Evembe's Sur la terre en passant and the Poetics of Shame

In Sur ta terre en passant, Evembe fashions a poetics of shame from the ordinary experiences of life in a large African city (Yaounde). He does it in such a way that the hallucinatory qualities and scabrous details of one individual's state of consciousness mirror the malaise which characterizes the larger social reality. The protagonist Iyoni (whose name means «shame» in the dialect of Evembe's native Kribi) experiences both misery and social respectability in an environment where traditional values have been lost, only to be replaced by artificial, dehumanizing hierarchies and an attitude of materialistic acquisitiveness. Despite the mysterious illness which is eroding his will to live, Iyoni always attempts to maintain a dignified pose, and he seeks to project his own poetic sensitivity and his morality of love and compassion onto the larger social fabric, but his physical body proves incapable of sustaining his ideals, and when he regards himself as a machine which ingests food and ejects clots of blood and excrement, he has begun to lose confidence in himself as a loving, feeling person capable of working toward a more noble social order. The resultant anxiety and shame permeate Evembe's novel, which has been undeservedly neglected due to its implicit antiestablishment critique of church, state, and the Negritude movement. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol4/iss2/5 EVEMBE'S SUR LA TERRE EN PASSANT AND THE POETICS OF SHAME RICHARD BJORNSON The Ohio State University When Francois-Borgia Marie Evembe's Sur la terre en passant was published in 1966, it received glowing reviews and a prestigious literary prize.' The first edition sold out quickly. Since then, this provocative first novel has never been reprinted, and few critics have accorded it much attention.' This neglect is unfortunate, because Evembe has imaginatively depicted a social and psychological phenomenon of enormous significance for PostIndependence Africa. As traditional culture and economic organization lose their hold over village life,thousands of young people flock to overcrowded urban areas, but there are jobs for very few of them, and those who do find work often discover that their new situation demands moral compromise and breeds a different kind of anxiety. This is precisely what happens to Iyoni, the protagonist in Evembe's novel, and to the extent that he is caught in a web of socio-economic forces which shape the destinies of countless individuals in a large number of African countries, his story is a typical one-so mundane that it would hardly merit a mention in the Cameroon newspapers for which Evembe has worked during the past fifteen years.However, by employing a direct, concrete idiom perfectly suited to the hallucinatory qualities and scabrous details of one particular man's experience of life under these circumstances, Evembe shocks readers into an awareness of the intense suffering which is inflicted routinely on young Africans by this process. He also makes the state of consciousness behind this particular man's tragedy come alive. Characterized by vivid sense impressions and a preoccupation with nausea and filth, 147 1 Bjornson: Evembe's Sur la terre en passant and the Poetics of Shame Published by New Prairie Press 148 STCL, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Spring 1980) Iyoni's thoughts are permeated by an omnipresent sense of shame, and it is this shame that Evembe weaves into a satirical yet philosophical meditation on the vitality of the human spirit under duress and on its yearning for love and truth in an imperfect world. In effect, he has fashioned a poetics of shame from the ordinary experiences of daily life in a large African city. In the language of his native Kribi, Iyoni's name literally means «shame», and after coming to the Cameroon capital Yaounde in search of a government job, he finds it impossible to escape the emotion suggested by his name. Near the beginning of his stay in the city, he falls ill. In his weakened condition, he is obliged to depend on the charity of friends for the basic necessities of life. Although he is shy, indecisive and passive, he is also idealistic, sensitive and proud. He never wants to appear ridiculous in the eyes of other people and therefore continually strives to maintain a dignified pose. Despite dizziness and fatigue, he struggles to stand erect. When asked about his failure to keep a doctor's appointment, he claims to have been on a business trip, although he was unemployed at the time. In the flirtatious Marie-Chantal's apartment, he feigns nonchalance to camouflage his nervousness. In each case, he is attempting to make others believe in a masculine dignity he does not actually possess. Nevertheless, he recognizes the insubstantiality of his pretentions and feels ashamed of them. In fact, he is always and everywhere ashamed-ashamed of his dependency, ashamed of a perishable, ridiculous body that refuses to obey his commands to adopt dignified poses, ashamed of clothes that brand him an outsider in respectable society, ashamed of a life in which he has accomplished nothing at an age when Napoleon had conquered half of Europe, but most of all, he is ashamed of being ashamed. Iyoni's mysterious illness is never specifically identified; it might be chronic diarrhea or dysentary or even the cancer he fears. The crucial point is not the name of the disease, but the fact that something is causing his body to eject clots of blood and horrible chunks of decaying organic matter. Whatever that something might be, it is not only physical; it is also spiritual, and it has been caused by conditions imposed on him by the same forces that are tearing apart the fabric of traditional African society. The two most important of these forces are urbanization and bureaucratization. As Cameroon moved from a subsistence economy rigidly controlled by French colonial authorities to a money economy administered by 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 4, Iss. 2 [1980], Art. 5 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol4/iss2/5 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1082