Wearing Our Words

 

Where would be without words?

I don’t know.  Perhaps we’d all be painters, ceramicists or sculptors, channelling our creativity into visual pieces to either display to the world or to hide in the back of the cupboard depending on our personality, outlook, connectedness and opportunities.

As it is, for writers, words are our tool of choice and my head is full of them for most of the day. Perhaps that’s why these art works caught my eye on display at a South African winery last year.

Their creator, Maurice Mbikayi was born in the Congo in 1974, gained his BA in Kinshasa and his MA in Cape Town.  According to his website he ‘interrogates the proliferation of technological commerce in our geopolitical system.’ Quite.

He’s intent on making the point that resources for twenty-first century technology have required the sort of mining in Africa that has benefited multi-national companies and big corporates but done very little for local communities.  By using discarded and outdated junk that was once considered cutting edge in the world of technology, he hopes to highlight some of these disparities and prompt those who view his work to ask relevant questions and perhaps flag some glaring political disparities.

These particular pieces, using old keyboards to create clothing are eye-catching if rather impractical.  However, they metaphorically carry the DNA of all those who used the keyboards in the past (I’m assuming – and hoping – there’s been some thorough disinfecting and cleaning of his raw materials) and that seems redolent of our work as writers.

Published or not, each of us consciously and/or unconsciously uses our experience of reading and writing.  We reuse words with as much accuracy and considered selection as we can in order to present an idea, concept or image in the mind of our readers.  I don’t know how we can measure the influence we carry of all the writers we’ve read over the years, but I know that it’s there.

The key board jacket may represent the way technology and the internet are now as much a part of our lives as the clothes we wear.  Do they liberate us, reflect our personalities or enslave us?  That’s a question for Mr Mbikayi, but for me, they illustrate how much of the life of a writer is given over to words.  The Techno Hat in particular strongly depicts the way words can go round and round in our heads as we ruminate on ideas, formulate manuscripts and wrestle to transfer them from our head to the page.  It reminds me that a notebook by the bed to capture those words/thoughts during the anti-social hours of the early morning continues to be a great idea. 

Some days we may do better to remove this ‘clothing’ altogether and give ourselves a break from the relentless torrent of words, forever pushing us to capture them in coherent and pleasing ways.

Whether you’re hoping to metaphorically put such a set of clothes on or take them off today, I wish you well fellow writers.

Jenny Sanders has spent the last twelve years living between the UK and South Africa. She writes faith-inspired non-fiction: Spiritual Feasting (2020) asks how we can ‘feast’ when life serves unpalatable menus; Polished Arrows (2024), explores the allegory of God shaping us to be fired effectively into our culture and contexts.     

            

Jenny also has two published collections of humorous short stories for Key Stage 2 children: The Magnificent Moustache and other stories, and, Charlie Peach’s Pumpkins and other stories. She is available for author visits and creative writing sessions in primary schools.  She loves walking in nature, preferably by a river, and has a visceral loathing for offal, pineapple and incorrect use of car indicators on roundabouts.