Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon
£18.00
About the author
Mbuh Tennu Mbuh hails from Pinyin in the North West Region of Cameroon. He obtained his B.A., Maitrise, and Doctorat de Troisieme Cycle in English Literary Studies from the University of Yaoundé (I), and holds a PhD from the University of Nottingham. He is a two-time laureate of the Bernard Fonlon Society Literary Award, and a founding member of both the Yaoundé University Poetry Club (YUPOC) and of the Anglophone Cameroon Writers Association (ACWA). Having taught in America as a Fulbright Scholar-in-Resident, Mbuh presently lectures in the Department of English Studies, University of Yaoundé I.
Review
“A Name that is Mine is an enriching contribution to
Anglophone Cameroon literary aesthetics today; a contribution which
highlights the poetics of Self that pervades Mbuh Tennu Mbuh’s writing.
This collection of poems is unique in its representation of topical
issues that animate life in transnational and geopolitical spaces.
Amongst other things, the poems are teeming with postmodernist,
postchristian, and postcolonial rhetoric which culminate in
interrogating the “ideologies of a nameless creed” that is couched in
the Graeco-Roman foundations of “civilisation”. The reader will find
delight in accompanying the poet/post… subject through the struggle to
“unstrap” the Self from the subterfuge models of life designed to
deprive him of the name that is truly his—his identity. I daresay no
reader will be disappointed by the jouissance derived from Mbuh’s
linguistic finesse that blends the formal, the colloquial, and the local
into exquisite poesy.”
Awoh Peter Foinjong, Lecturer, HTTC, University of Bamenda
“In this poetry collection, Mbuh Mbuh Tennu offers a virulent
indictment of the multifarious faces of pain which have lent a dystopian
colouring to “our” world. These poems are all at once, songs of lament,
regret, defiance and protest. The idea of naming which is a central
motif underscores the dangers of being foreign named; which implies
being claimed and owned – and more importantly the imperative of
self-naming – to claim a name and to own that name; to self-define and
to defy attempts to contravene this. This is a collection for our time;
our timelessness. It is an urgent, reflective and incisive call to stay
awake and be actors of our history.”
Blossom Ngum Fondo, Associate Professor, University of Maroua