My take on the spoken word... and I know you’ll lynch me

Awhile back, I wrote for your reading pleasure my most verbose, florid, and ornate prose which, as it were, was on the subject of “Keeping it Simple”. My editors rejected it because it was too long, and editing it would have killed it.

Undeterred, I proceeded to pen an equally overwrought piece for your enjoyment. It was on the importance of humility. I must say that it was an excellent article and my best in the “history of ever”, so I decided to hoard it for a grander occasion so that I could really impress you.

Sorry reader, but today’s thinned out journeyman’s response to the barbs I received for my recent piece on the ills of poetry will have to do. No, you can’t complain. You are not allowed to.

So, then, my words on the spoken word. First — and I know you’ll want to lynch me for this — poems were never meant to be read out aloud. That’s a no-no. It’s like salting bacon. The reader only makes it verse. He emotes the words, tries to act out the sadness, smiles at the joy, and the combined total of all the facial expressions make them seem like they are the onset of a stroke.

The best poets, I always maintain, are behind microphones. Anyone who chooses the spoken word is a failed rapper who lacks the internal metronome to count bars, and now can only count the bars he has been thrown out of.

Among spoken word events, there seems to be an obsession — no, a wide-eyed fixation, a preoccupation — with double entendres. Double entendres that clearly mean only one thing.

Double entendres are the building blocks of schoolboy humour. Some men never grow out of this phase. A few unenlightened folks claim that sarcasm is the lowest evolutionary form of humour. Well, double entendres are its primordial caveman ancestor.

And now the venue. It is always a bar, isn’t it? This is because the audience needs to be heavily sedated with alcohol to sit through the whole affair.

Never, ever reach for a microphone to ask whether an audience is having a good time. If they weren’t, they would leave. It’s like the MC reaching out for a collective pat on the back. He fumbles through his entire repertoire until he finds a joke that tickles our funny bone.

The worst MCs are the space-hogging, joke-flogging types who do not quit until the audience laughs. It must be embarrassing to be unable to get a bar full of semi-sozzled patrons to laugh.

Janssen discovered helium. A “couple” of curious Curies (Pierre and Marie) came across radium. Our MCs invented tedium. They are so boring that a few more minutes on stage and they would have struck oil.

The dominant theme — yes, there is always a dominant theme in these things because they are a tad poncy — is anger. Stern, acrimonious, impatient, paroxysms of embittered, red-eyed ire. Anger is humanity’s most important emotion.

Love spends its time talking, hatred spends her time scheming, but anger gets things done. It is the hardest emotion to bottle, the most easily communicated, and the quickest understood. No one ever fumbles for words when he is angry, and if he does find himself fumbling for words, he regresses to his fists.

The stories told are of misery, despondency, and disappointment. Misery needs company, so they regularly meet up weekly in Nairobi bars for Bar Stool Poetry.

The picture they paint is a sort of despotic, hellish existence, a relentless assault on our emotions. Tales of uroxide, robbery, and poverty. Garroting violence. Drunken debauchery.

If you were listening in, you would swear it was a live broadcast from Gomorrah just before the Lord decided to “Sod ’em.”

Bar Stool Poetry exists as a catharsis, an emotional release valve for the performers. If these “artistes” did not write poetry, they would walk the streets with Molotov cocktails and brandishing Kalashnikovs.

In fact, they are so disgruntled with everything in this country that this would be the most fertile ground for al Qaeda’s recruitment of suicide bombers: “How about one last performance for us, where you go out with a bang?”

The women rant against The Man, their men, society, and love. They are, to me, intransigent, termagant harridans, dykishly unattractive and sour-grape bitter. But the whole experience always makes them leave with a smile, a small one... for the night.

Gesticulate faster

The men gesticulate faster than the average sign language facilitator at a political rally, always pausing where they think the audience needs to applaud them. They have more raw intensity than authenticity.

I have never believed that they could accurately empathise with children living in poverty. They aren’t in this to really end poverty, you see, but to gain fame for their poetry.

They are whimsical, whingeing whelps who forget that, although a stiff upper lip is the bane of manhood, it must be worn with pride.

Nothing is more wrist-slittingly depressing than a man going on about his problems without the process being facilitated by alcohol.

The one performance I attended, at the insistence of my editors started at 7 o’clock sharp and ended at 10 dull. It hit a plateau mid-rant and never again hit the tempo it started with.

It is an interesting experience, but the subject matter, I felt, should be varied to include a few smiling poems.