'To improve your handwriting, you must hide your pen', he said, illustrating this with a gesture, 'like this.'

My body, a prisoner of his being there, could not hold my spirit being. I followed his gestures but very soon, I had become a mouse, then a rat, then a bush rat, and then a bird.

When I became a bird, I sang a song in the courtyard. I became a sparrow 'Cou cou cou.'
'Are you dreaming? '

Patrice Nganang

I was startled, slowly regaining the use of my body, the bend of my arm, the joint of my hand, and articulations of my fingers in a false fist, with my thumb and index finger forming a bird's beak.
My dad remarked : 'hey your fingers are like a bird's beak.'

All this was no dream: I drew a letter in my book : an O. I was losing myself.
'What is this ?'
My dad's voice woke me up.
What was I to say ?
'Don't tell me that is an O.'
What ?
'We are going to have to start all over again.'

I started again. My fingers shook harder than ever. I could feel my skeleton dancing. I could see my head tearing itself from my body and rolling on the floor. Like a capital O : an O of suffering. An O of pain : the letter was written under my skin, and not on paper.

'We start again.'

We ? No, I will start again. A thousand times will I write this letter O of sorrows : a thousand times will I pedal the emptiness of this bicycle with a double O ; a thousand times will I find myself in a ditch with the tyre tube with which I learnt how to swim. This O, alone prevented me from drowning. This O, opened my body to the voluptuousness of my flesh, to the tickling of water.

Several times before, I wrote these damned letters of the alphabet, I tore them from my bird-beck shaped fingers and inscribed their identically flimsy forms on paper with my tears, under the indefatigable gaze of my father, but not today.

On the piece of virgin paper that we covered with ink, I bore my cross all the way; the path of the prisoner, the way of the alphabet. I sometimes dream at night of crazy flights. Yes, I see for example an M carrying me up on his wings, wide open to the heavens. I see an H drawing up heights to be scaled in front of my steps and discover the depths of paradise. I see an I, bending itself like an archer's bow, becoming a C, for the sole purpose of launching a mysterious point that will follow it everywhere and this way, bring on ndomo ndomo on its own self. My dad taught me this word. He associated it with his childhood, like I associated my childhood with his writing lessons : I see his face irradiate as I desecrate paper with those sorrowful letters. I see him smile celebrating my successes. Never again will I see him smile so openly like he did in those moments when I wrote in the palm of my hand, this word, 'Cameroon', a word of 8 different letters.

Another aspect of my writing lessons, was actually walking there : my father held me by the hand and led me to school. My father spoke into the emptiness in front of him, with the surety that I, knee-high, understood what he was trying to say to me. As we walked, he walking much faster, knew that only his voice scattered on the way, linked us together. As we walked, it occurred to him that my tired feet left a trace of S-shaped footprints on the road. My father then stopped and said to me. 'Hey, let's rest for a moment'

In front of my eyes were the hands of the teacher writing on the blackboard, the same letters as my dad.

He, my teacher, never formed a false fist with his fist : he wrote alone at the blackboard, standing in front of us, his back bent, as if he had to adjust to the sinuous curves of the letters he traced, and we imitated him in our books, making the same gestures with our body as he did. I could only imitate him, but I could not on any occasion experience the beating of his heart as he traced those letters of the alphabet, but I captured the colour of his voice. I did not feel entering into my flesh the heat of his skin: but I remember the burning look in his eyes. He, like my father before him, had mastered the art of sneaking up on me as I traced the worst of my efforts. O, yes : whenever I succeeded an A and wanted to scream it out to the heavens, he was never near ; but when perchance my hand slipped at the bottom of a C, I turned around and found him there, he had become my shadow : Oh no, I saw his mocking smile. My teacher, he never said a word, this is where he differed from dad who would have said :

Never mind the, us, in the 'let us', I started again. One thing they both shared was how they both loved to stroke my head whenever they felt like showing appreciation. It meant the world to me. I smiled and allowed my capital A to rise pointing to the sky, I drew a bar across the heart of the other letter of my pain : it was this teacher that taught us to spell 'Cameroon'. He never told us what it meant: the purpose was the writing exercise. That and that alone. It was only later, that dad told me that the word was used to describe nothing more than, shrimps. He was making fun of something an educationist -of other peoples children ha ha ha-once said to him, 'it is important that school children learn something about their country of origin ha ha ha '. 'In bad Portuguese' remarked my dad, or just 'badly pronounced.'

But by whom ? We ? He held his peace, at this point. In those times, the process of starting letters over and over again defined my universe, just as the finessing of letters by my hand was expected to give meaning to my daily efforts.

The white page had become my terror ; the finished page, my goal. The rhythm of words was the path : their well-turned out bodies resonated like the sound of an instrument the flute. It was my dad who said : 'To write is to play the flute.'

He played before my writing lessons. Later on, I wrote whilst he played. I knew that when I stopped writing whilst he played he would stop playing, look at me with a question in his eyes, and would not go back until I started writing again. I would never say that my dad played the flute like I wrote, good heavens I was only a child. I also knew, yes I knew that he stopped playing when I disturbed the harmonious body of letters and asked me to start again. There is another thing I must confess : I did not stop writing because I wanted to incessantly listen to the sound of his flute, but because my writing inscribed in my conscience the certainty of his unremitting repetition. When I was with mum in the evenings, the whole thing changed. There was no flute, there was no writing lesson. Dad, he, was never around at this time. It was not rare, that he disappeared for a whole week at a time. 'He is on tour', mum would explain to me. Once I remember not seeing him for a whole a month. He always came back with thousands of gifts, in other words, books, loads of them. One evening I remember us, mum and I, going to a dark house, where he performed. It was a full house, loud and it stank. There were men and women everywhere smoking and drinking.

That was mum's voice drawing my attention to the stage. Then, I saw him, my dad stepping on to the stage. Very quickly the sound of his flute brought the noise level down to zero. I watched him work, note-to-note walking on the silence of the surrounding gazes. At a point, you could only hear the sound of his flute, tracing words above my head, stanzas, he quoted something recognizable and the hall erupted as hands clapped along in rhythm, my dad played and voices turned to songs, my dad played and women got up, climbed up on to the stage and placed money on his forehead, my dad played and a crowd of happy people formed a circle around him, each one with a hand in his pocket, covering him with bank notes, dad played and placed a smile on the face of everyone in that hall. He authored large letters of universal joy.

Even today, I wonder if I can make a crowd happy with words, if with a single of my phrases, I can make mummy happy. This is indeed what I understood: the word that he said was 'shrimps' badly pronounced, was his country. And suddenly, finding eight letters of this singular word, I found what was left of the voice that sounded so unfathomable as we walked the path to school tying me to his shadow. I saw myself walking behind him, allowing a space in between us, hearing only the sound of his voice. I remembered a phrase he once said : 'it is our country.'

He emphasised 'our'. What I have not been able to recompose, is the history of this country, as he told it to me. I am persuaded that the end of his tale eludes me. My excuse is that I was not old enough to remember. I still hear his voice, his words lost in the infinity of that path, that swallowed him soon after, my dad went away and never came back home. His photo disappeared from the house. I would have another dad, that I painfully had to learn to call, 'daddy'. It took several years to forget the face of my real dad not until I searched out the sound of his flute, into the heart of a music that is still undefined to me, I will find myself with a clenched fist as if I was trying to compose a letter, or write a word, I will dive without knowing it into the infinite history of our country. I will discover words that my dad said to me, words of silence: and which are inscribed in my conscience with the sharp blade of a flute that thrilled a crow ; I would discover that this crowd was made up of refugees of crazy wars for imaginary power and control of this country: I found in my hands the hellish place of this nation, buried deep in its heart and a history which is but traces of fire in the flesh of its children. I ran to my mother dizzy and full of questions, with the burden of the silence of his words in the heart of my dad's voice, I felt my bones metamorphose into flutes, it was as if we were possessed, or under the spell of a voodoo priest.

It was with hiccups and a quavering voice that she told me how dad went back home, shunning all advice. She said nothing about what happened when he got there, but she told me he died there.

Her face was not the explosion of happiness that I once witnessed: that total joy, shared by the crowd in the audience of that nightclub for Cameroonian refugees (as I later discovered), the same joy conveyed palpitating stories to their innermost beings, with the sing-song words of a flute, and flowed all over my dad in torrents of bank notes. In her face, I read anger. 'He thought he was a hero'.

I would later on find out that those refugees through concerts, and other similar events, some dissident, financed an obscure force that was supposed to infiltrate the country and in a Yaounde burnt to the ground, give birth to their hollow dreams. This force had secured the support of some neighbouring nations, hyenas drawn by the smell of petrol, some other countries were in support of other forces, counter to the group led by my dad. Was he really the leader ? Mum said, No, he had simply signed up to carry a rifle in the civil war, 'that bullshit', she added. He trained combatant soldiers with his flute, and he really thought he was 'going to save the country'. She shuddered shrugging her shoulders. 'What madness !'

I looked down to avoid having to watch her cry and discovered in the palm of my hands, the enigma of a face, the sound of a flute, the trace of letters, but also the abyss of a country of shrimps, birds, and rats. I twisted my fingers and chewed on my nails. What did my dad leave me, if not a never-ending story that keeps repeating itself ; what did he leave me; if not a warm hand in mine, tracing for then the time his silence on the madness that possessed his flute.