Fokam writes from Cameroon, Africa

Douala, Camaroon Images courtesty of Edouard TAMBA on Unsplash

Allow me to introduce the winner of third place in the recent fws Rod Carlos Rodriguez Prize for Poetry: L’Écrivain Fokam. Read his powerful poetry in the resultant issue, what we kept: a geography, here.

Having lived my entire life in the United States, mostly in Central and South Texas, and having only traveled a few times and never to Africa, I am intrigued by knowing someone who lives there! So, I asked L’Écrivain to contribute a piece to fws about growing up and becoming a writer in Cameroon. And he said, “Yes!”

I love his writing style and his command of the English language is especially impressive, since it is only ONE of his languages and not his original. I love knowing more about a place I’ve never visited and learning something about its people. Another fws contributor, Shaza Khalil, one I’ll introduce you to in a forthcoming post says, “the idea of building understanding through personal story resonates deeply with me.”

I hope this personal story resonates with you. Take your time with it. May it build understanding between us.

A Life Written in Bonamoussadi

Bonamoussadi is very much urban, not rural. It is, in fact, the administrative headquarters of Douala’s 5th arrondissement, one of the city’s formally recognized districts, complete with its own local government offices. Douala itself is Cameroon’s largest city and its economic capital, a sprawling port city of well over three million people, so when I write about Bonamoussadi, I am writing about a proper city neighborhood embedded in a major African metropolis, not a village on its outskirts.

~L’Écrivain Fokam

My neighborhood, Bonamoussadi, sits in Douala the way a favorite old shirt sits on a familiar body: a little worn at the seams, but exactly the right shape for what it holds. Motorbike taxis weave between potholes with the confidence of dancers who know the floor by heart. Vendors call out the price of bread, of phone credit, of grilled fish, and somewhere beneath all that noise, if you listen closely enough, you can hear the particular rhythm of a city that never fully sleeps but also never quite rushes.

There is a particular stretch of Bonamoussadi, in the quarter we call Nylon, along a street known simply as Couloir d’Or, that I still think of as the truest map of my childhood. It is not a grand street. The gold in its name has always been more a matter of hope than of fact — a narrow corridor of shops, mechanics’ stalls, and small compounds pressed close together, where the smell of frying plantain competes, most afternoons, with the smell of engine oil and fresh-cut wood. I learned to walk on that street before I learned to write on paper. I learned its particular music too: the creak of a certain gate, the way a certain radio three houses down always seemed tuned to the same station of makossa in the late afternoon. Couloir d’Or was never glamorous, and it never pretended to be. But it belonged to me the way only a first street can belong to a person, and whenever I sit down now to write about home, it is that corridor, and not any postcard version of Douala, that rises first in my mind.

I was born into a household where words were not decorations; they were tools, used carefully because there wasn’t room to waste them. My parents were traders — commerçants — people who spent their days in the give and take of the market, learning to read what a customer needed before it was ever spoken aloud, learning to hold a fair price steady even when the day had been hard. What I remember most clearly is not any single lesson, but an atmosphere: the sense that dignity did not depend on how much you had, but on how honestly you carried what little you did have.

School, for me, was less a straight path than a series of small, stubborn victories. I attended Collège de la Salle, where the days were long and the discipline was real, and it was there, somewhere in the middle of ordinary lessons, that I first began writing poems — not for any teacher, not for any grade, but because certain feelings I carried had nowhere else to go. I would fill the margins and the backs of exercise sheets with lines I was too shy to show anyone, and something in me settled each time I did it, the way a room settles once the right piece of furniture finally finds its place. I was not the kind of child who announced, at seven years old, that he would become a writer. I was the kind of child who collected words the way other children collected bottle caps or smooth stones after a storm, without quite knowing why, only that certain phrases refused to let go of me once I had heard them.

Those early poems were not good, by any honest measure. They rhymed too eagerly, borrowed too freely from songs I had heard on the radio, said too much and revealed too little. But they were mine, and more importantly, they were proof of something I did not yet have a name for: that whatever I was feeling, however large or unspeakable, could be reduced to a size I could hold, simply by writing it down. I still think that is most of what writing has ever done for me. It has not solved anything, exactly. It has only made the unbearable a little more bearable, by giving it a shape.

Today, when people ask what I do for work, I tell them, without irony, that I am an international writer — écrivain international. It still surprises me a little each time I say it, because nothing about how it happens looks the way I once imagined a writer’s life would look. There is no office, no publishing house down the street, no literary circle meeting weekly in some café. There is a phone, often an unreliable internet connection, and a discipline of sending work outward, again and again, into places I have never physically stood: a small press in Quebec, a poetry prize in Andalusia, a literary magazine somewhere in the American Midwest. Being an international writer, from where I sit, has come to mean something quite specific — it means my address is Bonamoussadi, but my readership, if I am fortunate on any given week, might be scattered across four or five countries I will likely never visit. It means learning the submission guidelines of strangers the way one might learn the customs of a new in-law: carefully, respectfully, and with the hope of eventually being welcomed in.

There is something almost absurd about it, if you stop to think too hard: a writer on Couloir d’Or, sending poems and stories out into inboxes in Marbella or Iowa or Montreal, waiting, the way farmers wait for rain, to hear whether something he planted has taken root somewhere far away. And yet it works, often enough to keep me sending more. Some weeks bring nothing but silence. Other weeks bring a small, unexpected yes — a poem accepted here, a modest prize there — and each yes carries a weight far beyond the money attached to it, because it means that a stranger, reading blind, with no knowledge of Bonamoussadi or Couloir d’Or or Collège de la Salle, still recognized something true in what I had written.

What came after school and those first shy poems was writing — not as a hobby squeezed into spare hours, but as something closer to a second spine, a structure I did not know I needed until it was already holding me upright. I write under the name L’Écrivain Fokam, a name that is both a mask and a mirror: a mask because it lets me step slightly outside my given name into a space reserved only for the page, and a mirror because everything I write under it is, in the end, unmistakably mine.

I write mostly in French, the language my mind reaches for first when emotion arrives before vocabulary. But I have also begun writing in English and, more recently, in Spanish, not to abandon French but to discover what my own preoccupations — memory, dignity, faith, the weight of origin — sound like in languages that did not raise me. Each new language feels like a room I am allowed to furnish with the same furniture, arranged differently. In French, I write about Couloir d’Or with a kind of intimacy that needs no explanation, because the language itself already knows the smell of frying plantain and the particular ache of a market day gone badly. In English, I find myself explaining more, translating not just words but entire ways of seeing, and in that extra effort I sometimes discover meanings I had not noticed while writing in my first language. Spanish, still new to me, feels like a third voice altogether — more musical, more willing to linger on an image before moving on, and I am still learning how to let it lead rather than follow.

I also keep a small Facebook page under the same pen name, a modest gathering place where I share poems, thoughts on the craft, and occasional reflections on what it means to write from where I write, rather than from where literature is traditionally assumed to come from. It is not a large audience. But it is a real one, and in a city where literary community is not always easy to find in person, that page has become a kind of window — one I keep propped open, in case someone passing by wants to look in.

If I am honest, I did not choose writing so much as I failed to escape it. There were years when I told myself it was impractical, that a young man from my circumstances should be focused on more immediately useful things. I tried, more than once, to set it aside. It never stayed set aside for long. Eventually I stopped fighting it and started, instead, asking what it might be for — not fame, which seemed both unlikely and beside the point, but something closer to translation: taking what is specific to Couloir d’Or, to my parents’ market stall, to my particular inheritance of scarcity and resilience, and finding the words that might let a stranger, in a language and a country I will probably never see, recognize something of their own life in mine.

Bonamoussadi has not changed dramatically in my lifetime, not in the way some cities reinvent themselves overnight. It changes the way most places actually change: slowly, unevenly, one new building rising beside three old ones that refuse to fall. I still walk Couloir d’Or the way I walked it as a boy. I still recognize, in the calls of vendors and the particular quality of afternoon light through zinc roofs, something that has not yet been lost.

What has changed is what I carry through those same streets now — not just the ordinary weight of getting by, but folders of poems, drafts of stories, the accumulated correspondence of a writing life built almost entirely through emails sent from a phone with an uncertain connection, at odd hours, between everything else that a life still requires of a person. I have become, without quite planning it, a kind of correspondent between two worlds: the very local world of Nylon and Couloir d’Or, and the very scattered world of editors, judges, and readers I will likely only ever know through their replies.

I do not know yet where all of this leads. I know only that I intend to keep going: keep writing, keep submitting, keep answering the strange and generous invitations — like this one — that occasionally arrive from people who, for reasons I am still grateful for and do not fully understand, want to know how a person becomes a writer in a place like mine.

The honest answer, I think, is this: not all at once, and not on purpose, and not alone. A household of traders who valued words even when the market had given them little else that day. A school where a boy discovered, almost by accident, that a poem could hold what he could not say aloud. A street named for gold it never quite had, which taught me anyway that a place does not need to be wealthy to be worth writing about. And a stubborn refusal, somewhere inside me, to let certain sentences go unwritten.

If there is anything I would want a reader far from Bonamoussadi to take from all this, it is perhaps only this: that the distance between a narrow street called Couloir d’Or and a judge’s inbox in another country is not as far as it first appears. It is crossed, in the end, the same way any distance is crossed — one honest sentence at a time, sent out with more hope than certainty, and answered, when it is answered at all, by someone willing to recognize a stranger’s truth as something like their own. That is, as far as I can tell, the whole of it — ordinary, incomplete, and still, on most days, very much in progress.

Editor’s note: I’ve added this little drone video I found to give you a visual tour of the place, Bonamoussadi. Who knows? Maybe one of these is even the actual street Fokam writes about, growing up on, walking on, writing his first po hanging around with his parents and friends.

L’Écrivain Fokam, is a Cameroonian poet and writer based in Douala. His work draws on Cameroonian and broader francophone African heritage to explore memory, identity, and belonging, spanning poetry, short fiction, and devotional writing.