Mountains and Valleys

By Leon Tuam

Tuams artistic talent in Mountains and Valleys confirms that poets are great curers of societies and peacemakers still. His texts convince us that we can work together to build a just and peaceful world. The collection is the authors call for justice, love, freedom, peace and respect to life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477216903

Leon Tuam

Leon Tuam was born in a country that he loves to call one of the African provinces, Cameroon. He has livee in exile since 1993.

Book preview

Mountains

and

Valleys

Leon Tuam

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AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

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© 2012 by Leon Tuam. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 06/19/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4772-1691-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-1690-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012910341

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

PREFACE

Free like the bird

Invisible wings of eternity

A Man under the fruit trees

Too many love letters

History laughs at you

Writers

Two birds of prey

I slam on the brakes

Listen to this wind

We expect the worst for the world

Behind any child

Strange river

If I were asked

Beauty

If that’s your choice

Harvesters

We all live in exile now

Because of that

Knowing all this

Cry for the lost flower

My life is a casino

A house next to the water

We walk in the opposite direction

They say

A dangerous spot

Children’s teeth

Become and remain a new soul

Hands which are apparently clean

I thought that I knew you

She does not live alone

Happiness

Our world

They do what they do

From Boston

America

You smile at them

A young believer and the preacher

Families today

In what you do

When I hold my weapon

Nothing is useless

I saw the clouds

Antelope

Art

People, beware of being the impostors’ prey

When you talk about your story

My ewe

The armed rain

They follow

Mountains and valleys

When you are up there

O day, o night

What is it?

You see that timber

The child’s cry changed me

Dictators

Sleepy sea

In our societies

The brewer

You are the wild partridge

I don’t want too much

Our catches are but empty nuts

The trees of hatred

Talks with the body

Yesterday in our societies

Victims without guilty parties

Glee, bliss, wisdom

Cameroon, o kidnapped gorgeous girl

About the power

Sorrow came

My country, you are a river

A rat sadly rings the bell

Look at the landscape

Women are like guavas

We were in the same boat

Modern governments and gangs

A constant major worry

This is a hand

Question, answer

Bittersweet dish

Work of the author

Always I remember

We were two, we were two only,

Hasten, hasten to heal

Fighting for food

Back from hunting

Little things

We met and talked and laughed

He said

You say enough is enough

The tree in the lady’s property

You trumpet that you are free

That young man

We live with a big lie

Children and education

We choose to grow like pumpkins

The cock and the leech

I was an earthworm

Tools of completion

Today as yesterday

The happiness’ seeker

As we, Africans, look at our wealth

Disasters’ punches

When we talk of heaven

DEDICACE

For Tagnie Tapchie’s family, Ntiéki.

PREFACE

I was Leon Tuam’s teacher in the early 1980s. I knew him as an intelligent, alert and promising boy. Then like Jesus for forty days in the desert, he disappeared for nearly thirty years, up to very recently when he surfaced and we met again. He was definitely no longer the same. Indeed People do change as they grow up and mature.

As he left his peaceful African rural environment for more knowledge and discoveries in cities and universities, he got caught in the whirlwind of injustice, discrimination, imperialism, persecution and silence. Naive as he was, he could not keep silent. How could he, being what he was? He was restless. He had to talk. He had to fight. He did fight. He fought with a few friends for a new order in his native land and the whole Africa. But like Prometheus, that was challenging Zeus, he had to pay for it. He had to be tortured. And he was tortured in all aspects of the concept.

He had to go underground to escape physical torture. He wandered days and nights, months and years. He wandered from country to country, from continent to continent, from season to season, from culture to culture, from race to race. Yet he came across other forms of tortures, more subtle and more insidious. He felt lonely and abandoned. He got scared. He suffered from insomnia. He felt nostalgia for home, countryside, friends, brothers and sisters. He got lost. He wished he could go back, and escape loneliness and anguish. He looked back and it was all despair; he saw hatred, violence, betrayal, lying, cheating, and exploitation of man by man, nation by nation, race by race, south by north. And he was lost again. Then he calmed down and began to think. Still he got lost. But people and nations too are lost as he points out in this collection; he is stunned by perversion and stubbornness of mankind:

At the point we are today,

If wisdom were hanging on small trees

Smaller than the tomatoes plants,

The world would completely

Turn into a sea of fools and sharks,

The world would simply

Plunge into the darkest of days.

He needed and ideal world for his wounds to heal, to make up for lost time and to set up a new world, more human and non violent. He had to create it. In this collection of scramble verses, Leon Tuam sets up to force his dream world into existence. As the fight for Cameroon’s liberation they undertook in the years 90s remains fruitless, he comes out with a new Cameroon already liberated in the poem entitled, Cameroon, o kidnapped gorgeous girl.

The language as used in this collection reflects his devastated experience. First, it’s an unusual association of concepts that generally don’t go together, of words that might connote different or ambiguous understanding and of a words order that at times deviates from the norms; second, he honestly pours down everything boiling in his mind, leaving fresh air to cool it down and the reader to rearrange it. It flows almost non stop. This is called ‘the stream of consciousness technique’. The best approach is to read from the writer’s state of mind to be able to relate it to the surrounding and visible environment.

At the background of Tuam’s mind and underlying the whole collection, is a fundamental conception of the world as fallen. But this should not be confused with the fall of Adam and Eve from the grace and paradise. His