Writer’s Block…

There’s nothing new to write on the Nigerian subject, and all I see, is the boring predictability of the evil governance systems, the wicked rulers, and the pathetically divided subjects, who have lost the capacity to identify the plain commonalities of their afflictions, and the many interests that they all share in common. The Nigerian state and its rulers have the people exactly where they have always preferred: on their collective knees.

Writing is second nature to me. I have always written as well as I have been gifted to speak, from as far back as I have been blessed with the capacity to write. But I have had my impetus to write severely inhibited in recent weeks.

I have rarely plumbed my imagination for writing materials or inspiration, and there are sufficient pains in my existential realities as a Nigerian to keep me moaning book after book, ad infinitum. I write as a balm to salve the pains. I have sufficient material from which to draw, but I have been unable to write.

When I began my public self flagellation in 2015, my Facebook page was the primary platform of engagement, and as I wailed over the easily predictable tragedy that is the Buhari regime, I lived out my frustrations vehemently, profusely, and tirelessly.

I wrote essays upon essays. When words would fail me, I reverted to poems. I shed words in place of tears. When the pains in my writing hand, neck, and back, became a bother, I learnt to say in a sentence, what I had once required an entire essay to communicate. To write books in spite of the pains, I have learnt to work by dictating for another to type.

Writing is a painful experience for me, and I do not speak metaphorically. But the pains have never stopped me from writing, and if the truth be told, it was the cauldron in which my gift was revealed. I have become efficient at working with my pains, and they are not the reason for my inability to write.

You can blame Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook algorithms for my affliction. But do not hesitate to blame yourselves as well. It has taken a combination of y’all, to give me what I believe to be my very first experience of what might be the writer’s block. I shall explain.

On the anniversary of each and every one of the several posts I have made on my Facebook page over the past years, the algorithm would bring back the memory of the post, and I would be confronted with something that I had written the year before, and then it became two years before, and then three, and now, there are four years worth of memories. Memories of me saying the same thing over and over.

The boring consistency of my wailing and vituperations regarding my country, has never been lost on me, or on anyone that has known me for any length of time. I am passionate about Nigeria, and I know it warts and all: I have never been deceived by it. I soon began to find a curious satisfaction in reposting the old pieces.

It began as a mode of self validation. The lizard that jumps from the Iroko tree, says that if nobody would praise it: it shall applaud itself. The rather nauseating consistency of the correctness and validity of the deductions contained in my works, outrageous as they seemed to my readers at the point of delivery, demanded that I reposted the works. But there is a secondary reason, one that I have rather enjoyed, and the one directly related to my inability/refusal to write.

The Nigerian has lost the capacity to see beyond the day, and we have become a largely existential people, shorn of the capacities to connect cause to effect, or to see beyond our immediate hunger. I have found a great deal of pleasure in reminding my readers of their not too distant idiocies, as they would sometimes read themselves, arguing blindly against a position that I had expressed only after prolonged periods of deep and agonizing cogitations.

I have taken no pleasure in seeing the tragedies foretold come to pass in real time, but I have derived a perverse kind of pleasure, in being able to tell some rather empty barrels to shut their gobs, and to engage their brains, before presuming to argue with me. I have rather enjoyed that, and I have no apologies to offer either. In a joyless land, I shall take my pleasure wherever I find it. So, hell yes! I told you so.

But now, I am tired of telling you so. I am sick of repeating myself ad nauseam. The impetus to write remains, but I simply cannot find the need. There’s nothing new to write on the Nigerian subject, and all I see, is the boring predictability of the evil governance systems, the wicked rulers, and the pathetically divided subjects, who have lost the capacity to identify the plain commonalities of their afflictions, and the many interests that they all share in common. The Nigerian state and its rulers have the people exactly where they have always preferred: on their collective knees.

What should I be writing on the Magu magomaho? Exactly what should I have written on the abomination of Pondei? How many words must I find to describe the painful spectacle of Akpabio before the National Assembly? What difference would my preachments have made if I had elected to write about the Ngige Comedy Half Hour before the James Faleke Committee? What microphone would I be using, when Hush Gbaja has finally removed the mike?

What do I write on Southern Kaduna that I had not written on the genocide in the Mambilla and the Benue Trough? What could I have said about Malami? What if Aisha went to Dubai to treat her neck pain? What difference would my writings have made on the subject of the country that would borrow to build trains, but is unperturbed by the knowledge that those whose future have been mortgaged to build the railways, are roaming the streets for a lack of classrooms and teachers?

I have found that each time I have reached for my device to bang out an essay in frustration and pain, I would be reminded of a piece I had written, that would be an exact replica of whatever it was that I might have set out to write, and the painful realization of the impotence of my wailing would then be accentuated by my the knowledge of the fact that, those that would read the painful regurgitations of the same old story, have become inured to pain, common sense, and the painful truth of their sickening realities.

I do not have any writer’s block: na me block writing to preserve my insanity.

DF