Delegitimization of Historical Narratives: A Lyotardian Reading of Bate Besong’s Poetry

Abstract

The representation of human experience in time and space makes for the most formidable hegemonic purveyor of discourses of domination and exploitation especially within historical narratives. Accordingly, there exists a perdurable need for the scrutiny of any such historical representations that seek to uphold a particular status quo. Based on the premise that the homogenising predisposition of some historical narratives is to hush the voices of minorities, and or those at the margin of the post-independent state in order to sustain their subjugation and exploitation, this paper seeks to explore some of Bate Besong’s poems as representational contestations of some key episodes in Cameroonian history that appear to foment and sustain suffering for the poet and his compatriots. By considering Jean François Lyotard’s postulations on grand narratives and petit récits, the study uses a text cum co-context dialectic to examine how the poet under consideration historicizes his poems in order to provide contestatory and or disruptive understandings of some key historical episodes in Cameroon. Proceeding as such, the paper argues that Besong’s historical activism is grounded in the fact that the history of Cameroon is not epistemically static because his comprehension of such a history is contingent on, and is mediated by his personal experiences as well as those of his countrymen within the framework of the post-independent Cameroonian state. In terms of theoretical tools, Newhistoricism and some tenets of postcolonial theory will be employed to buttress our argument.