Face of a fraud: Here is the epitaph of the poet who lied

As last week ended, a story broke in literary circles.

A young man who had become a known name in Kenyan literary circles and indeed, continentally, in the last year; a young man who had managed the amazing literary feat of winning two poetry prizes and being shortlisted for one in one week in August, was found to have plagiarised one of the winning poems.

I found out about it early Saturday evening and alerted two of the three literary organisations that had awarded or commended him for his poetry.

That evening on his wall he posted:

“You’ll hear and read about a lot. Allegations will be made. You’ll judge or you’ll be sensitive.

Hopefully, you’ll observe sobriety. In the end, you’ll realise it has been a great misunderstanding. You’ll marvel at how genuine we all are, because we care and respect.”

What we were going to read, which I had already read and forwarded to the two organisations, was a link to an article from a leading literary journal highlighting the plagiarism.

The editors of the journal had also taken time to look at other poems on his blog, which also turned out to have been plagiarised. Confronted with this proof, he quickly shut down his blog and posted the above on Facebook.

On Sunday morning, many literati in English speaking Africa on social media became aware of the allegations. While the initial articles suggested that the young man had been stealing from less-known websites and blogs run by women of colour, it would later emerge that he did not discriminate against men of colour either.

This was, sadly, no great misunderstanding. The young man had just stolen, finish’n’klaar as my South African family would say. Shock of the ‘is this really true?’ type, social media investigation using plagiarism apps and eventual condemnation, with some going as far as to ask for his arrest, followed.

In all this, three concerns came to my mind that would not go away.

My first concern was as a result of the phone calls I made to his friends when I saw a worrying post from the young man that seemed to threaten suicide. This was before he disconnected his accounts.

It turned out despite the robust social media interaction he seemed to have with everyone, all those who appeared to be his close writer friends had just met him once: at the events where he was shortlisted or awarded one of his prizes in August. None of them actually knew where he lived or a relative they could call to go and check on him.

I pose the question then, in this age of social media, how much do we really know some of the people we unburden ourselves to and interact with? If writing is about interaction, how do we write about it when we form human relations with people who may or may not be what they reflect on social media?
If, heaven forbid, those virtual friends of ours who we may be lucky to see at the one literary event were to get into an accident, would we know someone in their family who we could relay this to? Have we become such virtual animals that human interaction has failed us and we can safely call someone our ‘friend’ yet we do not know where they live?

And this is not a question for just those in the literary field. It goes to the very heart of Kenyan-ness because Kenyan writers are a mirror of the society they live in and are shaped by it.

As an advocate of African literature and someone who has always argued for the recognition of the work done on the African continent, I could also not really help feeling a tad sad that it took a non-African publication to discover the plagiarist we had been lauding and publishing. We failed in due diligence on this one, fam.

I read with interest a few posts that mentioned that people had had some suspicions about his poetry. I thought of my grandfather. Every time a family member died, my grandfather would say: “I had already seen it in his eyes that he was on his way out.” Or if someone got arrested: “I knew that young man was bad news.” If you had had suspicions, why not say something so that we do our own house-cleaning?

Further, a lot of the plagiarism apps that in the following days many used to check all the young man’s poems that had been published elsewhere with something akin to schadenfreude, are free and were already available. Why did we not use them to check if we were already suspicious? Would not a lot of our literary organisations have been saved much of the embarrassment?

Finally, at a time where everyone has access to Google on their phones and things are easily double-checked, what made this young man consciously decide to plagiarise? How long did he think he could get away with it? It has happened in early stages of being a writer before one discovers their own voice that a writer starting out may subconsciously end up sharing some of the views of their favourite works that they have read. But this was not that. This was blatant plagiarism.

Take one of the prizes which he won, which needed the poet to submit a poem in an African language with its translation. This young man took someone’s poem, translated it into his mother tongue, then translated it back into English. That was a lot of calculation.

But perhaps this young writer is a sign of the times. We live in an age where our teachers fail to teach us and we hope to pass exams from prayers. We live in an age where our tax monies do not go to medical care so we pray for miracle healing from false prophets. We live in a digital age where we must document every achievement, no matter how minute to our Facebook ‘friends’ and Instagram and Twitter ‘followers. We live in an age where success in art is about how much you flaunt what you have achieved.

Our young poet wanted fame and fortune too soon without putting in the work that being a good writer requires. For a short while, he got fame and a small fortune in prize money. But in a short time, that fame has turned to notoriety. We will never know how good a poet this young man could have become.

Sadly, whatever he now writes, no matter how well, will be scrutinised and treated with suspicion. His career as a poet may very well have ended with the words of Lord Byron: “And thus rewards the toils which to those summits led.”

Zukiswa Wanner is a South African author based in Kenya. [email protected].