Reading regional mobilities, Boko Haram and African urban youth in Max Lobe’s Loin de Douala and Hemley Boum’s Les Jours viennent et passent

Abstract

Two novels by Cameroonian writers came out within a few months of each other, each portraying a cross-country journey from the city of Douala in the South to the troubled region of the Far North of Cameroon. Max Lobe’s Loin de Douala (2018) and Hemley Boum’s Les Jours viennent et passent (2019) differ in many ways, but the common journey North in a context of widespread attacks by the terrorist group Boko Haram in the region in the mid-2010s shows a need for a literary imaginary that includes regional mobilities and current societal issues in Cameroon. I argue that the fictional regional journeys undertaken by the characters uncover not only a different kind of embodied mobility, but also questions of religious extremism and opportunities for the youth by transporting the characters to the locations where these issues are most pressing, and perhaps least publicly discussed. Spatial proximity becomes a way to change the themes the writers’ fiction embrace, to “get closer” as it were to some of the key questions of the region writ large.