Living by Words

A new born child depends on their mother for survival until he or she grows to know words and use them to express their desires, thoughts and ideas. In words they come to know that they are able to communicate with whoever they want.

Some individuals are known, respected and highly regarded for their unique abilities to use words. Who would have known and remembered William Shakespeare, the English playwright who died 408 years ago at the age of 57, had it not been for his 37 plays and over 164 works of poetry? Who would have thought that Jean Baptiste Paquelin, aka Molière, the famous French playwright known as the author of Tartuffe, would have lived about the same period as Shakespeare?

We can mention the Ethiopian poet, Laureate Tsegaye G.Medhin; the Nigerian writers, Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe; the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Naguib Mahfouz; the west African freedom activist, Amiral Cabral or even the late Nelson Mandela, who never gave up hope and wrote about his solitary life in prison.

Mandela’s was the story of a man who was shivering in a cold room with his head between his legs, tears roling down his cheeks, not for the end of his life, but for a time when his fellow countrymen would be free from the yoke of apartheid.

How many are those who are kept in darkness, left alone have a few minutes of sun bath, not even able to hear the sound of birds singing, enabling them to tell one day from the other? How many wives and children would have craved to see their fathers and mothers not knowing they would never see them again?

Human beings starve to know what is going on around the world. They want to have timely, accurate, fair and reliable information about how their leaders are executing the duties vested on them by the taxpaying community. Having this information is not only their democratic right, but also denying them this constitutional right is tantamount to abuse of the power vested in them.

The professionals who ought to provide this service are journalists, who know the ground very well before they tread on it. Should they fail to know their trades very well, it becomes the duty of their government to train and help them live up to their duties because they have to serve the people.

Words are nothing but modalities through which ideas, thoughts and opinions are transmitted from one person to the other. To send a deeper and more intriguing message, then, they are required to be adjusted accordingly.

There are times when words misguide, when they are interchanged with other languages. For example, the word ‘renaissance’ is sometimes used to mean transformation or ‘hidase’. Instead of knitting them into meaningful sentences, words can also be craftily rearranged and placed in a disorderly way, displaying the ability of the writer to be able to say what he wants to say in an obscure way.

The playwrights use aesthetic language, making human characters epicentres. Such characters as jealousy, ambition, misery, love, hatred, revenge, wretchedness, envy and thrift can be cited as human wickedness or success.

Those plays written in the 17th century are still transcending from one generation to the next generation. It is a pity that, regardless of the amount of reading and the accumulation of information throughout the years, mankind has got worse instead of improving itself.

But craving to read something worth reading still prevails, as manifested in the recent trend of readers to look for old publications to read. As youngsters, I and my friends used to read and appreciate such columnists as the renowned Stewart Walsop and James Crawford. The weekly “Letter from America” sent by Alastair Cook from America to the BBC was our favourite.

Books and novels by Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens and others were also our favourites. We were also fond of reading Tobia by Gebreyesus Afework, Araya by Girmachew TekleHawariat and other works by Hiruy W. Sealssie, Abe Gubegnaw, Bealu Girma, Dagnachew Worku. So were we avid readers of critiques by Asfaw Damte and translations by Bekele Tegegne.

Back prints are chosen not because they are perfect, but because they are better and more worth reading than present day publications that carry public relations propaganda.

It is not the will of vendors to guide what is for sale or not. It is the reader who knows what his money is worth. But whether hyperbole or quality compelling reporting, the trade is all words.


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