Cliff of Sirens

Cliff of Sirens is a set of poems about the plight of a people who, entitled and wishing to enjoy basic freedoms and rights in their own country, are assailed by a counterpart country of equal status. The belligerent has for long monopolized power, refusing to recognize the other party as a country of equal status, depriving it of fundamental rights including the cultural right to express itself in its own language in addition to legal and other rights. The situation is compounded by the fact that the victimized country has been subjected by its counterpart to a status whereby they have never enjoyed a genuine democracy, one man from the belligerent country having usurped power for almost forty years. The people of the assailed country, Southern Cameroon, who have been treated as second-class citizens so far and denied basic economic opportunities, see themselves as having been pushed through a tunnel to a cliff now collapsing dangerously, people of all ages ranging from babies and toddlers to adults being slaughtered with impunity on the basis of a totally unjustifiable genocidal war.