ODE TO THE KONGI AND THE ‘BITCH’. A Parody Of Shakespeare
By Mohammed Adamu
PROLOGUE
It took the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, pages after pages of textbook outpouring to explain his view of the ‘anomic’ society as the degenerate, “normless state”, or one in which there is “total breakdown of normative values”.
Soyinka in the second of his only three novels, ‘Season of Anomy’, fictionalizes the ‘normless state’ as the morally and ethically bankrupt state
But the anomic society predated both Durkheim’s textbook theorization and Soyinka’s prosaic fictionalization. Its literary description had already secured the imprimatur of Shakespeare’s poetic metaphorization as that state where:
“Virtue is choked with foul ambition; liberty plucks justice by the nose; the baby beats the nurse; and quite athwart” Shakespeare said, “goes all decorum”.
“THE BABY BEATS THE NURSE AND QUITE ATHWART GOES ALL DECORUM”! If Shakespeare had only left it at this, it would just have been poignant enough to etch the graffiti of a state of ‘normative normalessness’!
Or can anything be more ‘normless’ in a society than the ‘baby’ losing its pristine innocence and having to vent its cradle ingratitude even on the benevolent face of the ‘nurse’ that tend after it? Not that you can imagine!
But then imagine adding the metaphor of ‘cradle ingratitude’ to the irony of ‘virtue’ being ‘choked’ by “foul ambition”, or to the mockery of ‘liberty plucking justice by the nose’, what you have is the perfect anomic state -ala carte!
But “Pity”, as Shakespeare would say, “that the eagle should be mewed while kites and buzzards prey at liberty”! Or rather “The more pity” even, “that the fool may not speak wisely, what wise men do foolishly”!
This is the story of my fatherland; the sad tale of Nigeria’s ‘normative normalessness’, told from the prism of a parody of the great works of my literary idol, the iconic William (Girgiza Mashi) Shakespeare. Enjoy it!
THE FASCISTIC MOB
When lenity and licence, vanity and vice, play for a kingdom; and when wisemen sit to bewail their fate, rather than stand to redress their harms, it is the innocent gentler gamesters, Shakespeare said, that are the soonest losers!
Else what can be more fascistic in our ‘season of anomy’, than that even the Laureates in our decadent midsts have not the ‘liberty’ to ‘speak wisely, about what our so called ‘wise men’ do foolishly’?
They said that the Kongi was acting ‘tigritudal’! But Soyinka was merely his avuncular self, warning against the fascistic giddiness of youth and advising that our fragile democracy be allowed the oxygen of due process.
The Kongi had only lent his voice against the dystopia of fascism and against the delirium of illiberal anti-democratic tendentiousness. But the arrogant, muckraking army of geo-ethnicity would not have it!
The guilty are not always afraid they said. To save face, they are sometimes sudden and quick to quarrel. How dared the Kongi to taunt the devil about his eerie shadow? How dared he to preempt their mutinous intention?
Said the great Novelist, Chinua Achebe, in his evergreen novel ‘Things Fall Apart’, “An old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb”!
KINDER SONGS
This was the objection ‘lady Hibiscus’ was raising: ‘the talk about ‘dry bones’ before the rheumatoid and heavy-laden. This was the ‘tigritude’ the ‘upstart crow’ beautified by the feathers of forebears, was proclaim!
And as with the historic split of the atom to make the bomb, soon ‘Lady Hibiscus’ had mounted the grammatic soap box, to drop the epigrammatic bomb of “juvenile fulmination of non-juvenile people”!
“Folly in fools” Shakespeare said “bears not so strong a note as folly in the wise”! Or as “The wise man’s folly is anatomized even by the squandering glances of the fool”, we decided to cheer ‘God save the Queen’ when we actually meant the ‘Queer’!
And as “The raven does not hatch a lark”; or as the Hausas say, ‘Ko wa’ne tsuntsu kukan gidansu ya ke yi’, no one was in doubt the Eastern She-Author was merely singing the tunes of her kindred’s songs.
And you bet she acted the Eastern folly well: rashly opportunistic rather than calmly advantageous; jealous in honor, quick in quarrel, and seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon’s mouth.
As the gazelle will not run while its young ones amble, ‘Lady Hibiscus’ was every inch a scion of her rancorous kindred; because “when mother cow chews grass”, Achebe wrote, “its young ones watch its mouth”!
“Pity, that the fool may not speak wisely, what wise men do foolishly”!
THE PEN
The pen is mightier than the gun yes. But should the pen equally be foolisher? Or what ‘pen’ is there worth the wisdom of its vaunted inkpot, that invites the ‘gun’ to the profanation of the democratic hallowed space?
This was the feminine ‘virtue’ foolishly choked with the foulness of literary ambition’. ‘Lady Hibiscus’ was obviously treasonous and seditious; penning heretical letters on the otherwise delicate slate of cautious diplomacy.
And knowing neither ‘democracy’, ‘diplomacy’ nor ‘politics’, she had rumpled all on the altar of a mock-heroic request, that one democratic sovereign (America) should interfere with the sovereignty of another.
She wanted America’s Joe Biden, still smarting from the yoke of a disputed electoral mandate, to send an armada of Weapons of Mass Destruction, to lend flight to an ignoble kindred purpose here at home!
Modest as the dove; temperate as the morning; and for patience, seeming a second Grissel, or for chastity, the Roman Lucrece; but 2023 descended her to the ‘base galaria’, revealing her true color: learnered without cogent opinion and scholarly without the common intelligence.
But “Pity, that the fool may not speak wisely, what wise men do foolishly”!
EPILOGUE
And Obi’s ‘Mussolini’s Mob of Italy’ had the abominable effrontery to want a debate they said, between the Mighty Nobel Laureate Kongi and the puny trilogy-noveleta; -to settle the matter ‘once and for all’ they said.
And you wondered ‘to settle what matter?’ Is it Politics and democracy wherein she is bat-blind? Or literature and diplomacy wherein she is still cradled, featherless and un-peregrinate?
Of this matter, no one Eastern great (dead or living), is good enough! Not if they are in tow one for the other! Let alone this anomic toddler debutante still lactating on the nipples of her crawling debuts.
This is not about some one-genre-only novelists or playwrights who had told or still tell moonlight tales of ancestral exploits to serenade kindred nerves! For God’s sake, this is about the whole ensemble of literature .
To have a debate with the Kongi, you have to provide first, a ‘literati’ who is an all in one and a master of all: a poet, a playwright, a Novelist, a dramatist, an essayist, a pamphleteer, a satirist, a performer, a film maker and an actor!
And even then will that one candidate also be a political activist, a rights crusader, a peregrine diplomat, and a social revolutionary? Will his world of experience be as vast as the Kongi’s ‘Forest Of A Thousand Demons’?
If there is such a one in the Eastern ensemble, then he can have a debate with the Kongi. It is all about ‘category’! Or as Shakespeare would say, “The blood more stirs to rouse a lion than to start a hare”! If you want ‘Rumble In The Jungle’, give an Ali a George Foreman! If ‘Thriller In Manilla’, a ‘Smoking Joe Frazier’!
But still a “Pity, that the fool may not speak wisely, what wise men do foolishly!
-END-
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