Recovering The Lost Paradise: Again, Paradise Lies At The Feet Of Mothers
26 May 2013
By Abdul-Warees Solanke
Here is a confession: The view I am about canvassing
here concerning womanhood belongs to the old school;
it is of the past, archaic. It is conservative and
traditional. It has been defeated in the past by
modernity, since the industrial revolution. It is like
returning to the era of ignorance, jahilliyyah in the
language of the Arabs. Some will accuse me of slipping
back into the Dark Age from the renaissance; many will
pillory me for this slavery era thoughts. But I
deserve to be heard first before a fatwa is invoked on
me as a renegade of modernity.
We shall first look at the basics in this discourse:
the nature of the feminine folk; role conception of
womanhood; status of women; feminism and the feminist
movement; women empowerment and liberation, women
segregation, and denaturing and oppression of women.
In all these themes, I want to raise the contention
that women have become masculinised and that our
society is losing the values and virtues of womanhood.
Stretching further my argument, I want to conclude
that the collapse of the social or moral order is as a
result of the compromise of womanhood and the dearth
of parenting, in which the woman as the mother is the
first and real factor of human development. I want to
posit that the collapse of the family is brought about
by the misguided idea of women liberation. So, accept
my parochialism.
Accept my blindness, because, there are also many who
have sight or eyes but cannot see. There are millions
whose eye sights are blurred, even when they have
their one -inch thick lenses on. There are many, who
while looking right, are actually looking the left.
There are thousands whose eyes are only useful in the
night and not in the daytime. Numerous have tunnel
vision, very narrow one way sight and not broad view;
more suffer from myopia, also blinded by cataract,
uncountable are victims of long-sightedness or
short-sightedness, needing visual aid all the time to
correct their distorted sights. Almost every one now
uses correcting lenses or some recommended glasses to
see clearly in the day or in the night. In these, we
all have one eye defect or the other and so are
subjective or limited in our perception of what is
ideal and what prevails. Only our creator has perfect
sight, as the All-seeing, who suffers no sight
ailment, because He is the Perfect Most Excellent
master who creates and restores. We pray he cures all
of us from our visual deficiency.
Now there is a saying that paradise lies at the feet
of mothers. I will not take paradise from the
spiritual angle however. I will take it from the
aesthetic and physical perspective. Paradise denotes
beauty. It denotes calmness, where you can luxuriate,
surrounded by flowers, inviting fruits, lush green and
well manicured lawns. It is an expansive garden with
many orchards beneath under which rivers flow, singing
rivers. You have a clear view of the sky and the
horizon in it; the breeze is cool; its scents sweet.
Get a copy of the Watchtower magazine, or its sister
Awake published by the Jehovah Witnesses who are ever
willing to share you the romantic stories of paradise,
and you will want to replicate what you see on the
pages somewhere if you inherit a swath of verdant
land. In the bible, it is called the Garden of Eden.
In the Qur'an, it is called Al-Jannah, which has many
grades, the highest of which is Firdaus. Oh, let me
stop the description here or I become a preacher of
the word, which modernists run away from.
If such a beautiful garden is at the feet of mothers,
WOMEN really, it means they must be very good
managers, well trained in the management of
facilities, with eyes for details and perfection,
uncompromising on environmental sanity and
sustainability. They should be conservationists, well
trained to preserve nature. As the perfect facility
managers therefore, they will brooch no nonsense on
the use of the garden ensuring that only those who can
keep to the rules of responsible use of the garden can
enter it. Your entrance into the garden is at the
discretion of the facility manager.
But if the facility manager himself lacks or loses his
managerial acumen or is wrongly trained to manage the
facility or that he is distracted by some other
things, all sorts of beings will gain entry: agberos,
area boys, the deranged and the insane, the elewe omos,
the alagbos and the herbalist aafas searching for
herbs; the firewood gatherers soon take over the
garden already turning into a bush. They will
compromise the environment and the peace in the once
beautiful and scenic garden; the herdsmen with their
rampaging, hungry, riotous cattle will also smash
through portions of the weak fence to graze in the
garden now overgrown with wild weeds and useless
shrubs What is to be done? Sack the manager for
negligence?. Find another?
Unfortunately, women as facility managers in raising
responsible children and managing the home will always
remain one specie. You cannot get another. It is that
same specie that you must re-orient, bring back to its
original function and assignment and manage to manage
the garden of the family and parenting. If you bring
another specie not suited to the role of the facility
manager, you will have the same result of negligence.
All these analogies (are they necessary? Permit my
indulgence) is to tell all how important is the woman
role in the sanity of the society and raising
responsible future leaders and that in the wave of
feminism and equal rights movement, women liberation
and other modernist ideas that encourage women to
desert their pristine role of motherhood and
mentoring, the garden of paradise in parenting is now
crowded by all manners of creatures: the scorpions
with their poison; the lions and the leopards with
their long, sharp claws; the dangerous snakes; the
hawks and the deadly hunters hunting for bush meat
have become the occupants of the once verdant garden
that is now a forest of one thousand demons. Can the
dark forest become the sweet paradise again?
It is sad that in the permissiveness of modernity
today, its warped thoughts and ideas are denaturing
women, just as they are being deflowered unripe
through the knowledge, tools and products of this
so-called modern civilization. Not that I hate
modernity and its bye-products, my argument is that
modernity must bring the enlightenment that will
enhance our civility, and not compromise our humanity.
Many of the modern ideas are only turning men and
women from the best of conduct to the beast of nature.
With modernization, many lose sense of shame, worse
than animals copulating in the open. Many abdicate
parenting to the screen and some senseless surrogates
and maids.
Worst hit is the woman which modernity has turned to a
tool of sales promotion and object of entertainment.
The woman is now the best show piece when Mirinda is
to be marketed; the woman is on display when KFC is to
enter a local market; her hot legs and slender arms
invite to the show room of the latest benz, bmw or
volvo; her snow-white teeth with wide smile keeps the
banquet guests glued to their seats; her courteous
greetings welcome the tired travellers at the entrance
of seven-star hotels and on board flights as hostesses
and cabin crew members.
But her children are in the hands of some nannies that
pump them with valium to keep them asleep while mummy
is away on duty. Her innocent teenage daughter is in
the arms of some devils deflowering her as madam has
no time to guide or groom her to a responsible adult.
Her 20 year old son is at some joint, club, casino or
gaming centre wasting precious time since mummy has no
meaning in his life to mentor him. Now, the misguided
and the unguided on air and in print are parenting on
her behalf. Who should we blame? It is the world that
removed the skirt and the wrapper from today's woman
and forced her into tight trousers and jeans to box
and fight like an agbero in the motor park while
hassling for daily bread or to roar like a lion over
every little thing because she must assert and affirm
herself as a strong woman. She is now so strong that a
man makes no meaning in her life as a marital mate.
The thoughts and ideas that motherhood and parenting
is unviable is what pushed the woman into the labour
market. The woman as the perfect facility manager of
the past era is mostly today an incompetent mother
whose children are left at the mercy some scorpions
and snakes, lions and leopards to devour. So, the
paradise is lost as women lose the virtues of
motherhood through feminist ideas and women liberation
thoughts.
How we regain this lost paradise is a challenge for
all who are concerned about the future and the
successor generation. Our children will be saved from
the monsters of the modern world when women return to
the gates of paradise as responsible mothers and
managers of the beautiful facility of Al-jannah.
Again, paradise lies at the feet of mothers. Our
children deserve the good life which only real mothers
and not absent or part time mothers afford. Let us
save our children. Let us save our homes. Let us save
the family. Let us save the society by retrieving
womanhood from slavery in the name modernity, feminism
and liberation.
ABDUL-WAREES SOLANKE B.Sc. Mass Comm (Lagos); Master
of Public Policy (Brunei Darussalaam) Head, Voice of
Nigeria Training Centre, c/o VON Transmitting Station,
Ikorodu, Lagos. Formerly the special assistant to the
Director General, VON, he is the 2007/2008
Commonwealth Broadcasting Association scholar in
Public Policy at the Universiti Brunei Darussalam,
korewarith@yahoo.com 08090585723