Homelands

Eric Ngalle Charles

(Seren Books, 2022)

Review by Latifa Akay

Eric Ngalle Charles traverses landscapes, generations, relationships, languages and traditions with poignancy and wisdom in his debut collection Homelands which begins in his birthplace, Cameroon, and ends in his current place of home, Cymru.

He pulls no punches in his opening poem ‘Tandami/Ngelleh’ – a take on the English nursery rhyme, ‘Hey Diddle Diddle’ – that encapsulates all at once pain, absurdity, brutality and dark humour. Nyaka Mbusra (the ‘Last Cow’) is whipped to death before she ‘jumps over the moon’. The dish and the spoon, ‘holding hands, running’, hold particular weight in the context of a collection charting the causes and courses of displacement and movement, while both the laughter and eventual disappearance of ‘the little dog’ feel unsettling. 

Dismantling this English nursery rhyme feels powerful in context, when we know culture was a significant tool in imperialist domination. While Ngalle Charles does not speak to colonial legacies explicitly, the constant transcending of binaries and borders in the poems in Homelands feels like a powerful challenge to binaries imposed by colonialism; animals, birds, spirits and nature at times interchange with humans, and figures from Bakweri folkore occur and reoccur, presenting different sites and possibilities of power and perspective. In ‘South’, pregnant poets give birth to ‘crocodiles, snakes, alligators, centipedes / scorpions, and us.’ A soothsayer speaks ‘words swooping like bats’ and, in ‘1982’, ‘our bird choirmasters turned with us, turned on us, / hissing’.

The role of the poet, and the weight of the poem, is spoken to many times in Homelands. While the president is ‘a dictator croaking / like a dying frog just before dusk’, poets are revered as ‘gods’, and in ‘Memory’, are a source of truth: ‘the poet undresses in the dark and writes. Witness, she pushes herself to tell…’. In ‘Merci Pour Ton Coeur’ (Thank You for Your Heart) we have the invocation, ‘I pray your / poems turned to stars / eagles will fly them to your homeland’.

In this collection, Ngalle Charles plays that witness role himself – in ’Iya: mother of many children’, we see a nod to the vitality of aural transmission when the speaker’s mother is ‘recounting to you names / of those who left’ – even when the ‘you’ is a baby. In ‘Tea Pluckers’, he pays tribute to ‘our mothers’ – ‘no one / remembers their names until / payday’ and ‘no one / remembers their names / until they died’. 

Ngalle Charles shows readers a world in which even the most innocuous actions can have unthinkably high consequences. In ‘When They Came’, the simple act of trimming hibiscus is responsible for soldiers being able to enter the village and leave destruction, ‘Was it you? / Did you trim the hibiscus? They could / see us from beyond the hills.’ So, too, in ‘1986’, recalling the Lake Nyos disaster in Cameroon, in which 1,746 people died due to the eruption of lethal gas, the speaker wonders, ‘Did she invite / disaster by boiling beans over night?’ These are poems in which even the sweetest of things can be risky. In ‘Dreams in Times of Corona’ the speaker paints, then kisses a beautiful woman, but in the end becomes frightened and withdraws: ‘I erase her, / leaving a dot.’ 

While there are consistent undercurrents of disquiet in Homelands, these are accompanied by an assured confidence, and even defiance from the poet. He states this clearly in ‘Child’s Eyes’: ‘We grew up in uncertainty…This did not stop us from living.’ This defiance culminates in the final poem of the collection, ‘Zugunruhe’ as the poet paints a captivating portrait of birds preparing for migration. The title of the poem is translated in the footnotes as ‘the experience of migratory restlessness.’ It is a restlessness that rustles throughout the poems in this collection, in the wishes and desires of humans and spirits, and in the act of waiting.

The dreamlike ‘The Grey Book’ feels like a lesson in what it means to open up to slowness; to dance with the present and to appreciate and relish what you have when you have it. The poem begins with ‘My mind wonders what treasures are hidden within your spine’, closing with, ‘I wait, / reading between the lines slowly.’

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