REASONS I WRITE*

Every rational being will always have a motivating factor for every action he takes in his life without which the action taken is null. On this basis I one day engaged my mind on the reasons I write.

It was on the Christmas day of the year 2006 and I was working as a casual in the masonry at the Chale Island in the far end of South Coast.

Two months had elapsed after being conferred the “powers to read and do that appertains to this Degree” of Bachelor of Arts or what some people at the Njoro Campus of Egerton University laughingly referred to as Being Around (B.A).

Such statements were meant to arouse feelings to the effect that those studying for a degree in social sciences were jokers passing time at the university since after all they were only send there by their fathers for lack of something good for them to do at home.

It was also about eleven months since my poetry anthology Kenyan Martyrs: An Arsenal of Verses had come out.

On this day, rather night, I was reading Chinua Achebe's chef d'oeuvre Anthills of the Savannah. Now you know how catchy it becomes when Ikem Osodi the protagonist starts talking about 'The Tortoise and the Leopard - A political Meditation on the Imperative of the Struggle’ during the lecture he has been invited to give at a local college. And when he finally opens a Pandora's Box through his denigration of the key players in the society, and his self styled attack leads to his death, you know you are reading about post independence Africa that was afraid of the academia and which as Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye noted in Coming to Birth, was fond of 'striking down its best and brightest'. This is the point where the book becomes the cost of a sleepless night.

As you read you keep on musing on the role of a writer in the society especially if you are or desire to be one.

In the lecture Osodi saw it as the desire “to excite general enlightenment by forcing all the people to examine their lives because as it is the unexamined life is not worth living.” For this, as a writer, he had an inspiration he died for thus “to widen the scope of that self examination.”

But the chairman posed him a challenge:

that writers in the third world context must not stop at the stage of
documenting social problems but move to the higher responsibility of
proffering prescriptions'.

To which Osodi reacted immediately:

writers don't give prescriptions, they give headaches.

This is the argument I loved most. My poetry collection had surely caused headaches instead of prescriptions at my residential village whilst trying to describe patriarchy and social stratification.

Two of its poems 'Marry a White' and 'The Road to Shelly Beach' had not gone well among some Caucasian lay persons with whom I have had a close contact. The former they said was ambiguous on how the poet, a typical African chauvinist, could not accept to marry an African elite woman allegorized as a white woman and who is in the poem, alienated to the African aura.They accused it of propounding a racist motif while the latter they said did not capture the real situation of Shelly Beach - Timbwani.

Either, 'Marry a White' should have encouraged 'unity' or love while 'The Road to Shelly Beach' should have described how some of the foreign residents have become a Cinderella of cunning moves by some locals, so they thought.

This was very unfortunate of me. While writing I had not anticipated such headaches. Perhaps the desire to urgently become a published poet had made me myopic.

I continued thinking.

Two weeks had elapsed after reading the moving story of Orphan Pamuk, the Nobel Laureate for Literature in the year 2006. I found his reasons for writing rather weird:

I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write
because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I have
never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.

Here was one who wrote because writing to him was a kind of a palliative therapy. It gave him a unique feeling, a source of joy so to speak. Of what essence was it to me? I continued prodding.

Well, it was actually at night and those of us who were on duty at the island that Christmas season were supposed to be dead asleep. So we were huddled in a room in one of the houses were renovating for the island to peek as a tourist site of choice for many a country lover. You see we would spend the whole week from Monday at the island and only go back home on Saturdays. Unless we were working a crucial job that necessitated a night shift work ended at 6 p.m. By 7 p.m. we would have taken supper and ready for bed, so that’s how I decided to be reading every night before I sleep…unless as it is I was too tired.

As I was reading and meditating in the dead of the night I saw a lizard busy chasing butterflies around a bulb fixed on a wall on my extreme right. Below the bulb my roommates lay, deadly snoring.

Now despite having no life in the room there was a lot of it outside. Crickets were chirping in alternating tones and in the Indian Ocean waves were bursting in thunder on the coral rocks that fortify the island, about fifty meters away from me.

I checked my watch. It was some minutes to midnight. The moon, so tender at the time must have been clouded over hence it was very dark – the darkness in which owls pronounce bad omen and utter curses that remain to haunt man for long

As if sensing my loneliness a wild cat, wild because the cats in the island though of the normal breed have no home to be domesticated, came to pay me a visit.

He (the cat) only managed to go a few steps past the door when his eyes met mine. He stared at me for a few seconds, looked at the lizard that was now sliding down as it chased the fly, rushed for it, but sensing danger the lizard went up immediately.

Bored by this step he walked out unconcernedly, perhaps unhappy because he had missed a sumptuous meal, on Christmas day.

One of my roommates stretched.

,/

All this time I was sited ‘on my bed’ – a mattress with a red cover that had turned black by several days of dragging on the floor and by the exhausted dirty bodies that slept on it.

Next to me was another mattress (read bed) with no cover whose owner had gone home to celebrate Christmas. From its fissures came out a bed bug, a ‘thing’ I had not seen before so I at first mistook it for a cockroach. However I realized that it was slower and smaller than the species I knew.

I took a piece of paper and crushed it. Some blood gushed out of it as it succumbed to the wrath of my fingers. With this came a pungent smell driving me to that conclusion since I had heard before bed bugs have a pouch of bad smell that can even make you go crazy once let open.

From far, I heard some cool slow and sentimental music being played at the islands restaurant. Actually there was a group that had been invited to come and entertain guests as they celebrated the birth of Jesus Christ. These guests were living in the rooms we had cleared with before, about a hundred rooms or so.

Their drum beats were lovely and their tunes wooing.

I wanted to listen to them so as to forget about what was happening at least in my life. Imagine leaving campus with the hope that you have all the creativity that will send employers fighting for you only to end up as an apprentice of some guys who keep on making you feel education is not important, guys who flirt with women with you as a case study…” I work with university graduates, who can’t get my salary. Money is what matters in Kenya and I have big money” Ha!

But by that time my eyes were becoming heavy. Keeping the eye lids apart was becoming a burden, especially with the lulling flutes.

These sending me to sleep made me conclude the reasons I write:

To talk about the agonies and glories in life; to talk about the visitation by a wild cat in the heart of the night while a distance away some other people were being visited by Cupid.

I write to talk about the consolations and tribulations in the world in view of what Socrates in Plato's Republic says of the rich…that they have many consolations.

I write to celebrate life!

I write to be immortal!

With this I hope I will always make sense every time I write. And if I write more poetry I hope it shall fall within the limits that were given by the father of African Literature, Chinua Achebe, when he said:

Poetry is at the heart of man's creativeness, but in the end it must transcend the poetry of the word to enter the realm of the poetry of human relations.

*This piece is adapted from an earlier one I wrote in August 2007.