Day 3: Discovering passion and purpose within the arms of the female form/The Grand Deception

#03
Dear friend,
In the quick years that I have held my hands above my laptop keys, I have never written a line of poetry or prose in joy or ecstasy. I have written a poem in the rush of feeling from seeing a good movie or hearing an amazing song. I have held on to a particular scene through the press of my fingers on laptop keys until a story was formed but it has never been birthed from my own true feelings of joy. Today, I realise that while I have experimented with words in an almost hysteric zeal, I have never considered emotions truly, in my writing. The furthest, I have attempted is the common state I find myself which is a mix of nonchalance and pessimism, all children of the ongoing depressive rage I feel within.

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Emotion is a vital tool in the writing of any piece, in fact, it is necessary in any work of art. It is the breath of life in a sculptor’s sculpture, a painter’s painting, a poet’s poetry, and so on. Without emotion, all will be lifeless stone. There is no breathing thing that does not emote, even the trees, the wind, the sky, the sea, the beasts; they all share that powerful expression of feeling that makes nature so primal, so raw, so beautiful. As creators, seeking to master the art as much as the creator has been beneficent to teach, it is important that emotions appear on the facade of our art. The audience must take home something, a powerful feeling, an affinity if you may, with the piece of art. It is this feeling that returns the audience back to the piece.

Every movie, every song, every poem, every story, every painting that has remained a part of my memory, strongly etched therein, has been one with a powerful emotion attached to it. Unfortunately, due to my need to wallow in grief, either borrowed or otherwise, to dwell on pain, I tend to gravitate towards dark emotions when enjoying a work of art. This has in turn affected my writing. Recently, I submitted two manuscripts to one of Africa’s prestigious poetry contest. I don’t expect to win or even be shortlisted. Now I did not submit the manuscripts, knowing that I won’t win the contest, in order to get a much needed criticism—I won’t get it. My pride was in knowing that I was able to gather over 97 poems, all new works, at such a short notice. I had the option of using previously published works but I wanted to see how far I had developed as a poet.

One thing I noticed in my writing, especially these two manuscripts, was a common thread through all the poems—none of the poems was happy. They were indifferent, pessimistic, sad, depressing or helplessly angry. Imagine reading through a body of work and instead of things to get better as it progresses—it gets worse and worse until it patters away into nothing. Is there not enough pain in this world? Must I be among those who seek to amplify the trauma of living on this earth? In going through the pieces, I submitted, I also realised that even these emotions that I expressed had no fire—they felt bland, as if they had been used and reused too much and now they have lost their edge.

I am the poet without fire in his veins, without anger or horror, laughter or deep sorrow. I just take my ancient pain, wash it, press it and dress every new poem with it over and over again. It is stale. It is bad enough for me to begin to repeat myself across poems. So even as I attempt to invent new structures of grammar and formats of writing poetry and prose, my subject matter has not evolved beyond my first poem. I am a stagnant pool changing shape with the wind.

There must be a way to find the fire, to rekindle my poems and fictions, and language alone is not enough. I need to invest my heart, my soul into every piece I write. I enjoy writing. I love it very much for it makes me special. I feel unique creating something that someone somewhere considers art. It gives me a heady feeling but I am not passionate about it. I don’t feel a deep emotional attachment to my work. Most times, I write in a haze, in a rush, with the hope that it gets accepted. What this means is that the moment all of these artificial motivations are dead, I lose interest in my work. What does this mean? I don’t know if other writers feel the same way.

I have always felt that I was on the outside of the literary establishment because I see how writers are passionate about other writers especially if the writer is a friend and I don’t have that kind of passion. I see how writers read each other’s works but I do not really care what I read as long as it is good stuff. I did not start reading poetry until I started meeting and interacting with poets. Even so, I read only certain poets and ignore most people’s favourites. Not because their poems are no good but because they do not give me what I desire and in most cases, what I seek for in a work is passion, life, fire. If I seek for this in the works I enjoy reading or the art I enjoy perusing, why can I not find this passion in my own work?

Take for instance, the filmmaker Werner Herzog, who is obviously passionate about the art form of filmmaking. The way and manner of making his movies, the subjects he picks, his interests in the total form the film appears in after the final edits shows that he is passionate about the art form. He is not in the game for the money. It is a way of life for him. Is writing a way of life for me or is it a means to an end? People write, work on literary spaces either as editors or readers, get an MFA from one university or the other, publish a string of books, win an award or two, become sages in the profession of writing, deciding what is best and what is trash—is this a motivation to write?—yet I do not seek all these things even though I desperately need them.

These people who use their skill to get to the head of the line are not bad people—after all there must have been passion for them to have arrived at that point. It is passion that fuels ambition after all. The truth is that in these our times, being a writer, even worse, a broke writer such as me sucks. In the world before the coming of the television, the radio, the internet, the social media, a writer could garner for their self the patronage of the wealthy, of a city, of a class of people. A writer could become a cult figure but those days are now as mythical as Ogun’s hammer and Sango’s lightning bolt. How can a writer pretend to be the conscience of the world they live in when the world has forgotten them and relegated them to struggling for space in the teeming mass of information passing to and fro? How can a writer be unscathed in the pursuit of daily bread, untainted in the determination to live a better life?

I am thus faced with two fallacies of mind—that I do not need passion and access to diverse emotional states to write and that I do not need ambition as a writer. I have read of writers who were discovered and their works praised after their death and I find it the saddest thing. I picture a woman, who has created something generous with its humanity and believes in said creation, dealing with the disinterest of her peers and audience. It is painful to see the painstaking efforts of your genius relegated to the background while another’s is praised to the high heavens. To then be dead, only for that same piece to become a national treasure is another form of trauma on its own. Who does not want to be celebrated in their lifetime? Who wants to die broke and unlamented?

If I focus my attention though on the above issues, I will throw away my laptop after deleting every single document I have written in. It brings me back to the fire that carries one through the disappointments, rejections, disinterest, and so on. There must be more to writing than just the possibility of cheques and fame. The greatest writers whether discovered posthumously or not, were noted for the passion they had for the craft, their craft. You hear of writers who edited their works continuously until death. You hear of writers who left behind a huge body of work which is still being sorted out as we speak. They were all driven by their demons and aimed to leave as much of their vision as they could behind.

Can I consider my constant repetition of the gravest scenes a vision, my vision of the world? Is it proper to continually pour this vision of mine down the throat of my audience? Variety is the spice of life, so it is said—as such, do I not need to add spice to my work, explore other possible emotional range? The problem I face in attempting to escape the cage I built for myself is that inside me, lays a man who is very tired, nonchalant and lost. I cannot give what I don’t have. My poetry therefore implies that I am in a loop, going round and round without moving further. What I need to do is build a person from scratch, a poet persona that reflects the characteristics that I lack. Somewhat like Marshall Mathers with the Eminem and Slim Shady persona. These two personas get away with saying things that Mathers will never say. Or like Tyler Perry with his Uncle Joe and Medea characters. I need a persona that has the access to the full range of emotions denied me.

This persona would write the poems and stories and submit it, without any connection or relationship to me. This persona will be able to access the full range of emotions that I cannot seem to muster within myself. It is my desire that she is a woman, inverting the system of women writers bearing male pseudonym to avoid talk. With a woman pseudonym, I will invade every writing form and style, every rule of engagement in the poetry and prose form. I will demand a space for the violence of my alter ego’s emotions and I will make it count. This may be considered to be deceit, which is why I am posting it here. I do not do this for the financial gain, that is if I will even get any, but for the chance to be beautifully mad, free from societal constraints, beholden to no one.

It is my hope that within this female form, this alter ego, I will find the full range of my voice, give a face to the emotions that I have forgotten how to feel or express and in that manner, I will create something extraordinary. In another vein, I too will disappear and no one will think to connect me to the greatness that would be this she wolf, this mother hen, this girl dancing on the tip of a spire. It has always been my intent to fade off your memory someday. I don’t want to be remembered much and what is the best thing but to sit in public eye but remain unknown? This probably will not fly as I am known to start projects then abandon them halfway but it is a grand idea and I have probably wasted your time. Good night.

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📸: pixabay

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Yours always,
Osahon(warpedpoetic)