Lost art of letter writing in a world hankering for real human creativity

They say poetry is food for the soul. There is a sublime quality to good poetry that makes one feel it flows from a central fountain of human emotion, capable of driving one to tears or bringing profound joy or peace. It is something so real and yet so mystical that it cannot be cloned, mimicked, or otherwise counterfeited.

For those who lived before the arrival of the mobile phone, one need only recall the art of letter writing. In high school, even the toughest among us would be disarmed into a smile upon hearing our names read out among those who had received letters through the school post office box that week. It was such a powerful moment that some wrote and posted letters addressed to themselves, simply to hear their names called.

Those were the days when writing a letter was a high art. If you were writing to your parents, you began with the good news. You mentioned improvements in certain subjects, according to the latest continuous assessment tests, or searched your mind for something that would create the impression that things were getting better and that your parents’ sacrifices in taking you to school were not in vain.

Then came the bombshell, which was, in reality, the reason for writing in the first place. More often than not, it was a request for pocket money because whatever little you had had been stolen or spent on one thing or another, as though pocket money was never meant to be spent but preserved throughout the school term.

But perhaps writing to a girlfriend was the true centre of letter writing. We searched for lyrics from the most soulful rhythm and blues (R&B) songs and let their poetry express what we felt in our hearts for the intended recipient.

For those not gifted in crafting words that could melt mountains—with apologies to my friend Taban lo Liyong—there was always that class ‘consultant’ who could do it for you in exchange for a quarter loaf of bread. It was the anvil upon which many editorial consultancy and ghostwriting careers were forged.

When we were not pouring poetry into our letters, some combed through dictionaries in search of the most complex lexical items to impress the apple of their eye in some girls’ school with their command of the Queen’s English.

These letters were not ends in themselves. They determined where people would meet when schools closed. Those were simpler days when, if the last letter said you were to meet at Kenya Cinema at 5pm, you had to keep time because there was no luxury of texting or calling to ask where someone was.

Today, if someone is running late for a meeting, they may claim to be stuck in traffic on Ngong Road while still stepping into the shower. In other words, the era of letter writing came as a package that included values such as honesty and discipline.

Perhaps these are merely the nostalgic musings of an old man, but I have found myself reflecting on those simpler days. Such thoughts arise from the nature of the world we now inhabit—a world of hurried texts, emails and other messages where the primary aim is to communicate as mechanically as possible.

Lost art

On the literary scene, we live in a world where you can prompt Gemini or some other artificial intelligence (AI)platform that can not only write for you, but can unlock your muse block by sharing ideas on what to write about and even going ahead to ask you whether it can actually draft whatever you want for you. Now, looking at the mechanical, contrived slop that you get, those of us of a certain age will tell you that as writing and even publishing gets seemingly easier, we are increasingly being pushed to a corner where we weep for the quality and lost art of the seemingly tedious processes of the past.

When I first began writing for these pages, I would buy four sheets of foolscap paper and carefully draft my piece in longhand on two of them. Inevitably, there would be crossings-out and corrections, prompting me to prepare a clean fair copy on the remaining sheets. I would then place the article in an envelope and address it accordingly. While I could have gone to the post office to purchase stamps, it was often quicker to wait at the local newsstand, hand the article to the vendor, and have it passed to the driver of The Standard newspapers van returning to Nairobi from Embu or Eldoret. From there, it would make its way to the editorial desk, where it would be selected, typed, and eventually published. It was all part of the lost art of letter writing.

We have come a long way. Today, technology allows one to write a novel, a collection of short stories, or a play and publish it on Amazon through platforms such as Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), Smashwords, Draft2Digital or OkadaBooks without ever going through a traditional publisher. It is akin to taking the lift instead of the stairs. Yet, just as climbing the stairs would have made one physically fitter, authentic human writing carries a quality that cannot be faked, not by AI nor by any technological invention. True, AI can produce a poem, but a discerning eye will detect the mechanical seams in its polished, metrical lines.

So, today, the world is a jungle of all forms of hurried literary work, but instead of dimming the light of authentic human writing, it has actually added a premium to the value of authentic, expressive and ethereal creativity of a real human being. In a cacophonous world where anyone can write, real human talent still sticks out like a pier. And a well-crafted book or piece still keeps us hankering for the days when writing was a labour of love that coursed right from the fountain of the human soul.