Torn Vows Distant Graves

A diaspora epic. A spiritual reckoning. A love story watched by ghosts.

 There are some promises that cannot be unspoken—because they were never made only in words. This story begins not in America, and not even in Cameroon, but in a space older than either: beneath a tree, in the hush between generations, where love is not merely felt but witnessed. Among the Bayangi people of Cameroon, marriage is not just a celebration—it is a covenant. A vow that binds two souls, not only to each other, but to the soil that bore them, the ancestors who watch them, and the spirits who remember long after paper forgets.

Torn Vows – Distant Graves is a story of such a vow. It is a love story—but not a simple one. It is a migration story—but not one of triumph without cost. It follows Tanyi and Bessem, two young lovers joined by tradition and tested by modernity. Their journey will carry them from the red clay of Buea to the snow-covered streets of Maryland, from ancestral trees to courtroom walls, from whispered blessings to broken silences.

This novel is about what it means to carry a name across borders. About how love survives—or breaks—when stretched between continents, between old gods and new laws, between obligation and longing. It is about the invisible weight of heritage, and the ways in which even silence can echo for generations. For readers unfamiliar with Bayangi cosmology or Cameroonian rituals, know this: you are not outsiders here. You are witnesses. Step gently, listen closely, and you will feel the drumbeat beneath every page. You will hear the trees speak. You will know that no love—when bound by blood and witnessed by spirits—ever truly disappears. It only waits.
Let the story begin beneath the Nkeng tree.
Where vows were made.
Where the earth remembers.
Where the ancestors are still listening.