Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella by Frieda Ekotto

“Everyone knew what children, young girls, women had to endure. They kept silent, even though they were bursting with remorse. They told themselves, “Let the secret be kept as long as the ancestors shall live.” But every secret, whatever it may be, is uncovered someday.”

 Don’t Whisper Too Much is a novel first published in 2001 (though at under 100 pages more regarded in English as a novella) by a Cameroonian lesbian author whose queer work was the first such fiction to portray African women-loving-women positively.

Yet this book surprisingly put me off a bit. Perhaps, I am simply culturally ignorant of context since while I know a good deal about French literature, I cannot claim the same about Cameroon where author Frieda Ekotto was born and too where she has set these stories. Maybe my literacy is slipping as I was rather preoccupied with the generational patriarchal cycle depicted that link these women with abuse. Similar to points in the introduction by Lindsey Green-Simms, I think the nuggets found here are about silence and confinement— the many methods of oppression and resistance how one may or may not engage with such. The work is also interesting in the way it’s written. Rhythmical, different narrators, voices through texts in text, translated expertly to English in 2019 by Corine Tachtiris. Yes, writing quite a long time coming both in original publication and new editions.

Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella made up of short vignettes originally published in 2010, and the second part of the book, may be more approachable in style though, colloquial. These pieces written in majority from the perspective of a young woman named Chantou.But again, neither light reading for what is a small tome.

I’d propose these works for those interested in ‘path-breaking’ literature.

Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella by Frieda Ekotto, is available in English translated by Corine Tachtiris, in print and digital from Bucknell University Press