The Poetic Rhetoric of Mom'a Njoku a.k.a Simon Mol (Moleke Mo-Njie)

By Bate Besong (Senior Lecturer in Drama & Critical Theory - University of Buea, Cameroon)

In the Second Annual World Poetry Day sponsored by UNESCO and organised by the editors of Poetry Today, Simon Mol, with a rifty drum between recitation of his poetry, celebrated the Anglophone muse on the world centre stage.  A journalist with the English language Warsaw Voice, Secretary General of Asylum seekers in Poland, now, resident in London he is author of Africa… my Africa (Polish version Moja Afryko! Verbinum Warsaw, 2002) and Goddess of Mount Africa (Polish translation Bogini Z Mount Africa, Express Poligraficzy, Lodz, 2004). 

Mol’s first collection of verse has been translated into Hindi while Bogini Z Mount Africa, subtitled “an autobiographical anthology of metaphysical love and mundane challenges” is dedicated to one of the greatest Polish poets, Julian Tuwim, anti-fascist, one-man pressure group on behalf of “the common man”.

Modern Anglophone poetry (Bate Besong, Ba’bila Mutia, Nkarawi Nfor, Tennu, Ishmael Chi-Bikom, Yvusimbom, Ilongo, Kishani, Simon Mol) is a product of two distinct socio-aesthetic forces, namely, the received traditionalist aesthetic practices and the aesthetic over determined by colonialism and Re-Unification.  Poetry of this colouration can be read as symbolic of the wider selfish political bitterness and acrimony that has been imposed on Cameroonian peoples by the emergent class of Jean Paul Sartre’s “white-washed lies”.

Writing from his enforced exile home(s), Mol’s poetry incarnates a rediscovery of the intellectual, and demonstrates the elixir of thought to negate accepted limits and open the way to a new future.   It is quite clear that he thinks of his poetry not as an object of wit to be enjoyed for itself, but as a paradigm of passionate communication.  Mol’s poetry is therefore an excellent example of how a poet can compress much meaning into few words.

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