SimonMary Asese Aihiokhai.
I have been playing with the idea of trying to understand why writing is a very hard hobby to have and maintain, even for those whom writing is part of their life skill. Man, I tell you, it takes a type of focus and existential alienation to embrace this skill. Yet, the content of writing demands a turn to otherness. One cannot write always without being amongst others and allowing their senses to sip all the stimuli needed for imagination to play out.
While writing can be daunting, it is one of the most fulfilling experiences one can ever have in life. One wakes up to the realization that one has given birth to something so beautiful with their own genetic mark on it. It is a type of giving birth to a child by a mother who has longed for the experience of having a baby. Yet, the birthing process is painful, but the cries of the new born child are priceless. I believe this is the same experience writers go through. Each time I encounter an author, I intentionally look closely at their eyes and their hands. Their eyes glow with a solemn gaze of introspection that is fed with a turn to exteriority. To see within in a clear manner, one has to allow oneself to experience the polyphony of encounters that only occurs without.
The hands of a writer are evidence of a vocation of solitude with otherness. They evoke a continuum of encounters and fidelity to a dream, no matter how little the flickers of the dream may seem. Through fidelity, like a craftsperson, the writer slowly makes visible what was previously existing in the cloudy world of wonder. The hands hold the flying bird closer to allow for the imagination to domesticate what was previously wild. Writing is a form of acculturation of all that exists in the horizon of wonderness.
As a custom of mine, though only when appropriate, I like to kiss the hands of a writer as an expression of gratitude for the wonderful work of life they give birth to for all of humanity.
Less you think that I am only focusing on writing as the production of the literary world. A craftsperson is a writer. A plumber is a writer. A painter is a writer. To write is to imagine the possible by encountering the impossible. This is what the power of imagination evokes in all of us when we allow ourselves to wonder like a soaring bird flying over the windy petals of the sunflower field. This ability is not limited to the traditional understanding of writing. Whatever we each do is a form of writing if it is created within the world of creativity that the tools of imagination allow for.
Writing is always an anthropological turn. It allows us to become who we are meant to be; beings that exist and evolve into who they are meant to be as a continuum of meaning in wonder. We each write ourselves into existence. Yet, existence is not a moment. It is a continuum. As we each write, we each become human – a humanity that is trans temporal and yet grounded in temporality. Unfortunately, language tends to distract or at best limit our ability to understand this process because language is sometimes a tool of meaning that evokes temporality. But meaning is also a turn to transtemporality. More on this topic in another post.
Finally, writing can also be colonial. Wonder evokes a type of wildness – a turn to acoloniality. I would prefer to call it a turn to barbarianism. As a barbaric turn, wonder allows for the untamness of the mind and senses to fly away into the world of the unknown. The word outside of logic. The unfamiliar. The world beyond language. But one cannot live solely in such a world because as beings in sociality, we are conditioned to also make sense of the senseless. The process of making sense of the senseless is done through the creative power of the imagination. This is where writing becomes the tool by which the imagination allows for the mediation of making sense of the senseless. By making sense of the senseless, we prune the wilderness and make it a garden. But this garden, no matter how beautiful it may be, is always anaemic. All writing is anaemic because it validates a colonial turn, which is itself a turn to a systemic encounter with the content derived from the wilderness of wonder. Even with this critique, we must all write. We must all exist in a colonial world. We must all produce colonialities. This is how we exist as beings in community who have a praxis of meaning making that we each buy into like a social contract. We introduce literary laws to help reduce the toxic forms of coloniality that validate power matrixes and erasures of ideas. Even these literary laws, over time, become toxic because they become calcified in the epoch of temporality – we call this the literary traditions. We punish anyone who dares to go against such traditions. Until the literary rebels arrive who dare to upend the traditions. We scapegoat them. They are sacrificed at the altar of tradition. But their scapegoating becomes the pathway for a turn to freshness in how we make the literary tradition a living tradition. Tradition is only alive when some writers embrace the scapegoat vocation (again, more on this another time).
Do enjoy the article attached to this post.
I found this short article below where nine writers shared their own experiences. I hope you enjoy it as I did.
Simon Aihiokhai Blogs 