Eric Ngalle Charles is a long way from home. Born in Buea in Cameroon, he wasn't always known as Eric - he went by the name of Mosre Mo Ngwa in his homeland, his maternal grandfather's name which loosely translates to 'Dog of Dawn'.
Today, the 43-year-old poet, author and playwright calls Ely, Cardiff home. His arrival to Wales was "serendipitous" he laughed, a happier happenstance in a traumatic life that saw Eric flee Cameroon aged just 17 fearing for his life. For all the trauma that he's survived, Eric has a warm open nature that invites people in to his world and a lyrical voice that occasional sways towards a thick animated Cameroonian accent as he describes certain events.
He smiles knowingly, laughs often and has an intense gaze as he listens to every question. None of his answers are flippant. In fact, they are the very opposite as he recounts stories of escaping his father's family, becoming a victim of human trafficking and ending up with a one-way student visa to Russia instead of Belgium. He came to Wales on a Zimbabwean passport obtained on the black market and which declared him to be in his sixties.
Eric's poetry is starkly beautiful against the backdrop of upheaval and torture that got him here. His childhood in a traditional Cameroonian village was "heavenly" he said but in his teens and early twenties it became about survival.
"Life for us was very simple," he said. "My mum had farms, you'd go to school, you'd come home, you'd go to the farm, you'd have food when you get home. It was simple, it was wonderful, it was heavenly. My mother played the role of mother and father for the six of us children. For a writer, these endless childhood memories are quite significant because I keep going back to these places."
But aged 17, he had no choice but to leave. Throughout his childhood, Eric had witnessed people’s rights and freedoms being restricted. His family were members of the English-speaking community in Cameroon, but political and economic power lay with the French speakers. By the time he went to university in Buea in 1996, he was writing political articles and supporting the Cameroon Anglephone Movement (CAM), one of the country’s major pressure groups.
But alongside this political turmoil where gangs roamed the streets, riots broke out frequently and people were being burned in tyres in broad daylight, there was also family turmoil. A family row over inheritance saw Eric and his mother shunned and publicly humiliated.
In November 1997, Eric was attacked and then arrested. His father's family were now the enemy. Eric knew he had to flee.
Eric spent three days in prison and, once he was free, he fled the country via neighbouring Nigeria and found himself on a plane to Russia, where he arrived with $24 US. That was the start of a terrifying two years in which, with no official right to be in the country, he fell prey to criminal gangs.
"If I had stayed in Cameroon then we would probably not be having this conversation because what my father's family did to me literally killed me," Eric said. "I was ready to burn down my father's house with everybody that was in it."
Eric initially thought he was leaving Cameroon for Belgium to study for a degree in economics. There was a stopover in Malta en route and that was when he was told: "Mr Charles, unfortunately your visa does not allow you to transit in Malta, you have to go to Moscow as you have just a one way student visa."
He was 17 when he emerged from the Russian airport in a daze and thrust into an illegal world, being locked up regularly in police cells, having no legal rights, and seeing the money laundering and people trafficking.
"My first shock horror was when I came outside the airport and I saw these gaunt-looking black faces," Eric explained.. "These people were all victims of human trafficking. We were prey and they [traffickers] were preying on us. I was broke, I had no money, I had nowhere to go
"This is when the whole network of human trafficking kicks in. There was a chain. From the airport we went to central Russia and after three days and three nights on a Russian train, I ended up in Stavropol."
Eric continued: "A lot of things happened in Russia, I engaged in all sorts, but I felt that I was already dead and I knew that it was inconsequential what happened to me. The longer I stayed in Russia, the more venom I developed.
"I wanted to go back home, I wanted to confront my father's family and ask what was it that I had done to them that made them hate me. In 1997, I was dead."
The years have passed and over that time Eric has mellowed. He hasn't forgotten his home.
"There was something my mother did to me at the airport in Cameroon," he said. "When I looked at her she was crying so she avoided my gaze. But as a young man I was thinking, my mother is crying what does this mean? I wanted to go to my father and carry out my plans. But my mother took my hands into her hands and one by one she gave each of my fingers a gentle bite. And I didn't realise the magnitude of what she did.
"But later, my grandmother had invited my ancestors on that particular day that wherever I went they should be with me and they would have to bring me back to her alive. But for the two years and two months I was in Russia, I think my ancestors abandoned me and I was angry with that. But I think the African ancestors would not survive the Russian cold so for that brief moment they just had to leave me with my own affairs." He gives one of his deep musical chuckles to show he's joking, although it's a job to tell. In this moment, it seems he holds no grudges.
He spent two years and two months living on the streets of Russia, buying and selling fake dollars, dancing as a stripper from Stavropol to Sochi, Ivanova and eventually Moscow. In Moscow, the Cameroonian embassy rejected his citizenship arguing that he was not a Cameroonian on the basis that he spoke French with a heavy accent. He was told to go and hand himself to the Nigerian high commissioner.
"The UN had a repatriation programme for Africans who had stayed in Russia and I qualified for it because my Russian language was so good they thought I had lived in Russia for more than 10 years," Eric continued. "They were going to send me back to Cameroon but one week before the flight date they stopped the programme."
Somehow, Eric managed to obtain a Zimbabwean passport on the black market. It was his ticket to leave.
"When I look back at my time in Russia, it was traumatic, I will never go back to that, but there was something bigger than me protecting me otherwise I wouldn't have survived," he said. "I was involved in so many things where the consequences would have been tragic. Buying and selling fake dollars, torture to the point of death by 30 Cameroonians. I would not have survived but there was something bigger."
He arrived in the UK in July 1999 aged 21 where he spontaneously hopped onto a National Express bus destined for Cardiff. It was a name he recognised as a fellow Cameroonian and gifted mathematician - who lived in the same village as Eric - had left for the UK to take up teaching in the Welsh city. The teacher - Francis Elive - had returned to Cameroon in 1990 when the country played in the World Cup and the young Eric had remembered: "He's from the same village like myself, we went to his house, we thought he's come from white man's land, the land of milk and honey, let's go and see him, he's brought gifts and all these things. So we went to see Francis."
He continued: "Fast forward many years later and I've arrived at Heathrow, I have managed to come out of the airport with my Zimbabwean passport, and I saw the National Express bus and it says Swansea via Cardiff. I jumped on the bus and I came to Cardiff.
"So when I came to Cardiff at the bus stop, I came to Stand A and I saw a black guy and I thought I'd go to him and say 'Excuse me' in my thick Cameroonian accent. I said 'Excuse me, do you know a Cameroonian here called Francis?'. This guy looked at me as though I were mad.
"I saw another bus - number 27 - and there was a black guy in it dressed in one of those Cameroonian costumes so I thought' Oh my people'. So this guy comes off the bus and I approach him saying 'Excuse me, do you know a Cameroonian called Francis?' He started laughing and speaking in French." He was Rwandan and by coincidence that man, Emanuel, had been helped by Cameroonians during his escape from Rwanda. He wanted to return the favour so he welcomed Eric into his home.
Eric did eventually get to see Mr Elive and after an appeal he was granted full refugee status.
Beginning to put down roots in his new home in Cardiff Eric was "catapulted" into the world of Welsh literati. Peter Finch, head of the Welsh Academy (now Literature Wales) invited Eric to a literature and trauma event in Llandudno in 2001 to talk about how he'd come to be in Wales.
Eric said: "When I came to Wales all those years ago all I had were my memories. I was frightened. I was like I don't know which aspect of my memory you want me to tell you. The memory of a young man growing up on the streets of Buea or the memory of two years and two months in Russia and how I came to the UK as a 64-year-old Zimbabwean.
"I didn't know how to articulate myself. But something happened: there was a lady who'd travelled with her family from Afghanistan via Uzbekistan into Istanbul and Turkey. In Uzbekistan her father passed away so the human traffickers took it in turns to do whatever they did to her mother so they could secure their passage to Istanbul. She was on this stage articulating herself, talking about this trauma and I'm thinking Oh my God, I thought I had it bad. Seeing her tell her story became my inspiration.
"But I had still not found my voice. When we were travelling back to Swansea on the A470 I saw the mountains and the sheep and when we came to Swansea I wrote my very first poem: 'On a wet journey to Llandudno, Washing away pain and longing, A re-born voice crying, Between a mountain and a sea'.
"That was it, I'd found my voice. It was the first time I thought I had arrived. That first poem - Between a Mountain and a Sea - became the title of Eric's first poetry anthology published by Hafan Books in 2003.
Eric is a gifted storyteller - it's not just his word but it's on the way he uses them and the way he expresses them. He grew up telling stories he said: "My grandfather had many many children and I always knew that my mum would always be at work. To help minimise the pain of hunger in my stomach, every time I finished school I would stop at my grandfather's compound and I would entertain his children by telling them stories. And one of the mothers would have cooked and they'd feed me and I'd move to another compound and tell their children stories and they would've cooked as well.
"So by the time I got to my mother's house if she hadn't cooked it didn't really bother me. I believe poetry delivery, story delivery, it is everything. People don't just want to see your lips moving, they want to see if you use a particular word and where it takes you." He flashes another bright white smile.
Despite the struggles, he looks back at his early life fondness. In his latest book - Homelands - published by Seren Books in April 2022, he returns to the memories of growing up: "I fluctuate into Russia and then into Wales," Eric said. "These are the things that feed me constantly and for writers this is extremely important. These earliest memories are something which fuels the writing."
In Cardiff, Eric started his own family with his wife Debra - who he is now separated from - and his step-daughter Nicole and his own daughter Jolie who is named after his mother. He currently balances his Ph.D research with a job at Amazon. It was two decades before Eric returned to his home country in 2017. It would prove a traumatic homecoming: "I thought the shock horror of what happened to me, I had dealt with it," Eric said. "But as soon as I arrived at the airport in Douala I returned to the dark days of 1997. So much so that I couldn't even go to the village. I had to go and stay some place else one hour from the village. In one of the paces I was supposed to feel at home it became a nightmare."
On his return to Wales, he started doing creative writing workshops with the aim of linking Welsh writers with Cameroonian writers. He'd long been interested in the relationship between literature and trauma and how the former could be used to overcome the latter. Until March 2020, Eric ran workshops with the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea
"I realised early upon arriving in Wales that I was the only one who could tell my story," he said. "Sometimes, your voice could easily be lost under labels. By this I mean, instead of you being able to tell you story, you become part of a collective narrative. I work with asylum seekers, refugees, victims of human trafficking etc. By giving these group of people a voice, I found my own voice."
In 2017 Eric was awarded the Creative Wales Award by the Arts Council of Wales for his work in migration, memory, and trauma.
"Arrival and departure means different things for different migrants," Eric continued. "Some people arrive in a country but never actually arrive. Some people leave their country but never actually leave. So your head is stuck in one place and you find yourself in another place."
He illustrates his point recounting the story of an Eritrean man who attended his workshops. The man had been kicked out of a coffee shop in Cardiff's Morgan Arcade for going to the café but never actually buying coffee. Eric said: "He tells me that in Eritrea where he is was from every day they have an open house to drink coffee. He wasn't in the Morgan Arcade, he was in Eritrea in his head. This is so powerful. It's how the scent of coffee can transport him from the Morgan Arcade to Eritrea and back again."
In 2019, Eric's autobiography I, Eric Ngalle, was published by Parthian books: "I had to write that book first, flush it out of my system before I could move on," Eric said. It's helped him massively find his voice and his role in the world.
"I think I wanted to go back home. I wanted to become Eric Ngalle Charles. The Cameroonian government had confiscated my passport thinking I was Nigerian, I came to Wales and people were asking me to tell them my story. I didn't know what aspect of my memory they wanted to hear so I, Eric Ngalle was me redeeming my name."
Since coming to Wales, Eric has studied modern history and popular culture at Cardiff Metropolitan University, been featured at Hay Festival and the BBC, earned a place to start an MA in creative writing at Cardiff University and is currently a Ph.D. researcher at King's College London. He wants to write more novels and possibly go into teaching. I tell him I think he'd make a great teacher and he is grateful for my confidence in him. He has so much to offer, I say.
What is it about his writing that captures so many, I ask. Eric smiles and throws his hands into the air: "An element of hope," he says. "I thought about giving up many times. My story is something that I share with the world, I'm not in despair anymore. Some people have had it so bad but look at where they are now. So if we can do it then you can do better."
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