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The written word intimidates…

 The written word intimidates the hell out of me and I’ve studied post-graduate poetics. What must it be like for people who’ve dropped out of school and get put in a position where they must write for their lives. Like an appeal for release from prison. Or a protection visa application in another language, the language of the privileged. Oh Mediterranean! Oh Indo-Pacific!...

What must it be like to write for a living, no matter whether one believes in what one writes? People have to stay in the public eye and so inflate and conflate and conflagrate or else not get paid /as much. The written word is owned by the pros. Those who write with expertise in persuasion, not with heart and soul (and THEIR lives at stake).

“I don’t like English,” is what Peter Tosh, the Wailer who taught Bob Marley how to play guitar, said, “because it make my tongue all complicated,… I can feel something else trying to come out.”

At times I like English, certain words.

But the spoken word over the written word.

I prefer the oral-aural.

Not the written, the lawyer’s language.

I like the language of the bard, the travelling griot, the songman. Carriers of culture. The same language that holds one’s mother tongue and the language of love making, the cry in the night, the wise counsel, the many sided conversation and the celebration...

 

©Malachi Doyle 2022.




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