Saying goodbye when you never really left

Weird is a place inhabited by dreams in which the past, the present and the future intermarry to create rainbows in the night. It is a place you can explain only to yourself and God; a place known to refuse to go away no matter how hard you ignore it. Sometimes, it seems to me, the harder you ignore it the bolder it becomes.

***

I grew up in a small rural village in Nyeri, a place as beautiful as dreams. I have pictures to prove it.

 

The mountain air is thin and the sunshine like skimmed milk. During the cold season your shins feel like steel rods. I was young and trousers for girls were considered a decadent city thing. People have moved on, I am happy to note. The cold season lasts three months, but it comes right after the rainy season, so often there are four to five months of drizzle per year. The hills wear a cloak of fog, and wood fires never die out. The rest of the year is pure heaven. The peaks of the Nyandarua Range (some Bristish person stole the name and replaced it with Aberdare after a place in distant Scotland) seem to be at hand’s reach. On the other side Kirinyaga shines like the mountain of God, standing guard over the Naromoru plains.

Overlooking the plains

 When my parents uprooted us from Nyeri and planted us in Laikipia district, I was too young and naïve to understand the impact of my departure. Soon thereafter I left my parents new home for university and the rest of my life. But my heart never really left the little village. Every year I’d promise myself to return and reconnect with friends and relatives. My body had been translocated, but my roots clung to the fertile red soil, straining my sense of place in indelible ways, ways I began to identify when I went to university. At first when I was asked where I came from, I hesitated. I’d give a two-pronged answer: my parents live in Laikipia but I grew up in Nyeri. After living in Nairobi for about seven years the answer became: Nairobi is my home, I grew up in Nyeri, but my parents live in Laikipia.

A mouthful, I know.

My old primary school

 

In Kenya it seems everyone must have an ‘upcountry’ origin. It is a part of your identity. So, are people whose parents were born in urban areas devoid of roots? What will my daughter identify as her real home, with all these locales striving for a piece of my heart? Urban dwellings are largely considered transient and lacking in the essence that turns a house into a home.

*** 

About ten years after my parents moved, I started having dreams in which I’d be walking on the vistaed hills and enjoying the views. Fourteen years after the move, I went back for a cousin’s wedding. I remember the cold. It whistled through my skirt and tights and became a palpable presence in my fingers and toes. Not the nicest of days to try and reconnect with a place you never really lost. The resolve to return became stronger; the dreams more persistent. They’d sneak up on me every few months; so vivid that I could feel the chilly air searing my lungs.

One night in 2012 I had an elaborate dream featuring a massive construction project at an elevation we used to call ‘Kwa Mhindi’. I decided I’d had enough.  

One of the peaks of Nyandarua

Over Easter I was visiting family at the outskirts of Nyeri town. I requested my sister babysit my daughter. When I got into the matatu, there was a sense of being planted back into the dreams that had plagued me. I walked up the elevation that stands halfway between the shopping centre and the Gakanga Forest. It was punishing, healing, cleansing trudge. People looked at me funny as I took pictures, which made feel conscious of being an intrusion into a languid Sunday afternoon.

The hike knocked the wind out of me. I’d forgotten how steep the hills are. It is not possible to experience level ground for more than 100 metres at a time. I lost the agility with which I navigated the slippery valley paths more than twenty years ago.

I didn’t tell any of the family where or why I was going. Weird is when you go to reconcile with a place rather than a person.

I haven’t had another dream.

A hairy anecdote

The other day I decided to go for a drastic new look. Please revise your expectations downwards -- there was no mohawk or purple hair dye involved. Purple hair is to my mind the ultimate expression of courageous fashion. A little higher up on that scale than the small things Nairobi girls wear in July. The day I dye my hair that colour, watch out, world.

My first new look lasted eleven days. I went to a little place by Adam's Arcade that a friend had recommended. The lady at the salon wrapped braid extensions around small plats to create a dreadlocks lookalike. It was pretty cool, I thought, but by day three, the 'dreds' at the back of my head were falling off. I decided to go to one of my two regular platting ladies for a remake. As I walked in the door she told me she had to run off for a doctor's appointment (thanks for telling me in advance!) and handed me over a colleague. I judge hairdressers by their gentleness. Let's just say, that colleague is not coming near my head again. Two nights of cradling my head in my hands to sleep reminded me why I only let two women do my braids.

Down came the 'dreds'. In went chunky kinky braids. They are pretty funky, if I say so myself.

After the pain of pulled-tight follicles was over, it was time to try wearing clothes with a regular neckline. Into my dress went flailing arms and what felt like a wooly medusa. Half a minute of wiggling and twisting and I was ready to face the world!

Are you considering kinky braids? Rethink whether you want to wear your LBD while you have them.

'Sometimes'

Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail.
Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war,
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best intentions do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.

By a certain poet (not me)

The colours in our blood

(a critique of the rhetoric behind the colours of the Kenyan flag. To be read alongside Jerry Riley and Stephen Derwent Partington)

Painter: Your colour is black.

Wanjiku: The whole lot of us –

From the brown Wataita;

Chocolate Patels;

Yellow-yellow Waswahili;

To light as milk McIntyres?

Painter: McIntyre? Patel? Kenyan?

Think again. They were not born here.

Wanjiku: You mean they can’t trace the exact burial spot

Of their forebears six generations back? –

The way you can?           

Painter: I won’t argue with you.

          Moving on, red.

Generous swathes of crimson for the blood shed;

The price of independence.

Wanjiku: But that is so old! We have new stories to celebrate!

Painter: Old? You must never forsake your past, carved out with machete and home-made gun.

Wanjiku: As if I could, the way you rub it in my face.

Couldn’t red also mean the passion;

The fire forged every morning in Kibera, in Turkana

To make today a better day?

But since you will have blood,

Mention the violence in our homes 

and our machines of death

decorating the highways

with shattered limbs and broken lives.

Painter: You feel too much.

You question too much.

You believe too much.

Only I have answers; only I know the future.

And now to green:

O, majestic mountains and pristine forests!

Wanjiku: Really; where?

          Green turned to grey while you were sleeping.

City skies, burning slums, and chemical rivers.

I’ll take some brown for the desert cycles of flood and famine;

Tally the poor who starve annually.

Put our red-hot devotion to work; see the green return.

Painter: Your stubbornness doesn’t move me.

I must deliver the full lesson, as I was paid to do.

(God knows I deserve a raise).

SIT DOWN and listen!

White is the gentle dove of peace dusting this nation

With golden omens of prosperity.

Wanjiku (Yawning): I could fall asleep from your bad poetry.

I won’t let you infect me with your numbness.

(Walking out) I will take white for the hope in our faces;

A blank white slate handed

To every citizen,

On which to dream our identity.

I might just paint the whole thing white,

Except, white is just one colour.

Give me nuance, give me tertiary colours,

Give me love, give me a rainbow.

Blood and supper

There has been a blast/earthquake/fire/traffic accident. The media rushes in after the paramedics/fire engine/rescue services. In the breaking/evening news there is a clip of a lone unconscious man with a bloody bandage over his right eye. His trousers are still on him. They look like military camouflage, only red.

He has been wounded in someone else's battle.

Does this happen in other places too, or only here: hapless bodies filmed and their wounds archived for posterity without their consent? Did the now-unconscious bodies sign a release to have their stitched-up torsos photographed before oblivion came knocking? Does the journalists’ code of conduct state that when a patient is incapacitated, the duty to report trumps the patient’s right to privacy? How about conscious patients: how many know they have a right to refuse to be filmed? 

It seems that we are OK-ish with blood. Perhaps we are too OK with blood and violence. Let’s swap the unconscious bloodied man with a woman who’s given birth on the roadside. The first thing we do is smother her lower body with Khanga. We must hide the juices of her labor.  And you bet she won’t make the evening news. Birth blood is not sensational. If anything, it is a source of shame. It speaks of sloppiness, unpreparedness. A not-accident. Even though it’s been known that some babies decide to pop out at the most inopportune time. Ask Akitelek. 

Apparently not all haemoglobin is equal…

Never mind that the business of bleeding makes billions of revenue dollars for companies such as P&G, Johnson & Johnson, and many others. 

Now, I would not advocate that we flush out our sanitary towels with the same flair some do their smart phones – in the same way we wouldn’t flash our toothbrush or nail clippers. And I am not saying that menstrual blood is on the same level as mud on our shoes or curry on our shirt. Still I wonder who makes the unwritten rules about what body fluids we can watch at dinnertime.  

Woven alongside Dr. Wambui Mwangi, Akitelek Mboya, and Kati ya Wanawake.

A letter protesting the actions of Minister Liljeroth on World Art Day

Dear Ambassador Ann Dismorr,

I trust you are well. Your attention is drawn to the now very public issue/act that took place at the Moderna Museet in celebration of World Art Day. This is a letter of protest based on the following:

The depiction of a woman’s body as a consumable item

·         Enough said.

As art, it crossed several red lines

While the motive of the installation (provocation) may have been noble, the execution was wanting in several respects:

·         The ‘eating’ of a woman’s body is problematic for those of us who are against the commoditization and resultant cheapening of women’s bodies and lives.

·         The use of time-worn racist caricatures (a golliwog, disfigured African body, and cannibalism) was hardly imaginative of the artists. The endorsement of this by the Minister for Culture is, again, problematic.  

·         Was the installation meant to also depict a cannibalistic sexual rite (after all the audience ate the female figures ‘genitalia’ with glee)?

Cheapening of the horrors of FGM

·         The carving of the cake figure, much as it was intended to draw attention to the issue of female genital mutilation, ended up as an insult, humiliation and deep disrespect towards the bodies of women. That the action of slicing and eating was headed by a woman depicted absolutely no sympathy or fellow feeling for millions of black women who undergo real pain and real cutting in the process of female genital mutilation.

The obvious potential for the installation to be perceived as racist

·         While I am in no position to judge the Minister’s motives as racist, she should have known better; she should have known this awful picture would be perceived and received through the lenses of race. This is a case of inexcusably bad judgment on the part of a government official.

Depiction of Swedish people

·         That the lead person in this act was the Minister for Culture represented the people of Sweden in questionable light. I find solace in knowing there are many Swedish people who are angry about being represented this way.

I trust that your government will take appropriate action not only towards Minister Liljeroth, but most importantly, towards women throughout the world, whose bodies have been disrespected and desecrated once again in a very public manner by an individual who should have known better. An unqualified apology to from the Minister to all women, particularly black women, would be a helpful place to start.

In solidarity with woman,

Phyllis Muthoni 

Woven alongside Dr. Wambui Mwangi's Black and White and Red All Over

My favourite blogs of last week

Akitelek Mboya does this thing with words that touches all the raw and vulnerable places inside. She is able to do that without a hint of self-pity. She writes courageously. Sunny Days in Nairobi

Annette Majanja celebrates her 'Fighter' grandma. Her blog goes to show that true influence doesn't necessarily come from those with money or education. Rather, from those with the ability to see a new future and safeguard it for their children.

When women get angry, they shake the world. Women, like men, don't always do the right thing when they are angry. Do we stop and try to hear and heal one another's anger? Jean Thevenet has inspired me to stop and listen instead of judging.

Salt is like a stinging lash. So is the incisive dialogue brought to life by Nyambura Githongo in relation to the girls of Aitong Girls High School. The motivations for mortgaging our children's future are often complicated, albeit unacceptable.

Jerry Riley's photography speaks to me of depth of vision and an intimacy with his subjects that is empathetic and respectful. He is the biggest photographer of all time in my mind, because of the investment he makes in understanding and identifying.