Book Review - These Letters End in Tears
Homophobia is endemic in Cameroon. Same-sex relationships are outlawed and the LGBTQ+ community is persecuted with impunity. In her debut novel the Cameroon-born Musih Tedji Xaviere explores the reality of living in a country where being open about your sexual orientation can endanger your safety and livelihood.
Bessem and Fatima meet at university in 2002 and feel an instant attraction. But their relationship is brought to an abrupt end when the bar they frequent is raided by a group of thugs, one of whom is Fatima’s Muslim brother, Mahamadou. The women are brutally beaten and arrested. Afterwards Fatima disappears without a trace.
Thirteen years later, Bessem is still wondering what happened to her. Now a university professor, she continues to keep her sexuality a secret, as does her closeted friend and colleague Jamal. As Bessem suggests: “There is a mild kind of fear you carry with you when you don’t quite fit into a place, an awareness that the little comfort and good standing you have in your life is only there because people don’t know the real you”. A chance encounter with an old schoolfriend of Fatima’s pushes Bessem to renew her hunt for her former lover and to confront Mahamadou, who has become a local imam.
The novel begins as a series of Bessem’s unsent letters to Fatima. The epistolary form and prosaic narrative initially keep the reader at a distance, but, tracking back and forth in time, Xaviere fills in the details of Bessem and Fatima’s brief time together and paints a vivid portrait of Cameroon as a country riven by civil war and corruption, where women are pressured into marriage as soon as they reach early adulthood. In a compelling subplot Jamal bows to the weight of societal expectation: in order to assuage rumours that threaten to derail his college career, he marries and starts a family.
Xaviere leavens the novel’s darker side with occasional wry humour. The road that leads from Bamenda to Banso is called America “because it’s tarmacked and easy to travel. Africa is what they call the road leading from Banso to Nkambe … the path is unpaved, treacherous, and hard to navigate”. Bessem’s attitude towards her country is one of frustrated affection: “Cameroon is no paradise, parochial and corrupt as it is, but there are things I love about it”. Its mores remain largely unchanged by technological progress. Social media, Bessem reflects, intensifies the scrutiny of those who don’t conform by “constantly holding up their cameras, giving a face, voice, and meaning to everything under the sun and by doing so, unmasking individuals”. These Letters End in Tears illuminates the plight of those people forced to repress their identity or flee a country that suffocates who they are
Originally published by the TLS