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Dog Days: An Animal Chronicle (Temps de chien: chronique animale) (CARAF Books: Caribbean and African Literature translated from the French)

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With the publication of Temps de chien Nganang emerged as a writer noted for his innovative use of the French language. Any discussion on this novel that glosses over the function of language would amount to a parochial analysis. One can hardly speak of Nganang's narrative technique without reckoning with the linguistic novelty that characterizes his style of writing. Temps de chien addresses the question of language in Cameroonian literature in particular and in fictional writing in Africa as a whole. Nganang focuses on the manner in which the African writer employs language to wed form to content. The particularity of his style resides in the presence of bits and pieces (if not chunks) of Cameroonian languages in the text. In his attempt to transpose the speech mannerisms of Cameroonians into French, he employs a variety of linguistic codes, a phenomenon which Haugan refers to as "the alternate use of two languages, including everything from the introduction of a single unassimilated word up to a complete sentence or more into the context of another language" (Quoted in Omole, 58). Temps de chien harbors an amalgam of codes--French, English, Cameroonian Pidgin, Camfranglais and numerous indigenous languages. It is a novel in which street-talk, also known as "Kam-Tok", "Camspeak" or "Majunga Talk" (Ze Amvela, 56) blends freely with conventional French to produce a new code whose effect on the reader is exhilarating. In an interview he granted Taina Tervonen, Nganang had this to say about the stylistic choices he had to make in writing this novel: "La rue a une avance singulière tant sur les journalistes que sur les écrivains. Ce roman essaie de se mettre à l'école de la rue.... L'imagination et l'oralité des rues a fabriqué ces personages qui existent et que j'ai mis dans mon roman" (105) [The street exerts a unique pull both on journalists and writers. This novel attempts to depict the street school....The imagination and orality of the street have produced the characters that I have inserted into my novel]. In his attempt to interpolate the speech patterns of indigenous populations into the French language, he switches codes. Code-switching enables him to transpose native languages, Pidgin English and Camfranglais into French.