One Day I Will Write About This Place

by Binyavanga Wainaina

  The fall of day becomes a battle. Birds are working themselves into a frenzy, flying about feverishly, unbearably shrill. The sky makes its last stand, shedding its ubiquity and competing with the landscape for the attention of the eye.

  I spend some time watching the chief through the back window. He hasn’t stopped talking since we left. Kariuki is actually laughing.

  It is dark when we get to the club. I can see a thatched roof and four or five cars. There is nothing else around. We are, it seems, in the middle of nowhere.

  We get out of the car.

  “It will be full tonight,” says the chief. “Month end.”

  Three hours later, I am somewhere beyond drunk, coasting on a vast plateau of semi­sobriety that seems to have no end. The place is packed.

  More hours later, I am standing in a line of people outside the club, a chorus of liquid glitter arcing high out, then down to the ground, then zipping close. The pliant nothingness of the huge night above us goads us to movement.

  A well-known dombolo song starts, and a ripple of excitement overtakes the crowd. This communal goose bump wakes a rhythm in us, and we all get up to dance. One guy with a cast on one leg is using his crutch as a dancing aid, bouncing around us like a string puppet. The cars all around have their inside lights on, as couples do what they do. The windows seem like eyes, glowing with excitement as they watch us onstage.

  Everybody is doing the dombolo, a Congolese dance in which your hips (and only your hips) are supposed to move like a ball bearing made of mercury. To do it right, you wiggle your pelvis from side to side while your upper body remains as casual as if you were lunching with Nelson Mandela. In any restaurant in Kenya, a sunny-­side-up fried egg is called mayai (eggs) dombolo.

  I have struggled to get this dance right for years. I just can’t get my hips to roll in circles like they should. Until tonight. The booze is helping, I think. I have decided to imagine that I have an itch deep in my bum, and I have to scratch it without using my hands or rubbing against anything.

  My body finds a rhythmic map quickly, and I build my movements to fluency before letting my limbs improvise. Everybody is doing this, a solo thing—­yet we are bound, like one creature, in one rhythm.

  Any dombolo song has this section where, having reached a small peak of hip-­wiggling frenzy, the music stops, and one is supposed to pull one’s hips to the side and pause, in anticipation of an explosion of music faster and more frenzied than before.

  When this happens, you are supposed to stretch out your arms and do some complicated kung-­fu maneuvers. Or keep the hips rolling and slowly make your way down to your haunches, then work yourself back up. If you watch a well-­endowed woman doing this, you will understand why skinny women often are not popular in East Africa.

  If you ask me now, I’ll tell you this is everything that matters. So this is why we move like this? We affirm a common purpose; any doubts about others’ motives must fade if we are all pieces of one movement. We forget, don’t we, that there is another time, apart from the hour and the minute? A human measurement, ticking away in our bodies, behind our facades.

  Our shells crack, and we spill out and mingle. I care so much for these things that sit under the burping self-­satisfaction of the certificated world. Maybe I am not just failing; maybe there is something I have that I can barter, if only for the approval of those I respect. I have lived off the certainty of others, have become a kind of parasite. Maybe I can help people see the patterns they take for granted. Cripples can have triumphant stand-ups.

  I join a group of people who are talking politics, sitting around a large fire outside, huddled together to find warmth and life under a sagging hammock of night mass. A couple of them are university students; there is a doctor who lives in Mwingi town.

  If every journey has a moment of magic, this is mine. Anything seems possible. In the dark like this, everything we say seems free of consequence, the music is rich, and our bodies are lent brotherhood by the light of the fire.

  Politics makes way for life. For these few hours, it is as if we were old friends, comfortable with each other’s dents and frictions. We talk, bringing the oddities of our backgrounds to this shared plate.

  The places and people we talk about are rendered exotic and distant this night. Warufaga… Burnt Forest… Mtito Andei… Makutano… Mile Saba… Mua Hills… Gilgil… Sultan Hamud… Siakago… Kutus… Maili-­Kumi… the wizard in Kangundo who owns a shop and likes to buy people’s toenails; the hill, somewhere in Ukambani, where things slide uphill; thirteen-­year-­old girls who swarm around bars like this one, selling their bodies to send money home or take care of their babies; the billionaire Kamba politician who was cursed for stealing money and whose balls swell up whenever he visits his constituency; a strange insect in Turkana that climbs up your warm urine as you piss and does thorny unthinkable things to your urethra.

  Painful things are shed like sweat. Somebody confesses that he spent time in prison in Mwea. He talks about his relief at getting out before all the springs of his body were worn out. We hear about the prison guard who got AIDS and deliberately infected many inmates with the disease before dying.

  Kariuki reveals himself. We hear how he prefers to work away from home because he can’t stand seeing his children at home without school fees; how, though he has a diploma in agriculture, he has been taking casual driving jobs for ten years. We hear about how worthless his coffee farm has become. He starts to laugh when he tells us how he lived with a woman for a year in Kibera, afraid to contact his family because he had no money to provide. The woman owned property. She fed him and kept him in liquor while he lived there. We laugh and enjoy our misfortunes, for we are real in the group and cannot succumb to chaos today.

  Kariuki’s wife found him by putting an announcement on national radio. His son had died. We are silent for a moment, digesting this. Somebody grabs Kariuki’s hand and takes him to the dance floor.

  Some of us break to dance and return to regroup. We talk and dance and talk and dance, not thinking how strange we will be to each other when the sun is in the sky, and our plumage is unavoidable, and trees suddenly have thorns, and around us a vast horizon of possible problems reseal our defenses.

  The edges of the sky start to fray, a glowing mauve invasion. I can see shadows outside the gate, couples headed to the fields.

  There is a guy lying on the grass, obviously in agony, his stomach taut as a drum. He is sweating badly. I close my eyes and see the horns of the goat that he had been eating force themselves through his sweat glands. It is clear—­so clear. All this time, without writing one word, I have been reading novels, and watching people, and writing what I see in my head, finding shapes for reality by making them into a book. This is all I have done, forever, done it so much, so satisfyingly. I have never used a pen—­I have done it for my own sensual comfort. If I am to grow up, I must do some such thing for others.

  Self-­pity music comes on. Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton. I try to get Kariuki and the chief to leave, but they are stuck in an embrace, howling to the music and swimming in sentiment.

  Then a song comes on that makes me insist that we are leaving.

  Some time in the 1980s, a Kenyan university professor recorded a song that was an enormous hit. It could best be described as a multiplicity of yodels celebrating the wedding vow:

  Will you take me (spoken, not sung)

  To be your law-­(yodel)-ful wedded wife

  To love to cherish and to (yodel)

  (then a gradually more hysterical yodel): Yieeeeei-­yeeeeei… MEN!

  Then just amens, and more yodels.

  Of course, all these proud warriors, pillars of the community, are at this moment singing in unison with the music, hugging themselves (beer bottles under armpits), and looking sorrowful.

  Soon, the beds in this motel will be creaking, as some of these men forget self-pity and look for lost youth in the bodies of young girls. I am afraid. If I write, and fail at it, I can
not see what else I can do. Maybe I will write and people will roll their eyes, because I will talk about thirst, and thirst is something people know already, and what I see is only bad shapes that mean nothing.

  …

  It is late afternoon. Sunlight can be very rude. I seem to have developed a set of bumpy new lenses in my eyes. Who put sand in my eyes? Ai! Kariuki snores too much.

  Somewhere, in the distance, a war is taking place: guns, howitzers, bitches, jeeps, and gin and juice.

  “Everybody say heeeey!”

  The chief bursts into my room, looking like he spent the night eating fresh vegetables and massaging his body in vitamins. This is not fair.

  “Hey, bwana chief.”

  Is that my voice? I have a wobbly vision of water, droplets cool against a chilled bottle, waterfalls, mountain streams, taps, ice cubes falling into a glass. Oh, to drink…

  “Sorry about the noise—­my sons like this funny music too much. Now, tell me about all this cotton business.”

  I like this job.

  Chapter Twenty-­One

  A few minutes ago, I was sleeping comfortably in the front of a Land Rover Discovery. Now, I am standing outside in the cold, next to my bags, as the agricultural extension officer who gave me a lift here makes a mad dash for the night comforts of Narok town. Driving at night in this area is not a bright idea. We have been growing leased wheat and barley here for years. My father farms here to help pay our school fees. It is hard work, but I have always liked the adventure of Maasailand. There is a lot of time to read, too. My bags are full of library books.

  When you are traveling in an unfamiliar landscape, for the first few moments, your eyes cannot concentrate on the particular. I am overwhelmed by the glare of dusk, by the shiver of wind on undulating acres of wheat and barley, by the vision of mile upon mile of space free of power lines. My focus is so derailed that when I return to myself, I find, to my surprise, that my feet are not off the ground. The landscape had grabbed me with such force that for a moment it sucked up my awareness of myself. It occurs to me that there is no clearer proof of the subjectivity (or selectivity) of our senses than moments like this.

  Seeing is almost always only noticing.

  Rotor blades of cold are chopping away in my nostrils. The silence, after the nonstop drone of the car, is as clingy as cobwebs, as intrusive as the loudest of noises. I have an urge to claw it away from my eardrums.

  I am in Maasailand.

  Not television Maasailand. We are high up in the Mau Hills. There are no rolling grasslands, lions, or acacia trees here; there are forests, impenetrable woven highland forests, dominated by bamboo. Inside, there are elephants, which come out at night and leave enormous pancakes of shit on the road. When I was a kid, I used to think that elephants, like cats, used dusty roads as toilet paper, sitting their haunches on the ground and levering themselves forward with their forelegs.

  The cold air is irritating. I want to breathe in, suck up the moist mountain­ness of the air, the smell of fever tree and dung—­but the process is just too painful. What do people do in really wintry places? Do they have some sort of nasal Sensodyne?

  I can see our ancient Massey Ferguson tractor wheezing up a distant hill. They are headed this way to pick me up.

  Relief. They got my message.

  A week later, I am on a tractor, freezing, as we make our way back to camp from the wheat fields. We have been supervising the spraying of wheat and barley in the scattered fields my father leases.

  There isn’t much to look forward to at night here, no pubs hidden in the bamboo jungle. You can’t even walk about freely at night because outside is full of stinging nettles. We will be in bed by seven to beat the cold. I will hear stories about frogs that sneak under your bed and turn into beautiful women, who entrap you. I will hear stories about legendary tractor drivers—­people who could turn the jagged roof of Mount Kilimanjaro into Lauryn Hill’s Afro.

  I will hear about Maasai outside our camp, so near and so far from us. I will hear about so-­and-­so, who got two hundred thousand shillings for barley grown on his land, and how he took off to the Majengo slums in Nairobi, leaving his wife and children behind, to live with a prostitute for a year.

  When the money ran out, he discarded his suit, pots and pans, and furniture. He wrapped a blanket around himself and walked home, whistling happily all the way.

  Most of all, I will hear stories about Ole Kamaro, our landlord, and his wife Milka.

  Baba has been growing wheat and barley in this area since I was a child. All this time, we have been leasing a portion of Ole Kamaro’s land to keep our tractors and to make camp. I met Milka when she had just married Ole Kamaro. She was his fifth wife, thirteen years old. He was very proud of her. She was the daughter of a big-time chief from near Mau Narok. Most important, she could read and write. Ole Kamaro bought her a pocket radio and made her follow him with a pen and pencil everywhere he went, taking notes.

  I remember being horrified by the marriage. She was so young! My sister Ciru was eight, and they played together one day. That night, Ciru had a nightmare that Baba had sold her to Ole Kamaro in exchange for fifty acres of land.

  A few years of schooling were enough to give Milka a clear idea of the basic tenets of empowerment. By the time she was eighteen, Ole Kamaro had dumped the rest of his wives.

  Milka leased out his land to Kenya Breweries and opened a bank account where all the money went. Occasionally, she gave her husband pocket money. Whenever he was away, she took up with her lover, a wealthy young Gikuyu shopkeeper from the other side of the hill who kept her supplied with essentials like soap, matches, and paraffin.

  Milka is the local chairwoman of the KANU Women’s League and so remains invulnerable to censure from the conservative element in the area. She also has a thriving business, curing hides and beading them elaborately for the tourist market at the Mara. Unlike most Maasai women, who disdain growing crops, she has a thriving market garden with maize, beans, and other vegetables. She does not lift a finger to take care of this garden. Part of the cooperation we expect from her as landlady depends on our staff taking care of her garden.

  …

  Something interesting is going on today, and the drivers are nervous. Sang tells me about a tradition among the Maasai: women are released from all domestic duties for a few months after giving birth. They are allowed to take over the land and claim any lovers that they choose. For some reason I don’t quite understand, this all happens at a particular season, and this season begins today. I have been warned to keep away from any bands of women wandering about.

  We are heading back from work. I am sitting with the rest of the team in the trailer behind the old Massey Ferguson tractor we use to carry supplies and workers. We get to the top, turn to make our way down, and there they are, led by Milka, a troop of about forty women marching toward us dressed in their best traditional clothing.

  Milka looks imperious and beautiful in her beaded leather cloak, red khanga around her waist. The khanga features a giant cockerel, in the president’s party colors. Milka is, after all, the leader of the KANU Women’s League. This is her cultural dress: the party colors on twin rectangular cloths that were once Swahili traditional dress and have now entered all of Kenya. Around all this are rings, necklaces, and earrings. Because Milka is in charge of the party women’s league, she is the leader of all local women. She is, too, a cultural leader. There is an old woman among them; she must be seventy, and she is cackling with glee. She takes off her wrap and displays her breasts, which resemble old socks.

  Mwangi, who is driving, stops and tries to turn back, but the road is too narrow: on one side there is the mountain, and on the other, a yawning valley. Kipsang, who is sitting in the trailer with me, shouts, “Aiiii. Mwangi bwana! DO NOT STOP!”

  It seems that the 1990s tradition involves men making donations to the KANU Women’s League. Innocent enough, you’d think, but the amount of these donations must satisfy them or they w
ill strip you naked and do unspeakable things to your body.

  So we take off at full speed. The women stand firm in the middle of the road. We can’t swerve. We stop.

  Then Kipsang saves our skins by throwing a bunch of coins onto the road. I throw down some notes, and Mwangi (renowned across Maasailand for his stinginess) empties his pockets, throwing down notes and coins. The women start to gather the money, the tractor roars back into action, and we drive right through them.

  I am left with the picture of a toothless old lady diving to avoid the tractor. Then she stands up and looks back at us, laughing, her breasts flapping like a flag of victory.

  …

  I am in bed, still in Maasailand.

  I pick up my father’s World Almanac and Book of Facts 1992. The language section has new words, confirmed from sources as impeccable as the Columbia Encyclopedia and the Oxford English Dictionary. The list reads like an American infomercial: jazzercise, assertiveness training, bulimia, anorexic, microwavable, fast-­tracker.

  The words soak into me. America is the cheerleader. They twirl the baton, and we follow. There is a word there, skanking, described as “a style of West Indian dancing to reggae music, in which the body bends forward at the waist and the knees are raised and the hands claw the air in time to the beat; dancing in this style.”

  I have a brief flash of us in forty years’ time, in some generic dance studio. We are practicing for the senior championships, in a Kenya that is formatted and large, where work has digested us all, wearing plastic smiles on our faces as we skank across the room, counting each step like good students. The tutor checks the movement: shoulders up, arms down, move this way, move that: Claw, baby. Claw! In time to the beat, dancing in this style.

  …

  Langat and Kariuki have lost their self-­consciousness around me and are chatting away about Milka.