Who was that The Ethnocentrism? Or The Kleptomania?
The two looked so much alike! Like the Devil and sin. Or God and goodness. No one knew for sure, though Prof. Rumors had it that he, she, or it was probably The Porcupine. The Porcupine? Yes, The Porcupine. Since you were not so sure of The Porcupine’s true identity, did it not cross your mind that, oh, possibly, just possibly, the indefinite article, “a” and “an,” rather than the definite article, “the,” would have been more descriptively apposite, at least in that peculiar situation of yesteryear? Not too sure. Not too sure? Supposedly. How was that the problem of Sister Sure then? Well, we sure did not know that either! In that case, how about the usage of “some” as either the definite or the indefinite article in that atypical situation of yesteryear? Indeed, was yesteryear not a true mirror reflection of tomorrow, of The Present, even of The Past?
If you said so. So, again? Just so! In fact, we asked so, did not say so! Well, if you said so. Again. Fine. So be it. Fine. So-and-So said so. Fine. No problemo! Fine. Anyway, were you lost? You, how did you know? Not you! Us, then? Nope! That was all there was to it, then, Sister Sure, at least for now! So? Yes. Was? No. Were? Maybe. Probably. Possibly. Peradventure. Per adventure? What? What was that? That? Oh yes. That! What did I say? I? Yes. Who was I? Stated differently, who am I? You should have better asked that! That? You mean? No. You may have meant I then? No. That! But that had never been much of a problem, a major problem, either, in that un-ordinary situation of yesterday! Then, I, methinks Today must have been the problem in that un-ordinary situation of yesteryear?
Yesteryear? Per adventure. Besides, methinks Today, not I, must have had all the answers of yesteryear, to yesteryear. Yet that yesteryear could have been Today, should have been Today, or must have been Today. Of the Future. Of The Present. Of The Past…That was poetic bedlam! A Poetic pretence! Who nose! Oh my God! That was who knows!
Emphatically, that problem was eminently of The Future, of The Past, not of The Present. If you said so. Who was You, then, if of The Past should ask? I did not know. Yet, others had also said, even speculated, pontificated, that The Porcupine was a certain Empire, now a fallen Goliath, a feminized Samson and pre-mortem husband of the masculinized Delilah, a ghostly shadow of its former self. Its lost former self. A self? Yes. A self. A nebulous self. Since when? Indeed. Still, The Porcupine felt all that, including I, Some, A, An, of The Future, of The Past, and of The Present, even of So-and-So, Per Adventure, You, That, Methinks, and the like. And the like too? Yes. All of that.
Still, The Porcupine, all of that, lived in a psychological space of frigid isolation inside the blistering sun of self-conceit, of self-delusion. What is more, like the slothful Turtle, Snail, and Tortoise, he lived in relative isolation somewhere deep inside the spongy cocoon of self, of selfness, of selfishness, of the fallen Empire, where he forlornly nursed a thought, a millennia-old debunked hypothesis, that, The Shell, that shell of unimaginable foresight, was all he needed to establish his self-imposed contrived superiority. An unfortunate turn of event carried out against The Shell’s well-informed evaluative, albeit certifiable, objection that he was merely, simply, cotton, not even its boll. Understandably, the white pigmentation of the cotton added to his inventoried disguises of forced superiority. Sadly, even ironically, their she-men and he-women, educated and uneducated, bleached their beautiful dark skins in spite of their cottony acquired whiteness, snow whiteness.
Who was “their”? That was certainly The Porcupine. Pointedly, The Shell had meant to say to him that he was merely “a,” “an,” or “some,” not “the,” not even “it,” in the social universe of ethnic, religious, cultural, and racial equality, although his frigid isolation had imbued him with a horrifyingly false sense of ethnic, cultural, or racial superiority, granted that the word “superiority” was itself a relative concept—a social or cultural construct—in the political world of cottons. There, as it were, it sometimes, in fact, always, meant “inferiority” in The Cottonian argot, exactly as here, The Empire of Hollow Emptiness! Further, The Porcupine’s confused little bipolar or schizophrenic mind always told him, in fact, deceived him, that he was, without a doubt, “the,” that he exclusively was of yesteryear, of The Past, of The Future. And those other animals that looked exactly like him did not belong to those chronological frames of animality.
However, it never occurred to him that his Gangnam-style psycho-dance moves were mis-representations of echolocation, otherwise a correct diagnosis of auditory hallucination. Oddly enough, he, The Porcupine, was not even as proverbially intelligent as The Scarab Beetle, who, it may be recalled, possessed an ant-sized brain, yet still capable of employing the services of his unimaginable foresight in the navigation of the intellectual complexity of the known universe of nature, of life, including The Porcupine’s, with the aid of the Milky Way. Jealousy. The problem of jealousy. Jealousy soon became part of the general mechanics of socialization and of intellection. How? No answer. Yet The Porcupine’s misopediac attitude toward The Scarab Beetle partly stemmed from The Scarab Beetle’s international award-winning inventions: Afrocentric Nationalism and African Personality.
Technically, both innovative theories, the first of their kinds, paved the way for radical reorganization of the distortive thinking of post-colonial mentalities and for restoring de-personalized mis-characterology of colonized human beings, humanized by-products of Darwinian imperialism, racism, and colonialism, to the social and cultural pinnacle of existential sanity and of human decency. The Scarab Beetle even introduced a progressive legal instrument called the “Avoidance of Discrimination Act” to stave off nation incohesion, namely, the jealousy which The Porcupine had brought into their otherwise healthy relationship, of peaceful political cohabitation, but it still did not work, Regrettably, the misguided members of The Nation of Lousy Monsters (NLM) distanced themselves from them, the two concepts, while, rather believing in the Ivory-Tower invention of elitist rejection of the people As well as in returning the people to the colonial psycho-emotional brutality of Darwinian racism. Re-colonization! What more?
Understandably, as always, The Porcupine became maddeningly jealous of The Scarab Beetle’s long-tunneled range of visual, ontological, and intellectual mechanics, so he jestingly renamed The Scarab Beetle, quite provocatively and disrespectfully, The Dung Beetle, an exercise he undertook so willingly as night turned into day, life into death, decolonization into self-autonomy. Of course, like his well-respected parents and the larger community to which he belonged as a valued elder, sage, and leader, The Scarab Beetle loved dung and made no private or public pretence of disliking it. Instead, he used it to quench the consuming fire of his gustatory yearnings when the need arose, which they sporadically did. That was simply that! But, what about The Porcupine, if You may ask?
The Porcupine ate the dung of The Grasscutter, dawn, morning, afternoon, evening, year-round, too, but mistakenly, probably inadvertently, thought of eating dung as being outside the immediate sphere of public knowledge. The truth, the in-your-face truth, so to speak, was that the emotional simplicity of his midget mind had converted the limitlessly-expanding universe to “an ant,” a situation compelling him to perceive complexities exclusively in reductionist configurations, which also made him believe public knowledge meant “knowledge in the public” and “the public” meant “openness” or “privacy.” To him, The Porcupine, to his dead particle of dusty mind, there existed no difference between “silence” and “pandemonium.” They essentially meant the same as in “same” in his spherically-closed midget mind!
In other others, his overblown atom of all-knowing mind saw no qualitative difference between “privacy” on the one hand and “publicity” or “openness” on the other hand, which also adequately explained why he could scream at the top of his lungs in public spaces, in much the same way as he openly evacuated on beaches in full glare of visiting Cottonians or as he held “private” audience with members of his nuclear family. Also, rather repulsively, The Grasscutter dung eventually underwent cultural fermentation in The Porcupine’s self-deceiving sawdust-head and maggot-infected mouth, thus rendering his vocal and mental stench psycho-nasally intolerable. As a matter of fact, his fake ethno-animal superiority stemmed from public rejection and social isolation of him owing to his repulsive psychosocial and intellectual stench.
“Another obvious emotional sequent was that of his earsplitting ignorance, his failure to acknowledge his social-pariah status as a natural outgrowth of his intellectual and rhetorical dungy fermentation,” recalled Methinks, The Porcupine. That. Oh that! Of The Past. Of The Future. Of the un-ordinary situation of yesteryear. Today. You. I. A. An. Some. It. Of The Present. So-and-So. And the like. That? He was all that. The Porcupine. He thought his Empire of You, I, Some, Methinks, of The Past, of The Present, An, of The Future, So-and-So, A, Today, and the like, oh, was all of that. All that. Sadly. An Empire of Boastful Emptiness, of grudging nothingness feeding upon streamy mis-consciousness of bloated social and cultural self-importance. That! Still, The Porcupine, of The Past, of The Present, of The Present, I, Today, Methinks, and the like, hey, was merely a supreme virago-calabash of boastful emptiness, of psycho-spiritual animalness!
Oh that! The Porcupine—a man-woman, a she-goat man of hollow emptiness, a plastic bag of psycho-emotional feebleness that could not erect an Empire of grudging emptiness all by himself, a cheap undertaking whose culmination had been ascribed to his pregnant and infirm he-women, blind he-nieces, and earthly Yaa Asaasewaa, described himself as a she-man of warlike foolhardiness, not of “war” but of “warlike.” An empty taxidermy of vanities at that, The Porcupine! That Porcupine of The. Of I. Of A. Of Some. Of An. Of un-ordinary situation of yesteryear. Of Ethnocentrism. Of Kleptomania…That!
That? Oh yes! That. The Porcupine, according to his porcupinish anti-history, also drank stale palm-wine and ate roasted Grasscutter dung while their he-women went to war on his behalf! All of that, he boastfully said of himself. An. Of The Past. Some. Of The Present. I. Of The Future. Methinks. And the like. All of that. And yet whenever his brave “war” he-women complained about his manly she-ness of sisterly cowardice, The Porcupine, a she-goat man of hollow emptiness, would travel all the way to his forehead, The Salaga Market, and steal strands of hair-load of real “war” he-men, he-women, and he-children of Elephants, Dinosaurs, Horses, Tigers, Jaguars, Lions, Mammoths, Hippopotami, and Bears, great “war” he-fighters whom he forcibly employed as mercenaries during The Battle of Giants.
Yes. That. The Porcupine, a man-empire built exclusively from the psycho-cultural ashes of ethno-animal inferiority complex, found a quantum of solace in the ethno-animal superiority of ethnocentrism and kleptomania. “Ethnocentrism,” they say, “Goes with Kleptomania!”
Part 2 is already on arrival….
