Should I die, please bury me on my feet, for I’m a traveller

Writing is not a matter of life or death for me; it is something more serious than that. I write to defeat death: To subsist.

Lest you forget, we strive to achieve security by amassing wealth, hoarding power, drinking water, munching greens and running to the gym. I scribble, then I scribble some more.

If ultimate power is in the ability to take another person’s life, that is in the preserve of the maker. Unwavering, writing makes me so courageous to fight evil that, should the devil be making children cry, I would stomp to hell and spook him out.

That was why I could dare write point-blank articles and poems to learn the different governments of the day when it was suicidal to do so.

Nobody can dispatch my soul if it’s embedded in immortal books. Dictators never succeeded in silencing Socrates, Jesus, Martin Luther King Jnr, Mahatma Gandhi, Ken Sarowiwa, or Nelson Mandela.

I penned The Path of the Eagle when the political climate was not so cool. I’m an environmental writer because the environment dictates what I write. I also write about the environment.

They say that the reasons people write are to persuade, entertain, inform, instruct. I write to stop my maverick brain from destroying me, its real owner.

Come to think of it, if an idle mind is the devil’s workshop, then the human brain is a self-destroying organ. It leads its owner to early death.

Penning and contemplating various themes keep my mind on an even keel, and that stays me safe from self-inflicted harm.

What else explains why intellectuals go bonkers? Why do scientists crave dangerous travel into outer space while we duck the alcoblow?

The human brain demands hard drugs, methanol, stunts and extreme sports. Why do some of us perform self-mortification, endure painful tattoos, perforate our ear lobes, undergo painful circumcision, play Russian Roulette, engage in risky sex, and even take part in suicide bombing?

I say, train young people to discover and to use their talent and they will be home and dry. The search for talent should go beyond sports and showbiz. Isn’t the publishing industry the top earner of taxes in the UK? Just how much money has Shakespeare and Charles Dickens books contributed to the GDP in the UK? Wonder not, books are export commodities and the Jubilee government should consider supporting us, we struggling writers.

I see compiling a novel very like designing a city, where every chapter is a street; every paragraph is a building; every sentence is a room; every word is a door; every punctuation mark is a window. Out of the spaces, readers sample wonderful vistas with gardens, lakes ducks, glens and meadows.

Writing well can make mine a well visited city long after I’m gone. Today, aren’t we visiting and getting pleased with the works of Shakespeare, Jonathan Kariara, Francis Imbuga, Chinua Achebe and Maya Angelou? Books are the literary cities that writers build.

A reviewer opined that my novel, The Path of the Eagle, is the truest post-modernist novel set in our time. I conjured it up when Kenyan parents were rejecting Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People (1966) as a set book because it has red sins on the pages.

My The Path of the Eagles is also decolonised thematically and is not bogged down by gory-nice African themes such as dictatorships, genocides, HIV/ Aids, democracy, human rights, jiggers and FGM. It has current themes like bomb blasts, politics, with allusions to dynamic characters like Moi, Uhuru and Peter Munya and the first ever African woman president, not to forget the poor voter.

Set on the quest plot, The Path explores the human search for God, power, erotic love and hankering for property.

Methinks Kenyans have reason to celebrate because some pessimistic words have now fallen out of active use from the Kenyan political dictionary. Threadbare words like democracy, human rights, potholes, white elephants and what not, have long been replaced with optimistic terms like devolution, public vetting, integration, groundbreaking, launching, Lapsset, trillion budgets and Ngamia One.

Reading the choicest of works and listening to famous voices makes a first-class writer. Since childhood, hearkening to grandmother’s stories and thumping issues of the Rainbow Magazine that my parents bought us, visiting game parks and museums were rubbings-on and trigger effects that landed me space on the bookshelves and the bankrupt title ‘author’.

From a repertoire of 50 manuscripts and still counting, I have three titles published and several on the launching pad.

If you are digital enough or you live in the mountains and cannot reach a bookshop, please Google and buy yourself a Kindle edition of The Path of the Eagle from Amazon. It is listed somewhere in the web as an ‘unusually good book’.

Have a pen: will travel. Again, the call of the road or wanderlust keeps me on my feet full time. Now I have to move to save the rhino and the elephant because nature doesn’t give a damn whether or not the last of them is massacred. Nature is so cruel that it doesn’t care whether we perish of global warming, illicit brews, road carnage, volcano, Tsunami or by a suicide bomber.

No, nature doesn’t care at all because it’s a blind force. Therefore, it is our business as intelligent humans to preserve ourselves and our dignity. An activist, I spread awareness.

Yet again, I’m on my feet because there is a pie in the sky and I have a mission to meet all Kenyan authors and education fathers in a bid to improve the teaching of English and literature in our schools. I am also compiling the greatest tribal story based on the Meru people of Kenya.

Always on my feet like a pilgrim, should I fall by the wayside, for the next generation to perpendicularly find my message of our man and milieu, please bury me upright.
The writer is also the author of The Path of the Eagle (Jomo Kenyatta Foundation, 347 pages); Pride Comes before a Fall, a children’s story (Jomo Kenyatta Foundation); and Nguchiro Mwenye Maringo, a Kiswahili series by Phoenix Publishers. [email protected], [email protected]