Forever Unbowed

Now y'all know I don't do convention. I mean, this blog is about the unimportant things in life, not the things that matter. It's about the small peculiar things in life that catch my attention but have nothing to do with posterity, or with the bigger picture. But this one I must comment about.

Those of you who know me know that there is a severe shortage of shits coming from me especially about emotional stuff. I'm an expert move-oner. I get angry, sad and confused just like any human being but I quickly rationalize why I'm feeling that way, decide on some logical course of action and move the freak on. Cheers to the freaking weekend, right?

But I came as close to tears today when I learnt that we've lost one of the most (for now I'm leaving it open that there is someone more deserving of the superlative) respectable women Kenya has known. Professor Wangari Maathai. I'm told she was 71, and yet she was so full of life.

I guess that's what makes for life, isn't it? Living for a cause bigger that yourself. They say you have not started living until you have found a cause you are willing to die for. I completely agree, despite the fact that I'm as devoid of such a cause as I suspect you are. What is life but motions and emotions if we do not live for something that will survive our mortality? Isn't this life that we hold so dear nothing more than what the good book says - whisps of smoke which are readily dispersed by the winds of time.

I respect parents for that one reason. They dedicate (some less adequately so) their lives or a part of their lives to generate something that will survive them. Parenting (or just sex and it's consequences) having defied billions, nay countless, deaths to result in 6 billion lives, ATM (I really wanted to use the word "circa" somewhere but I guess I'm not that good, yet).

Back to the Prof. Nothing is as inspiring to me as defiance of the norm. Her book "Unbowed" for instance, I haven't read it, but I've read about it and can imagine the kind of stuff she's written in it. The topic, however, says it all. I mean, isn't that the epitome of defiance, rivaled only by my perennial insistence on stirring anti-clockwise?

Now get me right, I don't think she was perfect. I have previously raised the question of human perfection with Mother Theresa herself so Prof certainly can't cut it. In fact, now that I think about it, I would have one or two questions for the Virgin Mary. I won't blaspheme by questioning her virginity prior to the holy birth, but I'm sure she did have one or two issues to her name at some point.

I remember long ago watching a movie about Ghandi. I actually cried at his defiance - refusing, on pain of death to resort, to violence. The irony of course being that he also left a side legacy of battering his wife but lets not get into that.

I teared up when I went to the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center, not because of the atrocious acts of human being which I am perfectly acquainted with, but with the selfless acts of a few. The story of people who jeorpadized their own lives to save others, and of tremendous acts of selflessness (emotional overload + limited language = redundant expressions). I recall reading about this unarmed one who faced off many armed men pursuing a women - he beat them back by quoting this one phrase from the Talmud "Save one soul and you save the entire world". I had to leave my colleagues so as to sit and fight back the tears at that point.

So I cry for Professor, not because she's gone, because we all will go, but because while she was here she defied life and the norms it seeks to shove down ours. I mean, I just watched a youtube video interview of her talking about the story of the humming bird - of sacrificial devotion to a cause which on the face of it appears lost.

I will defy life, until death I will defy its conforming power.


As a by the way, I have to say, in addition to my views of human beings being a viral cancer on our planet, being completely vain and typical, I have recently had cause to add petty and pathetic to that list. And to that I say, I remain yours, the Unbowed!!!

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