The Present Moment

by Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye

  Sophia was breathing heavily. Rahel in the next cubicle creaked and sighed. Supper was served, eaten and cleared away. Bessie was found trying to bundle up a handful of squashy beans in the corner of her wrapper. Mama Chungu was complaining of constipation. Matron, breaking routine, came in for a check on the patients.

  ‘I have left some bread and a thermos of tea in the kitchen,’ she told Priscilla, ‘in case one of them should wake up and complain of missing supper. But for heaven’s sake why did you have to bring those girls here to upset Sophia? Don’t we have enough to put up with? I can’t understand you.’

  ‘I did not bring them, Matron,’ answered Priscilla at her most punctilious, ‘but I did not send them away either, if they thought fit to come. We sometimes behave here as if the only problems were old people’s pains and memories. Perhaps it does us good to remember that these young ones also have their needs.’

  ‘Indeed, indeed,’ cried Matron huffily in Kikuyu, a rare outburst for her and an admission of intimacy. ‘Old ladies’ problems from morning to night. I live with that. Thirty of you to worry over. It is enough, I tell you, without adding more.’

  ‘But, Matron,’ put in Wairimu, ‘we appreciate the trouble you take over us. One day you will be old yourself. Then perhaps you will see how grateful we are.’

  ‘One day, one day.’ Matron sat down on one of the empty beds and started to massage her ankles. ‘Do you think there is an age limit for troubles – do you, now? “Oh, my poor back!” “Oh, my dead children!” “Oh, my sainted husband!” “Oh, my barren womb!” Do you think someone is bound to be happy if she has children, even though they tear her apart and make her almost bleed to death? You are sure of that – those who are so sorry for themselves. And to have a husband, is it all joy, then, those who can remember – a husband like a waxed image, seals on documents, white shiny collars, pomade that rots your pillow-cases, a husband who lives in a brief-case and eats computer rolls for breakfast. And a job – joy of joys, a job where people grumble and snore and scream at you round the clock, and you think you have done well if you have postponed another death for another day, and everyone plays on your sympathy because a well-fed widow with grown-up children must be stuffed to the eyebrows with sympathy – isn’t that so? And no one needs sympathy before retiring age, you are all sure of that, it may be written in the constitution for all I know, and in any case grown-up children will be oozing out all the sympathy you might need. Isn’t that what you think in this nice emotional corner you have made yourselves? And in a country that’s pressed down and running over with kids, why should any old person be short of natural sympathy? Have you asked yourself that?’

  ‘But, Matron,’ Priscilla tried to intervene, ‘we have not meant to be hard on you. If you do not tell us why you are sad, how are we to know? It is hard for us to be sure even how much you are aware of our separate feelings, for we do not always show. . . .’

  ‘I know, I know, I know. I know as much as I can bear and I don’t want to know any more.’

  ‘My younger sister,’ said Wairimu cautiously, ‘even among ourselves we do not ask everything. It might be too hard for some to tell. We cannot ask you. But we should be honoured by what you may wish to tell us.’

  ‘Oh no, oh no,’ repeated Matron, crying quietly. ‘There has been enough of telling. If I make myself vulnerable to you two there will be no end to it. Organisation is what you need. Haven’t I always said so?’

  She stood up and reverted to Swahili, measuring out words like rations.

  ‘Let me know in the morning how those two have slept. Tell those people to keep the volume of the TV down, will you? And tell them I shall lock up the charcoal if they keep burning it at night. It is dangerous. Do I make myself clear? The house burning down and me held responsible, that’s all I need. Good night, then.’

  And she rustled out, as though it were really a hospital ward and pills and specimens the heaviest of her concerns.

  In fact Samuel was released without being brought to court. It happened that he had left a sales folder with some personal letters in it in the Kabete minibus and had run behind, shouting for the driver to stop. He had identified himself by giving the name and address on the letters, so this incident stuck in the conductor’s mind. He had scrutinised the passenger carefully before handing over the folder and so was able to identify him and provide an alibi for the approximate time of the murder. Baraka had been seen alive as late as ten o’clock and his broken watch had stopped at half past ten, which fitted in with the police surgeon’s estimate of time of death. His drinking companions had not seen him off because they knew that he sometimes called on a girl called Judy somewhere near the place where his body was found.

  Samuel found himself trembling as he walked away from remand. He felt soiled to the skin, and was terrified of speaking to anyone before he had been home for a bath and a pot of tea. He held out his fare wordlessly in the matatu, afraid he was injuring the market women by being squeezed so closely against them. He still felt physically linked to that man he had once threatened, ignorant as he then was of what a threat implies, a man he had seen only once and come no nearer to touching than the lapel of a tailored jacket which he coveted. A man a little younger than himself, better-looking, he had to admit, cleverer, richer, who had, in that same flesh that now lay gelid in the mortuary, pawed at Mary, demurely greeted Gertrude, withstood with who knew what inner scars the searing knowledge of fire. A man with a father like his own, bowing his head to the jabs of printed words and dusty, dictated statement forms. A boy who had a granny like his own, whose jaw would sag and clatter with incredulity, whose spirit would bend and endure the suffering like any old Kikuyu woman’s back heaving under its burdens. Would he ever separate himself from the unfathomed guilt that clung, not to himself but to that boy and the unknown hand that dealt out what he would once have seen as justice?

  He walked a long way to the telephone box, not daring to enter any neighbour’s house and ask to use the phone. He spoke to Gertrude, begging her to see him, and could not take in the fullness of her joy, the completeness of her faith. It was as though – he thought as he flagged down the matatu going towards the Nurses’ Home – she did not even know that some people let down their loved ones, lost themselves rather than face them again, waited year after year for a certainty that could only fade. And then the conductor, grinning, came by to shake his hand.

  It appeared that Sophia had seen her grandson. He often visited a friend in Eastleigh and one afternoon she had whispered to Nekesa, as they walked out for a breath of air,

  ‘See, that is Baraka. He does not know me. Probably his father has told him that I am dead or gone to Mombasa. He is a medical student – I am not supposed to know, but I have ways of finding out. He is clever like his mother.’

  She knew the soldier too. The old ladies often speculated about him among themselves. One day Sophia whispered in the street as he marched past,

  ‘Do you think your mother may be dying here?’ But he did not turn his head. He was still ashamed of running away: that seemed to her obvious. Sophia had not meant to be overheard, but Priscilla was behind with her sharp ears. Another time she had said loudly to Mama Chungu, in the soldier’s hearing,

  ‘You see that one getting out of the matatu? That is my grandson, a medical student.’

  Once she had hissed at the man in front of Nekesa, ‘Hey, you, do you not think it was your mother who was sent to the hospital for the students to practise on, and since she came back she has been worse, heh? My son abandoned me because he is a Muslim and sees it as his duty, but you abandoned her because you are a coward, heh?’

  Nekesa whispered to her, ‘Hush, he may even hit you. There is his stick and even young boys are afraid of him. And when Rahel was well it was up to her to say if she thought it was Vitalis.’

  They did not forget, for when so little happens how can you forget any of it? But they did not speak, for when you have been so much hurt you do not open you
r sore place to any conceivable enemy. You suck up kindness where it comes and let some out when it gives you ease. But you see, as in your young years you never saw, that all your experience presses bitterly upon the present moment and all the things you have shared are separately enfolded in someone else’s life. The tug at the cord, the spilt seed and the customary places round the hearth fall away, and sharing becomes a chance neighbourliness or a dangerous revelation.

  Bessie remembered a time when the soldier had come at dusk behind her boy, slinking, not with his usual noisy step. She had cried out and the boy had seized the hand raising the iron club and talked soothingly and sent the man away to march out his jealousies. But she did not speak, for grief was dearer to her than speaking.

  Nekesa had heard him muttering that death was for the young and cowardice for those who have more sense. But who would want to listen to such words? He passed big people in the street every day, who could take notice if they wished. Let the little people not be answerable for their neighbours.

  One day the papers said ‘a vagrant’ had been found with Baraka’s identity card. But he had several other identity cards as well, picked up, he said, outside the day and night clubs, and as he claimed not to be able to read he did not know what to do with them. So they did not charge him, but kept him under psychiatric care.

  Mr Wau again began shouting accusations of witchcraft. A celebrated witchfinder was called up from Mombasa and found nothing to the purpose. Matron did not let him in to see Sophia, but he requested a sample of her clothing and for the sake of peace was allowed to examine a wrapper with some of her hairs adhering to it. These he pronounced to be Christian in character and free from malice.

  The event was superseded by others. The old ladies kept up their quiet routine. One or two slipped away to die in hospital, one or two more were admitted, examined, clothed, absorbed, a nine-day flurry of gossip and then the broadening of the weight of experience, cessation of questions, harbouring of dreams. They found a separate room for Bessie and tried to see that she took sleeping tablets so that the others were less disturbed. Sophia became a compulsive talker, telling them of the beni and the dansi, the First World War, the football clubs, the dock strike, the silver jubilee, with tales of djinns and demons and the arts of love. But the curtain of water and the curtain of fire she never touched again.

  On the day Rahel was fading from them, Wairimu produced from some hidden place and laid on her pillow a silver paper medal tied with a broken bootlace. The old lady turned her vacant eyes and closed them again.

  ‘Where did you find it?’ asked Priscilla.

  ‘Beside the body.’

  ‘She has seen what she can see. Put it away now.’

  Solemnly Wairimu picked up the medal and scraped a hole for it next time she went out to test the vegetables growing scrawny under the shadow of the wall.

  Rahel’s shoulders creaked as she fell back across the pillow, and the pain was too intense to turn. The bawdy wedding-song fell silent behind her slack lips and she was overcome with fear. They had reached the awesome place and the others should have known better than to go on singing. She tried to force her eyes open and seemed to fail, but that could not be, for from where she lay, the petticoat indecently rucked up, the sprawling arm dusty, withered, unoiled, she could see that the fearful tree was now clothed in blossom and birds were singing in the branches.

  AFTERWORD

  Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye has carved an impressive space for herself in the world of Kenyan literature, a remarkable accomplishment for an Englishwoman who came to her adoptive country when she was twenty-five years old.1 She chose to make contemporary Kenya, its society and history, the setting and substance of her creative work. Her body of work—particularly her major novels, Coming to Birth and The Present Moment—constitutes a significant literary achievement in itself, and also in what it contributes to Kenyan literature: the long-muted voices of women, the long-absent sweep and variety of female experience in modern Kenya. The authenticity and sensitivity of her rendering of Kenyan life, more particularly of its working-class and poor women, have earned her the right to style herself as nyarloka, or “daughter from across the seas,” which is reflected in the title of her first collection of poetry, Song of Nyarloka and Other Poems.

  While there is a continuity of thematic focus in her fiction before and after The Present Moment, this novel represents Macgoye’s finest work to date, presenting as it does a rich and complex weave of women’s life stories anchored in Kenyan history. The central characters, seven women in a home for the aged homeless, relate or recall their humble lives of privation and constant struggle in the lower reaches of a hierarchical, androcentric, and rapidly changing society. The women’s aspirations and circumstances are grounded in and shaped by the history, colonial and postcolonial, of their country. Their valiant attempts to maintain personal identity in the face of these forces mirrors the larger society’s efforts to forge a nation out of an arbitrary creation named Kenya Colony.

  •

  Marjorie Macgoye herself experienced the meshing of identity and place. Born in Southampton, England, in 1928, she came to Kenya in 1954, the year after she obtained her M.A. in English from the University of London. She came initially as an Anglican lay missionary, at the height of the anticolonial Mau Mau insurgency. She lived in African neighborhoods in Nairobi between 1954 and 1960 when she worked for the Church Missionary Society bookstore. In a society where a rigid “color bar” operated, it was “one of the few public places where Africans were welcome and received attention” (The Weekly Review 30).

  In 1960 Macgoye married a clinical officer, a Luo from Gem location in Nyanza province in western Kenya. This interracial marriage took place when Kenya still remained for the most part a racially segregated colony. It was also a period of heightened tensions between Africans and Europeans as it became apparent that Uhuru, or freedom, was imminent. (Kenya finally achieved independence from the British colonial power in December 1963.)

  The Macgoyes moved to Kisumu, where Marjorie cared for their four children and taught high school English part time. Between 1975 and 1980 Macgoye and her family lived in Tanzania where she took up the post of manager of the University of Dar es Salaam bookstore. On returning to Kenya in 1975, she was appointed manager of S.J. Moore, one of Nairobi’s major bookstores, and worked there for five years. Later she worked as a publishers’ representative in eastern Africa between 1980 and 1982. Since 1983, she has combined her own writing with work as a freelance editor.

  During her early years in Kenya and after her marriage, Macgoye made a special effort to integrate herself into her adopted ethnic and national communities, a process which included learning to speak and write Dholuo and Kiswahili. She internalized the culture of her Kenyan family to a remarkable degree: “her people call her min Gem, or wife of Gem” (Ikonya 1994). A Luo critic has remarked with surprise at “the ease with which Marjorie talks about the traditions and customs of her adopted home,” which has led people to assume “she must have been born under the African sun” (Obyerodhyambo 6).

  Macgoye has differed from most Europeans in pre- and postindependence Kenya, and from their successor African elites, in maintaining throughout her years in Kenya a modestly spare lifestyle, one akin to that of a wide swathe of Kenyan society. She uses public transport and lives in a rented apartment in a lower-middle-class neighborhood on the immediate outskirts of downtown Nairobi. To explain her preoccupations in her fiction with the urban poor, Macgoye harks back to her own English working-class origins: “I come from working people, I write mostly about working people” (letter 5). Typically down-to-earth and attuned to Kenyan realities, she responded sharply to an interviewer’s question characterizing her modest lifestyle as one “at variance with that of most people [in Kenya].” Macgoye, realizing that the interviewer was referring to the elite, retorted, “I do not understand what you mean by ‘most people’ except in the sense that to most Kenyans I look stinking rich�
�� (Wajibu 7).

  Macgoye’s intimacy and empathy with “working people” are evident in her novels, which depict the lives of the poor and outcast in Kenyan society. Evident too is her knowledge of the urban landscape her characters inhabit: the distinctive smells and sights of the streets and marketplaces of Nairobi, the decaying neighborhoods and slums that ring the capital city.

  Interestingly, the trajectory of Macgoye’s own life resembles that of her heroines in Coming to Birth and The Present Moment. They leave their homes by choice or, more usually, force of circumstance, and journey to their country’s capital; it is a journey that is at once literal, psychological, and symbolic as the characters pursue their quest for a life, a living, and an identity. Macgoye’s journey began in a different geographical location; she left her native land in answer to a missionary call to one of her country’s African colonies. In Kenya she too “came to birth,” as she found her personal and artistic destiny.

  The journey to critical recognition was a lengthy one. Macgoye recalls that she experienced “constant rejections up to the mid-60s when my articles and poems started being published in East African periodicals” (letter 1). Between 1970 and 1977 she published one novel and a collection of her poems. But the first work that brought her wide attention and critical acclaim was Coming to Birth, which won the British-based Sinclair Prize in 1986 for a novel of social and political significance, and was published in both East Africa and Britain in 1986. Following almost immediately upon this success, The Present Moment was published in 1987. Since then, Macgoye has engaged in a flurry of creative activity, publishing a novella (Victoria), two more novels (Homing In and Chira), and a second collection of poetry. She has also published nonfiction, including A Story of Kenya (1986) and Moral Issues in Kenya (1996) and children’s books.

  In the 1960s and 1970s few Kenyan women writers were widely published. The major women writers of the period were fiction writers Rebeka Njau, Grace Ogot, and Miriam Were, and playwright and poet Micere Mugo.2 From the continent as a whole during that time came women writers Flora Nwapa and Buchi Emecheta (Nigeria), Ama Ata Aidoo (Ghana), Bessie Head (Botswana).3