By Amadou Camara
Call it cognitive dissonance. Holding two contradictory thoughts at the same time in the pre-frontal cortex of my brain – responsible for processing information, thoughts, and decision-making. That is how I felt for eons, as I grappled with the word: Love.
As a young man, shaped undoubtedly in a paternalistic, chauvinistic and conservative society like The Gambia, one of the key passages to adulthood is taking that faithful decision on the partner one wants to settle with in life. I say faithful, because it comes with serious consequences – good, bad and, at times, ugly.
As a divorcee, who has burned through one marriage already, I know a thing or two when a marriage relationship goes haywire. That is precisely why, I have equivocated, dithered and flailed over taking the plunge, joining the esteemed and esteemable league of married men. So, the thoughts used to yo-yo in my mind: have this decision right, all may turn out just about fine. Bungle it and have it wrong, everything could turn out to be just that: difficult. Or sometimes, during my streams of consciousness, I would question the truth, merit and validity of love itself, like a post-modernist nihilist. What a load of bollocks!
As a love skeptic – of yore now – this was crystallised to me when I stumbled on the cynicism of love, harrumphed by one of my political heroes, Napoleon Bonaparte, the former French Emperor, and military genius. On Saint Helena, where he was sent into exile by the British after was defeated at the battle of Waterloo, he expressed skepticism about love, saying: “Love is a social construct; it is a distraction of the warrior; it is the stumbling block of the sovereign.”
For years, these thoughts have regurgitated and ricocheted in my head, having a strong stranglehold on me like a scared scripture. Surely, I mused, Napoleon knew a thing or two about the varieties and contrarieties of love, erotic love (romantic love), agape love (deep love) and philia love (bonded-friendship a la love). His famous marriage to his first wife, Josephine, was held as a mirror image of a romantic love story in the mould of Romeo and Juliet. Although a closer scrutiny of their scandal-convulsed, dreary and drama-Orama relationship suggested anything but. Which ended in a divorce after she failed to produce him a heir to his throne. Then he married again to Mary Louis, the Austrian princess, who did bear him a heir. That made it two women for him, in addition to the over twenty mistresses and “goomars”, according to historical accounts, he bedded. Presumably, he was on to something, I thought, when he launched a withering diatribe against true love.
Enter Richard Wagner
The more positive, Panglossian and Pavlovian view on love, distilled eloquently, was made by the German music composer and philosopher, Richard Wagner. In one of his plays, Tristan and Isolde, a character chortled out the essence of love it all its beautiful form, saying that to find true love means: “love, not lust; adoration, not appetite; that you have to see your partner as a subject, not object; a means, not an end; and your relationship as transcendental, not transactional.” I was like, viola, this is the core doctrine – the cure really – to my love phobia, that I imbibed hook, line and sinker from Napoleon.
The Canadian philosopher, Marshall McLuhan, who coined phrases such as “the global village”, “the medium is the messenger” in his book Understanding Media, perceptively observed of an artist, which can be applicable to every human being, that: “an artists has to be an expert in sense perception.” If only we look deeply, and penetratingly, at the right place, we can discover our better half in life. By diving deep, our love antennae can detect, transmit and vocalise in our ears signal of the frequency modulation of the love vibration we need to align with. I know, because I have been there, have mashed the reset love button, and it is not all sound and fury, but it is all hunky-dory, squeaky, squeaky lovey-dovey bom bom!
Like the saying goes that we all have a book in us if willing and courageous enough to tell the story, we all have a fitting love partner destined for us as a match made in heaven. Now, after carrying the Napoleon and Wagner version of love in my head, am I still a dyed-in-the-wool love skeptic? Not on your nelly – absolutely not.
The gravitational pull of Wagner is too strong to resist. Which is to say that love truly exists, that is better to love than unloved. One of the irrefutable – which is notch in human nature – is that we love to be loved to love. This can only be possible if two partners come together, male and female, advancing the human race, the cosmos and civilisation itself. Not, as was misguidedly becoming the cultural norm and zeitgeist in certain societies – percolating through drip and drab in Gambia. I mean, for heaven’s sake, we need heterosexuality, not homosexuality. Gender reality, not gender dysphoria. That is the right, proper and natural thing. We are a Muslim society, guided by Islam, reason and truth.
In our country, The Gambia, this season – the month, weeks and days preceding the Holy month of Ramadan – used to see loads of people tying the marital knot. I have decided – on the Thursday of the 13th this month – to advance this tradition, by getting married to the love of my life, Lala Sowe. She is the incantation, the embodiment to me, of the Wagner love. Through her – beyond her beauty (and boy is she not beautiful), and her aesthetic nature, is her robust character, good-naturedness and the “transcendental” nature of our relationship. The Romans used to say “character is destiny.” She is my destiny.
She does give me a sense of purpose, a sense of reason, an oomph, to keep barreling on, rooted in the guided belief that, by allowing myself to be loosen in love, it gives me a higher meaning of life, that I can live and breathe for someone who will be primarily – front and center – in my life. That reality is something to behold. It says that there is more to the outlook life than looking inward; that it is better to be an optimistic than to wallow in pessimism; that love is casts in the image of God, as opposed to being a rational nihilist in the image of Raskolnikov in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment; and that love, like hope and faith, springs eternal. If you are in doubt dear reader, like I was in my formative years, take the steps and get married. The outcomes for your emotional, mental, material and physical wellbeing would be phenomenally transformative. This is the season of love (Valentine’s) and “nikah” (marriage) combined in one month this year. Let’s grasp it with both hands, strengthening the path of our creator, Allah, and lighting the path for us by our forebears. We are a conservative, predominantly Muslim country. One of the key tenets of conservatism is the umbilical bond we share between the living, the death and the unborn. Love, marriage and family are the institutions that can sustain, nurture and grow these things. Let’s double down on them. Oscar Wild, the Irish playwright’s aphorism that, “a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing” is true. Love is as priceless as it is valuable. Let’s be relational optimist, and bath in the comfort glow of love. Ramadan Mubarak to you.
Amadou Camara was a former editor of this Newspaper.
