Feature Article of Thursday, 24 July 2014

Columnist: Kwarteng, Francis

Citizenship; social equality; accountability; mass quality (critical thinking) education; probity; gender equality; tolerance; transparency; social justice; mutual respectability; strategic planning; and patriotism capture the idiomatic essence of nation-building. Thus, Chinua Achebe, an antagonistic hero of the so-called The Biafran War (The Nigerian Civil War) realizing clear-cut instantiation of ideological tendency toward gradual Afghanistization of The Country if care is not duly taken to arrest or reverse it, reminds the yechy unrecognized self-styled poet and writer, a bastardized ideological scion of The Brethren, writing:

The fiction which imaginative literature offers usdoes not enslave; it liberates the mind of man. Its truth is not like the canons of an orthodoxy or the irrationality of prejudice and superstition. It begins as an adventure in self-discovery and ends in wisdom and human conscience.

Question: How dare he, Achebe? Everyone knows it for sure! It? About what? Moral, spiritual, and intellectual decadence in the body politic, The Country! Well, everyone is fully aware it is not beyond the bounds of decorum to acknowledge Achebes advisory agency as a timely gesture of agreeable community, for the yechy unrecognized self-styled poet and writer, so-called, stands intolerably short as a hopelessly irretrievable national disgrace in the pageantry of civilizational sentience. Everything he supposedly poetizes about emanates from his schizophrenic, scrappy persona. Yet he sees himself essentially a scholar in his self-contrived wasteland of deranged consciousness. As a matter of principle, the scholarly community lacks a critical scope of accommodation with regard to his shallow, shoddy scholarship, hence his euthanasic narcissism, hence his manic persona.

That kind of scholar, a fetishistic victim of penile atresia, is the bane of civilizational de-colonialism, the proverbial spoke in the wheel of intra-national coherence. Even of his own mental integrity. Importantly, his viscous relationship with citizens whose progressive sense of community is not in question usurps the aristocratic conscience of national discourse, whence comes Chinua Achebes intercessory wisdom. In consequence, the moral caliber of the fiction, Achebes phraseology, is all there is to it, no doubt, though it resists the textural candor of George Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Even of George Orwells Animal Farm. Realpolitik. DoublespeakThe poetic realpolitik of the scholar. The poetic doublespeak of the scholar. Achebe said it in the nebulous archeology of Yesterday. In the substantial space-shuttle of Today. And in the nebulous time-warp of the Future. That what? That the poetic realpolitik of the scholar, that the poetic doublespeak of the scholar, that he, the scholar, has no patriotic interest in the compromising unity of The People, in the positive development of The Country. Stoking the embers of disunity, of ethnocentrism, of ethnic nationalism, is his thing, his patriotic duty! The scholars yechy poetry, the scholars yechy writings, O Great People of the World, are merely leprotic expressions of yellow journalism; no more, no less. The scholar intimately knows all about the dialects of the anatomy of lies!

Piecemeal Somaliazation of The Country. In one sense, therefore, the phraseologic aesthetics of Achebes the fiction beggars his, Achebes, advisory largesse. Surprising? Not essentially! In another sense, however, Achebes the fiction is the kind of national ethos whose cultural and philosophical actuation The Scarab Beetle strove to graft onto African PersonalityThrough The Scarab Beetles conscious replacement of old-fashioned colonialism with progressive instruments of de-colonialism, of poetic consciencismUntil The Brethren subverted it. The Scarab Beetles consciencism; Chinua Achebes imaginative literature. With The Janus-faced scholar being literarily antipodal to Achebes imaginative literature, his popularly despised yellow journalism scholarship, to The Scarab Beetles consciencism! The sick scholar and his well-known bounded rationality!

Oh, the Sisyphean weight of guilt will forever intrude upon The Brethrens splintered conscience even as it denies them a scintilla of sleep in the agoraphobic graveyard of moral accountability. This is the kind of heavy moral burden, of spectral introspection, those who hate men and women of conscience without justifiable grounds bear. The scorching guilt of immorality, of indiscretions! As a matter of fact Maya Angelou recalls this physiologic-moral catch-22, Wole Soyinkas operations of homeopathy, in one of her famous poetic formulae Insomniac:

There are some nights when sleep plays coy, aloof and disdainful. And all the wiles that I employ to win its service to my side are useless as wounded pride, and much more painful.

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