A letter to Biar John
4 min readDear Biar John,
May 17, 2015 (SSB) — Before, I write why I send you this letter, I oblige myself to check on your well-being because each of us acts a brother’s or sister’s keeper. I hope you will read this letter in a good health. With that said, I would like to address some of your arguments in your recent article as follow: In your own words, am I competing? Am I defending politicians? Your criticisms on my writings.
In your own words
In your own words, you mentioned how connected we all live and I do agree with you. Apart from crossing lines on this site (Paanluel Wel), we may have crossed bloodlines. So your step siblings could call me their nephew. However, it doesn’t stop us from engaging in arguments, which aim to correct us in critical areas. Although, I cannot give myself a privilege of littering this letter with abusive words or sentences as you did in your recent article.
I don’t need to call anyone to know you because I know you so if I stepped on your toe in the article I originally posted of which you responded then you need to address that part. Otherwise, I hold no grudges on you.
Am I competing?
Reading your article took me long to unearth what you intended me to understand because you concealed the information from sentence to sentence, withholding it (information) for long time from me, your reader. You accused me of so many things, which includes “competition”. I believe you wrote untrue statements about me competing. I don’t think I am competing. Competition doesn’t reel around my head.
Am I defending politicians?
Biar, I understand that politicians represent their constituencies and so they should listen to the voices of the voters. Or they deserve to shoulder the blames if anything goes wrong. However, some people befuddled me when they derailed from criticising the policies to spewing personal insults on politicians. I do understand that we (South Sudanese) lost many lives, which outweighed any insult but we must observe critically what went wrong with our seniors, the least we repeat it when get a go.
I know, writing about politics attracts envy among supporters of different political ideologies so labelling me as a supporter of politicians dented my heart not. Biar, we can appear fair in the faces of political situations especially if none of our relatives occupied any post but if the reverse happens, we distant ourselves from those who criticise our relatives in political posts. You may deny this but in the quietest hour of the night, you will admit it as true.
Your criticisms on my writings
My dear brother, I welcomed your dislikes of what I wrote and how I wrote it. In fact, different types of writings float on the webs and many publishers printed some writings and rejected some other types. They based their decisions on either the market of a particular genre or based rejections or acceptances on their (publishers) tastes.
So brother, telling me “you don’t understand what I write”, doesn’t bother me. I can choose to inflate my writings with expletives and weak verbs and get away with praises for writing nice or I can choose brevity and get myself critics who believe in expletives. “There’s hate between us” or “hate exists between us”. All sentences mean the same thing and grammatically correct but the two sentences will split the readers into two groups, those who fall for the former and those who drift towards the latter. So thanks for your criticism.
Your criticisms and why I take it as a good thing. I like your criticism because it validates or negates thoughts. And those thoughts, which worth no criticisms fade away easily. Through criticisms, we learn a lot of new sides of stories.
To rest this letter, I believe you understand my position. I welcomed your criticisms and no grudges on my side. I treat this engagement as a point of clarification.
So thanks,
Yrs.’ Kur Wel Kur.
–
The opinion expressed here is solely the view of the writer. The veracity of any claim made are the responsibility of the author, not PaanLuel Wël: South Sudanese Bloggers (SSB) website. If you want to submit an opinion article or news analysis, please email it to paanluel2011@gmail.com. SSB do reserve the right to edit the material before publication. Please include your full name, email address and the country you are writing from
About Post Author
