Touch me, please, as you keep your social distance

You can write to me or to the editor. I would even love a poem about me, as I emerge from these “reflections”. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • No communication is complete without a feedback from your target audience. This is why I am invariably delighted to hear from you.
  • Language acts on us. In other words, what is said to us and among us touches us and affects our circumstances and relationships.

My friend and former Kenyatta University colleague, Prof Alamin Mazrui, published, some years ago, a collection of his early verse, called Chembe cha Moyo (A Grain of Heart).

It contains a piece called “Niguse” (touch me), which is one of my favourite Kiswahili verse compositions.

Most probably written while Mazrui was in detention at Kamiti Maximum Security Prison during the terrible post-1982 times, the poem contains the following lines, across which I am jaywalking here for purposes of brevity. (“Jaywalking” was our teacher David Rubadiri’s word for failing to treat a poem with proper respect).

Anyway, in “Niguse”, Mazrui writes (as prosaically translated by me): “When I come out of detention, I will beg whoever is dearest to me to touch me, gently, languorously but sincerely. Touch me again and make me know again, teach me again, what life tastes like… Touch me again, please! Touch me.”

Those of us who, unlike Mazrui, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Wole Soyinka, Abdilatif Abdalla and many others, have not suffered the miseries of detention without trial should never stop counting our blessings.

But we know from both the accounts of those who have been there and from our own imagination the indignities, deprivations and dehumanisations to which such detainees are subjected, with the specific purpose of breaking their spirits.

Mazrui’s poem touches and moves me mainly because of the simplicity, economy, shapeliness and figurative sensuousness with which it communicates the detainee’s experience of loss, longing and expectation.

ASTOUNDING EXPERIENCE

Its main device is the ingenious (and ingenuous) repetition of the single word niguse (touch me). It is both a plea and a command.

But let me stop beating about the bush and tell you the two reasons why I am thinking about touching just now.

The first is that you and I should be celebrating an important anniversary. The second, closely related to the first, is that these prolonged lockdowns, complete with their masking, stay-home and social distance stipulations, make us sorely miss those instinctive graces, like touching, that we erstwhile took for granted.

The celebration for you, my dear reader, and me is that it is six years today since we started chatting here every Saturday!

Many of you were there in 2014, do you remember? We kicked off with the story of three country bumpkins, including me, being thrown off an East African Airways plane at the then-Nairobi Airport at Embakasi in 1965.

We were travelling to Dar es Salaam to join university, but we had failed to check in properly for our flight, owing to our abysmal ignorance.

Most of you reading today have joined us along the way, and I would like to believe that it is as worthwhile a journey for you as it is for me.

Indeed, for me, it has been, and still is, an astounding experience, this sharing with you the secrets of my feelings, my loves, my fears, my joys and my hopes. Is there anything about me of which I have not told you? Let me know, please, and I will oblige.

JOY OF FEEDBACK

Hearing from you is, indeed, what I love the most about this assignment.

We call it feedback and, as we keep telling our students, it is one of the most important aspects of communication. No communication is complete without a feedback from your target audience.

This is why I am invariably delighted to hear from you, even when I fail to write back, as I sometimes do.

The eager expectation that you will read and respond is, ultimately, what keeps me writing.

Your response assures me that we have “touched base”, and we have touched one another. There we go, touching again!

Indeed, for our anniversary, I wanted us to really, physically touch, shake hands, high-fives and all, and even hug and kiss here and there, but we cannot do that, of course, things being as they are.

Hostages and detainees of the dreaded coronavirus and its deadly Covid-19, we can only long for the day when, like Mazrui’s character, we will tell our beloved, “niguse”, without any inhibitions.

We are highly tactile and gesticulating creatures, as the limitations forced on us by these malignant bugs make us realise.

Our range of signifying and communicating facilities is much wider than the complex linguistic symbols, of which we are justifiably proud.

SPEECH ACT

Even the most elementary observation of how we generate and share messages reveals that our positions, postures, movements and facial expressions communicate as much as, if not more than, our words.

The Waswahili say, “akufukuzaye hakwambii toka” (one chasing you away does not have to tell you “get out”).

In popular speech, we say “actions speak louder than words”, and back in the 1960s, observers of human behaviour came up with what they called “body language”. In short, what we do, our actions, “speak” to us.

But equally importantly, language acts on us. In other words, what is said to us and among us touches us and affects our circumstances and relationships.

Consider, for example, what happens between a young man and a young woman when a qualified church minister says to them, “I pronounce you man and wife.”

Back in the 1930s, linguists formulated their insights into this phenomenon, calling it “speech act”. But, as we suggested above, “speech act” is counterbalanced by “act speech”.

WRITE A WORD

Briefly, what we do speaks to us, just as what we say acts on us. This is where we can hug and clap our high-fives on being able to share our small chats, in spite of Covid-19, lockdowns and social distancing.

Touch me, please, or the Saturday Nation, with a word about our column, and how we can improve it and make it even more relevant and more enjoyable in the years to come.

You can write to me or to the editor. I would even love a poem about me, as I emerge from these “reflections”.

Why has no one ever written a poem about me? Niguse, with a word.

Prof Bukenya is a leading East African scholar of English and literature. [email protected]