Days Come and Go by Hemley Boum – a trip to Cameroon
Days Come and Go by Hemley Boum (2019) Original French title: Les jours viennent et passent.
For the month of April, our Book Club’s read was Days Come and Go by the Cameroonian writer Hemley Boum. Born in 1973, she has always known an independent Cameroon. In Days Come and Go, three generations of women tell about their life and the history of Cameroon.
The book opens in Paris, Anna is dying, cancer is eating at her and it’s time for a life assessment. She was born circa 1940, in a Cameroon under French rule. She never knew her mother and was raised by Awaya, a woman from her village. She went to a school run by French nuns and, as she was a good student, was sent to collège in the nearest city, a boarding school run by nuns too.
This is where she met her husband Louis, who was involved in the fight against the French for the independence of the country. In 1960, Cameroon became independent and Louis graduated from university and became an influent businessman and politician.
Meanwhile, we’re with Abi, Anna’s only child. She lives in Paris, is divorced from her French husband Julien, and tries to take care of her children Max and Jenny, work and be a woman. And now she wants to spend with Anna, to be there for her and to soak up as many mother-daughter moments as she can before it’s too late.
The novel starts really well. It alternates between Anna and Abi’s lives and I learnt a lot of things about Cameroon, its customs, its ethnics and its first step as an independent country in the borders inherited from colonialism.
Anna lived an unconventional but privileged life and it comes from an inner strength, one that prevented her to totally bend to her husband’s will. She’s a free spirit in a patriarchal society and that’s not an easy stand. Abi has that kind of strength too. These women are not willing to sacrifice their lives for their husbands and families. They want to be on equal footing.
I really liked the book until Tina comes into the picture. She’s from the third generation, she’s 20 and friends with Max, Abi’s son. She tells the part about contemporary Cameroon and the Boko Haram violence, how the population didn’t see them coming. This part didn’t mesh as well as the others and I thought it turned out more like a reportage than a novel.
Still. Days Come and Go is an excellent way to read about Cameroon, I discovered a lot of things about the country as there’s a political standpoint underlying the book. Anna and Louis grew up in a colonized country and their education was a mix between local customs and knowledge and French school programs. Anna says that she didn’t read African writers until rather late in life.
Louis is part of the elite of the new country and Anna reflects on a certain failure of these decades. Endemic corruption means that the country’s resources aren’t used for the good of the people but for the wealth of a happy few. In a way, Anna’s generation is responsible for today’s state of the country.
Hemley Boum writes well, Anna and Abi are great characters. However, the book lacked the sort of lust for life that the reader feels in Small Country by Gaël Faye. Something was off in the last part about Tina and Boko Haram, as if the author wanted to include this topic in her book at any cost. In my opinion, she didn’t find a convincing way to link it to Anna and Abi.
As the book progresses, we lose the quest for intimacy between Abi and Anna and the exploration of the relationship between mother and daughter. Abi, the generation in the middle between Anna and Tina, isn’t as central as she should be. And there’s little Jenny.
She is the fourth generation, also coming from a lineage of independent and strong women broken by circumstances. What will this generation do? I guess that Hemley Boum wants to explore intergenerational trauma and wonders what will become of Jenny with her inherited trauma.
In the end, we understand better how the Anna came to Paris and where little Jenny comes from. Unfortunately the emotional link that tied the reader to Anna and Abi at the beginning of the book got lost in the way.
Days Come and Go is still worth reading, don’t mind my reservations. It has won literary prizes, has a 4 star rating on Goodreads and my response to it remains my own.
Book Around the Corner 
I don’t know anything about Cameroon so it would be interesting to me.
With the present trouble in New Caledonia, why do you think it was that France held onto its colonies so strongly in the postwar era, (e.g. that long war in Vietnam) whereas Britain basically just shrugged its shoulders and let it all go?
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It depends on the colony, Lisa. They had very different legal status.
In Indochina, I guess it was too close to the end of WWII, there was the fear of communism and the new political elites weren’t ready to negotiate anything.
In Algeria, legally, it was a department, like la Lozère or the Moselle. It was considered as a civil war, in a way. And there were people from France settled there as if it were their land, not as expats. They didn’t have a place to fall back on in France. That also explains why it took so long to let go. It’s wrong anyway to think you can just move over and confiscate a country.
And the rest was rather quick and less violent. Except for Indochina and Algeria, there was no long war but there were upheavals and violent responses to them.
Britain shrugged its shoulders and left quite a political mess in India, I think.
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Yes, partition was. But it certainly wasn’t what Britain wanted.
Perhaps there’s no easy way to dismantle an empire. The Dutch fought a bloody war to keep Indonesia too.
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I’ve never read anything by a writer from Cameroon so I’d like to read this if it is translated. It sounds like she did struggle to integrate the issues she was interested in into wholly convincing fiction unfortunately. But it still sounds an interesting read.
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It’s an interesting read and she has a good style. Maybe I’m too picky, it has good reviews otherwise.
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This sounds like a novel I’d appreciate. The introduction of the younger character must add something, if only another more current perspective on political events, but I can see how it would change the tone overall, as you’ve described it.
I’ve only read two novels by writers from Cameroon, very different novels but both worthwhile and moving. I’ll share them in case others here are interested in exploring them alongside the book you’ve reviewed, based on Lisa’s and MadameBibi’s comments above, not because there are themes in common (although I guess the theme of loss reverberates in these two as well). Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (a long, meandery story-soaked story) and Max Lobe’s A Long Way from Douala (translated from the French by Ros Schwartz, a short, poetic character-driven story).
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Many thanks for the recommendations, I’ll check them out. I don’t read enough African literature.
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I’m trying to read my way around sub-Saharan Africa in 2024, and have been seriously impressed so far by some great writing. On my list I have Imbolo Mbue and Max Lobe from Cameroon, but neither they nor Hemley Boum are available on Audible. I’ll add Days Come and Go to the list and might read it on Kindle later in the year – even if the last third is more reportage than story.
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Thanks for the link to your blog. I intend to read more of sub-Sharan Africa too, otherwise it’s like ignoring a whole continent.
Hemley Boom is a good writer and Days Come and Go is worth reading, at least for the background and historical aspects of Cameroon.
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