By Dominic Kidzu
People who love the front page and klieg lights will persistently overreach themselves to stay alive in the eyes of the public, no matter how low that brings them on the integrity scale. Natasha Akpoti, who I dare not honour with the prestigious prefix of senator, having been stripped of that honorific for the time being, falls into this tragic category of show-offs. A category besseted by inner psychological turmoils that drive them relentlessly to be the object of public discuss.
Rather than serving her six months of legislative banishment as a result of her shameful behavior on the floor of the senate in penitent obscurity and prayerful supplication to whatever god she serves, on land and sea, the restless gennie that fires her usually outlandish public displays has yet led her to the elevated plane of satire. Satire by the way is an elevated genre in literature that employs irony, humour and exaggeration to ridicule, expose or criticize people, concepts or practices in the society.
One of the most reviewed satires in literature studies is a 1729 Juvenelian essay titled ‘A Modest Proposal.. ‘ written by an Anglo – Irish writer and clergyman, Jonathan Swift in which he proposed to the king that rather than allow the children of the Irish poor to become a nuisance to the English gentry, they should be butchered and sold to the rich as protein. Gulliver’s Travels by the same author, Animal Farm by George Orwell, Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and J. P. Clark’s satirical poem, The Chair, are some of the most notable satires in English literature.
Satire as a form of writing is used to address very serious issues in human development. Never has it been employed as a form of self advertisement or self glorification as Natasha has so shamefully done. When such pretenders to the crown of English literati, such as Natasha is, try to dabble into elevated forms of expression for self-service, they unknowingly do grave violence to that form of art and rather ridicule their thin ago which they had sought to glorify with such elevated style.
William Shakespeare, that immutable English bard warns that “the abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power.” No one should rank themselves too big or high to say that they are sorry. Expressing remorse is perhaps the highest form of culture and civility and those who are well schooled and brought up do not tarry before they pronounce that magical word. Natasha can resume her journey of the Maggi, from coast to coast and from pillar to post, or become an emergency poet if she choses, the reality remains that her banishment (as a result of her unruly behavior) is destined to run its course as a testament to her arrogance and hubris, no matter how many satires she hires people to write in her name.
Dominic Kidzu writes from Calabar
