Nobody Does The Right Thing

Image by Som Adedayor

This essay was written in April, 2023, in reaction to an “incident” that happened on my class WhatsApp page, then English Department final-year class at Obafemi Awolowo University. It was first published here on this blog. It had quite a reception. Though huge silence followed it, it was decently read. It had, on the first day, or the first two days, a hundred and more views. Some people around me, some of them my classmates, some of them featuring in the piece itself, even shared the link on their WhatsApp statuses.

The only real voiced reaction that I know of was from a friend who thought I'd written about his involvement in the textual ruckus and, consequently, justified a condemnable act by the person at the centre of it all. I hadn't. He was wrong on both counts. Later, when we talked face-to-face about it, he said he didn't finish the piece. But I knew that before we spoke. Needless to say: we've remained friends, and he, nice and compassionate, has been helpful on many occasions.

But soon – I can't recall how long – I deleted the piece, satisfied it had done what it was supposed to. I have decided to put it up again to its first and perhaps natural home. Why? Well, my views have not yet changed. But if I have to justify it, it'll be that what the essay discusses, though from inside a WhatsApp page and from a time past, is still true today. The group page was only a pulpit; the world at large was its audience. As it still is.

The essay has essentially remained the same so far. Certain superfluous details have been cut off, some beats of rhythm have been retuned, and some sentences have been adjusted for clarity. Otherwise, almost no editing has been done. Below, then, is the essay.

♣

On perhaps an early 20th century blizzardous evening somewhere in a European countryside, a doctor is called upon to attend to a family's sick son some ten miles away. He’s ready to leave, furs around him, medicine bag in hands. But there is no horse to ride his two-wheeled carriage. His horse died yesterday. His help, Rosa, has gone round the little village to borrow a horse and has come back empty-handed save a lantern in hand. Doc is desolate. He stands there, snows settling on his head and body. Then, distractedly, he kicks the door of his pigsty in anger, and the door flings open on its hinges. From it comes the steam and smell of animals and out of it, crawling on all fours, a groom and his two lanky horses. Inside, on a rope behind the man and his animals, hangs a dim but stable lantern, glowing, swaying. Nobody knows how the groom got there. “You never know what you will find in your own house,” Rosa jokes.

The groom offers Doc his horses. While collecting the harnesses with which he shall help rein the horses to the carriage from Rosa, he, the groom, pulls the lady to himself. He shoves his face into hers. He bites her on the cheek, leaving teeth mark, drawing out a scream.

For a moment Doc is angry. But he cools off immediately. If he truly needs the horses he must let the groom have and do whatever he wants. Meanwhile he thinks of not going to his patient’s. He thinks of staying back to protect Rosa. But he's soon riding the magically speedy carriage.

With the groom awaiting Doc at home, Rosa hurries into the house. She locks the doors, rattling the chain lock behind. She kills all forms of light in each room and shuffles to hide herself within the darkness as she cries in advance for the incoming horror. Before Doc is out of earshot, Doc can hear the groom advance towards the house. He can hear the doors of his house break down. But he rides on and doesn't stop.

—

Earlier this month someone was called out on my class WhatsApp page for his misogynistic joke. Worse, instead of apologizing, he tried to excuse himself away. Worse still, he’s a friend. He himself DM'd me to say he was dragged on the group. He gave me a pair of keywords to weed through the messages that came after the whole thing. I read through the thread and punctually told him what he did, regardless of his intent, was hurtful. There was name-calling. There were bystanders fuelling the situation with memes and sarcasm. Someone even flipped the joke on its head. But she made it just about the guy, leaving the whole male gender behind in their riposte. Though not apologizing and still explaining, the guy kept his cool. But then, there was something else.

The lady that first called the guy out is a friend. She’s the same friend who, together with another beloved friend, had accused me of being politically correct last November. By way of an absurdist comedy, the guy she called out now accused her of the same thing. In response, she typed: “So yes. Politically correctness, he called it. I called it being polite, decent and humane.” To this, the guy said: “Understand humor and don't attach sensitivity to everything. Comedians wouldn't have a craft if you are going to tie cancel culture to everything. For every joke you've laughed at, don't you think there's a party who would have felt offended?”

This is not true. There is a difference between a joke, an offensive joke, and an insensitive joke. A joke is a joke. An offensive joke is a satire. An insensitive joke, well, is an insensitive joke. Somewhere down the line, the lady said a joke that demeaned anyone was not a joke. I couldn't help but heart the message.

But this is someone who is so vocal about her dislike of queer people. She is so homophobic she has the credit for the most homophobic WhatsApp status I’ve ever viewed. Cruel and heartless, it still haunts me after all this while. And I don't get it. This otherwise lovely Muslim friend will not only call out a misogynistic joke but also an Islamophobic one. What is this disturbing misanthropy? Why do we have to hate ourselves by hating others? Why do we have to switch from making a demeaning joke about a minority group to calling out a joke that demeans a group we belong to? When does a joke that demeans anyone become and does not become a joke?

—

On one green afternoon you check through your contacts' WhatsApp statuses. You soon come across those of a colleague who is a Muslim and a poet. The first few slides are opinionated. The next contains screengrab of tweets that call a minority group by the name of a TV: LGTV. The next contains a screengrab of tweets that call a minority group by the name of a TV: LGTV. The next contains, yet, a video of an old man calling the same minority group by a derogatory Yorùbá word that sounds like their name but means frauds. Accompanying these statuses are excessive laughing, crying emojis. But you do not find the jokes funny. You are not shocked. It's just another day of hatred.

A new smartness has flowered across social media. Snatches of arguments are ripped off Twitter and Facebook to build unchecked claims on WhatsApp statuses. The result is sickening. There are now WhatsApp intellectuals growing shallow gardens of counterfeit wisdom. There are now fakes peddling slides of chauffeur knowledge mostly about the things they mostly know nothing about.

We status viewers, too, are not helping matters. In place of intelligence we accept a mere performance of it. To us everyone is intelligent so far they can repackage stolen ideas and dress them up as theirs on disappearing slides. Depth is now taken not as depth itself but a display of it. Worse, we ourselves sometimes do exactly this. Social media apps are a lot of good. They have revolutionized communication. They still will. But foolishness is a virus on these apps, and no one is truly immune.

I find this vulnerability to foolishness a coping mechanism. I just dismiss people who are engaged in the daily business of hatred as victims of social media intellectual syndrome, which is sometimes true. They steal key ideas of a tweet that confirms their bias and hatred and wrap them up as theirs on their statuses. But I know I’m only excusing them away. Hate of any form is still hate.

—

Franz Kafka wrote the short story “A Country Doctor” in 1917. Classic Kafka, it is yet another piece about a person living in circumstances beyond them and one they barely understand. This fable has been publicly interpreted. One interpretation reads the tale as an enactment of the archetypical existential anti-hero. “Lacking the human stuff necessary to create and structure situations,” it goes, Doc falls flat in the face of life. He hasn't seen through the absurd design of life, we can imply, and has therefore failed to refashion it for himself, dallying off into a deeper doom.

I like absurdist fiction for this. Mostly about existence, they are at once vague and exact. I find them a comforting metaphor for life. In a moment of confusion, or one begging for an analogy, you can find me falling back to them. They are a consolation in the way they show me how okay it is for life to be shitty, incomprehensible, and how a meaningless life can stubbornly swell with meaning. And so, in this moment of flourishing hatred, you can find me reaching out to the deep wisdom stashed in such art, communing across time and space with Kafka, Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, Kauffman.

—

Sometime early last November, which is early last semester, I was walking with a pack of friends and classmates in front of English Department. Someone had said the word “___." Casually, I responded that the word is a trigger word. A classmate, an alhaja who’d just gone to Mecca, acknowledged that. Just then, almost immediately, at the same time, as if rehearsed, two other friends and classmates, closer friends than alhaja in fact, a lady and a guy, with a laugh and in a wry tone, said: “All you politically correct people sha.” Casually, I replied that they were missing the point. Of course this was not for them to not use the word – such censorship is unwanted – but to be aware of what might be at stake when they do. They replied that alhaja and I were being politically correct. “It is sha political correctness,” they said. I replied, choosing the same words. They replied, choosing the same words.

I was disappointed.

—

To be conscious right now, Krista Tippett has said, is to be confused. I get that being sensitive to fellow humans so as not to hurt them might look like a task. I know that, like Doc, we can sometimes let the urgency of living – being a doctor, being a Muslim, being a WhatsApp intellectual – becloud our choice to be humane. But no one needs be another version of Doc. No one is doing a chore when only being “polite, decent, and humane.” We need not be, in the words of Garous Abdolmalekian, “actors in a silent film.”

We are all familiar with pain. The world is so full of it we spend our lives trying to avoid it. We eat so as not to starve. We work so we don't have to be poor. Some of us even worship various supernatural beings partly because we want to escape eternal suffering when we die. We can't claim not to have a sense of how hurtful inhumane jokes and comments can be to people. A student fellowship senior pastor doesn't need to be a gay activist nor a Muslim feminist an ally before they both know that the Twitter jokes they heart and laugh at hurt gay people. Neither should the richest person on your WhatsApp contact list be a classism scholar before they shy away from making demeaning jokes about poor people. You don't need to be a friend or a classmate or a student fellowship senior pastor or a devout hijabi sister or a WhatsApp intellectual or a well-read OAU student or a poet. Only need is be human and have a small sense of pain.

Comedy is context. Context is comedy. A joke is funny if people laugh. It is the same way with Doc. He doesn’t challenge the groom because he’s borrowed his horses. He chooses his transport over his home. He exchanges Rosa's safety for a ride. She is the price for his commute. If he had stayed back to protect her by fighting off the groom and his patient had died, assuming the boy’s is a deadly sickness, which is not, can he be responsible for the latter’s death as he is for the former's suffering? Like Doc, who chooses a pair of horses over his help's safety, the same help who had gone round the village in a blizzard to get him a horse even though no one could have released their animal for such journey in that condition and at that time, these people tease fun out of an insensitive joke, and choose a laugh over fellow humans' emotional welfare. They prefer to hurt some target groups to being “polite, decent, and humane.”

But people sometimes miss the point. No politically correct person is being politically correct. Conscious of how hurtful we can be to each other, they are only being “polite, decent, and humane.” There is in fact no political correctness. It’s a useless jargon when humaneness will do. And I don’t get it. Everyone is politically correct when the joke is personal. Otherwise, it is a good laugh. But being “polite, decent, and humane" is beyond a shorthand for all the stripes of “isms.”

Well: I get it.

Once, by his patient's side in the sickroom, thinking about how he might have rode sows if the groom’s horses dragged out of his pigsty weren't horses, thinking about Rosa, thinking about the sick boy, acknowledging how the boy's family do not know all this and how, if they do, they will not believe it, Doc says: “It’s easy to write prescriptions, but it’s tougher to really get through to people.” 𖦹