New Reads

You can't get away from Barack Obama in this American election season. Asked for her favourite writers, Tsitsi Dangarembga (author of 'Nervous Conditions' & 'The Book of Not) lists Obama among. Read her interview in the new issue of Per Contra. Among the fiction fare in the edition is 'Through the Looking Glass', taken from Dangarembga's forthcoming novel, Bira. High jinks on the bus queue...

Excerpt
"But women!" Now it was a young man chuckling. “What is it with these women! Some of them just walk just like that! With everything in the open!" Some age mates of his standing nearby grinned. They slitted their eyes in speculation and let their observation, like a single gaze, meander over the young women. "Ah, they want to inflame us!" The speaker sighed, and continued with amused indignation. "Now, isn’t it known that when it’s like that it can’t be stopped! So what if we don't want to begin and be inflamed! And get a gaol sentence? We don't want! Now these hussies want to put us in gaol! People, isn’t that why! Isn't that what makes people stone them!

• Read Through the Looking Glass
  

Also in the fiction is something from a forthcoming novel by another favourite writer of Dangarembga's, Sefi Atta. In Grief Mongers (from the novel 'Swallow', soon to be published by Farafina), a young woman comes to her overcrowded building and finds a drama of grieving unfolding. A young boy may have drowned in the septic tank...

Excerpt

The day my father’s body was found, I came home from school. A group of women were holding my mother down in her room. They were the women of her former esusu group. They saved money together and my mother had for a while been in charge of taking and keeping their contributions. "Your father is gone," one of them said, before I had a chance to walk into my mother’s room. She was my uncle’s wife called Sister Kunbi. I could tell she expected me to be sad and instead she made me furious. "I know," I said to her. "He has gone to Lagos." She seemed offended that I wasn’t crying. She reached for my shoulder. "This world is a marketplace," she said. "The other is home. Your father has gone home." "This is my father’s home," I said.

• Read Grief Mongers

And don't miss Silver Leaves for Judah Jones by Vanessa Gebbie - newly unveiled winner of the Per Contra Annual Fiction Prize. Her collection of short stories, Words from a Glass Bubble, has just been published.

~

Per Contra's non fiction this time round focuses on the theme of 'Chaos, Terror and the Rise of the Police State' - and there are two pieces on the recent turmoil in Kenya.

• What is his name, the child whose death you spoke about, Kiraithe? by Ayo Bole; and
• Rigging is Just Rigging (Or, A Nation Held Hostage) by Muthoni Garland.

Pearshaped Blogosphere

Some friends say Let us blog,
we’ll call it Kenyablog.
They blog and blog and blog.
A member posts
This blog is tedious,
I’m gonna form a blog,
a blog called Lakeyblog
where Lakey types can blog.
The rump of Kenyablog
rename themselves TheHighlandblog
and blog about the soil,
quite unaware that other Forestbloggers
formed another blog in which
the self-same soil is blogged about.
Now keen to keep the secrecy of blog,
the lively Lakeybloggers
shift to write in bubbles
while TheHighlandbloggers
only write in cones,
a sort of hieroglyphic oath,
each to his own, each to his
non-discursive moans
until the bubbles burst with anger
and the cones erupt with hate
and all are blogging-blogging-blogging,
typing keyboards with our pangas
blogging Highlandbloggers suck
and blogging Lakeybloggers blow
and blogging Forestblogger mothers are all hoes,
now blogging rumour blogging anger
blogging gossip blogging rancour.
Local fissures rip the WorldWideWeb
as bloggers blog their cyberfoes to death.

© Stephen Derwent Partington
Kenya, February 2008

• Used with permission
  

Kenya...

My comment minutes ago to a blog post on Renegade Eye, "Kenya: What is to be done?"

Kenya did not seem the kind of place where anything remotely akin to this could happen. I say this as someone who's been there before, and who encountered, in the main, very mild-mannered people. I was horrified by the turn of events therefore, and can barely pluck up the courage to look at the increasingly portentous news reports. It's getting harder and harder to sanitise the blood from these newsflashes. On the one hand, you don't want to see the blood; on the other, you dare not allow yourself to be deluded as to the extent of the atrocities, so you want to see for yourself, just how bad it is.

When Kibaki was hurriedly sworn in before the vote results had actually been announced, I could only shake my head. I despaired, looking at the man. He is past his best; he has nothing left to offer anyone, let alone a country; he is saddled with an embarrassment of a wife who slaps officials all over the place. Yet he wants to hold on to power. This is the tragedy of my Africa; leaders that just won’t go.

This is not democracy. This is what the late Fela Anikulapo-Kuti called: Democrazy.
But what is happening in Kenya now is beyond anything connected to a disputed election. It’s no longer about a recount, but the counting of the piling bodies. Hard to make sense of it, but what is clear is that these are old grievances, old rivalries, breaking out like phantoms from hell. A flawed election has merely given vent to it.

I saw a news bulletin the other day where a young man whose panga was caked in what he called the “pure blood” of many people, boasted about killing a former classmate of his. You wonder: what makes someone who never killed before suddenly become a butcher of men, women and children? What madness? I don’t know. But it seems to me that there is a madness lurking under the civilised veneer of every society. Given the right – or shall we say wrong – circumstances, it will come to the fore. And when it does, Lord knows what is to be done.

A fellow writer pointed out to me today how Kenyans who are not even on the ground back home, who are in the Diaspora – are tearing one another apart in the blogosphere with the most hateful language imaginable. I went to some of these sites to read some of the comments for myself. Frightening. Something has been unleashed, which will be difficult to curtail even after the bloodbath is over. Long live Kenya.

Praise Poem

We praise the man who,
though he held the match between
his finger and his thumb,
beheld the terror of its tiny drop of phosphorous,
its brown and globoid smoothness
like a charred and tiny skull
and so returned it to its box.

So too, we hail the youth who,
though he took his panga on the march,
perceived it odd within his fist
when there was neither scrub
nor firewood to be felled,
so laid it down.

An acclamation for the man who,
though he saw the woman running, clothing torn,
and though he lusted,
saw his mother in her youth,
restrained his colleagues
and withdrew.

We pay our homage to the man who,
though his heart was like a stone
and though he took a stone to cast,
could feel its hardness in the softness of his palm
and grasped the brittleness of bone,
so let it drop.

We laud the man who,
though he snatched to scrutinise
the passenger's I.D.,
saw not the name - instead, the face -
and slid it back
as any friend might slide his hand to shake a
friend's.

And to the rest of us,
a blessing:
may you never have to be that man,
but if you have to,
BE!


© Stephen Derwent Partington
Kenya, January 2008

• The poet is a member of the Concerned Kenyan Writers Initiative.
• Poem used with permission.

Ngugi on Kenya

Writers must sometimes feel like the Greek prophetess Cassandra, gifted to see the future but fated not to be believed.

What is unfolding in Kenya could as well have been lifted from my novel Wizard of the Crow where the ruling party and the opposition parities engaged in Western-sponsored democracy become mirror images of one another in their absurdity and indifference to the poor.

The picture of men and women burnt down in a church where they had gone for refuge still haunts my mind. A child running away from the fire was caught and hurled back into the flames.

One of the few survivors was quoted as saying: "But they knew me; we were neighbours. I thought Peter was a friend - a good neighbour. How could Peter do this to me?"

I had heard the same puzzled cry from Bosnia. I had heard the same cry from Iraq. I had heard the same, same words from Rwanda: "We were neighbours; we'd married into each other. How could this happen?"

And now I hear the same cry from Eldoret North in my beloved Kenya. For me this burning of men, women and children in a church is a defining single instant of the current political impasse in Kenya.

And this must be separated from accusations and counter-accusations of rigged elections by the contending parties.

Rigged elections is one thing - it can be righted by any mutually agreed political measures - but ethnic cleansing is another matter altogether.

~

• Read more from Ngugi wa Thiong'o.
• Kenyan writers on the Kwani Blog (thanks to Potash for the link).

Letter from Nairobi

I am safe and my immediate family is safe. We were holed at a house on the coast, an idyllic place, far from the mayhem - the only inconveniences being a shortage of phone credit, fuel and tonic water. I even managed to use the internet at a hotel at the end of our strip of beach. It was the horrific images on TV that had us glued to the screen and distressing phone calls that enjoined us in what was happening. We kept saying this is not happening, this is not Kenya. We reeled from disbelief to horror and back again. Distant relatives fleeing the mayhem in the northern Rift are still camping at my brother's house in Nakuru. For four days, my best friend was holed up like a prisoner at her mother's house in Kisumu - site of some of the worst rioting, fearful to step outside for the sound of screaming and gunfire. I heard the fear in her voice, the disjointed background noises. Two days ago, she said it had quietened but that she could not leave as there was no fuel available. I myself had tried to return to Nairobi last Thursday, but the road to the airport in Mombasa was closed. I made it back to Nairobi yesterday and 'enjoyed' the fastest drive ever to the city centre on an eerily empty highway. On that one street, I saw more police than I have ever seen my whole life.

These have been the most traumatic times in Kenyan history. We've put together a coalition of writers to try and put words to it. But I suspect it is too recent for us to truly grapple with the nature of the beast unleashed.

Muthoni Garland

Nairobi, Saturday 5 January 2008

*

~

• At times like this, nations are forged - Binyavanga Wainaina
• Kenya on the BBC