Literature and Anger

Heard it being said that the best writers are the most reclusive and angriest lot on this earth. Simply because happy people don't write gripping tales. Happy people are - happy. and when they are happy, a pen is the last thing they think of. They think of booze and drugs and sex; there is simply no place for a prayer. 

But it is when a person is angry or is missing someone or something that badly that he suddenly sees things so clearly he turns into a philosopher and feels the urge to share his newly acquired pain - under the guise of it being knowledge or a brilliant work of fiction. Nobody knows they are that good at praying until they come face to face with Godzilla on their doorstep. And closer to home, most of us might have known of Hon. Tendai Biti's exploits at Honey and Blackenburg, but we only got to know his mastery of the English language when he lost an election to the Zanu Pf juggernaut of Robert Mugabe and Co. 

But Biti is a lawyer; I was talking about writers; and the most obvious port of call would be at the grave site of Dambudzo Marechera. Were his works driven by an ire so great it drove him mad? Or he just saw things as they were and presented them as they were? Which is the excuse of all apocalypse writers, really. They all claim to see things as they are. Oh; we write this way because that is how the world is right now. It's hell on Earth. 

Really? Is catastrophe all there is to the world? Isn't there love and weddings, and booze, and football and sex to make people's lives happy? Why do fairy tales have to be a thousand pages of heartbreaking soul-searching, and one paragraph of happily ever after? Maybe its because people don't like to read happy, happy, happy all the times. Or there is really nobody to write all that joy in the world because all the happy people are busy soaking in their happiness and our writers include the likes of Charles Dickens, who enjoys the sight of people eating from the same plate as pigs and Earnest Hermingway who loves it when he puts guns to his head and blows his brains out.

I don't know. Maybe the writers of this world write what they write because they are angry at the world itself for being such a fucked up place. There is hunger. There is poverty. There is floods. There is lava that eviscerates its own innards and blows people into ash and cinder. Governments lead their states into extinction. There is all the other personal griefs all of you can think of. And where there might be all the happiness in love, there is hate to go with it. After all, don't they say there is a reaction for every action? Weddings with divorce. Booze with hangover and penury. Football with heartbreak. Sex with disease. So - for the writer - there is nothing in the world to be happy about.

So here's to all the angry writers out there. We need you there - here. To give our souls a daily dose of how much we are lost sheep who can never be free until the last man on earth declares himself happy by diving into a tank of alcohol and drowning himself in it. Now, thats happiness. 

But until then, here's to some sad literature...