I’m fresh from watching a video where, in an unfortunate sequence of events, a lady jumped off a roof. A rather morbid way to start a story, I know, but who am I if not your cultured purveyor of emotions; and it would seem that, after avoiding it for so long and plodding through literally every other emotion, it’s finally time for sorrow. (Or in this case, lack thereof?) The expected reaction, one would think, would be for my blood vessels to constrict, for me to recoil as if I were the sidewalk, she’d just had a rather abrupt meeting with. One would think…
As circumstances would have it, I felt all of an overwhelming wave of nothing. I had, in fact, the presence of mind to calmly brew a cup of tea, the one I’m drinking right now as I sit here, pondering my evident disregard for life and questioning my normality (and my sanity?). This situation, as it is, is stirring up a very beautiful cocktail of existential angst and loops upon loops of uncertainty in a mojito glass, and what sort of host would I be if I didn’t invite you all to partake? Welcome to happy hour!
Writing Can Set you Free – A Creative Nonfiction by Rosieda Shabodien, South Africa
I have a running theory that the world really did end in 2012, that God took away all the lovely, nice human beings. The ones who run rescue shelters for puppies, the ones who lend you pens when yours stops working during an exam, and the ones who whisper the answer to you when the lecturer ambushes you with a question and you are just standing there, like a deer in headlights. The rest of us, the wretched of the earth, were plugged into machines like in the Matrix movies to eke out an ignoble existence, cursed to never feel joy, or anything else really, for the rest of our lives. That would explain why life tastes like week-old bread and over-diluted juice cola, right?
Death, death, death, if you say it three times, it sounds either like a very vigorous prayer by a Nigerian pastor or a curse from a third-rate Bollywood movie. Either way, it leaves a rather bad taste in your mouth. In as much as I would love to pawn off my ingrained compassion fatigue to the rapture having already happened and us being in the matrix, I doubt even Olympic gymnasts can stretch that much. The truth, in all its unappealing glory, is that we have been in contact with death so much for so long, we hardly care anymore.
Nashipae – A Creative Nonfiction by Beth Ruga, Kenya
When I was a kid, which honestly isn’t that long ago, I adored computer lessons in school. The teacher would ramble on for some minutes and then leave us, she believed, to exercise our fingers on typing master. Immediately she left the lab, we would employ our freshly taught computer savvy to explore the most exhilarating use of those old machines, killing things without guilt! (Madam Goretti, if you are reading this, I’m so very sorry)
In hindsight, discovering that there are endless ways to kill everything at the age of eleven couldn’t have been very good for my mental development. To an eleven-year-old me though, there was nothing more satisfying than running over a GTA vice city hooker and some cops before Mrs. Goretti came back in. After every holiday (this was boarding school, you see), we would sneak in copies of video games and then shove them in our pants before the first computer lesson so we could install them on the old machines and play, oh what bliss! The romance with video game murder continued for years. That was, of course, until we discovered porn, but that’s a story for another day.
Fast forward, fourteen-year-old me and my little friends, in a flash flood of hormones called adolescence, discovered interesting new uses for our little friends (cough cough). What ensued was the scramble and partition of the feminine population and discovering new ways to exploit our newfound resources (cough, hem! damn this cold). Smart Alek discovered that horror movies tended to have girls jumping into the closest available pair of arms. As you can imagine, movies were sought from the depths of hell itself, and bones, I mean arms, were jumped into. And thus continued our romance with the morbid and the fatal.
More Than a Reality, Our Reality – A Creative Nonfiction by Akoth Otieno, Kenya
The result of our continued entanglement (cough! seriously, this cold!) with death is, of course, that we have become jaded, and numb. I’m genuinely surprised that compassion fatigue hasn’t been added to the list of mental illnesses. Maybe because they can’t design a drug for it? It’s a bigger problem than it seems on the surface. For example, we’ve had a war ongoing, one that is still continuing, and one that we were all righteously indignant about at the beginning, but now, it isn’t even worth the meme space in our heads. Unfortunately, I don’t think I have enough pages, or enough tea to talk about everything wrong with the world, and Mututho would probably astral project and haunt me if I extended happy hour, and thus, we run off to ponder, brood, and brew (tea), until next time.
Alex Tamei is a writer who almost always has his nose buried in a book and only ever looks up to admire the passing beautiful things in life. The only thing he enjoys more than writing is research in the areas of law and African thought systems.
