Hemley
Boum

How does one introduce a woman writer? What truly matters, and why? Is it her date of birth? Her birthplace? The cities she has called home? The number of books she has written? The literary prizes she has received? What journalists or booksellers say about her? What she herself reveals about her novels, her vocation, her inspirations? The motifs that resurface from book to book—a city’s name, a character, an obsession? All of this, and so much more. 

Hemley Boum was born in 1973 in Douala, a great port city in Cameroon. She studied anthropology. She has written five novels since her first, which was published in 2010. She now lives in a small town near Paris, in a house bordered by a forest and a stream—landscapes which, when she writes, take on other hues and other shapes, folding into the forests and waterways of Cameroon, of all the places she has lived, and of those she invents. 

She is said to be the great novelist of exile, of winding destinies, of memory—an author who, in each of her books, seeks to illuminate the margins, the forgotten worlds, the forgotten lives. 

She is called a storyteller, a weaver of tales born of Cameroon’s history—of its war of independence, of the maquisards. Tales arising from family epics, from the gestures and words of a mother, a grandmother, from a secret intimacy that fiction alone can explore. And also from a political passion, from the stories of those who depart, who fight, who bind Cameroon to France, the South to the North, the city to the village—stories that force us to abandon our vantage points and seek new ground from which to see. 

In The Fisherman’s Dream, her latest novel, Campo—the land’s far edge at the southern tip of Cameroon—becomes the center of the world. A fisherman stands against the great fishing conglomerates, the predators, and is defeated. Yet his defeat casts a gesture that endures, one we recall when his grandson, living in Paris, returns to Cameroon and reclaims his own story. Time layers upon time; destinies cross; defeats are never final. In this, Hemley Boum invents new centers, new bearings, new legends. 

Hemley Boum’s stories are our stories: lives crushed by war, by colonial and then neo-colonial rule, by the powerful. Our stories: carried by resisters, rebels, dreamers, by women and men who understand the value of time, of patience, of memory, of tales passed down, of truths that hide and reemerge. They know that days come and go. Nothing is lost: love is lived; people are born, grow, drift away, lose themselves and return—to a land, a mother, a lover, a story that belonged to them without their knowing. 

Hemley Boum’s novels shake us, offering new frontiers to imagine and inhabit, new forms of transmission with other codes, other rituals, infused with a touch of magic. Everything is movement, metamorphosis, upheaval, for her intimate geographies are intricate—like her readings, from Jane Austen to Toni Morrison, from Ben Okri to Balzac; like her inspirations; like the cities that quicken her pulse; like the languages that inhabit her. There are no assignments, no moments of rest, no ready-made certainties imposed by others. Her characters are searchers—seeking a house, a refuge, a place of rest and resistance that belongs to them alone, that speaks to our endlessly novelistic lives. These words are Hemley Boum’s, yet they might also be those of Zach and Zacharias, of Abi, of Sarah: “What becomes of the places, the beings, the paths, the times that haunt us? What becomes of the lives we did not live, the dawns that found us asleep?” For each of them, the answer lies in life, in memory, and in the act of writing. 

Anne-Sophie Stefanini