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Face Me; I Book You!: The Arts and Asocial Media

Amatoritsero Ede

“If the poet can no longer speak for society,
but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch”
– Henry Miller

I remember setting up a Facebook profile with great reluctance a few years ago. I did not put up a single picture there for two years and I screened myself off with a pseudonym. Otherwise, any evil eye could peep into my soul or sitting room at will through the window of social media – never mind the much-vaunted self-protection modules on the site. All it would take is a hacker-style breach of all privacy protocols. Still, “resistance is futile” in the age of social media – particularly if you need it as a tool or do not want to risk ending up as a twenty-first century Luddite.

My creative activities eventually unmasked me and I am now a regular denizen of that cyber world even though I inhabit that space strictly for its utility. But a recent strange encounter from the most unexpectedly irritating of sources – another creative writer – confirms my suspicions in ways far in excess of my original worries and leads me to question the artist’s sense of social commitment in an age of the “global babble” that social media is.

Before going into the details of the macabre encounter I want to elaborate on the reasons for my initial aversion to social media because it has import for the event itself. Apart from possible unbidden intrusions there is the tendency for great miscommunication due to ‘interference,’ where messages, instant or not, get twisted en route, especially without the mediation of a face-to-face. Another irritant is the twin staple of vanity and narcissism deriving from the manic self-importance reflected off the mirror of social media. This sickening almost perverse self-love is further exaggerated by that insidious illusion of instant familiarity called the ‘friends list.’ While all these can reduce the full grown adult to a blubbering, self-worshipping infant and egomaniac, it also leaves room for unwarranted abuse, harassment, intimidation, and bullying or cowardly attacks from behind an impersonal computer monitor.  The last is precisely what I suffered in a surreal encounter this past week in the hands of a pretend friend and Internet Tiger – apologies to Pius Adesanmi – on Facebook.

I must say I had completely buried my social media phobia and was oblivious till the devil himself violently tapped me on the shoulder with his spiked trident: “You’re an asshole, Amatoritsero, a total, fucking and complete asshole. Fuck you and everything you stand for. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.” Those were the devil’s deranged words in a private Facebook message to a ‘virtual’ stranger. Let us keep in mind that I have never met him in real life, never had any conversation beyond a few hellos across the ether in several years. I did not know how to react to this bolt from the daemonic blue and wondered if it is not an example of that miscommunication of which I was wary. Otherwise, I seriously suspect that this apparently high-strung writer might be on drugs. ‘Give the devil the benefit of the doubt,’ I thought. ‘He may be coming down from a hard dose of cocaine or has had a bad day in hell.’ So I ask him calmly:

“Why this unwarranted attack; I am mystified?”

And he responds sharply:

“I only say to you here in a private message what I could not say to you in public. The so-called ‘attack’ is due to your insularity. How can you not know Keziah Jones!”

This is when I remembered that several hours earlier and for the first time ever I wrote on the devil’s Facebook wall, asking him who the artist in a video still he posted a short while earlier was. His irritated response had been: “Keziah Jones, of course! Google him. Don’t tell me you don’t know Keziah Jones!”  Now in light of the vicious verbal assault in a private message, I wondered why, if at all, I needed to know Keziah Jones, who seems to be the devil’s alter ego.

I turn to my horned pretend friend himself for answers. I examine his life and work. He is Nigerian, like his alter ego, the musician. Both of them are expatriated – my wicked antagonist to London, and the other to London as well and then Paris. Another common bond between both is that they are vicarious entertainers. Apart from writing fiction, the devil struts his stuff on the stage like the musician does. Both are theatrical. And what this kind of absurd theatre does is to merely entertain in a world going through paroxysms – a tumultuous Middle East, racism, the Israel/Palestine debacle, a wayward global economy, environmental pollution and the threat of extinction from nuclear proliferation. Not in any of the devil’s novels or plays do I find a tissue of social conscience. A huge moral hole plunges through his writings. As for his alter ego’s music, surely it is neither  fringed by the firebrand activism of a Fela, nor does it have the philosophical depth of a Bob Marley. These kinds of art are Sunday distractions for somnambulist petit bourgeoisie; transient art, which like bubble gum, is chewed, enjoyed, and spat out.

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