Fragments, cultural tensions and postcolonial societies gasping for balance

Like the muscles of the upper arm, societies grow through a rather contradictory fashion. While some forces push one way, other forces push in the opposite direction. Finding the balance between the two forces is what keeps communities, institutions and individuals rooted, grounded and sane.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the father of dialectics, was a German philosopher (1770–1831) whose work shaped modern Western thought through the idea that progress occurs through the conflict of opposing ideas. He taught that we move forward when a new idea (thesis) is counteracted by an antithesis and that the way forward is often to find the middle ground (synthesis).

Take, for instance, the age-old war of perspectives between the powers-that-be and intellectualism, especially the written word. Ever since Kenya became an independent nation, like many other African countries—and indeed across the entire postcolonial world—there have been simmering tensions between the people of letters and those whose job is to keep the body and soul of nations together.

So every time a play is staged or a novel launched that might stir the hornets’ nest, there is an almost paranoid fear that soon the centre may no longer hold, mere anarchy is likely to be loosed upon the world, with apologies to W. B. Yeats, and that things will fall apart. To this school of thought, a play, a novel or other creative work has the capacity to take us back to what the author of Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes (published 1651), calls the state of nature; a lawless jungle where life is “nasty, brutish and short”. And this school has a point, for haven’t we seen works of little literary merit, sometimes propagandistic innuendo, masquerading as art?

That said, art should be viewed not as a threat to society but as a mere antithesis to the direction society chooses in terms of values and its sense of natural justice. It invites us to look into the mirror and be jolted by the warts we have earned along the way. It shows us how far we have veered from the basic African spirit of Ubuntu, where each one of us is because we all are. As for its capacity to destabilise us as a society, I agree with the idea, propounded by Greek philosopher Plato, that literature is an imitation of an imitation. Given that our human frailties do not allow us to fully comprehend the world we live in, it follows that our art is an attempt to mirror what we can’t quite wrap our limited brains around. Viewed that way, it means whatever we capture in our art, outside political propaganda, is no more harmful than the choices we make in life that inspire the themes our art explores.

The trick, in my view, is to find the balance, the synthesis, the river between two opposing ideas. Failure to consider new ideas is akin to embracing the leper called stagnation. For all the atrocities societies the world over have faced through interaction with others, more often than not, these encounters do not just bring about pain and suffering. People learn new ideas, technologies and perspectives.

Again, as people learn new ways, they must never lose sight of what works for them. For instance, Africa under colonialism may have faced some of the worst atrocities ever, but today we are able to travel across the world and interact with others because we can now speak European and other languages. Of course, the ignorance around this area is palpable, with many of us going overboard to hate our own mother tongues just because we can speak a smattering of English. Our teachers used to punish us heavily whenever we were caught in school speaking the very languages through which our ancestors, whose DNA moulded us, had as their only tool for decoding the universe. So much so that today it is a badge of honour, especially in city estates, when one’s children cannot speak their parents’ mother tongue. How we see that as a sign of progress is the kind of absurdity that results when we fail to balance between the theses and antitheses of the societies we grew up in.

So, instead of frowning upon novels, plays and other works of art, we should ensure we have a refined grasp of literary art that serves as a guard against raw political propaganda by politicians being passed off as art. We could even go one better and create literary awards and prizes that recognise works that truly mirror, entertain and enlighten society purely on creativity and merit, not contrived bile against others veiled as progressive themes.

An old story is told of a CEO who called his employees to an amphitheatre. There, in front of the gathering, stood a coffin propped up on four stools. The CEO announced that the person who had been ruining the organisation and making the working environment toxic had died. He then invited them to line up and view the body of that monster responsible for all that was wrong in the organisation. One by one they filed past the casket, some crossing themselves, others bowing, before viewing the small screen fitted with a mirror. As each leaned in to see the vile monster, they saw their own image.

The idea was to teach everyone that they are responsible, in their own small way, for making their organisation better and not passing the buck. It is so with literary art. More often than not, we think literary art criticises leaders, politicians and those in power. In the real sense, however, the barbs and bouquets in art target the man in the mirror. As Nikolai Gogol, in that small masterpiece, The Government Inspector, reminds characters laughing at others, whenever the written word makes us laugh at others, we are, in truth, laughing at ourselves. For there are no others when it comes to the sting of the written word. It is always the man or woman in the mirror being invited to see an antithesis to his or her own ways, then find the right balance between their worldview (thesis), the alternative view (antithesis), and arrive at a workable synthesis going forward.