By S. Ekema Agbaw
Paradise of Love and Pain is an excellent first novel that explores the extent to which sexual promiscuity and marital infidelity disrupt the life of Cameroonian families bringing untold suffering to children and parents alike. The main plot of the novel hinges on the actions of a wealthy and free-spirited woman who poisons her husband, Mr. Peng, to indulge her sexual appetite with her selfish and arrogant boyfriend, Tom. The plot is further complicated by Lydia’s affair with her young Pastor which results in the birth of a son, whom Tom thought was his.
Although the novel opens with Ellen, Lydia’s daughter, reflecting on the death of her father and mother, the reader quickly forgets that significant detail as s/he becomes absorbed in the long flashback that explores the relationship not just between Lydia and her husband as well as Lydia and Tom, but also that of several other couples caught up in the same predicament.
These multiple sub-plots include the rape of a young girl by Tom’s father, Pa Nujam, when he was a young man in the military and his relationship with his wife, Na Kohtan; the flight of Mrs. Barnabas, Tom’s sister-in-law, to her parents in Sumba as a result of her husband’s affair with the University student, Roseline, which led to the death of their daughter, Judith; the divorce of Lydia’s sister from her husband as a result of his infidelity and the difficult relationship with her son, George, who could not get along with her boyfriend, Jean, all contribute to reinforcing the central theme of the novel—the breakdown of the Cameroonian family as a result of sexual promiscuity and marital infidelity.
Despite these multiple sup-plots, Paradise of Love and Pain is a unified and coherent novel. Langmia Kehbuma achieves structural unity in a narrative that could easily have been fragmented due to the many stories and flashbacks, by having all the minor characters related to Lydia and Tom in one way or the other. The actions and reactions of the different characters intersect with each other to create a web of intrigue, betrayal, and deception.
Another strategy the author uses to achieve structural unity while narrating multiple stories is the use of coincidence. Ellen, Lydia’s daughter decides to move in with her aunt, Elizabeth, on the same night that George, Elizabeth’s son moves out of the house after a quarrel with her mother’s boyfriend, Jean. After spending two weeks with his friend at the university campus, George decides to go to his father in Dola. In the park, he meets Tom, his aunt’s boyfriend and lover returning from Dola. This accidental encounter enables Tom to learn everything that has transpired in his absence, including the fact that Tom Jr. is actually not his son, but the Pastor’s son. This revelation from George would motivate him to plan his diabolical act to kill Lydia and the innocent child.
Paradise of Love and Pain is a compelling story told in simple straightforward language without stylistic flourishes or embellishment. The author’s style enhances the realism of the novel making it a mirror reflection of the social environment of contemporary Cameroonian society. The novel touches on other social crises in Cameroon like corruption, extreme wealth and poverty, and the Anglophone crisis, but the author never digresses from his central theme, which he explores as a matter of fact, in a dispassionate and non-judgemental manner without excessive commentary.
Langmia’s straightforward use of language and sensual style is most clearly reflected in his graphic descriptions and erotic passages which seem to present sexual relationships with pornographic details. This is ironic because although sex is so pervasive and common in Cameroonian society, open conversation about sex remains taboo in Cameroonian public discourse. In this way, Paradise of Love and Pain has broken new grounds in contemporary Cameroonian writing in English. Since Mbella Sone Dipoko’s Because of Women, no Cameroonian novel in English has explored the Cameroonian culture of sex with such candor.
As I came to the end of the novel, with Tom administering his deadly portion of acid to Lydia and the baby, Tom Jr., I started wondering why the author decided to use the equation of love and pain as a conceit for his first novel. Throughout the novel, we encounter a lot of pain, but no love. We see characters undergoing the torments of hell, not the pleasures of paradise. The most memorable actions that the reader is left with are violence, poisoning, flight, rape, suicide by drowning, quarreling, slapping children, and of course, physical sex.
By juxtaposing these two powerful emotions, love and pain, is Professor Langmia drawing the reader’s attention to the absence of love in Cameroonian culture? Is he thereby interrogating the values of a society that pursues the false gods of wealth and sex? If so, what is the alternative? We are not shown any. Rather, the characters of Paradise of Love and Pain, like those of Tsi Tsi Dangaremgba’s Nervous Conditions are trapped in a cycle of pain that seems to pass from one generation to the other.
But, unlike Nervous Conditions, where the reader is made to see the white colonialist education and religion as the source of all the pain the characters undergo, Professor Langmia does not give his Cameroonian readers the opportunity to shift responsibility by seeking answers in postcolonial theory and blaming the white man for all the pain his characters undergo.
May 9, 2022
