RHETORIC AND CULTURE IN JOHN NKENGASONG’S ACROSS THE MONGOLO

Abstract

This paper explores and discusses the synergetic link between language, culture and literature as underscored in John Nkengasong’s Across the Mongolo. Nkengasong, in his novel Across the Mongolo, intertwines Cameroon culture and rhetoric through cultural thought patterns such as the family structure, greeting and salutation, communal life and hospitality, culinary delights, days of the week, as well as linguistic thought patterns such as transliteration of metaphorical expressions and imagery, direct loans, coinage, code-mixing, French discourse, and Cameroon Pidgin English discourse, as index of socio-cultural and linguistic identity. These expressions ornament the write-up of the novel giving it a Cameroonian romantic aesthetic in linguistic texturing. They equally reveal that the language of Across the Mongolo portrays the interconnection between language and culture, and language and socio-cultural identity construction.  The paper argues that a good knowledge of the socio-cultural and linguistic context of Cameroon is necessary for a good understanding of the rhetoric of the novel Across the Mongolo.