A Name That Is Mine

“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.” 

“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.”