Reflections: ‘I Have Found Myself’
“Stanley Macebuh’s reaction to my end-of-year column touched me deeply, and I went home thinking hard about it … Dele, he said you’re competing with your former self … but thank God, I’ve found myself, for my soul is now free.”
When good friends of yours who have no reason to malign you, people who are really close to you, begin to ask: Dele what’s wrong with your head, why are you writing now the way you do? and so on, one should worry. Not only those who are my good friends have asked these questions. Even not-so-good friends have asked the same questions. Some of these questions are asked with more than questionable motives. A fellow writing from the Obafemi Awolowo University said in a language that was rather too strong that I was merely passing off prose and glibness for substance. That foul language was so infuriating that I threw out the letter. Now, I wish I didn’t. If the man had questioned my column generally and raised issues about a few of them, I might have published the letter and, maybe, reply him and explain myself. What he did was to question the usefulness of the article I did on John Lennon called “A star is deed.” His outburst was not only unfair, but malicious as well. Everything a columnist writes doesn’t have to touch on politics or some kind of crisis or what the fellow called “urgent social issues.”
The article on John Lennon was necessary. Lennon was not just a British kid who made good. He was a giant in a peculiar sense, an avant-garde poet who used uneven and coarse verse to say socially profound things. It didn’t matter really that he was shot in far-away New York. What my antagonist failed to grasp was that something existed called the human community which transcended national on continental boundaries. Because Lenno was the man that he was, he was a leader of the universal neighbourhood. Another fellow, Robert Wood Orji, writing from Lagos, described himself as “your injured admirer.” He was picking a quarrel with my December 7, 1980 column “the press speaks for the powerful and its owners.” While admitting that “there may be some truth in my statement,” he nonetheless went on to say that he would “expect a journalist of your standing, with some reputation to protect, to think again before making such an unguarded statement. “Mr. Orji, in effect, was asking me to lie. What I did in the column in question, which was a statement I made at a symposium at the Obafemi Awolowo University, was to state the role of the press as it existed in a “free society.” But Mr. Orji would prefer me to tell a half truth!
The comments that really got me reflecting on my writing of the past eight weeks or so came from Stanley Macebuh, a good friend who is like a brother, and Bose Agbabiaka, a fellow journalist. Stanley’s comment came in reflection to my end-of-the-year column about which Stanly remarked that the piece far short of my former writings. Without obfuscating, Stanley wrote off the piece as nothing more than a shell of my writing at my best. “Dele,” he said, “you are competing with your former self.” He argued further that the piece was choppy, labored superficial. Although other people have complimented the piece, Stanley’s observation thouched me deeply, and I went home thinking hard about it. A week later, Bose Agbabiaka made almost similar comments about some of my recent articles. At that point, I had to sit down and think. To a good extent, Stanley knew what was wrong, and his argument was to say, “man, pull yourself together and get on with life.” In other words, he was saying that I shouldn’t allow my private life to affect what was essentially my public calling. That sounded much simpler than what was easily possible.
Not so long ago, I wrote a column called “Private life in public.” A few people asked subsequently about what really I was getting at in the piece. My message then was that a journalist who had reached the level whereby he was recongnised instantly at airports, parties and in the traffic could not enjoy that people call a private life. All that notwithstanding, the writer is a human being with that little thing called the heart. Once he possesses that, he is just as human as the next fellow. He may even be more vulnerable than that next fellow if he takes creative approach to journalism. Recently, a body called the Young Writers’ Club organized a symposium to examine whether the journalist could be called a creative writer. That’s the question, really. Some of us are not mechanics who sit down to write about the traffic and armed robbery, leaving the arts and the culture on the back burner. Some of us are romantics who cannot easily separate their hearts from their heads. A John Denver record or a novel by Graham Greene may set the mood for a column, and that’s that. In essence, a column is dictated by the mood of the writer, and readers ought to realize that fact. For example, if I write about Marshall McLuhan, and I can hear you say: who the hell is Marshall McLuhan” I would be accused of travelling in alien space. Which is not to say that one shouldn’t discuss National Electric Power Authority (NEPA) or the Nigeria Airways and our legislators. One time or another, I have touched on some of these things, and would in the future.
Unlike Mr. Orji and the fellow who wrote abusively from the university, writing ideological jargons and expecting me to see his mind through the nearly 200 Kilometres between Ile-Ife and Lagos, another fellow sent in a letter taking a rather interesting aesthetic view of columnists. I like to quote from his letter. His name is Nenty J. Obot-Nenty, and he wrote from Ikot Ekpene, all the way in Akwa Ibom State: “I like reading columns especially because of the columnists running them, and have come to the conclusion that photographs of columnists do add spice – at times – to the message put across. Readers read meaning into photographs of columnist. A lot of them portray the feelings of the photographed. The cause of all this was your recent change of the photograph on the Parallax Snaps page. The present photograph doesn’t present me the true Dele Giwa I had admired all long. Your old photograph presented a Dele Giwa with a serious face looking thoughtfully at the ground. I was happy and started pumping meanings into that photograph immediately and became an avid reader of the column. Here was a young man who had probably grown up painfully and now here he was trying to search and pick this uncontrolled life of ours among the grains of sand as if it were broken into smithereens …”
Mr. Obot-Nenty went on in that vein. His last paragraph quoted above was the most apt. Why I was looking down in the photograph in question was not the “uncontrolled life of ours.” My readers, I was looking down at my life, uncontrolled, as I looked back at the painful way I grew up. And, now, I have found myself, for my soul is free, and those who read me hence will see that soul freed from the shackles that held it prisoner.
©Sunday Concord, January 18, 1981
(Pp.99-102)
