By Ekpe Inyang, Nnane Ntube, Jude A. Fonchenalla, Franklin Agogho & MD Mbutoh
Five published poets by Spears Books pulled together to compose “Silence Warns” in the wake of the brutal killing of 7 children in Kumba, South West Region, Cameroon. The poem was first performed at the Spears Poetry Festival on Nov. 14, 2020. Poetry has served as a powerful tool of resistance and mode of bearing witness during the four-year conflict that has plagued the erstwhile West Cameroon (constituting the English-speaking South West and North West regions) of Cameroon. Learn more about this conflict and how our poets have responded to it by getting a copy of Bearing Witness edited by Joyce Ashuntantang & Dibussi Tande
#BearingWitness #Poetry #SouthernCameroons #AnglophoneCrisis #Kumba
Watch a Performance of Silence Warns
Silence Warns
Intro
[Song] by (Nnane Ntube)
[Ekpe Inyang]
What do I hear?
Surely not a melody.
No, no, no, not a melody.
But…sounds like a dirge.
No, no, not again. Not again!
Where are my grandchildren?
Where are they?
Surely not still in school!
The food is getting cold.
It’s long past time
To find them running in
For their share of food.
I’ve called out to their moms
Ring ! Ring ! Ring !
Silence peeped,
Giving such a strong warning
And I have this premonitory feeling.
My heart is beating fast.
Where are my grandchildren?
I hear voices – crying
Louder and louder.
Men, women, children crying.
Oh, now I see a crowd.
Drifting towards my house?
What do I see playing out
Before my own eyes?
I hear sounds of crickets,
In pure melancholy notes,
Calling for dusk. I see bats
Fluttering over my aching head.
A thick cloud of darkness
Covers my thinning grey hair.
Soaked in generous sweat.
Trickling down my body.
Slowly, slowly, slowly.
Like polluted Kumba Water
Searching for River Meme.
[Nnane Ntube]
When a palm tapper
breaks through grasses
leaving behind his sap to flow on cracked soil
Know the sun has poured cold tears,
Smoke did not force coal
to chase it away
unless coal has been heated
Victory
Jennifer
Princess
Telma
Rema
Chema
Renny
your blood on floor
is thunder in hearts of our ancestors
Ha ! they’ve refused to close their eyes
there, their looks dig
well but water refused to flow
even wind has turned its back on us
we have done you wrong
we failed to protect you
we failed to wipe off the dust that kept
our hearts aflame
We failed to cry
Our voices hid themselves under heavy weight of throats
though worms in stomachs vowed not to be accomplices
what happened ?
these words danced on our tongues
yet air in mouths did not push them out,
….
[Jude A. Fonchenalla]
We wanted to be brief
But your lives
Already were!
You, the grass,
Watered,
To be greener
Were altered into
The elephants’ battle field.
With your small feet,
You left grand prints!
Marks big as shoes worn
By founding fathers.
History will talk of you,
Babe Martha,
Ngarbuh Isaacs,
Foncha and cohorts.
Guns we masked
To summarize you all,
To destroy hopes,
To destroy a future.
From holy-land
To father’s land,
No one condones
With your exits.
Not even the trigger monster
Who’s already sentenced
By conscience!
You have become heroes
Before ‘great men’
[MD Mbutoh]
To you my waxed-ears uncle’s, this
is a silent progressive insanity of a
kid, decaying on ridges of adults’ hatred & sadism…& we’re caught
in this cancerous net!
Our present seems distant & stolen
from the threshold of tomorrow,
Yet so close to a bitter past
shoved in the armpit of memory.
It is a past alien to today’s infants,
Yet infants form soles on which
Score settling thrives!
We bled in Kumba, Ngarbur, Ndop…
Our infant’s earth bleeds before it
Crops to adolescence…
Oh ye leaders, our sun sets before it rises, can’t you see?
If we were not in this bitter past,
Why mortgage our future for your
Budding egos?
Our fathers, this past keeps threatening to take you away from yourself, and make the present a
disillusionment of shredded fantasies.
Today is a terrible metaphor
Of what yesterday might have thought, especially when ambition seemed to walk on tortoise’s feet.
Dear fathers, don’t put us on the
Bargaining table and make our
Heads all skulls before they’re mature.
Your forebears ploughed the field,
And you sowed & swore it.
We’ve cropped, and cropped well…
yet your boots stifle our stem and
we die before our time!
They say we’re on stage and each
One his dues as he mimics his path
Through throngs of confused trees,
Why do you hasten our exits before
Our climax?
When has a play ended before its
beginning?
When has miscarriage taken place
Before conception?
[Franklin Agogho]
Land of promise
Land of glory
Land of peace
Land of…
Bullets, politics and opened infant skulls
At the crossroads,
Preachers of freedom
In black cassocks,
Red ribbons,
And green helmets
Scream repentance
With rattles from swollen cartridges.
How will the world
Not be hell
When democracy has been demoted
To the class of superiority complex
Arrogance
And the weakness to win by all cost?
How come the search for peace,
Equality, freedom, autonomy and unity,
Found justification on the lives of those
Whose first gaze knew nothing of
A land of promise
A land of glory
A land of peace
A land of…
How come we misplaced our true identities?
Performed at the Spears Poetry Festival, November 14, 2020
