'G' For God?

I've been asked this question a few times: Why do I use the upper case ‘G’ when writing about the monotheist deity? I think the answer to this is simple. The monotheist God is no less the name of a thing than Sherlock Holmes or Big Brother, and if I do not begin the names of these two fictional characters with small letters, why do it in the case of Yahweh or Allah or Olodumare – or God? To show that I do not believe in It, or that It does not exist? Well, I do not look up to Sherlock Holmes for moral or intellectual guidance (in spite of his keen intelligence!), nor do I believe that Big Brother is more than a figment of Orwellian imagination. 
By the same token, if I write the initial letters of the title of a fantasy novel like Lord of the Rings or Stephen King’s It in capital, why begin the word Bible with the lower case (except, of course, in the case of the figurative bible: the bible of foodies, for instance). I write the ‘G’ in God in capital because whether It exists or not, It is an entity. I’ve seen someone write ‘Ogun’ and ‘jesus’ in the same sentence. I was rather amused because so far as I am concerned, both figures are semi-mythical, and while Jesus has the advantage of being scripted (though he might as well be fictional), Ogun is orally storied. 
But then I am not being prescriptive or anything - let’s not turn this into a kind of Swiftian war between upper-casers and lower-casers. If it takes your fancy, write God with the small ‘g.’ After all, ee cummings wrote everything in lower case - it might as well be a matter of style and expediency in this age of textese. Why go to the trouble of tapping ‘caps lock’ to write about a deity you dislike, even abhor, the deity you want to damn, that you want to give some well-deserved slapdown. For a lot of people, it is also lexically trendy to write God with the small ‘g’, it is now a noticeable inflection in atheist-speak, one of whose salient characteristics is lippiness. But I think the parodic belittling that the small ‘g’ is supposed to achieve if the article ‘the’ is used before ‘god,’ or even ‘that,’ so that it reads this way ‘the god who created the world in six days.’ Although, in my opinion, it is better to differentiate, for clarity, the monotheist God and Its polytheist friends with upper and lower cases (being proper and common nouns), it is fair to say it’s easy to deduce the deity the users of the lower case ‘g’ are writing about when it is used, what other god would atheists have time for if not the so-called ‘sky-daddy?’ Indeed, that great philosopher of Language Game, Ludwig Wittgenstein, would be proud of lower-casers.
I’d like to believe I am not a purist, I make free with language. Unlike prescriptivists, I believe nothing about verbality should be fixed. So why not slip into the emerging in-thing of using the small ‘g’ for God? I don’t often do this because I suspect that there is an underlying and unsuspected fear beneath the foregrounding of the lower case ‘g’ for monotheist God. Oh no, not the proverbial Fear of God, but the fear of embarrassment. Fear of what fellow ‘unbelievers’ might think of you if you constantly write ‘God.’ Fear that you might be seen as still having a vestige of belief and faith in God, that you still think It is - or why else would you dignify It with capital ‘G’ if you said you did not believe in It. But the fear I am talking about is subliminal, slippery and reversed, because if you ask anyone who writes God with the small ‘g’ that she does that because of fear, she’ll say no and may go on: ‘I just don’t give a fuck about god’ – which, again, is true, just as the subfear of being judged for being too polite with and about God. 
I use the big ‘G’ for the human-creation that is God because I believe it is better to do this and yet be objective and clear about your lack of belief in It. I use the big ‘B’ for the human-written Bible and Quran because I believe it is possible to do this while pointing out the absurdities, contradictions, archaisms and fictions in the books. I use the big ‘J’ for the biblical Jesus because it might as well be the name of a ragtag roving rabbi who lived some time ago in Palestine, or the name of an entirely imaginary man-god like Zeus. Wouldn’t it be silly of me to write ‘zeus’ in order to prove that he never existed and that he was a creation of Greek imagination? What could be more compelling and pointed than Dawkins’ pronouncement on ‘God?’: ‘The God of the Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust..’ and so on

Philosophy Masterclass from my 5-Year old Son

There is a trinity of books that I like and find associatively memorable. Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. And an out-of-print book entitled Travels with A Son. The first two are classics in their own right: the pacy epitome of philosophy chic, Zen, and the lavishly dark The Road. These two books have one thing in common, summed up in the title of the third, Travels with A Son. While stylistically workaday, the latter has its own charms - for me, at least. Father and son travel through West Africa, my native land. I read two of these books even before I had a son, but there is something at once latent and lateral about the romance-tinged desire to go on a journey of some sort with my son (the first of two), maybe a philosophy-flavoured one as in Zen or a touristy ‘grand’ trip as in Travels with A Son. McCarthy’s ‘road’ and apocalyptic counterworld is a different literary beast - it is fiction, no less fascinating, though, for its exploration of father/son fellowship.

I travelled with my five-year-old son a few days ago. Oh, but the 4 am world I took him into was unlike Cormac McCarthy’s understated chaos in The Road. The London we drove into was a semi-empty world, sparsely peopled by zombie-quiet early-shifters, mostly smileless immigrant faces. I wanted to go and collect a car some 300 miles away. I set out in another car, but since no one can drive two cars at the same time, we switched to a red London bus somewhere along the line before finally settling in another red Virgin train at Euston.

We arrived in Hartford, collected the car and set out on a return journey to Kent. Would the five-year-old help relieve the drudgery of almost a quarter of a day’s journey? Well, perhaps in no better way than he relieved the train journey outwards. Daddy, where are we going? Why did we leave your car in London? Do trains speed faster than cars? I am bored. Can we go and see whether the restaurant is open now? Is the train going fast? I am bored. When are we going to get there? One minute? Two? How long is one minute? The poor boy is yet to grasp the speculative economy of time – he always lops time into simple nano-units. As for the antsiness - how else do you want a boy of five to orient himself to a suddenly messed-up biorhythm?

He was more settled during the return journey. While I was not too eager to begin a 4-odd hour drive, my beloved urchin was looking forward to the stops that I promised him at KFC or some other fast-food joints. I zapped the car radio from one channel to the other, impatient with everything I found; I was also looking for something that would interest my son. Anthemic Coldplay’s Paradise? Beethoven’s 7^th on Classic FM? And there was my favourite leftwing rambler on a talk radio station taking calls about the illegality of human taxidermy in the UK. I hate the idea of swaddling children up inside a draped cot of moral and visual pleasantness (a bed of roses, as it were); I’d rather they see the world for what it is - good and bad, ugly and beautiful. But I would not subject my eternally ‘bored’ son to a long radio discussion of why human cadavers are not stuffed and mummified for display purposes.

Then I’d run into Michael Jackson’s Man in the Mirror on a retrocast station.  

Me: You know who this is?

Son: Michael Jackson.         

Me: You like him... His music?

Son: Yep. (A pause) What year was he born?

Me: 1958.

Son: When was he a toddler?

Me: Late 1950s... Early 60s.

Son: When was he a boy, a boy like me?

Me: In the 1960s.

Son: When was he a teenager?

Me: 1970s.

Son: When was he a man?                                                                                   

Me: 1980s, 90s and the noughties.

Son: And when did he die?

Me: 2009.

Son: Why do people die?

Me: People have to die, or else there will be no houses for babies and toddlers to live. The world will be too full.

Son: Sometimes babies and toddlers die.

Me: Yeah, they do.

Son: Why?

Me: That’s...

Son: It’s not nice to die.

Me: Often, it’s not.

Son: Do people wake up when they die?

Me: No, they don’t.

Son: But Mrs Watson (his teacher) said Jesus woke up when he died.

Me: Did she?

Son: She said Jesus was woken by his father. Is that true, Daddy?

Me: What do you think?

Son: I don’t think it’s true. People don’t wake up when they die.

Me: No, they don’t.

        

Femi Fani-Kayode: 'God's' Gift to Nigerian Women?

 In a curious way, I find Femi Fani-Kayode fascinating. Intriguing might be a better word, really. If I were to write Stracheyan portraits of certain Nigerian personalities, Femi would be factored in as the surprising and divisive choice for an Eminent Nigerian. My interest in Nigerian politics and politicos reached the nadir of utter uninterest a few years ago. To me, someone like Fani-Kayode is as representative of the thieving run-of-the-mill Nigerian political class as James Ibori or Bode George. I think it is a waste of time and brain cells writing or talking about the pack of them.  

However, I must confess that I have been buttonholed by Femi Fani-Kayode a few times – and not so much by his politics as by his sociology. He seems like the sort of man you would like to meet in a pub or ‘beer parlour’ and have a long, beery and blokey chat with – that is, if he were T-shirt casual. But then something also suggests itself to you when you read Femi’s works or see him speak – particularly when he is suited, you get a glimpse of someone who furtively anoints himself with the ointment of cant and artifice, reminiscent of a pentecostal pastor.  

I occasionally read his essays, and while I find some of his views slightly off-the-beaten-path and idiosyncratic, I think he makes as much sense as any rational being. He is opinionative, all right, but who among us is not... to varying degrees?  Even his overt-covert Yoruba nationalism should not just be dismissed out of hand. It is no more than an idiosyncratic and useful ventilation of the Nigerian question. But then that is politics, Nigerian politics, which I refuse to have any truck with for now.

And what is Femi’s sociology? As it happens, two instances of Femi’s sociologising have had something or the other to do with women. A couple of months ago, I happened on a thread on Facebook wherein a tattle of tireless Facebook denizens were wrangling over the propriety of Femi’s seemingly paltry aside that he’d had the honour to ‘date’ three Igbo women. One of these women was Bianca Onoh, later Bianca Ojukwu. So far as some of the commenters were concerned, Fani-Kayode had committed not just a castration-worthy offence but hanging treason: he dared boast that he was once romantically involved with the widow of the Nkemba, the Dim, the Generalissimo of the Republic of Biafra: Bianca, the sculpturesque grand dame who had become the Nigerian Ambassador to Spain at the time picayunish Fani-Kayode blurted out his long-doused ardour for the former Most Beautiful Girl in Nigeria.

I was amused by some of the responses to Fani-Kayode’s retrospective and needless kiss-and-tell. And it was clear that tendrils of ethnic atavism had begun to weave themselves around the Facebook thread. You could pick up the raging, if suppressed, static: a jumped-up Yorubaman dared insult the widow of Nkemba! This was when I thought I should not comment and leave well alone. Because however much balance I tried to bring into the flame war, there was the possibility that I would be seen as taking the side of someone from the part of the country where I, incidentally, also came from.

But then, while it was rather foolish for Fani-Kayode to introduce his bygone boyfriendhood of three Igbo women into an argument about ethnocentricism, the indignation some people showed over his particular mention of Bianca Ojukwu was comical. Now, I am coming from an ultrahumanist, albeit commonsensical, position where I see every human as biologically equal. Before Bianca began to bear the imperial spousal cachet of noli me tangere as Ojukwu’s Wife, she was a young, beautiful woman – and free, free to date anyone she liked.

No, I might have been challenged, I thought. It wasn’t about who Bianca dated or not dated; it was the pointlessness of Fani-Kayode’s resurrection of the phantoms of these late relationships. A counterargument which would have held some water. But I would have posited: what if Fani-Kayode is a cad (pardon the archaism, it is the mot juste), an amoral, cavalier kiss-and-teller? After all, what he did was less obtuse than the tomfoolery of a comedian telling jokes about 90-year-old grandmothers begging to be raped by a group of young armed robbers. Perhaps Fani-Kayode only wanted to aggrandise himself as a kind of semi-retired cosmopolitan Casanova who could count three Igbo women among his conquests! I remember Fani-Kayode bringing up the image of another modern cad to my mind – silver-tongued James Hewitt, who only stopped short of describing in graphic detail how he shagged Princess Diana.

A few days ago, an old friend sent me a Facebook round-robin, an upended confession written by Femi Fani-Kayode. It is called ‘A True Story.’ The ‘true story’ is about how he fought off the seductive wiles of a friend's wife, who was detained at the pleasure of Obasanjo’s government. Fani-Kayode begins the essay with a reference to his poem, ' Power of Women’ – a title which recalls Chinweizu’s farcically misogynist treatise, Anatomy of Female Power.

Fani-Kayode tells the ‘true story’ of how he went to visit the wife of the jailed friend and how the woman had tried all she could, including stripping off, to seduce him. But Femi, an upstanding and devout man that he believes he is, had resisted like a kind of 21st-century Joseph fighting off Potiphar’s wife; he had pleaded and reasoned with the woman and had (of course) prayed! When all of these availed nothing, he had fallen back on his security detail, who was at the ready outside and, like the Praetorian Guard, the men had stormed the woman’s house to save Mr Fani-Kayode. Now, rather than coming across as a cad, Fani-Kayode would like to be seen as a man of honour, loyal to his friend, and strong enough to vicariously mortify the flesh of his poor friend's wife. That is what comes across from the tenor of the essay.

Fani-Kayode makes the point in the essay that what shocked him about the nonevent was the loathing and disgust the woman expressed towards her husband and how she confessed that she was only sticking by him because he was rich. Although Femi does not express this, I suspect this is a critique of not only the woman but women in general, particularly Nigerian women, with whom Fani-Kayode has more contact these days. But would I, for instance, have been surprised by the woman’s behaviour? No. She is human, and humans do curious and unexpected things, including trying to seduce their spouse’s best friend or expressing detestation and disgust towards their husband or wife. As a matter of fact, one of the most depredating cankerworms that eat into the fabric of marriages is Disgust – it is the antithesis of Love. 

Even then, Fani-Kayode’s shock is understandable, although it is hard to suppress the hunch that the essay is also a tad self-serving. Because while the man has the right to write anything he likes, the question may still be asked: What is the point of it? To let people know that women are not to be trusted? A cautionary tale about women’s capability to deceive, lie and dissemble? Of course, the essay is slyly phallocentric. Having offered a prayer up to his God to ‘help us all, particularly we men,’ Fani-Kayode couldn’t have been sending out his quasi-biblical message to women, or could he? After all, within the Judeo-Christian tradition in which Fani-Kayode proudly belongs, both men and women are supposed to read the story of how Eve inveigled Adam into eating the ‘fruit of knowledge’ and marvel at its profundity. But what I really find funny about the whole piece is how Fani-Kayode avows and re-avows the discretion he has displayed so far about what happened between him and the woman. Really? I mean, this guy describes where the woman’s husband was when she tried to snare him; he let it be known that the nearly cuckolded man is a politician, an influential politician.

And what did he tell his bodyguards after they’d saved him from the Nigerian avatar of Jezebel? Probably something – on the off chance, I’d add. Would Fani-Kayode have let go of the opportunity to further enigmatise himself before his henchmen: a keen lover of women who had suddenly rejected a member of ‘the fairer sex’? And did he really scruple at writing ‘A True Story’? Did he have any Hamlet-like introspection: To write or not to write? Probably not. I think Fani-Kayode knew exactly what he was doing; he knew that in spite of his feeble attempt at making the woman nameless, it wouldn’t take a supersleuth or a summa-cum-laude graduate of Sherlock Holmes Studies to work out who the woman was or at the least, who her husband was. But here is the dramatic irony in ‘The True Story.’ Chances are that Fani-Kayode’s friend, the husband of the femme fatale, will read the story, and he must be a prize bonehead not to deduce that the Parable of a Good Friend is, in the obverse about him and his beloved wife. So Fani-Kayode writing that he has kept the secret close to his heart is absolute bull, Irish bull - or even pure bullshit because he must have been well aware of what he was doing; he knew he was about to carry out an elaborate stage whisper.

Which is why I find Fani-Kayode intriguing. While I wouldn’t go as far as describing the politician as a consummate bullshitter, to a degree, he has the flair and facility of one. You only need to read a few of the articles on his website to pick this out. But then again, why would I not find a Nigerian politician who writes poems and prose-poems interesting? I am, after all, a litterateur. As an essayist, Femi Fani-Kayode is prolific and promiscuous in his interests. His prosaic poems, taken together, read like a cross between The Psalms and Songs of Solomon. There is one entitled ‘An Ode to Jezebel.’ Okay, this is an ironic piece of free verse. Still, it represents, more than all, the author’s moral attitude to women, a monologic psychopoetry, a pious jeremiad against a certain woman.

I have also gleaned from Fani-Kayode’s website that he is a very ambitious, politically ambitious man. Uncommonly enough, he dabbles in culture. In other words, he is sidling towards positioning himself on the plinth of Plato’s philosopher/king. Well, his feet of clay might not give him a solid foothold on the plinth. He also writes poems, I mean those slobbering ditties, so he may not even be allowed in the Republic.