May 17th 2013
Barrack Muluka
Images
of human beings, pigs and blood in the streets of Nairobi invite you to
reflect on surrealism in art, and especially in literature.
At
its finest, surrealism fuses the gap between imagination and reality,
the image and the referent. The mess on Parliament Road this week,
indeed, invited you to reflect on the possibility that there could be a
meeting point between the private mind of the human being - in any event
the private mind of some human beings – and that of the pig.
You
may, of course, want to question the possibility that the pig could
also have a mind. If it were so, they would probably not have said in
the Good Book, “The swine returns to its vomit.” But, who is the pig in
this narrative?
The swine is the essence of animated folly and
squalor. Why would any intelligent being return to its vomit? Such a
being must be presumed to be without a mind, totally deficient of
intelligence. The pig, the swine.
The animal whose images Kenyans
have witnessed in the media, chomping away blood and dirt, in the
streets of Nairobi, amid tear gas and sundry mayhem and confusion.
Again, who is the swine?
Civil society groups brought the swine in
the streets as the image of the Members of Parliament eager for
extra-super scale wages. Yes, the pig is greedy; it will eat just about
anything. In its omnivorous habits, it will even feed on another pig. It
would eat itself, its faeces and its all, if it could. It will return
to its vomit. But who is the pig?
Let us address the MP, first.
Human conduct, carried to certain extremes, diffuses the boundaries
between the beast, even such as a pig, and the human being.
It is
no longer easy to state whether we use the image of the pig, for example
to state that a certain Mister now behaves like a pig, or whether he
has become one. Where, in their acquisitive pursuits, would it be
reasonable to draw the demarcation line between the private mind of a
pig and a Kenyan Member of Parliament? Have MPs
and pigs become “birds” of a feather? Do they flock together – or shall
we say to gather – even as one would assume superiority to the other?
Are their omnivorous habits their lowest common factor?
W
hen some MPs
invoke religion and condemn being likened to the swine, they do so
within the rational prism of tradition. Reason and societal limitations
would frown upon certain kinds of associations as extreme and not
permissible. But there is also such a thing as the law of attraction.
Psychologists have told us that like attracts like.
When your
appetite becomes uncontrollable almost to the extent of becoming
whimsical, is it in order to expect that such appetite could be depicted
in imagery that is equally whimsical as to defy what is traditionally
decent and acceptable?
Mr Mithika Linturi of Igembe says that he does not mind being
depicted as a pig. He does not stop there. He says he enjoys eating the
pig.
That this is why he enjoys being called a pig. It is
difficult to tell how serious Linturi is in this assertion. For he must
know that the pig would eat itself, in its unbridled omnivorous habits?
Would the MP eat himself? If you would eat yourself, then you surely
will stop at nothing to eat anybody else? Is someone saying, “We shall
eat you, you Kenyans, if we have to eat you?”
Our collective
eating habits as the Kenyan nation are worrying. In 1945, George Orwell
wrote about human beings and pigs in the allegory Animal Farm.
While,
ironically, the pigs were the nobler of the two beings in Orwell’s
story, there was the misfortune of the pigs degenerating to resemble
human beings.
In the tenth chapter of Animal Farm, Orwell writes
of the ultimate corruption of the pig, “No question, now, what had
happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside (the House)
looked from pig to man and from man to pig, and from pig to man again;
but already, it was impossible to say which was which.”
The demonstrators who have danced with pigs and blood in the streets of Nairobi obviously did not intend that MPs
should love them for this demonstration. They meant to tell the
legislators, “When I see you, I see a pig. I see a swine that would
return to its vomit.” How should the MP respond?
He has several
options. He could elect to do some serious reflection and ask himself
why citizens would see no difference between him and the swine.
Or he could just ignore and go on with his blood and vomit, regardless of what anybody thinks.
The tragedy is not, however, that MPs
don’t mind behaving like swine, or being treated like swine. The true
tragedy would seem to be that we have become one huge swine people. Mr
Aden Duale tells us we are squarely responsible for the greed in
Parliament and that we must live with the consequences.
When the
next election comes, we shall return to our collective national vomit
that are our elected leaders. Such is the life of a pig.
-The writer is a publishing editor and special consultant and advisor on public relations and media relations
okwaromuluka@yahoo.com
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