Writing at the edge of realization

Midnights Kindred

Writing at the edge of the real

18–19/ 03/ 2013

Writers are the right kind of mad. Many artists are mad too, but writers, especially the variety that thinks really deeply, feels really strongly about the most complex and sometimes the most seemingly miniscule of matters. Those are mad people, people who think that whatever they may imagine, express on paper or project onto screens or through the airwaves can actually change the world. What audacity, attempting to alter the natural entropy or chaotic order of this cold, cruel, crazy, beautiful world.

They are daring to re-invent the world in their own images. Some are daring to invent a completely new one. One permeated by truth, justice, spontaneous joy and natural progression and unhinged from stifling traditions and the moral mores prevalent in the one we live in today.

With the same zeal and bold imagination that characterises the freest and most ‘open’ minded children; many writers invite and launch us into their headspace and cause us to see the world in new ways. This should not be seen as anything new, surprising or which came only through the process of writing. Writers have merely tapped into the inexorable storehouses of stories, dreams, legends and mythic universes. It is just that the business of telling stories has become so nuanced and fraught with all kinds of parasitic forces. From the voracious and bottom line motivated international publishing industry to the fickle yet indispensable reading audience, writing is a maddening yet equally captivating phenomenon.

What I witnessed and part-took of last-night reassures me that writers are some of the most dangerous and craziest people to ever walk the earth. And I absolutely love them for it. It was after the opening night of Time of the Writer festival held at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal’s Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre. A couple of writers and me went out to get a bite and have some drinks on Florida Road’s famous Spiga Doro Italian Restaurant. As expected, the conversation flowed as easily as the wine and laughter. It was a brief yet enriching moment where ‘thinkers’ and fantastical and eloquent people from all over the globe shared a hearty conversation, although of course there were really as many as three to four different groups talking all at once. In our joined tables, I think there was about twelve of us.

Topics ranged from the literature found in pornographic magazine’s such as Playboy, the challenges faced by young black Afrikan entrepreneurs, developing a reading audience in Afrika’s urban areas, creating socially responsible yet highly lucrative businesses to similarities between the struggles of Palestinian, Nigerian, Ugandan, and Southern Afrikan writers, activists and people in general. We also spoke about lighter things such as art, design, food, sex and writing as a pleasure.

But what dominated the conversations was the uses and abuses of words such as Culture, Tradition and Democracy. At my end of the table we were earnestly discussing the role of pan-Afrikanism, Black Consciousness and its role in the anti-capitalism or anti-imperialist narratives. I was sitting next to one of the visiting writers from the USA who has dual citizenship in Nigeria. Nnedi is one of the rare or odd ones out in the world of Black literature or literature written by black Afrikans.

She is a professor of creative writing at Chicago University and most of her books are targeted at young adults. I call her rare because she writes science fiction/fantasy. The Time of the Writer booklet calls her a ‘speculative novelist’.  I found that term quite interesting since I thought that most if not all writers of fiction have to speculate a lot, even if they do base their stories on realistic premises. Don’t they all have to creatively construct a world where there wasn’t already one? Or don’t some of them strive to impress upon our imagination a vast array of possible pasts, presences and futures?

I personally consider the tendency of writers to deny that they are fence-sitters, un-prescriptive or objective artists quite unfounded. Is there no opinion or perspective in any of their fiction or even non-fiction work, and if not then where is the difference between the imagination and the conjuring of words and worlds where there was none such?

The writers on that midnight meal had all been quite different. On my left side there was Jackee Budesta Batanda, a Ugandan journalist who lives in Johannesburg and works as a writer and research fellow at the African Centre for Migration and Society at the University of the Witswatersrand. She has written widely on foreign policy issues and has published in many anthologies, journals, newspapers and websites. Some of her work has appeared on such anthologies as The Thing That Ate Your Brain, Out of The Shadows and Africa-Asian Anthology, which are available on Kindle. I liked the energy and hardworking ethic of this Ugandan sister. During our conversation, Jackee sounded like the kind of socially responsible entrepreneur that I have always wanted to be. As writer who also has dreams and plans of becoming super-rich through business in order to contribute financially to the uplift of Afrikan communities, her every word reflected everything I strive to be.

There is such inspiration when one shares thoughts with people who are such big dreamers, it makes one question ones pace and whole outlook in life. I found myself asking, how many hours do I waste doing what will not fulfil my dreams, how musch education and determination will it take for me to achieve even half of what these women, as young as they are achieving?

And then there was Susan Abulhawa, a beautiful award-winning Palestinian/American novelist. She is said to be a notable science writer in medical journals and who has contributed papers on cardiovascular disease, diabetes, haemophilia, schizophrenia, women’s health and oncology.

 But her passion for literature and life in general has seen her books being translated into 24 languages worldwide.  Her first novel, Mornings in Jenin (previously published in different form as The Scar Of David) was hailed by The Times as “the first English-language novel to express fully the human dimension of the Palestinian tragedy.”

How can one possibly be un-inspired in the presence of such notables? Yet all of us were just talking as people. We spoke as people who are mostly concerned with the transformation of all our worlds, a transformation of the collective consciousness of all of humanity. We are all after-all is said and done, just ordinary people making and trying to make a living. If our ways of seeing the world have been tempered with the intuitive and natural propensity of writers to search for meaning or a deeper truth; that is just the way it is. Writers must write just as mathematicians must calculate, it seems to be something in our genetic or perhaps psychic design.

One writer last night, I think it was Jo-Anne Richards, the author of the imagined child, said that when she does not write she feels odd. Yet it is this very oddity or the audacity to write, to hope and to shape characters and create imaginary worlds that seems somehow odd. It has been said that God is an artist; this can be accepted by both Creationists and Darwinists and has been thrown about by the whole debate on Intelligent Design that was all the rage a few years ago. But what does that mean exactly?

For the creationists, an Artistic God is an entity of a Supernatural being that is or was able to use thought and words etc., in order to create something where there was none. This would fit perfectly with the Biblical and Quranic narrative of an entity that is removed from the world as we know it and can shape both matter and the destinies of the living.

Of course writers are as varied as are languages and human beings and they all come from vastly different cultures. While others fully accept this view and often go as far as taking on the role of ‘prophets’ or messengers themselves; many more writers in both the non-fiction and fiction worlds have no such bold inclinations and it does not matter whether what they write might incidentally transpire into reality or appear to be prescient. They are just writers.

I think that every writer is an activist, whether they accept that or not. Writing is thoughtful work. Whether it be as a reporter, a journalist in whatever sense that may imply, or whether you speculate about odd and widely intersecting and infinite possibilities or whether you are a script writer and a song writer who also happens to be a poet and a spoken word artist. You are being introspective, retrospective and above all else, you are thinking and active in the documenting of moments, imagined or actual. You may be concerned with the world of poor people who work under slavery conditions in today’s cosmopolitan settings or in the mines and farms.

 

You may write about the contradictions of freedom and democratization or you may write to express your own inner being, what you see, feel or hear in your own head. Whatever it may be, it still remains possible that most writers are quite a loony bunch of individuals who can’t even help it.

 The only way to satisfy a writer is to let them do what they do in freedom or relative liberty. They have to be mad, most of them seek to change the world simply by auto-suggesting ways of seeing, hearing and being.

It was written:

“All rebellious movements are movements against invisibility. Perhaps the clearest example is that of the feminist movement … to make visible that which was invisible: to make visible the exploitation and oppression of women, but more than that, to make visible the presence of women in the world, to rewrite history from which their presence had been largely eliminated. The first step in struggling against invisibility is to turn the world upside down, to think from the perspective of struggle, to take sides. The issue of sensitivity is well posed by the Ethiopian proverb…: ‘When the great lord passes the wise peasant bows down deeply and silently farts.’ – The Material Reality of Anti-Power - from Change The World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today by John Holloway, Pluto Press, 2005)

For some strange reason I seem to be drawn to theistic interpretations of everything. Perhaps it is because my world has been saturated with religion since I was born. But it could also be due to the fact that I am really interested in telling my stories and writing in order to understand and over-stand the pervasiveness of faith, belief and spirituality in the world. I seek to understand they who, why and since when of religious conflict, religious based prejudice, patriarchy and even my own world of somewhat chaotic, or eclectic religiosity. I have after-all convinced myself and others that I am a Rastaman, although I have cut my dreadlocks more times that anyone can count. But I am a strange Rasta. Perhaps a hypocritical one, since I defend almost all its tenets while at the same time, I refute many of its positions on women, the Christ, Gays and Lesbians etc

All I know is, the world is far more complex and even much simpler than how religious people portray it. What with the incorporeal characters such as Satan/the devil and God/the un-married Father and wifeless father and the Holy Spirit all thrown into the cosmic soup?

As a Rastafarian, I am generally uninterested in theology as propounded by preachers, imams and books such as the Bible or the Quran. I have read these texts ad more thoroughly and without bias. But what I have found instead of faith and firm belief, is merely confusion and human error. This human error is often blamed on the devil and sometimes even God Himself who may allow a person to transgress in order to show how great His salvation or redeeming power is. The whole notion of free-will, freedom and scientific inquiry is anathema to religion.

Yet billions of human beings are fascinated and even live and die in defence of these ideas from ancient times.

I am also interested in history and even some forms of spiritual and ritualistic devotion. I like the Gadaa system of the Oromo people of Ethiopia for its simple and nature based ‘doctrine’ or Indigenous Knowledge System.

I also am captivated by the ancient Egyptian mytho-poetic and even historical foundations of civilization. Fascinated by the Nile River and its ascendance; its cosmic relevance to Afrikans and even socio-political significance. And that is a tale worth re-telling ad infinitum. This is also the reason why I happen to be interested in the Ethiopic Book of Enoch.

This is an important text in Afrikan literary history even though its Afrikanness is a perpetually contested issue. But that is also a subject that requires its own elaborate analysis. But the Ethiopian anthropologist and author Ayele Bekerie has done justice to it in his book The Book of Henok/Enoch insinuates that among the fallen angels who ‘chose to abandon their holy estate in order to cohabit with human women.” There was among these ‘spiritual entities’ a most inventive and volatile of them one called Penuel who is said to have invented the pen or instruments of writing.

It is said that among the secrets that these rebellious angels revealed to mankind via the agency of women, was the art of creating stories and inscribing them for generations to discover. They also revealed the secrets of numbers, divinations and the uses and abuses of metals, make up among other things.

Of course this is a fabulous account from a mythical and mystical North-Afrikan or Afro-Asiatic text and as wonderful as it is, it bears many contradictions. But at the core of the Enochian texts, is the age-old battle of Good over Evil with the righteous being blessed and the wicked being judged.

The Book of Enoch has been interpreted in many nuanced and often magical or ritualistic ways, yet few have explored its significance as a work of literature; but this is the problem faced by many texts which are considered sacred. Yet its origins and its authorship is still a contentious matter.

At the Time of The Writer I was asked to be an interpreter for an author who writes in IsiZulu. He has consciously chosen to use his mother-tongue to introduce and express himself. I met him over lunch among the rest of the authors at a famous Afrocentric restaurant in South Beach, Durban. Mr Khawula, is an ordinary and unremarkable family man at first. But behind those glinting; proudly Zulu eyes there is a gentle soul who is not only a post-traditionalist but also an avid reader and listener. The trouble is there is something rather stiff about his political outlook. Listening to him one gets the feeling that this man is stuck in theory or stuck in the pre-94 liberation ANC-ism.

So instead of judging him by how he says things and even what he might say, I am really looking forward to reading his book Yihlathi Leli.

But what really impressed me most about many of the writers in their vast varieties and styles is this sheer devotion to free expression. Expressing oneself may seem like the most natural act yet in a world which is under the control of many oppositional agenda’s, this freedom to be oneself and even dare to imagine a different world is challenged. Writers want to leave beautiful impressions in the hearts and minds of readers and listeners. Writing, just like thinking freely is an offensive act in many societies. Writers, Thinkers, Activists and many other similar impressionists, expressionists have been beaten, killed, jailed and banned before.

This still happens in many countries that are considered undemocratic or in violation of basic human rights. This is because honest, introspective and even opportunistic writers are not afraid to express human wrongs through their words. But to an ordinary person, it is just way too risky to speak your mind, whether it is done creatively, satirically or put in plain language. Ngugi Wa Thiong’o has put it characteristically well:

“Unfortunately writers who should have been mapping paths out of that linguistic encirclement of their continent also came to be defined and to define themselves in the languages of imperialist impositions. Even at their most radical and pro-African position in their sentiments and articulation of problems they still took it as axiomatic that the renaissance of African cultures lay in the languages of Europe. I should know.”  - (The Language of African Literature* )

Menzi Maseko ©