“It feels as if I am in a film”– Hero of Russian Revolution on being arrested and charged with treason at the onset of the infamous Moscow Trials
A week, it is said, is a long time in politics. For a nation in perpetual commotion, two months can feel like its eternity compressed into a self-detonating match box. But nothing lasts forever, not even relentless pains and inconvenience. In many societies, people have learnt to cope with stress by simply moving on despite the relentless rockets of adversity.
Hence, the restless ambulations, the perpetual shuffling and shunting; the hustle and bustle of quiet desperation and the rush to go to nowhere in particular that one often encounters among the harried and harassed habitants of these places. It is a strategy of containment. Indecisions are often final and resolute irresolution helps to delay confrontation with angry demons that prey on the soul with malicious insistence. Ignorance is bliss and reflection is the enemy of contentment. What you don’t see or think about does not kill you and even if it does, it doesn’t really matter since you have already taken the antidote against remembering.
This is why in many societies, the seer and seeker after the bitter truth is designated as a troublemaker, an implacable irritant to be ignored or consigned away before the poison spreads. Unfortunately, no human society has ever progressed without confronting its demons. Human communities no matter how mismanaged and maltreated by their own have a way of communicating their sufferings and anxieties to some of their own. It is like a beating a person and asking them not to cry or complain. Tragically enough, only a few can recognize when a society reaches the limits of the elasticity of pains and trauma, or when the stress level becomes structurally unbearable and politically unmanageable.
Writing is no longer pleasure. For this writer, it has never been. It is a painful burden; a harrowing existential struggle with the uncomfortable actuality of real existence where every word, clause and sentence has to be judiciously weighed and appropriated. There are times when words are more powerful and potentially more devastating than heat-seeking missiles. Unlike the pen-wielding mercenary who writes only for his pocket and for patronage and preferment, the true writer is often filled with caution and circumspection about the possibility of writing as a time-bomb except when the actual social condition has deteriorated into an active violent conflict.
This is why sometimes the most active pacifists are often people who have seen actual wars or participated in widespread carnage. The gory smell of human blood haunts forever. This human propensity for unproductive warfare and senseless slaughter is what should be prevented at all costs. A famous Nigerian general and civil war protagonist once asked this writer how many of the notable self-determination activists can actually read the map of their immediate vicinity beyond their senseless haranguing. But you don’t need to know how to read a map to dominate Sambisa Forest forever, or do you?
