For Lack of an Article

By Wamuwi Mbao

I was all set to write a witty block of text on the tragic state of a world where people don’t write anymore. I was going to try to make you, dear reader, chuckle knowingly at my literary-elitist puns as I ripped into Chitter Twitbook or MyFace or whatever new “social networking” site has the worderazzi in a huff these days. But rambling on about the pseudo-communication of the interwebs has been done to dessication, so I decided to try my hand at something else.

Why not attack literary snobbishness? After all, that’s a worthy cause if sprinkled with enough literary vinegar. There had to be enough targets of my ire, what with the Conservative Colonial set who swoon about with flattened vowels muttering about the post-colonial literature that slew Byron and James, and professing a wish to see “Keenyaa” one more time.

But this too will not do. What I needed to do was draw upon my “shared African experience”, I thought. After all, weren’t my lecturers always subtly hinting in postcolonial tutorials that I could identify with these poor black protagonists (a knowing look is usually the path of least resistance)? If I was asked to present an “African” viewpoint, it would seem as though my black skin made me spokesperson for this continent. But this too is a well-worn pathway, and the call of the disgruntled native doesn’t travel very far in these parts.

Then I thought I’d head in an alternative direction. As I write this, I’m sure there are very many hapless individuals out there pounding out their gonzo imaginings on keyboards, tweaking at hand-rolled cigarettes and imagining they’re going to write the next “Fear and Loathing in (insert generic city for sake of metaphor here).” After all, in a world of moodily lit HBO series with their eccentric heroes always willing to engage in improbable verbal sparring, everyone who can write wants to be Hank Moody.
Wading out of the very shallow literary puddle that constitutes gonzo journalism, I switched on the fluorescent lights, stopped trying to write like “the new” anything, and instead focussed on actually writing something that people might want to read. This got me nowhere at all. So I looked to the news. People waving the old flag around? So much outrage, so much vitriol. So much liberal lip-service. Best not to attack it from that angle. How about interrogating the Anglophone white South Africans who fly the current flag boldly but see absolutely nothing amiss when each and every one of their bosom buddies and lifelong pals is another liberal, suburban white person?






I thought I’d hit on something there. Then it dawned on me that I was in danger of pointing the spotlight rather too close to my own audience. Clearly not the best path to take, and not one likely to be looked on favourably by those who judiciously wield the editor’s pen. Besides, that would just be replicating the conventions of so many articles with a formulaic foray off the beaten track.

So I was left in a bit of a quandary. Perhaps this would be my inspiration, in a corkscrew-looping sense. Who knew that writing some drivel for a journal would be such an exercise in difficulty? I certainly didn’t. At this point I thought of abandoning my avant-garde ambitions and write something that would sit comfortably alongside the undoubtedly fine entries that shoulder this one. But I couldn’t. That would be a cop-out, and I wasn’t prepared to do that yet.

And then it hit me. From this fog of mediocrity in which I’d been wandering like a certain Shakespearean (*spit*) ghost, something that could loosely be termed an article had formed. It looked like an article, had all the qualities of one, and just about met the word-count too. So I stopped there.






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