21/05/2024
The Posting Mother World
My students had said that the present age is the “posting mother world”!
Of course you'd wonder what is meant by "the posting mother world" or at least, like I did, get the hang of the intended connotation, but wonder at the thought process that produced such a novel expression to describe the present age. Walk with me, it will be short enough.
8 am, Friday. My students had grudgingly gathered in the Language Laboratory to attend their first writing lab (practical session) of the semester, and for most of them, of their lives. The grudge stemmed from the fact that early morning classes are seen as aberrations by a large fraction of them and because "country is hard and transportation is costly." They would have preferred to not show up at all as the session would be their only reason for coming to the campus on a Friday. Well, in an unusual manner predicated upon my certainty of what's best for them, I put my feet down and the rest is history as they say. They turned out in their numbers and the lab was filled to capacity.
The prompt I chose and allowed to replay on the screen throughout the entire one-hour session depicted people - "postmodern" humans - chasing money, working their tails off, dying on the job, bowing to the dollar, falling in eternal ditches as they pursue the latest I-phones, turning to monkeys and lambs as they demurely slide into TikTok and Instagram, practically leaving their brains in waste bins at the door, going naked as they chase clout on social media and abandoning career and high value skills in their choice of OnlyFans. It is, after all, the 'postmodern world' (I remember having used the term a lot in the conventional class a day earlier). The task was to compose an essay (expository and/or narrative) based on the prompt.
10 am, Tuesday. Creative writing class holds on Thursday. Exams processing and other administrative duties had kept me away from grading and assessment of the products of the lab session. It is imperative that I give feedback on the session and the product. So I had to steal some hours to peruse the two-page essays of 70 students. After about ten scripts, something I had simply 'ringed' in the usual manner of the school teacher grading essays began to nudge me. At least, six of the students had mentioned the term "the posting mother world" and I had to pause to think. "What! What do they mean by this expression? Where had they got this nonsense from?"
There and then, it occurred to me like a man meeting his own ghost. The posting mother world had been my students' understanding of the postmodern world. That was what they 'heard'. "A world where a mother abandons her children and spends all her time posting on social media." "A world where the youth post pictures of their mothers sans the true intent to honour them but mostly to garner likes on social media." It dawned on me that I didn't for once write or spell out the phrase throughout class: I had taken it for granted that my students knew the term and what it connotes. Had I mispronounced it too or been too rapid in speech? I did a quick but deep review there.
But now I know, they got a partial sense of the term "postmodern world" but have processed it through a somewhat narrow and pedestrian albeit valid world view and had produced their own term, "the posting mother world." So now, I have to go back to class to clarify: the posting mother world is actually just a minute piece in the jigsaw that is the postmodern world.
Olushola OYADIJI, Ph.D.
Credits: (original video owner)
