From all indications, my newly discovered discipline and desire to keep ramping up and broadcasting--I have a specifically agricultural image in mind here-- the miscellanea from from my besieged pabulum ran into serious trouble these past seven days or so.
I have serious excuses to mollify the most implacable of critics who would want to call me out on a charge unkept. But, he-he-he! I won't share those excuses. At least, not for a while.
Something else has been bothering me and has taken up most of my time in the past week. The complacent base of my easy/happy assumptions about my neighbours ran into a devastatingly negative decalage last week when one of them walked up to me and told me, point-blank: "Look, I don't like you. I don't like people like you." Just like that. Right in the heart of Accra, Ghana c/o God's Own Green Earth.
"If you were this player, what would you do?" I had read this question somewhere in a now defunct newspaper, The Soccer Scene, in 1986 just on the verge of the Mexican-hosted World Cup when a player called Jose Toure, one of the key performers for the Blue Cocks of France, sustained an injury and was forced off a team that went into the tournament as number one favorite and eventually ended up with a fourth place finish that disappointed a lot of neutrals.
Now, you would ask: What has that got to do with anything? Well, I am coming right along to that: I fancied myself as a kind of top player for the post-ethnic human sensibility team, you know, a kind of Jose Toure with enough acrobatic gestures to qualify me as a diplomatic Maradona, or something equally cool enough along those lines. And I thought I was coasting right along towards my own fiesta universalia until my neighbour you-know-whom walked along, punctured my idealistic balloons, and sent me to the back-of-melancholic-beyond to revisit morbid mutterings I thought I/we had left a long time ago.
For my neighbour was none but the same old face of the trib(e)/al/ist/ic champion who thinks-- I am more tempted to believe you can't think these things, you only need a thick, savage dot-head to repeat them every time your stupidiasis starts acting up, but let's stick to the t-word, for lack of a better--that I deserve the soul-burning excoriations of the old savage sensibilities that marks the man on the other side of the fence as the enemy, the one bad "thing" without whom the world would be perfect. I was, for her, the lingering symbol of that for whom she and her companeros dunder-heados needed to constantly write/rewrite/revise/act out their own Mein Kampfs as a prelude to the staging of their final solutions, too.
Now, having spoken in round-aboutish manner so far, let me come to the main point of this evening's ramble.
My neighbour's Stonehenge-shaped message, in simple terms, was that I belong to the "wrong" tribe.
In this age.
In this time.
In this place.
In our Africa of the post-traumatic Renaissance.
Oh yes, I think of myself as an African. And I guess part of that has to do with the fact that I have no quarrel with where the Transcendental Force wisely decided for me to set up base and contribute to this contrapuntal melody we call life. But my African-ness grows in the awareness of other people's stories. Stories that are as legitimate as mine; stories whose essential colour in tandem creates the rainbow visual that is our collective heritage. We all, Africans, Asians, Americans, Europeans; we all bring colour to that table. And to come to the place of appreciating those stories, I left the wisdom of the tribal prejudice behind a long time ago. Or I thought I did.
But maybe that kind of worldview is too lofty/too unrealistic. My neigbhour brought that much home to me last week with her all-knowing, prehistoric poise. Her florrid fatuous flatulence about why it is that "your people are trying to take over the country from my people when it has always been that the country belongs to my people and that it was my people who built the empires and ruled the others and created all the history and produce/d all the brainy ones and are known across the world and are chosen by god/God to continue the good works...etc etc etc"
And she added in good prophetic measure: "The war is coming; it is inevitable. The battle lines are drawn, and something would have to give...Some people must be sacrificed to enable these multicultural environment to be sanitized with the univocal truncheon of the savage ideal...We will clean out your people, or drive them into the sea, or out to XXX across the border where they belong..." I could almost see the cockroach accusation not far behind, already solidly formed on the mental horizons of this thick-skulled throw-back to an age of human evolution that we may only refer to in qualified whispers.
I laughed.
Not because I found it funny. What's there to find funny about foolish ideologies that demarcate "chosen people" versus "gentiles" and encourage genocidal fantasies about those "unlucky" to be so chosen? What's there to find funny about nut-case philosophies that invent, calcify, and then sanctify the myopic tribal essence as the be-all and end-all of all existential striving? What's there to find funny about ideas that have produced Apatheid's hell-holes and the German Holocuast in Namibia and Hitler's concentration camps and Rwanda and DR Congo and Liberia and Sudan and so on?
But I laughed. Laughed because on the spur of the moment, I could do no more than that. And also because I found out a long time ago that one could not persuade a sick fanatic based on logical arguments.
So I laughed. And then I thought of Robert Frost, the old New Englander criss-crossing his snowfields debating his birch trees invoking his missed opportunities/roads not taken...Robert Frost... recalling the stone-age savage philosophy that glorifies fences and stereotypical masks the prevent humans from recognizing fellow humans as complemental pieces that enable a more rounded vision of the puzzle of life.
But after laughing, I went back to my room and then fell into a deep depression of the spirit. A morbid melancholic wrestlemania with all the warps and manufactured distortions that hold back the quintessential melody of being...That's where I have been all this while.
Maybe I have shared my good excuse about why this blog took the long leave, after all. But hey, I am back till a better excuse pushes me back into hibernation.
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