"It Is Not Good That Man Should Be Alone": A Particular Fight for Civil Rights and a Forecast of a Future of African Americans in the United States of America Through Poetry by a Christian Young Man

By Pierre Mouna-Dora

It Is Not Good That Man Should Be Alone is a compilation of three works written by the author in the sixties and seventies for its large number of writings. This was the great and determining era of the struggles for civil rights in the United States of America, as everybody knows nowstruggles which were also the lot of the author in a very particular way that inspired these fifty-seven poems and the play. This illustrates a Christian romantic poetry of the civil rights struggles.

Translated from the French, the long-ago published works by the editions Saint-Germain-des-Prs, which are Harmonie Reversale and Le Pas de lAube, have been revised and augmented. The play, titled in French jirai en Alabama (Ill Go to Alabama), is facing here its first publication. All three works want to bear witness to the sentence in the preface of Give and Take Harmony, stating that racism can be defeated and is indeed defeated, and, I can add, is defeated through love in its fullness to wit, appeal, and reciprocal feelings, then marriage as conceived by the God of true Christians, thus opening the way to sexualityall that expressing the necessary bond of Adam and Eve. This can be characterized in Give and Take Harmony by the poem Blues for Peggy in Its Time for Alabama, by the biracial love between Molly, the white young lady, and Guemby, the African student at Howard University; and in Dawn Step by The Banquet, to which the children of Americablack, white, and grayare invited to the communion of flesh and blood and of bread and wine, which necessarily makes true the dream of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Besides the three prefaces of the three works and the postscript of the book the reading of which is a mustit brings to light the motivation and the aim of the authors endeavor for a harmonious multiracial society in America.

The author, P. Mouna-Dora, besides writing poetry and songs which can be Christian and romantic like those found in the book, enjoys reading, music, and sports.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524572228

Pierre Mouna-Dora

Pierre Mouna-Dora, (the pen name of Aimé-Gaston Kuoh from Douala in Cameroon, Africa) is now a learned elderly who has always been fond of mathematics, christian theology, music, and poetry. He is a former young bank executive in France, a former manager in a subsidiary of the French company Total in Cameroon, and a former editor of Ponda (the Times), a weekly newspaper in Cameroon. He holds three master’s degrees in pure mathematics, public law, and managerial economics from universities in Strasbourg and Paris, France. The author is an adamantly committed Christian and a founder of an assembly in the Baptist Church, which he led for sixteen years in Douala, Cameroon, while working. He has been involved in various cultural and political activities and events in his home town. There was an enthusiastic forecast by the author’s mistress of fourth grade, who was from the French West Indies and was very proud of the young black child being number one in mathematics in the best and multiracial French school in the country and who saw spontaneously Gaston becoming a bridge builder after studying civil engineering. Still under the influence of that early forecast and after his master’s degree in mathematics at the University of Strasbourg, the student went to Stanford University in California at the graduate school in civil engineering. There, Pierre Mouna-Dora discovered—as was unveiled through all his life—that our God wanted him certainly to be a bridge builder but one building bridges not on lands, but on hearts and souls. At that time, which was still deeply a time of fights for civil rights, the author stayed one positive year at Stanford University then went back to France to study law and managerial economics in Paris. As a grandson of a martyred young Baptist pastor in Cameroon—for not compromising over the will of God—he was raised in the church and learned to know and like the protestant Bible. So when the time became almost favorable, he looked for some brighter light in theology and was admitted in Westminster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania on the MAR (master of art in religion) program, where he studied for one year. He feels very honored and proud to have been admitted as an alumnus of both Stanford University and Westminster Theological Seminary.

Book preview

IT IS NOT GOOD THAT MAN SHOULD BE ALONE

A Particular Fight for Civil Rights and a

Forecast of a Future of African Americans

in the United States of America through

Poetry by a Christian Young Man

Translated from the French

by

Pierre MOUNA-DORA

And

Marsha RAMANA – Henriette M. KUOH

Copyright © 2017 by Aime-Gaston Kuoh.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016921170

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5245-7224-2

                Softcover         978-1-5245-7223-5

                eBook              978-1-5245-7222-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Rev. date: 01/11/2017

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

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CONTENTS

Dedication

FIRST WORK / POETRY

Give and Take Harmony

Preface

Part one : Inoculation

1.1   The White Man

1.2   The Negro

1.3   A Chronicle

1.4   Private Conversation in Louisiana

1.5   Peggy’s Blues

1.6   COMMUNION

Part Two : Spasm

2.1   Childish Wake

2.2   Dry Tear

2.3   Worrying for Love

2.4   Weaning in Villanelle

2.5   Message

2.6   Bitter Disappointment of a Youngster

2.7   Beyond the Grave

Part Three : Ataraxia

3.1   In the Father’s Bosom

3.2   All in love

3.3   The Voice of the Angel

3.4   Mother

3.5   Telegram

3.6   Expectancy

3.7   Now at Rest

SECOND WORK : A PLAY IN ONE ACT

It’s Time for Alabama

Preface

The characters

1   Guemby – Molly

2   Guemby - Wright

3   Bob – Bill – Hope – John

4   Bob – Bill – Hope – John – Guemby

5   Bob – Bill – Hope – John

6   Wright – Eric

7   Wright – Eric – Molly

8   Eric – Molly

9   Eric alone

10   Eric – Guemby

11   Guemby – Wright

12   Guemby alone

13   Guemby – Molly

THIRD WORK / POETRY

Dawn Step

Introduction

Part One: The Mist of Daybreak

1.1   Lonely Traveler

1.2   The Relay

1.3   Reminiscence

1.4   In my World

1.5   Rondeau for Hope

1.6   Human Measure

1.7   The Birthday

1.8   Nyambé

1.9   Michel Laying out Thoughts

1.10   Just Passing Through

1.11   Grieving Your Departure

1.12   Love Flame

1.13   An Eye Caught

1.14   Crossroads

1.15   Eve’s apparition

1.16   On the Wings of Time

Part Two: The Early Morning Courser

2.1   Calamity

2.2   Intercession

2.3   The Call to a Rebel

2.4   A Little Creed

2.5   Outstretched Arms

2.6   As Long as it’s Day

2.7   Vital Choice

2.8   Ordeal

2.9   Wedlock Love

2.10   Step at Dawn

2.11   The Banquet

2.12   Lady X

2.13   The Message to Isaac

2.14   Hope in the Negro’s death cry

2.15   Father God knows

Postscript

DEDICATION

I dedicate this compilation to all those young ladies who are not heralded in its lines, but whose hearts bled, whose eyes wept and-for some of them-whose lives were fashioned in bitterness. As the late French singer Claude François expressed it, they all were beautiful, beautiful, beautiful like the day,…like true love. They were from: France, the Netherlands, Guinea, England, Vietnam, Liberia, Cameroon and America still.

If Pidi, when all is said and done, became my beloved wife it meant that the Lord God put in her the ability to stitch rents and bandage wounds of my heart without shades in my memory. She marvelously succeeded because, for all those beloved girls my memory is much alive, and to this day my scarred heart is still beating!

So, congratulations to everyone, with the bright hope of seeing all of them with Jesus Christ, the coming Lord.

FIRST WORK / POETRY

GIVE AND TAKE HARMONY

PREFACE

(Translated from the French)

The desire to publish this collection today is stained by a strong feeling of purposeful desertion. Desertion because, far from offering to francophone readers a poetic theme that praises mutual sentimental exchanges, so spontaneous and exemplary, I submit to their judgment as a first collection, a fragrance of the United States of America. I prefer the healthy atmosphere of the francophone world, nothing can be truer than that. Nonetheless, it wasn’t any less natural that the poems in Give and Take Harmony, inspired by the problems of American society, should address themselves to this society, thanks to the relationship I was able to cultivate there. The muse being an Eve, she often appeared in my ephebic soul with the features of American girls: it was Maureen, it was Jean, it was Willa, it was Joan! However, I never doubted that Nicole was charming and distinguished, that Pascale was pleasing and well-read, and Françoise beautiful and jubilant. To tell the truth, at the flirting age, I particularly feared the marriageable young French ladies, wrongly convinced as I was that an idyll could only have led to the prospect of a more materialized, a more concrete union: what would have become of my freedom at that time? Was I not at this age solely devoted to the fight for the causes of the century? , the only issues having any claim to my self-body, soul and spirit?

The American girls could certainly offer fleeting commitments, but America almost crushed me!

It is truly with detachment that I meditate upon these relationships. Once before, years ago already, at the end of these experiences, I had thought of offering this collection to the public. The reader will find below some enlightening disclosures made to preface the poems at the time of their writing. Some of the aspects therein were adjusted in order to better suit the public of the day. It seemed to me they remained the appropriate introduction to the sphere of this written work. Here is what they said:

Little Secrets Unveiled For the Reader

Resignation, sadness and apprehension accompany the decision to deliver this collection to the idle and generous reader who would like to take a look at it. Why resignation? In fact, for a long time I thought that the poems published today were my own secrets that wouldn’t stand up to being exposed. But time passed, the sky changed its colors, and the wind its direction. It would perhaps be useful to give to a particular public a vision that may be of interest to them. The fear of violating a certain intimacy, nonetheless, was not the only cause for delaying publication. It’s that we had to deal with a world which was the negation of all hope and optimism that a person of our generation could nourish in his earliest youth. Negation, not so much of life values, such as we might have determined or discovered them, but of the impetus that was the expression of our unyielding will, opposing it with the inertias of cowardice, of mediocrity of the soul, of cynicism. Life, such as our generation came to discover it, was a deal to seal with the devils. It was a question, in different forms, of renouncing one’s own essence, of progress, of light, of truth, of life, while accepting the status quo in order to eat, to study, to find work, to have housing, to grow – in a word: to breath; or else to lose, depending on what one possessed, one’s family, one’s friends, one’s country, one’s faith, one’s life – in a word: to die.

Our perspective wouldn’t in any case be taken into consideration. In all areas, everything was brought back to one alternative caricaturized in left or right. Everything was done to discourage any idealism that would deny the fatality of a world divided into two blocs not communicating with each other, of a humanity of three races without affinities or fellowship, of a world of men in two classes, one the heartless oppressors, the other the hopeless oppressed. This world that our fathers intended, probably unconsciously, to bequeath to us as our heritage, our generation had the duty to condemn it, to refuse it and to force those amongst our fathers in whose hands remained the wherewithal to do so, to propose something else. That’s just what we did. We are ashamed of ourselves for the acts we committed in many regards, but we are happy to be proud of ourselves in this regard. Today the wind is no longer blowing in the same direction; therefore I am resigned to publish these poems. Sadness? Also. The American friends with whom I lived these experiences were sad; they could not feel proud, and even they were ashamed of their country, because of destabilizing racism which always makes life in America full of permanent anxiety, and makes happiness somewhat illusory. One can’t help but be sad faced with the gruesome convulsions of racial violence in the United States of America, all the more so if one felt affection for that country and its children. Sadness, alas! Lastly, apprehension, because having always been fond of discretion, I am apprehensive of the whirlwind of publicity into which the published collection might hurl me. That reminds me a bit of the pause one is sometimes led to make before plunging into the cold waters. One discovers happily sometimes, I may say, that the water is lukewarm, rarely hot.

Having decided to propose you this collection of words, dear reader, allow me to introduce you into the universe of these writings.

You will notice regarding the form, that most of the poems in this collection are written in rhyme. I point this out in order to share with you a few moments of delightful curiosity and enthusiasm that lightened up the first phase of the decade over which the contents of this collection stretch. Indeed, during my high school studies at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France, I much appreciated the works of the classical authors, mainly Corneille and Racine, as still do all high school students. Taking into account my temperament, I will admit to a greater admiration for Corneille, precisely due to his superior conception of honor and heroism which give to his verses their proud martial resonance. Refusing to believe that their rhyming feats were due to privilegedly given talents, I undertook to imitate them. Along the way, I discovered Victor Hugo, whose varied rhyming acrobatics acted upon me like a spell, and with him, the romantics whose sentimentalism resonated in unison with my sensitivities. After this delightful tasting of versification it became almost contrary to nature for me to think of French poetry except in rhyme. Once the poetic inspiration matured, it came to me as an idea in verse form. As an African, the discovery of the poetry of President Senghor, of Mr. Aimé Césaire and Mr. Léon Damas subsequently liberated me from the stuffy rigors of versification which I had not yet truly mastered anyway. I would write, from then on, not because I was a poet on the path of development – nor even an under-developed poet with respect to poetic skills – but because I had messages to convey which came to me in the form of compelling inspirations. Today, these poems in rhyme in no way express a conception of poetry, but simply constitute writings which are what they are, in form and content.

The content of the collection deals with racism