[Music Review] A New Chapter in the Kamer (Cameroon) Hip-Hop Files…And there was Jovi Le Monstre: A Review of H.I.V (Humanity is Vanishing).

Kangsen Feka Wakai

Last year, the Cameroonian hip-hop scene took a major step in consolidating its place in the African hip-hop world with MuMak’s release of Jovi’s self-produced debut album, H.I.V (Humanity Is Vanishing).   Before Jovi’s emergence, no solo Cameroonian hip-hop act, especially one rapping predominantly in pidgin (Cameroonian Creole), had penetrated the global hip-hop world, or had any shown his kind of promise.

H.I.V is a colorful addition, not only to a budding local hip-hop scene but to the contemporary Cameroonian music scene as a whole; it is the long awaited arrival of a self-assured emcee very conscious of his abilities, the vacuum in the genre, his audience’s expectations, and the right dose of hustle to assert his place amongst the likes of Les Nubians and X-Maleya as a flag-bearer on stages across the globe.

Jovi emerges almost three decades after the first Run DMC, Rakim and MC Solaar tapes began making rounds, mostly amongst teens in fenced houses, in Cameroon’s urban centers.   Since then, the swagger, vogue, language and sounds of that sonic phenomenon from the Bronx has woven itself into the fabric of the Cameroonian youth experience.  In fact, Jovi is of a generation that grew up imbibing a gumbo of sounds from all four corners of the Afro diaspora in addition to the salad that was the local scene.

Actually, when Wild Style (1983), featuring New York teens (including hip-hop pioneers Fab Five Freddy and DJ Grandmaster Flash) dislocating their joints to electronic drumbeats, found its way to the few living rooms it did find its way into, all it took were a few pair of eyes for their Cameroonian counterparts to join the global breakdancing craze.

In mid-eighties Cameroon, it was not an unusual sight to see teens with sharp fades beatboxing during lunch breaks or break-dancing along sidewalks in Yaounde, Douala and Bamenda.   Who did not dream of carrying their own boom box?

Hip-hop’s landing was immediately impactful as evidenced in the rapidity with which it found its way into the speech and mores of a nascent Cameroonian teen culture; however, the genre’s journey to find its voice in an already congested musical scene would take a lot longer.  For at least two decades, it would play fifth fiddle to Soukous, Makossa (in all its apparitions), Bikutsi, and Bend-skin.

Thus H.I.V’s release, at the zenith of neighboring Nigeria’s Afropop resurgence, is timely but far from accidental.  In a way, the Jovi’s of Anglophone Africa can be said to be drinking from the  fountain of  P-Square’s success—musical offshoots of what has been called hiplife (Ghanaian in origin); a West African blend of R&B sensibilities, rap and occasional hints of Rock Steady.  But where some have attempted to copy P-Square’s silky delivery, auto-tune notwithstanding, Jovi for one lets others do the singing.

Nonetheless, a close listening of the album not only reveals a rapper of great potential with a fluid delivery, a producer with a sharp ear, but also an album constructed to cover the range of sounds that animate hip-hop today.  H.I.V  is a hodgepodge of chopped down influences from the US dirty South, a Kanyesque approach to sound quality, and gems of original beats that would bop heads from Dakar to Tokyo.

From the album’s first track, ‘Don 4 Kwat’, which is also its first single, listeners are swept into the fantastic world of Jovi, and in a way into the mindset of the artist’s generation:

Yo!  Ask petit dem for kwat

I dey for here for helep

Early morning time

I dey veranda wit cheleps

Bring me cold shack

Openam wit teeth

When I drink drunk

Show me any wall for piss

If an emcee’s first verse is supposed to reflect their persona and outlook [the monologue in the opening of Dead Prez’s ‘Let’s Get Free’ (2000) comes to mind], then Jovi’s introduction in ‘Don 4 Kwat’ to the world does not miss the beat in that regard.

The album also demonstrates that far from stunting creativity, recent digital technological innovations—to the chagrin of its analog detractors—has not only democratized creativity but offers an opportunity for kids in countries lacking the marketing and A& R infrastructure to dream, and with the right hustle, deliver an album that can hold its own alongside others in the global movement that is hip-hop.  After all, all one needs is internet connection, and YouTube and iTunes are just a click away.

In ‘Achombo House’, another standout track with a playful and unmistakably Cameroonian element, featuring Krotal—an emcee of high standing in his own right—Jovi’s microphone skills, complimented by a cerebral sound reminiscent of a RZA production, is almost flawless when he spits:

Ask Noma 

Yi go tell you

Bo, Jovi no normal

Comot Kwat

Turn back na inside H3 Hummer

Man dey 4 here for njoka

Any day na peteh

Flow too tight

Dem other flows don wepe

I don di hustle since

You fit ask na Egbe

Boy dem hustle Ngola

Na 4 hustle the pepper

Layered with beats and samples of varying influences, for a debut, H.I.V is perhaps the most complete hip-hop album to hit the contemporary Cameroonian hip-hop market.   Not only that, in the process of introducing himself to the listening world, the artist pays tribute to Eko Roosevelt in track 8, ‘Bush Faller’, and to Tabu Ley Rochereau in track 4, ‘Pitie’,  projecting himself as one very conscious of the post-independence canon.  For that reason alone, he deserves credit.

But then again, he should be reprimanded for wasting an opportunity, as afforded by ‘Bush Faller’, to address a trend, flight, which has characterized his and a previous generation with the depth that it deserved.  Instead with Eko Roosevelt wailing “Attends Moi” in the background, Jovi unleashes a verse bemoaning his girlfriend’s looming departure with a crispness others rapping in pidgin (BAHOOD Records come to mind) could learn from, but besides, that is distracted by his penchant for self-adulation.  The rapper brags:

Ah, my chap fine

I no go lie

My chap fine

I di ever lick ground

When I say my chap fine

I know say thing dem hard

But for her I keep trying

I say girl you won’t leave

If you are in your right mind

We just like Jay-Z and Beyonce

She dey for my back like I be Moses

Then as the song progresses, Eko still singing away, the song takes a different turn, and Jovi’s  presence soon begins to fade in the shadow of the giant’s vocals.  Besides this and a few minor shortcomings, H.I.V is an impressive debut.  With tracks like ‘Man Pass Man’ and ‘Haters Coffin’ among other solid tracks, the emcee has established a standard for future rappers.

Eventually, the concept of keeping it real takes different postures in the hip-hop context; it could mean relaying ones reality as it is, or a mere rendition of fantasies removed from ones circumstances.  After a thorough listening of H.I.V, one cannot help but wonder if all the weed, sex, money and expensive cars are a figment of Jovi’s imagination or part of his reality.  Either way, welcome to the fantastic world of le Monstre.

 

Kangsen Feka Wakai is a Boston based writer and freelance journalist.

[Commentary] Anglophone Cameroon Literature: the Travails of a Minority Literature

[Part 1]

Oscar C. Labang

For a very long time now, I have struggled with inner pressures not to join in this theoretical quibbling about Anglophone Cameroon Literature and just content my soul in a quiet corner and make my modest contributions (whatsoever) to projecting it to the heights that it deserves. I have tried not to enter the debate but to use the usually very informative and enthusiastic arguments to develop something.

This escape is somewhat part of my upbringing. My father was a teacher with a Psychology (Education) background and he often thought me that life is made better by doing your share to the best of your ability not by asking who has not done their share. It is pretty interesting how boyhood scolding can resurface now. As much as I try to avoid asking the questions, it seems the critical effort just like its seismic half never goes away when you want. Consequently, I have chosen to develop a series of short follow-up essays on what is clipping the wings of Anglophone Cameroon Literature (ACL). Evidently, I am plucking my immediate inspiration from Dibussi Tande’s interesting and cogent argument titled Soaring with “Clipped Wings”: Anglophone Cameroon Literature on the Move.

The truth is that we are soaring. But the question is Can we soar better and higher than we are already doing? My answer is a quick and strong affirmation. Then, my research question follows: what is clipping our wings or stopping us from achieving these higher heights? As of this moment, two defining causes have come to mind— what I term lack of apologists and academic gangsterism. In this essay I will be concerned with the lack of apologists as a factor that prevents a minority literature from soaring very high.

Lack of Apologists

Anglophone Cameroon Literature (ACL) can comfortably be classified under Minority Literature. The definition and very nature of this literature justifies this position. No Minority Literature can survive without apologists. It needs critics who are dedicated to writing, commenting, reviewing and critiquing this literature in other to give it currency in the literary market place. It needs Journals, Reviews, Newsletters, Blogs and Notebooks dedicated to the publishing of any “trash” written about this literature. It needs writers’ associations, literary interest groups, genre associations/clubs, and literary pressure groups. It needs awards and prizes, honors and rewards. It needs conferences, symposia, readings, writers meetings, cafés, discussion and workshops. Anglophone Cameroon Literature is deficient in much of these.  

The first proof of life and need for survival of a minority literature like ours is the need for a band of individuals who are dedicated to writing, commenting, reviewing and critiquing this literature in other to give it currency in the literary market place. The absence of reviews, commentary, and critique of a literature in the market place of literary culture is a clear indication that such a literature does not exist. Literature exists when people read it, mock it, play with it, evaluate it and celebrate it. When I talk about dedicated individuals, I mean people who love this literature for the sake of the literature and not out of need for promotion in the academia, or to achieve a particular political goal or as a favour to a colleague, or need for friendship.

Writing academic papers on a literature is the surest way of exposing that literature to a world of scholarship. But the problem with the way it is handled in ACL is what leads to problems. Much of academic writing on ACL is not born out of genuine love for the literature or the work in question but out of what I call “academic gangsterism”, which I will discuss in a later part. This attitude which presupposes that you belong to the academia to have your work read and interpreted by a scholar is a stifling attitude in ACL. I dare to borrow Guattari’s phrase to call this tendency “powerful signs which massacre desire.” (qtd. in What is A Minority Literature, 13). It massacres the desires of the writer who does not belong to the academia, as well as massacres the desires of readers who look to academic scholars to recommend beautiful works to them for consumption.

Many essays have blamed the Cameroon public for not reading ACL. The public has a reason, and a good one for the matter. The public does not have critics or reviewers or commentators who can tell them which book is good, for what reason and why. Let me give you a practical example; I read Bole Butake’s The Rape of Michelle as a secondary school student because I had heard waves about the great playwright at the University of Yaounde 1; then read Epie Ngome’s What God Has Put Asunder as a freshman, (thanks to Mbuh T. Mbuh who kept talking about this great play, and later flushed it down our throats against our desires. He had a good cause!!!). Besides these two playwrights whose other works I read for personal vanity, the others have been Bate Besong and John N. Nkengasong.

More than a decade after, it still lingers in my subconscious that these are the only readable playwrights. WHY? The answer is simply, the critics who projected these works to the masses and students have either turned to academic gangsterism or have given up the supreme task they took or have simply remained parochial. This means that Mathew Takwi, John Ngongkum Ngong, K.K Bonteh and the host of other playwrights I do not know have to sing their own songs. God forbid that the writer becomes the spokesperson of his own work.

Critics, reviewers, commentators etc cannot exist without a means of getting the word out to the public. This is what brings the medium of publication to the forefront of how a minority literature needs to survive. Every minority literature needs Journals, Reviews, Newsletters, Blogs and Notebooks dedicated to the publishing of any “Trash” written about this literature. I have chosen to call it trash because a sophisticated name will limit the ability to comment or review to a limited group. Not everybody can write a scientific paper but everybody (including those given with the rear fine power to write scientific paper) can write Trash. But as far as I am concerned, trash is not Trash, because technology has given room for continuous recycling which in turn has given value to trash. Can you remember “Trashy” literature that now has a place of its own in world bibliographic literary data? Think about Onitsha Market Literature, if you want to know its international status visit the University of Kansas Library or just google Onitsha Market Literature. That is the power that such a medium of publication can bring to Trash in an age like this.

What happened to The Mould? Was it just one of the ladders? What happened to The Mongo Review? Did it die to prefigure the collapse of the bridge or the union? And most recently, (to my own very Kang) what happened to Palapala? (Let me tell you why I prefer to call you Kang, instead of Kangsen. In my village the kang, is the name of the leading juju, i.e. the captain). I, like others, have always seen/respected you as the leading online magazine personality in Cameroon literature because some of the most provocative essays of our time on our literature featured in Palapala; some of the finest pieces of art and poetry were published in Palapala until the morning I read your farewell note, (which I decided not to talk about it then because I was angry). There is not a single journal on Cameroon Literature; there is only one review (The Ngoh-Kuoh Review), there is only one magazine now (Bakwa Magazine), there is only one blog (Cameroon Literature in English) and one Personal journal (La Bang), there is an open column (Up Station Mountain Club),there are no Newsletters, and no Notebooks.

How can a minority literature with such limited representation be known or take its place in the context of world literatures. So where is this literature talked about? In classrooms and amphitheatres? In very limited and skeptical ways. In literary circles? None exists beyond the KIF /Miraclaire monthly poetry reading (Café). In beer parlors? No, there is much politics to talk about. So where then? NOWHERE!

So why are we so conspicuously absent, or do I say insignificantly present on the techno-media landscape. An outsider may be tempted to say that it is because we don’t write. Such an outsider will be right if we go by the amount of exposure our works – single poems, collections, plays, short stories, novels and criticism – have nationally and internationally. On the contrary, we do a lot of writing. The main problem is that Anglophone Cameroon writers still revere writing and publication. What I mean here is that we still think parochially that our works need to be published in international magazines and journals. We still believe that great literature is that which is published out of Cameroon; we still think that online magazines are not worthy channels to publish our works; we still think that the magazines, reviews and journals run by Cameroonians are not academically sound enough to publish our works. The issue is not with the qualification of the person who manages the review or journal or column or newspaper; the issue is the quality of the work.

For example, this year The Ngoh-Kuoh Review submitted some short stories for the 2012 Caine Prize, those short stories will be judged not on the strength of the Review but on the creativity of the story-tellers. The stories might not win or even be shortlisted but the judges go home knowing that entries came from Cameroon this year. That might be the beginning of their interest in that literature as a whole.

If we must soar higher than we are already doing then we need to break out of this narrow-minded reverence of our works; break away from the sentimental attachment we have with our works. A good example of a poet who is breaking out in daring ways is Wirndzerem G. Barfee who has the courage to share part of his work in progress on Facebook. The commentary that followed might seem insignificant but you can never tell what it did to the imagination of those who read the poems. Some writers fear plagiarism. What? So out of the millions of poems online only yours can be plagiarized? Well, I do not deny the possibility; I just think that it is too slim a possibility. Joyce Ashutantang’s blog has readings/performances of her poems. I am yet to hear that they have been plagiarized. Let us loosen-up the grip on our works if we have to be present on the world’s stage.

As a minority literature, ACL needs writers’ associations, literary interest groups, genre associations/clubs, and literary pressure groups to carve out avenues for its propagation. The Anglophone Cameroon Writers’ Association (ACWA) is definitely the body that should play this role. When Nkengasong, like the biblical Prophet Ezekiel breathe life into the dry bones of ACWA, I am sure this is what he had in mind. These dry bones have grown to a skinny creature that lacks sufficient flesh and energy to carry itself along successfully. Also, this is the only writers’ association that exists or that comes out fully and that is why too much is expected of it. Why is there no Anglophone Cameroon Female Writers’ Association? Are there no female writers? Why are there no literary Cliques? Why are there no Novelists, or Poets, or Playwrights Associations (genre associations)? I know there is a young writers’ association (or something of the sort) in Bamenda and the Yaounde University Poetry Club (which is gradually gaining ground again after a long hibernation). The absence of such groups beside ACWA has a deadening effect on ACL.

The very existence of ACWA is a threat to such other associations. Efforts to create such associations are interpreted as attempts to secede from ACWA, especially if the founder is a member of ACWA. It is clear that ACWA alone cannot organize all the activities, events and readings that can sufficiently project ACL. The online group CAMLIT is a good example of the kind of grouping I am talking about. The unfortunate thing however is that CAMLIT functions more like a dysfunctional ex-student network. What happened to the lofty plans – the journal, the reviewers network, the mentoring/coaching and all what not that we happily aligned with? The answer, my friends, is not blowin’ in the wind. It is hidden in the corridors of our minds.

The existence of the above mentioned groups will bring about new awards and prizes, honors and rewards as well as conferences, symposia, readings, writers meetings, café, discussion and workshops. From the 1994 Yaounde Workshop to 2012, it is almost two decades during which nothing has been done or said about ACL. The annual or biannual meetings proposed in the CAMLIT forum would have given ACL a dimension and projection that is unimaginable.  Individual papers have been presented in conferences and published in journals or conference proceedings but to pull writers and critics together has proven to be a very difficult task. Is it that it is so difficult a thing to do? I really do not think so. We simply do not have the will.

Presently, there are less than five (5) literary awards and prizes. In fact there is the EduArt Award, and the Eko Foundation/ACWA Award. These are prestigious awards with the potential needed to project ACL to glistering pedestals. The very funny thing about these awards is that the same Anglophone Cameroon Writers for whom these awards are created are skilled at second-guessing the awards or organizers. I know international awards in the US with cash prizes as low as $100 U.S. So what makes us think that awards of 50.000 FRS or 100.000 FRS in Cameroon are small or that recognition certificates are not enough? I am not denying anyone the power of criticism but what is the function of criticism at the present time (to rephrase Matthew Arnold). One is left with the impression that we think that art will be the source of existence for the artist. While we cannot completely dismiss the fact, we must acknowledge those who make the effort to offer awards of any nature – they are vital to the growth and recognition of our literature.

The popular saying in my village and in much of the grass-field of the North West Region of Cameroon goes thus “if you don’t clap for your own juju, who then do you expect to clap for it”. This points to the fact that we are the ones to champion the cause of our literature if we want it to get to the heights where other minority literatures are. We must be dedicated not only in writing, or in inflating our personal egos but in a communal effort to give a louder voice to Anglophone Cameroon Literature. As promised, in the follow-up (part 2) I will discuss Academic Gangsterism as a major force that clips the wings of our literature.

Oscar C. Labang is winner of the Bernard Fonlon Poetry Competition (2005) and author of This is Bonamoussadi (Poetry), The trial of Bate Besong (Drama),” “The Visit (Short Story), Riot in the Mind (Criticism), and Editor of Emerging Voices: Anthology of Young Anglophone Cameroon Poets. He lives in Kansas.

[Commentary] Petit Pays: Nudity and the King

Kangsen Feka Wakai

Petit Pays owned the nineties.  And if he didn’t own the entire decade, then he owned the most significant part of it.  And if he didn’t own the airwaves, he certainly owned sidewalk speakers and dance floors.  The ‘matinee’ generation would come of age dancing to the sounds of  ‘Nioxxer’, ‘Maria’ and ‘Polissy’.

If Lapiro de Mbanga stormed through the gates of censorship in Cameroonian popular music in the mid-eighties with his abrasive diatribes against the socio-political order, then Petit Pays widened those walls with lyrics that were at once irreverent and suggestive.  His were songs that were layered with innuendos, social commentary and were meant to provoke.

If Lapiro was the revolutionary, Petit Pays was the provocateur.  If Lapiro got the masses dancing, thinking and angry, Petit Pays wanted them dancing, laughing, thinking and redefining their perceptions.

When trends in Cameroonian popular culture are eventually chronicled with the clarity of hindsight, Petit Pays—Lapiro de Mbanga notwithstanding—will no doubt emerge as perhaps the most influential singer of that era.

Having emerged out of the dregs of the golden era of Makossa, a genre that had dominated the Cameroonian music scene since independence—a sound born in the native quarters of Douala, Petit Pays will commandeer this ‘new’ Makossa sound across the continent all the way to pockets of African immigrant communities across the Atlantic.

Francis Nyamnjoh and Jude Fokwang have convincingly argued in their study of ‘Politics and Music in Cameroon’ that Makossa’s prominence in the local musical sphere was a consequence of both geography and history.

“Douala’s strategic position as a seaport and Cameroon’s largest commercial center gave Makossa an early lead.  The fact that this brand of music was more easily electrified was an added advantage to its rapid development and modernization.  Its gentle, bourgeois, cosmopolitan and adaptable rhythms and dance styles made Makossa the perfect music for urban Cameroon at a time when expectations of modernity were highest,” the authors suggest.

But, Petit Pays’s sound was a hybridized version that incorporated elements of Zouk and Soukous without straying too far away from its Makossa roots.

Makossa, in essence, had always been a gentleman’s affair. Makossa was Nkoti Francois in a four-piece suit, Moni Bile in a bowtie, and the avant-garde tastes of a Dina Bell.  However, Petit Pays’s sound, and eventually his image, was radically different from the unadulterated ‘old sound’ championed by the likes of purists like Toto Guillaume and Ben Decca.

It was a sound that did not confine itself to the heartbreaks, crooning, ‘bal a terre’ and relationship confessionals that had come to lyrically define the genre. It was not the youthful and soulful sound of Epee et Koum; Petit Pays crooned too, but did it while subverting decorum and offering social commentary, and unlike the gentlemen of the seventies—the Makossa nostalgists favorite epoch, he courted controversy. And controversy sells.

His apparition [without controversy] on the musical landscape would occur in 1987 with the Eyabe Kwedi produced ‘Hausa’. In the autobiographical title track he would introduce himself as the son of an Hausa father and a Douala mother.  This album, and subsequent albums by this detribalized son of Makepe would even elicit hope amongst Makossa enthusiasts in need of a messiah to counter the sonic assaults coming from neighboring Yaounde [Bikutsi] and as far away as Kinshasa [Soukous].

But it was the release of his opus, 1996′s ClasseF/M that would establish him as an icon and immovable boulder in the pop-cultural landscape.   The album came in two tapes, Classe M and
Classe F.  But, it was the cover of Classe F, which made headlines and kept flippant tongues busy—posing, like a minute old baby—think of biblical Adam before self-awareness—his hands covering his crotch, mischief all over his face.

It was an image that rattled and startled the gallery of official and unofficial censors.  It was as if he was saying “je m’en fout!”   But this act also seemed like a metaphorical meditation on the polity’s collective nakedness after the embers of liberation had died following the political euphoria of the early nineties.  It was a rebuke at the parochial and hypocritical.  It was Felaesque in its audaciousnes, jaw-dropping and shocking.  But above all, it sold 50,000 copies in a week—a record, and made him an icon.

In fact, before Petit Pays could even claim fans in places as far away as Abidjan, Ivory Coast, he had imagined himself an icon.  He had enthroned himself the King of Makossa Love.  He had even declared himself ‘l’advoacat defenseurs des femmes’ even as he objectified those same ‘femmes‘ in his lyrics.   He would claim to be ‘number one Africa!’  He became Le Turbo!  And like other legends of sound and verse sang of his death as if to remind listeners—and himself—that he was destined to be great.

Today Petit Pays lives on Rue Petit Pays in the Makepe neighborhood of Douala in a mansion inscribed with his aliases: OMEGA and TURBO.

According to most published reports, he was born in that neighborhood on June 5th of 1969.  In his late teens, he would leave for France to study law, and according to legend was repatriated. It is even rumored that his band, Les Sans Visas, owe their name to that experience.

In any case, his decision to bare it all still stands amongst his most timely and daring artistic statements.   With that act, he transformed the musical landscape from sheer entertainment stage and dancefest into a living canvass of socio-political expression.  The image uttered an ocean of words.  But it was the music that reminded those who might soon forget that, “meme les chef d’etats meurent”.

So, when he sang of ‘Polissy beat ma back oh…soldier e beat ma back oh’, it was a mere regurgitation of scenes scripted on the streets of Kumba, Bamenda, Bafoussam and Douala.  These songs and others reflected an engaged and conscious artist.

In a way, and in the context of the time, Petit Pays’s decision to bare it all could even be viewed as an act of self-sacrifice, a mutilation of mores, and an altering of perceptions and an artistic risk.  But as fate would have it, Classe F/M was not just an attention-grabbing gimmick.  It was a meticulously executed project that varied in mood that can even be credited for helping usher in the short-lived Makossa subgenre, Zengue.   But ClasseF/M would also be his last great album.

In recent years, Petit Pays has graced an album cover in drag, baptized people in his name, given himself countless aliases, kept concert goers waiting for hours, rambled through songs, shot awful videos and made many sloppy albums.

He had always sang with a hoarse, at times off-note key, but could count on stellar production for the accentuation of his sound.  His true gift was always the persona that came with the singer: a sharp wit and keen eye for the ironic.  He was an average songwriter with a knack for catchy choruses and hooks, but it was his understanding of the role of marketing and the power of the artist in society that might have been his greatest talent.

These days, the music Petit Pays makes sounds like bad samples of his earlier releases.  The crisp production of his heyday has been substituted by a crude production.  The social commentary and iconoclasm have now taken a backseat to creative monotony.  His recent releases have been at best lackluster.   It is as though he doesn’t even try.  As the social and sonic flame he helped spark fades in the dusk of our collective consciousness, one is left to wonder:  does this King still rule supreme or has he lingered to the domain of comfort-induced apathy?

 

Kangsen Feka Wakai is the author of Asphalt Effect and Fragmented Melodies. He is also the Founding Editor of Palapala Magazine. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts. You can read an interview with him here .