Anticipating our book fair and ruing the ruined environment

September is a month of memories for me. The triggers for the memories are many and varied. But for those like me, who live by books, the recollections gel around books, book events or, generally, texts. That is literary thinking.

Just now, for example, my mind is whirling around the Nairobi International Book Fair, entering its 23rd edition. My fear had been that it might fall victim this year to the ravages of the coronavirus. Fortunately, our intrepid colleagues at the Kenya Publishers Association have decided to host the Fair, in hybrid form, between September 28 and October 2.

For book lovers, book sellers and book creators, the Fair is the ultimate pilgrimage of each year. We romp from its scores and scores of stalls of books and other publications, through its reading tents and fun activity spaces to its lively seminars and discussions. The whole Exhibition Hall at the Sarit Centre turns into a book city.

Then there are the book launches and the thrill of expectation of the awards, especially the Jomo Kenyatta Prize. Indeed, many great writing and publishing careers and businesses have been inaugurated at the Nairobi International Book Fair over the years and decades.

My own experiences at the Fair are a mixture of sad and sweet actions and happenings. My saddest grain is, curiously, my association of the Fair with the tragic death of the eminent Ghanaian diplomat and poet, Kofi Awoonor (Williams), and many others, in the Westgate terror attack in September 2013. That coincided with the Book Fair, and I believe that Awoonor’s presence in Westlands at the time had something to do with the Book Fair.

Obvious consequences.

I had always admired the late Awoonor’s poetry, even before I met him in Lagos in 1977. One of my favourite pieces of verse is his poem “Egg”, in which he suggests that love is like an egg. If you grasp and clutch it too hard, it breaks, and if you hold it with unsteady, loose hands, it drops, with obvious consequences. So, hold it with “tender, steady hands”. Awoonor arranges his poem in the shape of an egg, for obvious reasons.

Anyway, one of my best moments at the Book Fair was in 2015, when my sisters of the FEMRITE (Uganda Women Writers Association), of which I am a founding member, exhibited a wide range of their publications, attracting a lot of deserved attention from the fair-goers. My sisters know how to write, and in Nairobi, they got it just right. I hope they will be there again this year.

I, too, launched my environment advocacy play, A Hole in the Sky, at the 2015 Fair. This was at the invitation of my publisher, and in commemoration of the fourth anniversary of the passing on of our environmental militant icon, Nobel Peace laureate Prof Wangari Maathai. Maathai, to whom I dedicated my play, passed away on September 25, 2011. The late Prof Francis Imbuga also dedicated his posthumously published play, Green Cross of Kafira, to this uniquely inspiring lady.

Speaking of books and the environment, two other texts have been nudging my mind. One is John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost (1667) and another is Thomas Malthus’ Essay on Population (1798). I will tell you briefly of the environmental startles that brought the texts to my mind. I believe that environmental awareness and responsibility should be a primary concern of all intelligent people. In Literature we are increasingly speaking of “ecoliterature” and ecocriticism.

John Milton’s Paradise Lost is a re-telling of the biblical story of the fall of human beings from grace. Succumbing to temptation by Satan, the devil, who had himself fallen from the favour of his maker, the humans lose the idyllic home that they received from God. Original human sin was “overharvesting” their resources, eating the fruit, until they had to run for the last remaining leaf to cover their nudity.

Milton coined the term “Pandemonium” to mean the home of all demons, from which they proceed to torment us. Today we use “pandemonium” to mean noise, as well as uncontrolled and undisciplined action. Human behaviour towards the environment seems to be moving increasingly towards pandemonium. Recent scientific pronouncements suggest that we have damaged our planet beyond possible repair.

Highest temperatures

The best we can do is to limit the damage now by stopping all the well-known irresponsible actions that got us to where we are. There are direct and obvious links between our denudation of the earth, pollution of our earth, water and air, degradation of our wetlands, all these delinquencies, and the daily horrors that we are witnessing around us.

The highest temperatures on record, the longest droughts ever witnessed, unprecedented tragic floods and forest fires do not come out of the blue. Even the pandemics tormenting us are traceable to the pandemonium of the greed and selfishness that we call modern living. Can we save our planet and ourselves, or should we just let ourselves and our descendants hurl and whirl irretrievably towards annihilation and self-destruction?

Malthus, a clergyman-turned political economist, is popularly known as a pessimist. In his Essay on Population, he seems to suggest that, since populations grow at an incomparably faster pace than the means of survival and sustenance available at any time, nature and history will find ways of regulating our numbers on earth. The ways, according to Malthus, are not always kind, and may include famines, wars, natural disasters and pestilences. Is this a prophecy of doom or a stern warning to us to come to our sense?

Optimists like you and me have to prove that we can save our planet and ourselves. But how do we do it? Light that little candle of yours and let it shine wherever you are. Even picking one scrap of litter off the street is a contribution to saving the earth. Wangari Maathai made her contribution with her Green Belt Movement and Greta Thunberg is making hers through her young people’s voice.

We do not lack role models.

[email protected]