In These Letters End In Tears, the Cameroonian author Musih Tedji Xaviere plants her flag on the mountain top of tragic romance territory. Considering the constellation of iconic star-crossed lovers in this camp, this is a very ambitious move for a literary debut.
Adding to the ranks of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Emily Brontë’s Catherine and Heathcliff, and Titanic’s Jack and Rose, Xaviere presents us with a new duo, Bessem and Fatima. In addition to navigating the obstacles posed by belonging to different religions, social classes, and ethnicities, the lovebirds are also burdened by the extra challenge of being a lesbian couple in a country where homosexuality is criminalised to the extent that it attracts a five-year sentence.
As the author herself asserts in a 2024 essay for LitHub, “if anything is considered worse than criticizing the government in Cameroon, it is homosexuality.” Living and loving under such conditions is a huge risk but one both women — emboldened more by youthful instincts over strategy — are determined to take until a brush with the law.
Written as a series of missives, the novel’s narrative begins thirteen years post-separation, prompted by Bessem’s anguish over the unsolved mystery of Fatima’s disappearance. To many, the prospect of hand-written love letters may appear to be a quaint and old fashioned device but here, they evoke nostalgia for the pre-smartphone era that define Bessem and Fatima’s shared life with each other and afford Bessem a tactile way to channel her grief and yearning. It is regretful though, that in a portion of the novel where the stakes are heightened and the story begins to drift into suspense/thriller territory, the self-contained, reflexive nature of the epistolary form doesn’t permit our literary vehicle to successfully shift gears.
What this approach does excellently, however, is strike a balance between Bessem’s memories and her observations of the harsh realities of queer life in contemporary Cameroon. Financial independence and being a conventionally attractive, femme-presenting woman provide Bessem with a camouflage but for others who aren’t as lucky, entering unwanted marriages or adopting hyper religious behaviour are survival tactics employed to evade suspicion in a homophobic environment.
The queer/heterosexual divide isn’t the only bifurcating line here. Xaviere’s Cameroon is a country marked by several tensions and divisions — patriarchy versus women’s rights, and Anglophone versus Francophone (Cameroon’s ongoing civil war is referenced a few times) and these contribute to Bessem’s growing dissatisfaction with both the state of affairs in her homeland and the trajectory of her life.
The only bright spot in such a bleak situation is her connection to Fatima, which manages to be equally tenuous and anchoring. Ironically, the severance of their bond is the same thing that preserves it. Bessem might grow disillusioned with society and surprise herself by making the kind of decisions her younger self may have never contemplated, but the one thing that remains fixed and constant in her world are her memories of Fatima, fossilized and untouched by change or time.
It is as if the only way perfect love can be achieved is if its growth is interrupted by tragedy. Perhaps, this is the appeal of doomed love affairs and why they endure in the popular imagination.
***Akumbu Uche is a writer and storyteller from Nigeria. Her works have been published by thelagosreview.ng, Aké Review, Brittle Paper, Canthius, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere
