Art of being stubborn: Are there parents who praise their kids for dreaming?

Are there parents who wish their children to grow up to become daytime dreamers and inventors and whittlers? Parents who high-five their kids for that amazing doodle they did during the chemistry class while trying not to fall asleep? FOTOSEARCH 

In Summary

• Do we give art the respect it deserves? Artists think differently from what the norm dictates. That’s almost — though not entirely — a requirement of the impulse. As society quiets down reluctantly and resentfully, I can detect the preternatural cessation of joy, mostly through how we don’t art much anymore.

By ELSIE EYAKUZE
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Question: Are there parents reading this who go to bed at night praying that their child will be the odd one out? That they will be the jester at the back of the classroom, the one who can’t seem to concentrate on their maths homework.

That they will almost always come back filthy as a sack of newly dug cassava because they just had to make something very strange out of mud to fulfil their imagination.

Or do they dread those parent-teacher conferences, knowing that little Prudence has been caught slacking off again, drumming on her seatback as she stared into space, trying to recreate a beat she heard?

Are there parents who dream of their child growing up to be an... artist? More interestingly, if we gave the arts the kind of respect they demand, would we be healthier societies, peoples, nations and even regional communities? It has been weighing on my mind lately, and yes, you guessed it, for political reasons mostly. Not only, but mostly.

I can’t do very well with “flat” art. Making head or tail of it, for the most part, is tricky business. We all have limitations. Things have to be obvious to communicate to me in a static space, like comic books or cartoons.

Kingo? I get. Those ridiculously magnificent paintings before modern art with the pierced St Sebastian, for example, or the tiles from the now-defunct Nyumba ya Sanaa by Lilanga? Yes.

Impressionist masters, though, or those people who put white paint on white paint? Eh.

But the other day I saw something that stabbed me, and it came from a most unexpected place. Masoud Kipanya did a piece that had nothing in it except colours bleeding into each other. At the bottom was purple, exploding upwards like it was leaking, or maybe dying. At the top was a dominant green with a yellow tinge, crushing the life out of everything else there. No pithy speech bubbles. No cynical mouse. Just amazing political commentary, by brush.

It was a revelation.

Aside from being technically competent — God bless them — artists tend to have that other thing they do that opens portals of discernment. I was gifted a flash of entirely satisfying insight by a cartoonist about something entirely difficult to convey — with an added tangy twist of mockery and a good bassline of hard truth to cement the lesson. Only art can communicate with us on that visceral level.

Staring at the tiny digital piece of work, I was struck by how much stubbornness it takes to get anywhere with that stuff in our society. Sure, there are pockets: We are damn good at music and will always be. We love and respect a good oration and a good lyric, and... ah, the list of things we love and excel at is long. Hedonism has its advantages.

But beyond the sheer sensory pleasure of it all is the social advantage it confers: Contradiction. Few endeavours thrive better in the intellectual wastelands of dirigism than the flowers of artistic expression.

But do we give art the respect it deserves? Artists think differently from what the norm dictates. That’s almost — though not entirely — a requirement of the impulse. As society quiets down reluctantly and resentfully, I can detect the preternatural cessation of joy, mostly through how we don’t art much anymore.

The mechanism through which this stripping of joy is happening is a simple and effective one: Censorship. We have to clean up our acts and our lyrics, our print and our orations, our dances and so on and so forth. To say that it is tedious doesn’t even begin to describe the situation.

To go back to the initial musing: Are there parents who wish their children to grow up to become daytime dreamers and inventors and whittlers? Parents who high-five their kids for that amazing doodle they did during the chemistry class while trying not to fall asleep, or who snicker with pride over the superb, irreverent, sarcastic comeback the headteacher was mad at little Prudence over? Little Prudence who might just be better off in a writing workshop? To be continued...

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report. E-mail: elsieeyakuze@gmail.com