roads, crosscuts, byways, lines, and lanes reveal a face, a human face beyond color, that throbs with stories of dancing myths, healed wounds, purging spirits, repaired pasts, forgiving presents and hopeful futures. G’s is a tale without a tale, a story without a plot, in which G, in the end, turns out to be the reader’s double self; in brief, you. This is the book you have always been looking for, the book you would not dare put down; the book that will make you cry and laugh; laugh and cry; the book you will want to kiss at the end and press against your heart like a child because you feel it has healed you inside-out and has made of you a better person. Radio and other stories is a book brimming with faith and bathing in doubt, at the same time. This paradoxical reality is more methodic than random, as it reveals the inner battles the typical Cameroonian (African) fights. It holds the mirror up to the complex conditions (local and global) that continue to shape and reshape the modern men and women of Africa who, while in Europe, still gravitate to the south. This book is spot on for a world united by God, divided by humans and back. Gil Ndi Shang has twisted an instant classic for students in African studies. Besides readers in African literature, this book is a must-read for the students of critical theory, philosophy, sociology, psychology, and cultural studies.
