There is power and justice in everything that we read until we give our perspective the permission to see it as thus.
As for me, I can bear to live now. I understand that there is a glare and an illumination to everything African and everything ‘proudly African’. Writers and artists are much more intellectual now more than political. Transformations are taking place in ordinary life. Women are creating their own realities lyrically within the choices they have made in the past. These choices are balanced on the wilderness history of their childhood and the psychological framework of their adolescence. It intoxicates.
The democratic polity exists even in nature. Human nature. I will write further on this as I continue. Told by a close friend that the following ‘reads like a memoir’, I have chosen this to be my presentation. Do not get me wrong. I love men and I love women too. One means relationships and the other friendships. Women are little birds. They will always be disillusioned by the burdens that they carry. Mum’s blue dress is mine now. As if, her anxiety, her manna was not enough. Her golden cell has become my prison. Life is like that. Very much a waterfall once you turn your back on it. Making drawings of children, chairs and toys.
From childhood. It starts with a botanical memory. We are not trees. We move on. If you were brought up in church. Her lungs are a signal. Lost to her children. She is the flying sun. Moonlight and Valentino. I think she wants to take a lover. Here comes Jordan. Here comes the River Jordan. Here comes Moses. Here comes Jonah and the whale. Her flesh is still beautiful. The blue dress when she wears it is still elegant. The words that come out of her mouth are in parrot fashion. There is a waterfall in the pleats of the dress. She sings gospel out of tune. She is an inglorious mother.
They are giraffes surveying the world. Men are hungry lions, tigers kept in captivity looking and waiting for prisoners. I do not know how the one exists without the other. When I was a child, I was always looking at the external as most people do. They believed oh, if I do not have this then I could not be part of this reality that I am living in. I call that living in poverty. A kind of intellectual poverty, spiritual poverty. I should begin to talk about the moral ambiguities at play in society.
A tarnishing comes with the human spirit’s measure of what loss is. We grieve for a while and then it goes out of our hands, our mental faculties, psyche, awareness, vision, psyche and intellect as if nothing has happened. With the sheer and unnatural force of illness comes a novel instinct and we learn new definitions of words like ‘truth’, ‘love’, ‘friendship’, ‘trustworthiness’, introspection’, ‘Kafkaesque loneliness’, ‘solitude’ and ‘fury’.
A woman will always remain innocent until that man takes that innocence away from him and the same applies to a man. A man will always remain innocent until a woman takes that innocence away from him. Polities have always been the refuge, the sanctuary, the pedestal that a man has been worshiped from for eras. Man has been glorified whether he is sane or insane some part of him remained the joke at the party or the life of it.
Whether he is talented or a devout disciple, a devoted follower. Instead of taking liberty with reflections on the concepts of power and justice within a democratic polity, I have endeavoured to look at how three people, ‘the man’, a young and inexperienced girl who still lives in a world of make believe and another young woman called ‘Anita’ live alongside this glorious democracy that makes fools out of all of us.
The people who have money can escape but ingénues will always find themselves drowning. The women in the world called Anita think that in the end they have power and that their ends justify the means of the sexual arrangement. Men not woman use the word erotic and there is a certain power behind that word. The guffawing man in the following ‘memoir’ as my close friend called it is a concept or rather concepts.
He is ‘power’ to one girl and ‘justice’ to the other. To me philosophy has not only been heaven-sent but I have read about, am constantly seeing the world from the writings of other women. Anais Nin, Ayn Rand, Susan Sontag, Princess Diana, the humanitarian Angelina Jolie, Antigone, princesses, mermaids with their conch shells pressed to their ears listening for the sound of the river falling into the ocean, the vast waters of the open sea, listening to the effortless sound of the fractured wind, and Mother Teresa.
All women are princesses. Rilke, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell I admire and more (the list could go on and on) but I admire the female gender too. We live with war in the moment and in retrograde. We want to believe that we are all innocent but at the heart of it, we are not. Women have to change the way they think. To transform their circumstances they have to deliberately cut small holes in their inner and external reality to see the sun. In order for a girl to choose freedom, she faces a difficult decision when the men in her world have all the power, the influence, the status and all they seem to plant in her world are gifts.
At the end of the day, this is only the beginning of her moral captivity. She is a prisoner. While she fights for another day, her internal struggle will continue unabated. They will corrupt her in the end. Destroy the best of her. She will think by the time she has her own children, is a wife and a mother that she is ruined through the damning sabotage of the father figure she has searched for her whole life. Nothing has been ruined; I want to tell those young women. Nothing. It was an escape, then it was an intoxication, and then it was an infatuation. Of course, it was not love.
Youth excites me. The youth in men. The youth in women. I cannot help for that. Trees that spilled over into the street. Let me talk about the word ‘magic’. What it means to an orphaned child, a girl who is in search of love, and an older woman who has lost love as her looks as faded. Magic will transform all three just by bringing a smile to their face and their whole demeanour will change. They will know they have places to go now. The orphaned child in Africa or the runaway will know that they need to get an education, be educated to get to where they want to be in the world.
They have heard of POTUS, FLOTUS, Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry. Now your life is beginning. It is just another mask, another elaborate costume. At the end of the day, all of us must hang up our costumes.
