One Day I Will Write About This Place (4 page)

At the corner of this fence there is a dead log, an old eucalyptus tree, and an abandoned car we mutilate every day. As we follow Mum, pleading, I stop for a moment to perform the ritual of this place. Every time we knock on the old log, ants come streaming out. They don’t stop. Sometimes so many come out they swarm into our clothes. You hit it and hit them, and they keep swarming out of the dead log. They have patterns I can’t see, but they keep perfect rhythm and time. You knock, they stream, there are endless streams hidden below safe logs, speaking not your language, arranged not like you have been taught to know.

…

It is dark and I don’t know where Ciru and Jimmy are. When the afternoon shadows strike, I knock on Mum’s door. She does not open. I walk to the sitting room, rubbing my back against the wall the whole way, to feel the world.

I am hungry, but do not want to go to the kitchen. The giant portrait of Kenyatta is in the dining room. His eyes watch you, red and real. I turn on the television. Cartoons. I call out, loud, for Jimmy and Ciru to join me. They don’t come. I can hear them playing outside. I sit on the big green velvet sofa.

Every day, all day, we see Kenyatta lying flat and dead on television, and people come to see his body. His body is gray and covered with death-­snot.

I want to explode like frying Uplands pork sausages.

The pouting tip of my cock hurts, swells, and tickles against my trousers. Then jazz trumpets burst the pressure open, and wonderful warmth seeps into my underwear, flutes down my thigh, into the spongy green velvet under my bum, a smooth steady stream of sound and liquid.

I run outside to find Ciru and Jim, before Mum finds out what I have done. My eyes are shut when I streak past the dining room.

…

Mum makes us supper, and that is nice. Baby Chiqy is sleeping. Then Mum goes away to feed Chiqy, and Baba is not yet home. If goat tripe could sing, this is what it would sound like, boiling goat tripe singing on television, singing for Kenyatta. Jimmy is in his room listening to
Top of the Pops
on BBC Radio. He is in a groovy mood, which means he wants nothing to do with us. Ciru and I are jumping on the sofas, trying to fill the strange silence with action.

An old man grins on the black-­and-­white screen. His beard shifts. Teeth flash. He pushes a stick across a wooden bow and string, tripe and beans boiling and spreading into the house on a hot day. My bright yellow mouth organ is stuck in my mouth and shaped like a maize cob. I am talking all muffled and letting the sounds of my words hum out of the organ. The music sounds like, like chaos.

Television voice: “This delegation from Nyanza Province is playing a
nyatiti.
They have come to sing for the late President Kenyatta. A 
nyatiti
is a traditional Luo musical instrument.”

Matiti. Ciru giggles. I giggle. Titi. Titties.

We like to play Maasai sometimes. This means taking off our clothes and thrusting our necks forward and making guttural sounds. We move faster and faster, making our bodies perfect anarchy. Soon we are timeless beasts, carried by dizziness and adrenalin, no thoughts or plans or ideas, no past or pattern.

The old man has a colobus monkey–­skin crown. He makes belly sounds—­shaking, shapeless sounds. He rubs the stick up and down, up and down against the string; the tail of each upward movement accordions dangerously against my chest. I roll across the carpet on my stomach and put my eyes next to the screen. I have done this before. Close to the screen, my panic fades. It is clear that their faces are fully owned by the television screen: they have been broken into thousands of small dots; the television has counted every piece that makes them up and they have no mystery. But when I back away from the screen, the man’s shapeless sounds grab me again.

Ciru and I are jumping up and down on the springs of the sofa, and laughing and pointing at the man. We find a strong rhythm and can’t stop laughing. We hug each other, and roll, Ciru and I, laughing. Our bellies hurt. I lie down and face the ceiling, which is clear and white, and my stomach settles, and I can hear the
nyatiti
rubbing away.

In my mouth is the plastic yellow grin world of the toy maize cob harmonica: fixed, English speaking, Taiwan made, safe, imported unblemished plastic, an Americangrinning mouth organ, each hole a clear separate sound. In school we were taught that all music comes from eight sounds: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do—but what those people are singing and playing cannot fit those sounds. Gibberish. Kenyatta is dead. Those red blowtorch eyes in the dining room pulling together all those gathered
harambee
sounds of people in the many costumes of Kenya, singing and dancing in no choir, many unrelated sounds and languages and styles and costumes, and facial expressions.

They have nothing to do with each other.

Ki-­may.

This is my new word, my secret.
Ki. Maay.
I let my jaw fall slack, with the second syllable, like a cartoon man with a cash register jaw.
Ki-­maaay.
It calls at the most unexpected moment. Certainty loses its spine, and starts to accordion. My jaw moves side to side, like a mouth organ. Once the word lives,
kima-­aay,
it makes its own reality. I rub the word against the roof of my mouth, which is ridged like the ribs of some musical instrument. I swing my jaw slackly from side to side, let small marbles of yodel clamber up my throat, from my chest, let the breaking waves of yodel run on my tongue and leap into the shape of the word,
kie-­mae-­ae-­ae-­y…
eay…

Kimay
is the talking jazz trumpet: sneering skewing sounds, squeaks and strains, heavy sweat, and giant puffed-up cheeks, hot and sweating; bursting to say something, and then not saying anything at all; the hemming and hawing clarinet.
Kimay
is yodeling Gikuyu women, Scottish square dancing to the accordion-­playing man who wears a hat with a feather. It is a neon man called Jimmy, who has a screaming guitar and a giant Afro. It is ululating Gikuyu women crying around Kenyatta’s body on television. Gurgling Maasai men jumping up and down. Luo men in feathers and Kenyatta beards, nyatittying. Congo men singing like women.

I can speak English. I can speak Kiswahili.
Ki-­may
is any language that I cannot speak, but I hear every day in Nakuru: Ki-­kuyu, Ki-­Kamba, Ki-­Ganda, Ki-­sii, Gujarati, Ki-­Nyarwanda, (Ki) Ru-­fumbira.
Ki-­May.
There are so many, I get dizzy.
Ki-­may
is the accordion, the fiddle, the bagpipe, the trumpet. All those spongy sounds.

I fear slides and bagpipes, swings and dizziness, Idi Amin, and traditional dancers yodeling around the dead president on television. Most of all I fear accordions.

It is a Sunday. I am nine. We are sitting on a patch of some tough nylon grass next to the veranda. Mum has brought out her Ugandan mats. I am reading a new book. I am reading a new book every day now. This book is about a flamingo woman; she is a secretary, her stick­like legs improbable in cloggy high heels, her handbag in her beak.

Flying away.

The flamingo book came with a carton of books my mum bought from American missionary neighbors who were going back home. The sun is hot. I close my eyes and let the sun shine on my eyelids. Red tongues and beasts flutter, aureoles of red and burning blue. If I turn back to my book, the letters jumble for a moment, then they disappear into my head, and word-­made flamingos are talking and wearing high heels, and I can run barefoot across China, and no beast can suck me in, for I can run and jump farther than they can.

On my trampoline of letters and words.

Mum is shelling peas and humming, and our bodies all hum smoothly with her. Chiqy is peeling petals off flowers; Ciru is running around with a yo-yo from the same American carton of goodies. When Ciru laughs, everybody laughs, and when she is running and laughing, everybody is warm and smiling.

Yellow dahlias hang their heads and start to shed their petals. I think about making a kite, like Jimmy showed us. Take a newspaper. Baba will beat you if you use the Sunday
Nation.
Cut one page off its twin. Use a knife to split a stick of old bamboo from the fence. Tape sticks, diagonally, with cellotape. Three holes in a triangle, in the right place. Make a long long newspaper tail. Run. Run run.

There are two old kites stuck on the electrical wire. We got into trouble for that.

Standing here, we can see my whole hometown—­stretched springs of smoke and the silos, one a clump of four tall, glued-­together concrete cylinders, Unga (flour) Ltd, and the other two separate metallic blue and silver tubes, silos, where Baba works, Pyrethrum Board of Kenya. We call it Pie Board. He is the managing director. It is a farmers’ marketing cooperative. There is a factory. Labs and research scientists. Process­ing. Pyrethrins are a key ingredient for international insecticides. Like Johnson’s It.

Behind us is Menengai Crater; to the west, sitting under Nakuru Golf Club, is Lena Moi Primary, where we all go to school. At the bottom, near the lake, are thousands of tiny rusty-metal-roofed houses. When school bells ring, tens of thousands of people come streaming out of those homes.

Ciru has been number one in her class every term since she was five. Last term I surprised everybody, including myself, and beat Ekya Shah and was number one in my class. I like the new things we do, like English composition, and geography especially. You don’t lose marks for handwriting, and my handwriting is terrible. I do not concrentrate in class, but I read everything I can touch.

Daniel Toroitich arap Moi is our new president. He is young, awkward, and fumbling, but clean, tall, and sharp in a suit. He is on tele­vision, moving like an accordion, apologizing in his uncertain voice for just being here. He has found himself at the center of things and does not know what to do now that he is no longer Kenyatta’s vice president.

Like Mary, in our class, who is large and hulking and always bent over scribbling. She pretends she can read, but sometimes we catch the book upside down, her body locked into a fierce bow, her eyes glaring at the book.

My neck and ears burn when I see a teacher turn to her and say, “Mary, what is the answer?”

Sometimes we like Moi because he fumbles, like all of us. He isn’t booming like Kenyatta, or polished and slick like Charles Njonjo. His English stumbles; his Kiswahili is broken and sincere. We have no idea what man and mind he is in his home language, Tugen. That is a closed world to the rest of the country outside his people. We are not curious about that world. We make a lot of jokes about him.

It is almost lunchtime, and boiled cauliflower looms. We live on top of the hill. We look down on the town. From here, looking down on Nakuru, everywhere there are purple, puffed-up cabbages of blooming jacaranda heads. Cauliflowering, I think. I shudder and look away.

I look past the silos, to the edge of town: the symmetrical fields of green maize. Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. Then wheat. Weetabix is unbeatabix. All around, in the distance, are mountains.

Nakuru is a high-altitute town at the bottom of the Rift Valley. This geography-class contradiction confuses me. Ciru and I like to call Kenya’s tallest building Kenyatta Cornflakes Center.

Brown is near. Green far. Blue farthest. The hills in the distance are dark. Maasailand.

From here you can see Kenya’s main highway—the Mombasa-­Kisumu Road, where there are often long, long lines of army tanks and trucks going to the Lanet barracks. Uganda is still falling. Idi Amin ran away. They killed all the prisoners and left blood and guts in the prison. Some bodies had no heads. Tanzania and Museveni attacked Amin. Mum is on the phone a lot with uncles and aunties. Most of them are now all over the world.

President Moi says Kenya is an Island of Peace. President Moi says Somali Shifta bandits are trying to destabilize Kenya. Somali Shiftas don’t tuck in their shirts. The king of Rwanda is nearly seven feet tall and is always standing outside Nairobi Cinema, where women come and kneel in front of him. He is not allowed into Rwanda. He is a refugee. He used to flirt with Mum before she met and fell in love with Baba.

Kings are in trouble. From presidents. The Buganda king is a waiter in London. Uganda is a picture on a map, shaped like the back of the bumpy head of somebody facing giant Congo stubbornly, his long
kimay
jaw swaying as it cuts into Rwanda. His face is full of lakes and rivers.

Presidents are also in trouble from generals. Like Uganda, and Sudan to the north. Everybody is in trouble from communists. Like Mengistu Haile Mariam, whose hand I shook when he visited Baba’s factory with President Moi and our school choir sang for him. He was very short and had size five Bata shoes, exactly my size. Lord Baden-Powell was also a size five. He left his footprint at Rowallan campsite in Nairobi.

In every classroom there is a map with a photo of the president’s head in the center of each African country. Kenya is an island of peace, it says on TV all the time. People should stop politicking, Moi says.

Mum’s home in Uganda is near the border with Rwanda, near Congo. She can’t go to visit; the border is closed.

I look up from my book, from the surety of flying flamingo secretaries, look up first at the sky, then at pink and blue Lake Nakuru below us. A first word and picture book, my own book, snaps into place in my mind. In it, clouds are the hair of God. He is old and balding. The radiant blue light leaks out of his head. We sit inside him, receiving rain and sun, thunder and lightning.

I look up to watch the flamingos rise up from the lake, like leaves in the wind. Our dog, Juma, is grinning, mouth open and panting and harmless, and I have this feeling. It is a pink and blue feeling, as sharp as the clear highland sky. Goose bumps are thousands of feathers, a swarm of possible people waiting to be called out from the skin of the world, by faith, by the right words, the right breeze.

The wind swoops down, God breathes, and across the lake a million flamingos rise, the edges of Lake Nakuru lift, like pink skirts swollen by petticoats, now showing bits of blue panties, and God gasps, the skirts blow higher, the whole lake is blue and the sky is full of circling flamingos.