By
Obododimma
Oha
YES and NO,
as expressions of consent and refusal, are central to numerous human affairs.
I also suspect that they are found among many human groups. Among the Igbo, for
instance, this expression is couched in a proverb that says, Nwaanyị obiọma na-aragbu onwe ya na di
(A woman who wants to be seen as a good person would sex hersef to death). The
assumptions in the proverb are that:
(1) She could
have numerous male sex partners who want to benefit from her favours;
(2) The sex
partners are more than she can handle;
(3) It is
about impression! The numerous sex partners are smart and exploiting her poor
jugment;
(4) Every one
should know limits.
A tree that
shelters all manner of birds will soon bend, apart from its branches breaking.
She is a generous giver, it is believed, and that is her risk, her sore spot. That
sore spot will kill her or is the surest way she could go down.
Interestingly,
male sexual exploiters think that her logic can always be subverted. In
Nigerian public life where one can find this male logic, it is thought that a
woman’s thinking could be negatively predicted. In this case, when she says NO,
she means YES. That means that her YES and NO are undecidable. Everything is
left to the swing of her mood, her unpredictably predictable mood. Oh, did I
say “mood?” Is she not seen as being moody, and that is in the province of pathos. She lives and moves in emotion.
Her motion, is, in fact, an emotion or expression of an emotion. So, she is MOODY sometimes.
This is fast
becoming a gender thing! It should not be so.
The ability
to say YES and to say No is an exercise of sound judgment. In the first place,
one who cannot say NO to people sometimes, no matter the person involved, is in
trouble, great trouble. The person is even a poor specimen! That all kinds of
birds would want to rest on her branches is just a beginning of that tree’s
problem!
One greater
problem is the impression that that person is too “soft” and cannot reason
well, or bends too easily. That is vulnerability! The person bends too easily!
Sad. That is a symptom of the nature of the person’s thinking. It warns us not
to depend on it, to avoid it . Every bird of opinion can perch on the branches
of that person’s mind! Life invites us not to be naive, to test every wind of
doctrine. Was it not why the Ancient
Greeks in their philosophical orientation said that an “unexamined life is not
worth living”? These days they examine the life and deploy intellectuals to
give an imprimatur to idiocy as a way of life!
Do you see
why being able to say NO is a kind of virtue, especially where things are standing
on their heads. Being able to express an objection is a risk, and that risk is
worth taking. It is manifested not only in expressing an unpopular opinion, but
also resigning (which is why one must admire Theresa May) and speaking out when
it is considered dangerous to do so.
When your
community is going down, you should
have the courage to say NO. When the unacceptable
becomes acceptable, when the abnormal is considered normal, you should have to courage to
say NO.
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