Dead people don’t read obituaries,  praise them in life 

On Wednesday  the 25th, Buchi Emecheta died at 72 in England.

I had just finished reading her novel, The New Tribe the day before.  When I heard the news, it felt like I had been lucky to read her work just when I did. It felt like a fitting tribute. A week earlier, the elderly South African writer who I probably bear more similarities to in my nomadic tendencies than any other, Peter Abrahams died at the age of 97.

Abrahams died in Jamaica, which had been home to him for over half a century after his departure from apartheid South Africa via England.  I received a request by at least three publications including this one to write his obituary. I considered writing the obituary, indeed I started and stopped a few times but in the end, I declined to write anything for any of the three publications. There were two reasons for this.

Two days after Abrahams’ demise, it was the twelfth anniversary of the death of another South African writer, K. Sello Duiker.  A borderline schizophrenic, Duiker did not live to even a third of Abrahams’ life, dying at his own hands at age 30. His first novel, the Commonwealth Best First Book Africa region-winning Thirteen Cents, was published in 2000. In the time between the publication of that first book and his death in 2005, Duiker had also written another critically acclaimed novel The Quiet Violence of Dreams and another posthumous book, The Hidden Star.

Duiker, who has been celebrated by having one of the South African Literary Awards named after him, is one of the reasons why I declined to write an obituary on Institute of Jamaica’s Musgrave Medal winner, Abrahams. You see, while I am very familiar with Duiker’s work and yet would never have written his obituary because I did not think I knew him enough, I was even more unfamiliar with Abrahams’ other work beyond his novel Mine Boy and his memoir, Freedom Now.

An obituary focusing on his work from me would have been fluffy.

CELBRATION OF LIFE

Another reason for declining to do this tribute was that two Sundays ago while in Johannesburg, I visited another South African writer, Miriam Tlali. Famous for being the first black South African woman residing in the then apartheid nation to write a novel in English, Muriel at the Metropolitan,Mme Miriam as many call her is as famous for her writing in both fiction and nonfiction as she is for her activism.

The latter saw her housing and hiding many young activists in the wake of the 1976 Soweto Uprisings. Her writing has resulted in her getting a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Department of Arts and Culture and receiving  the highest South African national order for the arts, the Order of Ikhamanga.

While her writing and her activism meant she co-founded  the literary journal, Staffrider, where many South African writers and artists emerging in the 70s and 80s were first published. And yet when I and three other writers went to visit her at the nursing home, Mme Miriam seems all but forgotten. Now in her 80s, widowed and with her biological children dead, Mme Miriam lies in her bed in the nursing home unable to walk or move herself. She warns visitors not to leave her any fruit or snacks as the nurses will take it for themselves. We see some of this disrespect not just for who she is and what she has contributed– because these nurses do not know – but for her humanity.

When I make a request that they move her into a wheelchair so we can walk her outside to get some fresh air, a nurse tells me they cannot take her out of bed again as they have just tucked her in and it is too much work to do it again. ‘We already had her in a wheelchair when we took her to eat her lunch.’ Sadly, the dining hall is on the same floor and she has not been outside in days but, at the mercy of these nurses who have their own januworries, she will miss a beautiful day outside.

Unlike Mme Miriam who  I visited and am hoping will become more comfortable having alerted a few friends to her situation, Abrahams died alone and with many, including myself, having done little to acknowledge his contribution to literature when he was alive. A celebration of his life by me now that he is gone would have been insincere.

It is perhaps one of the less attractive things we do as humans, this veneration of those we hold in esteem when they are gone. Fortunately in the case of artists like Emecheta, Duiker and Abrahams, their work lives on. But how about we start trying, if we are not already doing so, to show appreciation for our artists, our liberators, our parents, our children, our siblings and our friends while they are alive?

Because as we all know, dead people read no obituaries.