Joyce Ashuntantang Masks, aesthetics and meaning: Framing bate besong’s disgrace: autobiographical narcissus and emanyankpe collected poems On March 8 2007, a few hours after launching his last collection of poetry, Disgrace: Autobiographical Narcissus and Emanyankpe Collected Poems, Bate Besong, the firebrand Anglophone Cameroon writer died in a ghastly car accident at the age of 53. In his short lifetime, he wrote six plays, five collections of poetry and a plethora of critical newspaper and journal articles. Bate Besong’s poetry and plays have been scrutinized using various theoretical approaches including postcolonialism, Marxism, deconstruction, historicism and structuralism. As the gadfly of Anglophone Cameroon Literature, Bate Besong positioned himself as a minority writer and held that position as a creed for all Anglophone Cameroon writers. His literary credo is summed up in his keynote address on the first workshop on Anglophone Cameroon writing held from January 18-21st 1993 at the Goethe Institute, Yaoundé. This workshop organized during a period of growing Anglophone nationalism in Cameroon, was sponsored by the Anglophone Cameroon writers’ guild and the University of Bayreuth, Germany. In his address, Besong characterized Anglophone Cameroonians as “an embattled people under the cancerous embrace of “national integration” and in this vein he warned:
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