"When the "Lire à Douala" association, represented by Christian Wanguè, asked me to be the patron of this event, I immediately jumped at the chance, so much do I love this city. I fell head over heels in love with literature in Douala, and that affection has never left me. Douala has allowed me to develop a certain perspective on the world: a sense of self, a framework, an anchor that makes me feel at home everywhere, because I come from somewhere. I will never be an exile, because I am a traveler: someone who leaves of her own free will and returns whenever she pleases. I owe this freedom to this city. Returning here for "Lire à Douala" was a natural choice."

“It's a real tragedy that books are so expensive and there are so few libraries. I don't have any easy solutions. For my own books, I always negotiate with the publisher to get a much lower price in Cameroon than elsewhere, but it's not a sustainable solution. Ideally, we would have a local publisher who could reprint the books at a lower cost for the local market. I'm very interested in this kind of solution.”

“Reading is a matter of sensitivity, curiosity, and openness to the world. I would never say that reading makes you a better person: let's be frank, scholars and intellectuals tend to be arrogant and condescending towards those who know less. Nevertheless, the love of reading is a grace, a journey without moving. Books have taught me, moved me to tears, made me laugh out loud, all alone, in a crowded room, on a train, who knows? Alone? No, in the company of characters who spoke only to me, whom someone else had conceived and crafted so that they would speak only to me. Books have informed me about myself and taught me to trust my intelligence to understand the world. Reading is essential, as essential as the air we breathe. Boko Haram means "Forbidden Book," and today more than ever, confronted and attacked as we are by this murderous obscurantism, reading becomes in itself an act of resistance.”

“I write the literature I love, an intimate literature that gets as close as possible to people to express human turmoil, the small victories of everyday life, and also what Dickens called "Great Expectations." The small, seemingly insignificant stories of love, friendship, jealousy, betrayal, and loyalty—our ordinary lives—are the very fabric of History. It's not right that this should disappear behind important dates, battles won or lost, street names that evoke only heroes. Here, in "The Maquisards," we grapple with characters we know intimately, whom we hate or with whom we identify, but none of them are strangers to us. This is the literature I love, a kind of dialogue of soul to soul where even the worst characters possess a humanity.”

“I want to reiterate that this war could not have been fought without the participation of women. Traditional societies, particularly Bassa society, were organized in this way. Women held a sphere of power that belonged solely to them. The Ko'o, which I describe in "The Maquisards," is an order of priestesses, the feminine aspect of the Mbog. A battle of this magnitude could not have taken place without women joining forces alongside men, just as they did daily in their societies. When Mpodol was killed, women were with him. They were part of his inner circle. They risked their lives just as much as the men. It was a matter of restoring them to their rightful place alongside their comrades in arms. For history, but also as an example. For us Cameroonians today, it is important to understand that our fathers AND our mothers answered the call to this historic event.”

“My sole commitment as a novelist is to express myself without taboo, with complete freedom. I know that words, public speech, bind the person who utters them. My ideas and biases are very clearly expressed in my work. In that sense, yes, I am committed. This book addresses several difficult questions: the terrible silence, the necessary question of the duty to remember, and the use we choose to make of this past, both terrible and glorious.”

“I wanted to study my characters in all their human, spiritual, and sociological complexity; to do this, I needed to ground them in a culture. I chose a single location, the Bassa forest, to house my characters. The Bassa country thus becomes a metaphor for all the villages, all the peoples, the entire country. In fact, that's how the book has been received, and I'm delighted. Readers from the Bamileke, Douala, Beti…and even from outside the country have told me how moved they were by reading *The Maquisards*.”