I have been responsible (in part or wholly) for good. I have blended families and rectified some wrongs. I have had schools rebuilt where they had been destroyed. I have caused to be organised properly the alleviation of blindness. I have refurbished clinics. I have trained, taught and mentored persons who have shone. I have fathered and loved. I have buried loved ones in dignity. I have written some beautiful things. I have opposed wrongdoing and evil.
With young writers in southern Africa, I discussed evolution and skirted around love and the new law on safeguarding, as compared to bride price.
In the southern African case, the jungle or savanna is like the readers and other writers, the snakes and dead trees (bark eaten by elephants), the predators and the nourishing sweet grasses,
A poem or creature either adapts, regresses, or stills and attempts to destroy the context changing around it to something compatible or just empty, something between punishment and banishment.
Writing is like self-taught and self-practiced dentistry informed only by the dreamed ghosts of antique dentists.
The same goes for criticism.
It is not an issue of thought and feeling, virtue and sin, abstraction and concreteness, nor even the social and political. It is certainly not self.
God, I loved the snake in the grass. The old Bull elephant sniffing the teenage cow while the young guy snuck through the bush to hide by the waterhole.
Don’t forget: it was the poets and novelists who advised the strategic theatres of the dictators.
…now there is the added menace of the P.R. persons making obvious shameless and deniable transparent undeniability.
Continued in Part 4