The Role of the Writer in a Worldwide Lockdown – by Iquo DianaAbasi
The Role of the Writer in a Worldwide Lockdown.
By Iquo DianaAbasi
The Covid-19 pandemic started for most of us as a distant echo; a disease far away from us, communicable but distant; existing on the Asian continent as conveyed to us via CNN and Aljazeera. Soon the echo became a sneeze that snowballed into a scream across thousands of nautical miles to our shores and doorsteps. With social distancing came the need to reduce our physical engagements to the barest minimum. Ultimately, many facets of our lives and businesses had to be suspended. An invitation to the maiden edition of a movie award show would later morph into an indefinite postponement. International book
festivals and fairs were cancelled or postponed indefinitely. I for one had to cancel the book tour for my just released collection of short fiction – the mantra for the times became: ‘Life first’.
Public life may have been suspended indefinitely, but the everyday business of living must continue, and for this to happen we have had to seek different ways to bend the terms of reference for ‘living life’ as it were. Still, the future is uncertain for many people, and the writer is not left out in this. For manypeople, hospice and family visits have been replaced by facetimeand WhatsApp video calls. Impromptu management meetings, and interactions with prospective investors are now a zoom click away. Even this discourse today did not require a physical meeting, but so many discussants converged to share their thought sand educate others. We are adjusting.
Victim of the Times?
A victim in the grasp of the times, the writer is as if manacled and constantly ground on the anvil of economic recession, loneliness, boredom, loss – of opportunity and spaces for creative expressions, of time, of the infinite material which human interaction provides. These losses pose a threat toeconomic currency, but this threat must become the opposite for writers and other creatives.
The writer must rise to become a survivor and warrior in these times.
From Victim to Survivor & Healer
Where others feel a strong sense of listlessness, hopelessness and loneliness in the ensuing isolation, a writer as a deeply sensitive being, feels the tug at the mind a little deeper; there could be that constant lure to fall into psychological instability, yet we must not allow these temporary realities muzzle our creativity, because after the pandemic, life will return – maybe not to normal – but return it must. Creativity will be the beam to which we cling and find solace. For others, our poems, essays and stories will light a path like rays from a lighthouse on a desolate beach, rays which will help each one to find self while at the same time giving the world room and reason to heal.
Here too, creativity must be shared to have impact and heal.
Thanks to Instagram live and Facebook live, Book chats no longer require convergence of many in one physical location, Ballerinas in Russia inspire the world with dance routines shared on social media pages, and artists share their art and creative process on these same platforms too. Artists worldwide have risen to the occasion with creative modes of sharing their art with the world. In this global village we have become, we stand together – though remotely, this pandemic is our common enemy, but our survival is a common goal.
A Word Warrior
As warrior, the writer wrestles with uncertainty, in the quest for survival. As the quintessential artist, s/he must interrogate this situation, raise questions, milk the teat of this pandemic in orderto find meaning, and ultimately survive. We fight this war with our essays, poems and prose. Our essays must breathe and tug at hearts, our poetry must stir, disrupt, and our stories must be true to this time
Hence the Writer is Chronicler…
As writers we are the ones who will dig beneath the periphery to tell of the pains and the resilience of those who were more than a statistic, those who fought and remained standing, those for whom the road ended without their families getting a chance for nurture, or a last goodbye, those left behind to forever mourn with no hope of closure… We are the ones who will remind posterity of how intimacy was weaponized before our very eyes, and how a tiny entity made rubbish of social strata while we returned to the basics and clung to bare necessities.
The Writer Bears Hope
In his chronicling the writer is at once also a proponent of hope. For this he must not simply accept what any side brings forth, or all propaganda as they arise, he must interrogate nature and our relationship with her over the millenia, and find answers for posterity. He must elevate reasoning to the point where he challenges humanity to prepare for a different tomorrow, a future which must come, even though its realities may differ strongly from what we have hitherto known.
When this is over, our works will have toughened us, redeemed us from our pain, and given others reason to be irrepressible. Let us stride forward courageously with the word as our sheath and sword!
Thank you.
Iquo DianaAbasi is the Acting Chairman, Lagos ANA and Author of Efo Riro
