By Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye

The other day I came upon an English poem that seemed to summarise the feelings of many people under the coalition government in Kenya. The form and vocabulary are dated, but this reminds us that similar situations and responses occur throughout history: literature is not the work of the super-sensitive bestowing enlightenment upon the masses. It is the words and images that those gifted in expression make available to those who share the same griefs, passions and bewilderment but may not have found a way to ventilate and come to terms with them.

Vikram Seth reminded us at the Storymoja Hay Festival in August 2009 that the political responsibility of writers is precisely the same as that of other citizens. Putting pen to paper does not make us wiser than anyone else. Concerned writers, concerned plumbers and concerned farmers all have a role to play. We would all wish from time to time that we had learnt to apply a tourniquet, to defuse a bomb or to detect a forgery. This is the poem which I don’t remember seeing until it was included in Michael Schmidt’s The Great Modern Poets (Quercus UK n/d):

By David Kaiza

In The Interpreters, Wole Soyinka’s hard drinking journalist character, Sagoe, summons the office messenger, Mathias, and begins to read to him his essay on the “philosophy of voidance”, a knotted thesis that we encounter more than once in the novel.

Mathias, whose English (pidgin) is no where as grasping as Sagoe’s, let alone Soyinka’s, sits through a reading in which “voidance” morphs from void to voidate, voidante, voidancy, voidatory and climbs up to variations such as “arborial voidatory” and “Voidante pseudo-negritudinists”.

Doubtless Mathias sat through the lecture for the wicked bottle of beer Sagoe bribed him with for his attention (drinking at work), lost, as it were, in this linguistic void, managing a down-to-earth “Na so life be oga” in reply.