The new writing craze everywhere on mobile phones
Everywhere you are, in church, at football matches, at home and anywhere, someone is busy letting life and the world go past while their doting eyes are fixated on some mobile phone where very often they create their own orthographies.
IN this “App age” when anyone and everyone can publish anything, anywhere, anytime, some of the novelty of the traditional book, what we often call the hard copy, may be wearing off. Ironically, too much amateur writing could be killing writing as an industry.
Whereas in the classroom whenever it was composition-writing time, some of us literally shook in our boots, not knowing where or how to start.
And there was a lot of trepidation around the inadequacies of our writing — from the mechanical (shaping the letters of the alphabet) to the creative and transactional.
Handwriting sessions were an agonising experience for those of us whose efforts on the page were nothing more than unseemly squiggles.
We doodled our way through these mechanical writing lessons with the teacher often wielding the big stick.
You may want to ask what it was we wrote about. Well we practised with such inane sentences as “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy brown cow”.
Nobody ever stopped to think why the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy brown cow.
We were all so compliant despite that the teacher never explained anything.
In time we were able to work out the fact that this “popular” sentence enabled us to practise the shaping of a considerable number of letters of the alphabet.
The “Hey, diddle, diddle rhyme” (By Mother Goose) was another regular item from the curiosity shop of writing torture.
That we had no idea whatsoever, what the fuss was about, let alone what the rhyme meant, was a known fact.
But, we continued with the exercise, nevertheless, and mostly because the teacher said so. Thus we all dutifully wrote in our exercise books: Hey, diddle, diddle, The cat and the fiddle, The cow jumped over the moon; The little dog laughed To see such sport, And the dish ran away with the spoon. Delightful nonsense of course and such as would make ECD children suitably mystified and keen to experience more such fantasies. Oh for those moments of rare mechanical erudition, if there is such a thing!
These days our writers regularly subvert all the rules whenever “they go WhatsApp” and when they upload their thoughts (usually borrowed) on Facebook and other spaces.
The words are seldom spelt correctly and the obsession with wanting to write in English quite often creates some hilarious moments on the World –Wide Web.
But hey, who cares, everybody is writing! It does not matter that much of the writing is self-indulgent and conceited. Many of these “new-fangled scribes” have no real sense of audience and are more concerned with sounding clever and independent, being then most fettered by expectation.
The mobile phone has made all this easy and possible.
Everywhere you are, in church, at football matches, at home and anywhere, someone is busy letting life and the world go past while their doting eyes are fixated on some mobile phone where very often they create their own orthographies.
The wonder of it all is that those for whom the texts are meant read and understand what is sent to them, despite all its peculiar shortfalls.
Don’t talk about originality because it does not feature at all.
In fact, most people are just recycling “stuff” that has come to them from heaven knows where.
Those are some of the blessings of technology and the Internet. You can assume a multiplicity of personae and many of your bamboozled followers will give you their “likes” without ever really understanding what it is you are saying.
In this virtual world neither spelling nor grammar are of any importance. One of these days I am going to come up with a compilation from these “writings” and see what use we can put it to.
But why are people so keen to write? What do they benefit from their “writing”?
Everyone has a story to tell and everyone can tell a story or thinks they can, particularly stories about themselves, but there the similarity ends. Where art begins narration stops and where narration stops, there we begin to be artistic.
Even herd boys and starry-eyed girls in smoky kitchens have their own thrilling tales. The problem is that hardly anyone pays them any heed.
Here I am thinking of a boy who was a dreamer and a herder of cattle.
For board and lodging and a few dollars each month (before the hyperinflation) he undertook to look after our cattle. For the purposes of today’s story we shall call him Fodhisi.
Fodhisi spent inordinate amounts from his lean wages on pens and exercise books. He said he was writing a novel and that it was going to be the biggest book ever written by anyone in our environs.
This would have been a great feat on his part because without mentioning names he was, in fact, thinking of squaring against a local lad who had made good and become an international literary icon.
So if you crept upon him in some of his moments of creativity you would either catch him scribbling away under the shade of a tree or just marvelling at his own genius. He did not hesitate sharing his ‘art’ with you if you gave him the chance to.
The end result of all his efforts was a collection of discarded exercise books. It goes without saying that he was angry with the world for ignoring his writing.
We probably have lots of boys and girls out there all entertaining one dream or another.
Get on board a chicken bus any day and you will see these travelling salesmen who sell their wares aboard the buses.
These men are artists in their own right and could put many of our comedians to shame with their effortless performances. Some of their tales are naughty and tall. I am convinced that if we did a collection of these rascally tales we would have something akin to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
The other day, one of these fellows was warning women with babies aboard buses to make sure that they never fall asleep while breastfeeding.
He swore that he had witnessed a most unfortunate incident in which an innocent woman was accused of infidelity by a jealous husband.
All because of something circumstantial.
There she was, this breastfeeding mother on a two-sitter with some unknown male.
When her baby began to fret and fidget she did what most African mothers with a strong rural background normally do under such circumstances.
She gave her baby the breast and the brat fed himself so lustily as to lull his mother to sleep.
Meanwhile, the male sharing the two-sitter with her was gorging himself on sweet potatoes. But, as life will often do, it brewed a shocker.
He began to choke and in his moment of desperation he saw the baby at the breast and promptly displaced the infant at the breast.
The woman woke up with a startled yell. Her baby had grown unusually robust in his feeding. It so happened that the bus had stopped and that the woman had reached her destination where her husband was waiting. Imagine his shock then when on boarding the bus to check for his spouse he saw what he saw.
The need to have one’s words and thoughts captured in perpetuity is a natural impulse.
We all want to send a message to the future. It’s probably one way to prove that we too were once of this world.
The graffiti we see everywhere speaks of this desire.
One of the greatest stories the world has ever known, when it comes to trials and tribulations, is the story of the hapless Job, a man abandoned by his God to the point of destitution.
Job has so much to say that his anguish explodes into the words: Oh that my words were now written! Oh that they were printed in a book! (Job 19:23 King James Version). When things are really tough we need a record.
Artists will tell you about the detachment and abstraction they often feel once a work is done and accomplished. They wonder if indeed they are the originators of the works of art.
This is why Al Mustapha, the prophet in Kahlil Gibran’s “Prophet”, wonders after receiving a vote of thanks for his teachings. Gibran writes:
And Almitra the seeress said, “Blessed be this day and this place and your spirit that has spoken.”
And he answered, “Was it I who spoke? Was I not also a listener?”
In this utterance, Al Mustapha talks about the relationship between speaker and listener and by the same token raises the question of writer-reader relationships.
When you write you keep your audience/readers in mind.
What you write must really be worth their time. Our greatest challenge may be how to separate the pretenders from the genuine writers. David Mungoshi is a writer, social commentator, editor and retired teacher.