Brethren, consider this an inefficient blow thrown by a passerby in a raging fight that does not concern him, because it somehow concerns him.
We all know what this fight is all about. The mistake we are making is that this fight is not about the Brittleness of a Paper. It is about the inability to look a viper in the face and command it to stop biting because it has bitten people on your behalf before.
See, it is dangerous to allow Arts to have political investors. That is what is happening. If any of you have read ElNathan’s intervention earlier you’d understand the stinking hypocrisy we carry about as writers of a nation’s conscience.
A politician’s ill mannered son throws a shade on a woman, on an entire race. His mother, a feminist, a writer, a first lady and Chairman of Girl Child Right Commission in Kaduna supports the son.
A worried Arts Editor fires an appropriate stinker at them, and his stinker is taken down.
Now get the jerk. It wasn’t taken down because it was a stinker. It was taken down because it was fired at a wrong person. At an Arts investor’s son. At the wife of writers’ benefactor.
I doubt Brittle Paper would have taken it down if the receiver of the appropriate stinker was a non-entity.
The truth is that the publisher of Brittle Paper does not understand Nigerian politics and who cares if a Dictator is sponsoring an Arts Festival by the way. As long as it allows writers to come and take pictures, sell their books, carry long bags and pretend their arses out. It doesn’t matter if the sponsor is more reprehensible than all the evil political characters in their books. As long as they get their books sold and get fellowships. Who cares if it is an African dictator.
So Brittle Paper unknowingly plays into a ploy to hoodwink writers from writing political pieces because she’s not in the know of the modus operandi of those who have long perfected their plans to stuff our voices with stones of silence.
In all these, I am more worried that our feminists are not talking; that their colleague’s son threatened to gang rape a woman. An Igbo woman. That their colleague kept quiet in the face of the outrage from people of conscience even as her spoilt child taunts reprimanding voices. Then we became inundated with journalistic pieces that attempted to whitewash her image on newspapers and blogs to save face. That was when we heard her rebuking voice which was not enough, which was long swallowed by the weight of her son’s action.
If it were a commoner, many of our esteemed crusaders must have spoken and condemned this python. But no, this one is an anointed python from an important place where our Arts’ movement is propelled.
What am I even saying!
The views on the article are simply those of the writer and do not necessarily represent those of Black Boy Review!
