- I have not written here for a while now. Somehow, I felt like writing this night but could not immediately conceptualize any idea to focus on. I am experiencing an intellectual drought. A certain aridity has overwhelmed me even as a torrent of events occur, which are themselves vivid and significant enough to undermine any form of elucidation. The passion of a writer is to invest his intellectual energy in making his readers acquire a new sensation from the monotony of his environment.
- The first obvious topic that comes to mind is Donald Trump and the aftermath of the presidential elections in America. This topic is provocative enough to be any writer’s delight, but I think it has become moribund to me. I had written and published a long poem on Trump four years ago, a work which in all modesty should vindicate me as literary clairvoyant. What else can strike a code of creativity from the Trump story which has become very familiar, its juice of sensationalism wrung out of its sinews?
- That is the price we pay for an over flogged story. It becomes stale irrespective of how steamingly hot journalists may claim it is. There’s certainly a loss of originality and flexibility in a story that lingers on for four odd years perpetually exhibiting an absurd moral code for racism or class superiority. For me to write on Trump again is to unwittingly give him and whatever philosophy he represents an undue attention in my work.
- Do I then write about the abduction of hundreds of students of the Govt Secondary School Kankara, while President Buhari went visiting his home state of Katsina? Should I overlook the gruesome murder of four other people in Makurdi in the same night by unknown gunmen suspected to be Fulani herdsmen? What about those Nigerians kidnapped in lorry loads in Kaduna and Niger states? Have we not lost count of the number of Nigerians killed everyday in their Villages, or farms or public highways? Have we so soon forgotten the 43 rice farmers that were beheaded less than two weeks ago by the Boko Haram insurgents in Borno state?
- Then back home in Makurdi, is it so easy to overlook the cheap murder of a Professor by his student and the car snatched from him? The bloodletting continues unabated. How can you write well in a forest of a thousand demons? The orgy of death strangulates the muse of creativity in the writer. Unknown gunmen, hired assassins’, insurgents, kidnappers and bandits have laid siege on our sacred places. The angel of death looms large in the recesses of the writer’s faculties, depriving him of the wit to philosophize on the emotions of death or compose dirges to honour the rites of passage.
- Should I then write about Christmas 2020 which is due in less than two weeks? The Sahel environment has turned brownish with dust, the grasses have withered away while the early morning chills send signals of yuletide. The carols taunt the poor on radio, the okadas and the Keke-napeps conjure a false sense of urgency. Christmas then becomes a season of heightened anxiety and despondency. What is there to comment on Christmas again when it appears several Christmases in the past were practically postponed in most homes. Hunger, starvation, poverty and unemployment had combined to deprive our society of the exotic and romantic feelings of the nativity and the Manger.
- Masquerades and other creative performances of Christmas have also left the streets, weary of begging for coins that are reluctant to drop. I do not deny that our world has a preponderance of raw materials to constitute great essays.
- Indeed, there’s so much happening, yet so little to write about to make sense, or much less to encourage you to write. When it rains, it pours. Deaths come to our generation like an epidemic, hunger comes like a plague while poverty presses us like an incubus. In the present state of indeterminacy, it is difficult to choose which perspective in maze of cacophony to write, talk less of writing well to gratify one’s aesthetic desires.
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