These massive waves of lake water have on their
backs messages to the dry land inhabitants, the human race inclusive. But
everything just neutralizes. Every message comes to a point of deprivation as
depth declines and the static stones colonize with power the soil that gives
the inhabitants most of its life.
Each wave says its last prayer on one of the million
stones, some of them pebbles others giants which needles to say have since time
immemorial been watching closely the yearning distinctive of each of these
waves. The moon watches them too, the vegetation as well. We don’t. The birds- I wish they could talk. Talk to us about
things we’ve never known.
All we are so eager to get from beneath these waters
is those graceful creatures we call fish. The hippos watch us do this, only I
don’t know why they can’t get the fish for us or why they are not protective of
their miserable neighbors.
There are those dhows which realize the power of the
wind. That same wind that escorts the splendid waves, waves with messages only
to eventually carry with it the messages and takes them- don’t know.The bird
flies slightly above the waves and as a quick response, plunges itself in a
valley of a wave. Guess it has found its package. We haven’t.
I am sitting here on one of these ageless stones.
There is that beach to my front left and what is in my eye is only part of the
Kavirondo Gulf as they called it back then. Though behind me to where this wind
blows seems a bush land, it opens up to a place. A garden if you may. And right
now there are some things that are being set up. I have just left them there
together with their claiming owners. I just came here, alone, to see if I can
try and get answers; answers about them; answers about art.
 | |
| Simon's painting entitled "The Billows". Oil on Board (34"x34") | , 2013 |
I am looking, no staring at a tree with such an inquisitive
face only for it to be wiped away by the wind every now and then, no response
whatsoever. But though I refuse to admit it, I now know it is possible for one
to get just what exactly these essential messages are. Literature has always
been relaying these messages to the rest of us.
For Prof. Francis Imbuga, the late, did not leave me
alone on this one when he talked of his wanting his art to be universal and
permanent to the future hazards of interpretation on its own. I now begin to
see the gravity there lies in art once placed in its factual position.
And then Nadine Gordimer still does bless me
especially in that short story I read almost alwaysAmnesty. In the story she cites,‘the farm belongs to the Boer, but
that’s not true.’ Where ‘the cattle don’t know that anyone says he owns it.’Everything
in her eyes ‘…is nothing on the back of this earth. It could twitch them away
like a dog does a fly.’
When I read Wole Soyinka talking about the enemies
of humanity (Saturday Nation September
27, 2014), it all dawns on me that we are the answers. Only we are
responsible for everything and anything that surround us.(These three are just
a drop in the ocean the list could be infinite.)
In the evening I must get the awe-inspiring sunset,
the water waves are still doing what they always do. On the back of my head
however there is a hint of happiness (characterized by a tingling sensation)
and yes at least I have partly a solved mystery.
Let’s use this power, this literary power, on behalf
of all of us, to build all of us and not to let ourselves be ruined constantly
by the waves of doom, because there
will always obviously be such.
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