Birdfall (or, who determines our agenda?)

The National Geographic (October 2012) reports that China legally bought 73 tonnes of ivory from Africa in 2008. In 2011, poaching reached the highest levels since the 1989 ban in ivory trade. A single tusk can fetch up to USD 6,000, providing a strong incentive for the poor and criminals. We must urgently take back the driver's seat in setting our own human development agenda.

Birdfall

The next someone says the sky is falling

I shall be more inclined to listen,

because this morning I saw a strange thing happen.

I saw a bird fall onto the tarmac, and I promise you it wasn’t dead.

We might say it hit the ground flying.

I don’t know any more if it’s true: that only dead birds fall to the ground.

Here we don’t cry wolf, because the wolves were wiped out with the smallpox.

And the African painted wild dogs are nearly extinct.

Soon we won’t be able to cry anything at all –

not lion, not leopard.

Certainly we won’t be able to say, I was chased by a rhino on the way to work.

But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

The sky is falling. The air cannot hold the birds.

Cities are crumbling, even as skyscrapers go up.

Our stories are about extinction and eradication.

We can’t speak of miracles; such as birds defying buoyancy.

That would be mere superstition. If we insisted that it happened,

some more research would be required.

The research consortium would then patent

the gene that causes live birds to fall from trees.

When the right hand is trying to breed back the wolves,

the left hand is holding workshops about development infrastructure.

The rhino keepers dart, dehorn, and then decry the waste.

Have you ever seen a lump of rhino rotting?

While the cameras flash, the horn makes it way to Asia.

The technology is assembled in Asia.

Part of our development is built on cadavers.

Me, I’m keeping my eyes open. There might be other birds falling.

Maybe this not such a rare phenomenon.

I want to hear what earth might be telling me.

I might to catch a new idiom; speak in tongues.

The accidental minimalist

In July 2012 I sold all my household stuff save for:

• Some linen (my 280 thread count bedsheets and a pair of curtains)
• Books
• Art (I turned down many offers)
• Johari's bed and toys
• Work tools (computer and backup drive)
• Two cabinets, one of which is an antique piece

I was able to scrape together some money for further studies abroad. In a totally unexpected turn of events, my visa application was turned down. I'd given up my apartment as well. I had already resigned from work, and was therefore jobless and without an address. That's an interesting place to be when you have been used to a certain level of financial and social independence. Even if I had been able to have my apartment back, it would have been rather echo-ey, with nothing but the art on the walls. A good friend offered to house us while I figured out what to do next.

The bed I sleep on, the cup I drink tea from, the chair I sit on...all belong to someone else.

Depending on another person for a roof over my head was the scariest part. And strangely too, it has turned out to be one of the best experiences in terms of letting go and letting other touch me. I feel more meaningfully connected, perhaps because I am so aware of others looking out for me. I think this is one of the reasons why embracing minimalism (intended or accidental) can be so powerful: it frees up time that can be invested in relationships. Other opportunities have included rediscovering pleasure in small tasks such picking up the laundry and learning new recipes. 

I stumbled upon the minimalists blog this week; it has become a source of inspiration. Reading the blog has helped me consolidate my thoughts about the place of material possessions in my life and identity. After all didn't Jesus say that a person's life should not consist in the abundance of possessions?

I shall not buy new stuff for the next ten months. I shall most likely take up a new apartment (looking for a roommate) and borrow necessities. Earlier this year I blogged about living on little more than hand luggage. I have lived out of two suitcases for a month. I have been OK so far. I am scared of being without things. At the same time I am excited to see what will come out of my situation: how my community will receive  my need not to buy things: how much time I shall save from not worrying about things, what new dimensions will be forged in my relationships, and how my perspective will be shaped by having only what is strictly necessary.

I even sold my camera. Now, that I really miss.

A culinary look at Kenya's political economy

Pat-a-cake: a Kenyan adaptation
Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker's man
Bake me a cake, with my neighbour's flour
I'll eat it, and have it, and grab someone else's
And put them in a Swiss Bank, for my descendants and me.

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.