There is certain penchant for frivolity in today’s literature that I find nauseating and blatantly patronizing of our mental and cognitive faculties, while subverting our intelligence to scales of retardation.
Of late, writers are writing epistles with the fervor of resurrected tongue-less corpse, and to them the technique is a sure way of gaining readership and conveyer-belt acclaim.
And, like many I pontificate now disgusted by such cowardly litanies lining shelves of corporate book-store under guise of being critical analyses of a social climate many cannot even stomach.
There is also this cult of children’s books, the strangest of anomalies being that many are written by morally dysfunctional adults still scaling through shit-mud mess of a civilization eating its own knickers during an orgy with bankers and otherly gods.
But why this unending buffet of books with pseudo-religious prosaic anecdotes disguised as philosophic incantations, why such slight and frigid poems, reeking of perfumed speech and limerick gloss, and why are we gluttonously munching our way to its bone?
You watch black-tied crowds gather inebriated to launch shriveled-brain prose in colossal stores off felled trees trimmed for man’s sane thoughts, many speaking in vicarious verses of concern, their hymns pleasing stale tastes chained to method.
New voices are remixed with brine doused wine, lines of designer narcotics dredging last drops of talent from foreheads of stale youths, now cremating their true dreams at alters of fame.
And yet, we trust our narrative woes upon such palms of dead spirits, collapsing within, suicidal without any valid grudge against life.
We watch writers laud their monstrosities in expensive universities and call them learned, inspired, whereas many are pied rats in a race towards churning out forgettable stories of romanticized poverty.
We are a generation left to plunder our present in company of literati that is petrified of its inner horrors, sweetening their nightmares with floral phrases for predator audiences.
But why not spew your bile down throats of a gullible populace, many spineless writers must be asking?
Of course, the masses deserve a diet of broth and lamentable yapping by dystopic youths in over-aged bodies and broken minds.
Of course we can argue that some amnesiac mother bred their ceaseless quarrels with society, hence their offspring will bear the brunt of blunt words worthy of porn pamphlets and new age deification of a radioactive ‘nature’.
Those scarce narratives of the possessed that should the mirror the lies we pose to our children are nowhere to be filed; a nakedness that leaves no blemish unclaimed even by ourselves.
But, we are seldom encouraged to claw up narrow crevices of our collapsing minds, as avalanches of social catastrophes tumble down our towers. We watch with broken eyes as children explode during sleep, as fathers kneel in prayer for warmonger-gods to replenish their blood-thirst.
Yet, our writers are concerned with coffee table verbatim that masks insulting tones of their misery. Today’s prosodies make ash of burning stories and writers become malignant warts on a truth that metastasizes and blisters a nation from within. And we, the gulping masses stand, patting their diseased shoulders with promises of more sales and awards, with a prize tagged to noose a donkey to its pen.
What writers are these, culprits in a dumbing-down project managed by deranged automatons in power struggles with their adolescence?
Look, I am not asking for academic verbiage, disguised as ponderous deconstructions of social constructs, but just engagingly decent writing which doesn’t use ‘incomprehensibility as a means to profundity.
A book that waltzes through every cloned room of my tears and wars, a text that bothers my soul to hell and back on a broomstick with beads of livid tales and bloody truths.
But why these cursed hordes of bad writers on earth this time around?
Is it a rerun of crash-scenes as experienced in ill-fated creative practices such as film, where every camera-wielding law-school-dropout thinks themselves as ‘artists at heart’?
Are they to be welcomed as proselytes of a proverbial dumb-age, versed in ornamental words?
Ok, perhaps we have silently accepted their idea that obscurity and double-meant words give an aura of importance, hence most books tend to fall in this category.
But we know that those pedants hogging mounds books in secret houses while libraries stand barren as a used up virgins, they are embedded writers exhibiting glass house collections of Solzhenitsyn they have long left unopened.
The auction stale autographs scribbled by bored marketeers of Ben Okri volumes, and often are translators of communal miseries under banners of corporate text wholesalers.
Yet, we keep writing… word after word for postcard loves and histories, we tour through our nightmares on rusted buses and car-carcasses, and I wonder… should I stop writing about the fact that writers make me want to stop writing?
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