The lives of the old women in the Refuge contrast with those of a new generation of Kenyan women. These young nurses and community health workers in training already have more choices than Wairimu had. Each nurse cares for an old woman, listens to her stories, and eventually confides in her. Macgoye has carefully paired younger and older women who share something in common. Mary reveals to Wairimu her distress over a boyfriend’s betrayal, which summons up for the older woman her own betrayal by Waitito, the man whom she forgave because he introduced her to a life in which she could make choices. One way in which Wairimu consoles her younger friend is by making her aware that she already enjoys more opportunities than Wairimu did in her youth. Jane bonds with Bessie because both have lost loved ones in the aftermath of the attempted coup d’état in 1982. Priscilla, prim and proper because of her own experiences in life—abandonment by her new husband, Evans, and an incident of bloody horror during the Emergency—sees in Gertrude her own younger, robust, and passionate self; this allows her to unbend enough to reveal her story to the young woman, already engaged to be married to Mary’s brother. Nekesa feels an empathy with Judy, the young prostitute, and encourages her to seek a new life and redemption, much as Nekesa herself did.
The younger women take for granted opportunities for which Wairimu’s generation had to struggle. When Wairimu had first come to Nairobi, and after “the golden haze over the city turn[ed] black and smoky, . . . [and] the dream had turned into a nightmare” of urban sleaze and danger (49), Nduta counseled: “Go today—go now. The town is not yet ready for you. Unless you have a man—a husband, best, or a father to speak for you, but at least a steady man—you get the worst of the bargain here. . . . One day it may well be different,” (50). Six decades later, that day has come, as Wairimu makes clear to Jane: “I think I would be a nurse if I were young now. But in my day there were only two choices, picking coffee or looking after men” (15). When she relates her own story to Mary, Wairimu explains why she chose to go to the coffee: “It was one way of choosing for yourself. Otherwise for girls there was almost no choice. . . . For girls there were very few school places and as yet little choice. . . . The girl had no alternative to marriage until the coffee came” (17).
Having situated The Present Moment within a feminist framework, it becomes necessary to respond to Macgoye’s reluctance to identify herself as a feminist writer.7 In this regard, she is similar to other African women writers who “like to declare that they are not feminists, as if it were a crime to be a feminist” (Ogundipe-Leslie 11). Ogundipe-Leslie remarks on the paradox that “these denials come from unlikely writers such as Bessie Head, Buchi Emecheta, even Mariama Bâ,” all of whose repudiations of feminism are belied by the content of their fiction: “Yet, nothing could be more feminist than the writings of these women writers, in their concern for and deep understanding of the experiences and fates of women in society” (11). Ogundipe-Leslie attributes this hesitation of African women writers to accept a feminist label to “the successful intimidation of African women by men over the issues of women’s liberation and feminism. Male ridicule, aggression, and backlash have resulted in making women apologetic and have given the term ‘feminist’ a bad name” (11). Several writers, including Macgoye herself, have articulated their own reasons for rejecting the term—most prominently, its close association with Western feminism, not always at home in an African context.8
In such a contradictory situation, perhaps the most productive course a reader of Macgoye’s work might follow is that suggested by D. H. Lawrence when he counsels readers to trust the tale, not the teller. Turning to The Present Moment, it becomes abundantly evident that Macgoye focuses closely and sympathetically on the difficult lives of her female characters and on their brave efforts to survive in desperate circumstances. Moreover, she has lavished much care, affection, and pride on the most prominent of these characters, Wairimu. Spice is correct when, in his review of The Present Moment, he writes:
Macgoye seems to have most affinity with Wairimu . . . [who] is granted the most developed self-consciousness, so she emerges as the Everywoman figure, the character whose destiny the reader takes to be representative, and around whom the destinies of the other characters group themselves. (4)
Wairimu is a feminist born ahead of her time. She is a strong, quickwitted, resilient woman, and throughout her life she has been curious about the world she lived in and anxious to improve herself. She remains free of self-pity. Boldly, she made her life choices—above all, rejecting the fixed “pictures,” or limited roles, set out for women in her community.
The changes which overtook Kenyan society in the twentieth century resulted in the redefinition and extension of the concept of “home,” with repercussions, both positive and negative, on the lives of the novel’s women characters. Wairimu, a Kikuyu, chose in her youth to leave her rural home to explore the new life on the coffee plantations and in Nairobi. Her younger colleague Nekesa was hardly acquainted with a rural home; Nekesa, a Luhyia “understood Lubukusu and some of the related dialects that made up Ololuyia, but it had never been a major language of her life and never since early childhood had she visited the home village or shared in the digging of those little overcrowded plots” (115).
Most of the protagonists’ experiences away from their rural homes were unremittingly harsh. Nekesa was a prostitute in Kampala, Uganda, for much of her life. Wairimu’s “golden haze” became besmirched. Bessie eked out a precarious existence in the slums of Eastleigh after her rural home was destroyed during the anticolonial insurgency. Mama Chungu was reduced to increasingly menial and exhausting jobs, and finally to begging in the streets. Lacking are the safety nets of home on the ridges and in the villages. Children die or disappear, as do siblings, spouses, and lovers. The women have to summon up their own meager resources just to survive, and they are especially vulnerable in old age. Just ending up at the Refuge is a concession of defeat.
Yet the new opportunities and possibilities for women which also developed in this era altered women’s sense of “home.” Mobility, owing to coercion or choice, widened the horizons, consciousness, and skills of the women in their youth. As an army wife, Rahel followed her husband to the barracks far from their rural home and “learned to read there and to look after a military house” (13). Wairimu had more choice and independence and learned more than she would have had she stayed at home: “She could not settle back to life within the ridge. That would neither expel her fear nor satisfy even the narrowest part of her dream” (50).
In The Present Moment, mobility is only one agent of change in an already complex definition of “home.” In common with most other African countries, Kenya, paradoxically, is an artificial creation. The nation’s geographic outlines were determined by European great powers’ colonial rivalries in the late nineteenth century. In the “scramble for Africa,” many indigenous communities were divided by imperially imposed borders. The new borders often brought together a multitude of ethnicities: native, colonial, and immigrant. In any given African colony, the colonized ethnic groups had to build alliances among themselves, often despite old antipathies, in order to eject the colonizers. In the novel, we see the development of this more inclusive consciousness and coalition building begin quite early on, after the Thuku rally ends in failure:
In fact, what was happening was Nairobi drawing together, becoming, on the African side, a community. . . . Most of us were Kikuyu, it is true, in that meeting, but everybody knew what was going on, even the Somali and the Luo kept their children home from school and their wives from market that day. . . . The ground was ready and the community began to grow. (46)
The Refuge itself epitomizes the changing nature of “home.” As an institution for elderly homeless women, it is a product of the new society where charity must sometimes provide what the family and community once did. The very need for an institution of this kind tells us something about the social changes that have overtaken traditional African communities. Natura
l communities of “filiation”—in which the group into which one is born assures one’s ties, status, and welfare for life—have gradually been replaced by a society increasingly marked by “affiliation”—in which individuals choose to ally themselves with a group of relative or total strangers, for example with one or another Christian religious denomination, or a trade union.
Simultaneously, the Refuge functions as a microcosm of the nation’s ethnic heterogeneity. Of the seven protagonists, three are Kikuyu, and one each Luo, Luhyia, Swahili, and Seychelloise. At the Refuge, they live out a larger, more commodious and inclusive conception of “home,” one which encompasses a Kenyan nation of various ethnicities. The nation’s heterogeneity is most evident in Sophia’s life story. She is a Swahili who comes from Mombasa’s Old Town, mostly inhabited by Arab Muslims who “considered themselves a cut above the inland people, Christians or pagans, kaffirs all, except for a few who had seen the light and were beginning to follow civilised ways” (31). In order to counter Arab Kenyan legislative power and to win better wages and labor conditions, the Muslim Swahilis (a coastal people, the product of African-Arab intermarriage over the centuries), including Sophia’s husband, Ali, a docker, throw their political lot in with upcountry Africans, many of whom are Christian: “So Swahilis had begun to talk about unity with inland Africans, and once one started to think about them as brothers it was impossible not to see that they were suffering” (31). Later, after her husband’s death and after she has traveled a bit, Sophia can begin to move beyond her provincial insularity:
She smiled and tried to think about Kenya. She had been a short way up and down the coast but never a dozen miles inland. But some of the women she talked with in the market had come from as far as Kisumu, two nights’ journey on the train, to visit their husbands working in the docks. All this was Kenya and all those people were Kenya too. (66)
The women at the Refuge do indulge in petty bickering and stereotype one another. Rahel, a Luo, harbors unflattering views of Kikuyus, thinking of “the terrible bent backs of their burdened women” in contrast to the Luo women with their “graceful carriage and a steadily balanced water-pot” (14). Wairimu complains about Sophia: “fat and flabby and flaunting herself like a young girl. Look at her hands—never did a hard day’s work in her life. And all those bangles—jingili, jingili, jingili!” (27). Sophia despises all her mates as “faded old ladies,” lacking in sophistication and whose Swahili is “dull and devoid of ornament” (32–33).
But alongside the squabbling, a sisterhood develops among these old women. A fine example of this solidarity and care for one another occurs at the beginning of the novel:
“[Rahel] is very weak,” frowned one of the nurses. . . . “Don’t you think she would be better in hospital?”
“No,” said Wairimu firmly. “She likes the company of people she knows. She is better here with us. . . .”
“But isn’t it depressing for the rest of you?”
“She got worse last time they took her to hospital,” put in Sophia. “And it’s not depressing to have her here. What would be depressing is to think that we would be kicked out if we got like her.” (7)
The author underlines the redefining and widening of “home” and “community” by enmeshing the characters in a network of links, most of which they themselves—and the reader—become aware of only as the mysteries in the novel are gradually revealed. Reverend Andrew, who visits the Refuge, might be the son of Evans, the husband who deserted Priscilla. The half-crazy Vitalis who parades outside the Refuge might be Rahel’s missing son. Sophia might have unwittingly precipitated the murder of her own grandson, a medical student, when she maliciously hinted, within Vitalis’s hearing, that Rahel’s condition has worsened after she was “experimented” on by medical students at the nearby hospital; the author suggests that Vitalis was the murderer. It is likely that Henry/Kinyozi, Sophia’s second husband and the one who left her, is the freedom fighter whose cause Mama Chungu aided, but neither woman speaks about him. The sheer number and weight of coincidences linking the characters seems implausible from a realistic point of view. But Macgoye seems to be suggesting a deeper truth concerning how Kenyans are all linked in one way or another, echoing Priscilla’s employer’s view that “in one place or another we were all strangers and pilgrims” (65).
Like the sisal rope that Rahel dreams her long-dead uncle is braiding (4), the novel’s narrative is structured around the life stories of its seven main characters; their stories constitute the skeins and strands of a shared history, but one approached from different locations, cultures, experiences and animated by differing temperaments and aspirations.
In a culture and literature where women’s voices have long been muffled and marginalized, the seven central characters directly address their life stories to one another, to various individuals who visit the Refuge, and to themselves, retrospectively. Their stories are not filtered through the single, authoritative voice of an omniscient narrator. Macgoye captures with remarkable fidelity the very cadences of Kenyan speech in all its variety. The author’s voice and sophistication do not distort or overwhelm the voices of her humble characters.
Further, there is an immediacy to the characters’ stories. As the narrative shifts from the storytelling site of the Refuge, in the novel’s “present,” to the places and scenes of the women’s event-filled past lives, the young women within the old women come alive in all their complexity, and mesh with the present of the Refuge. Time becomes multilayered in The Present Moment, without sacrificing realism, authenticity, and vitality.
An important aspect of the author’s art in shaping the novel, and of its richness, is the multilayered quality of mundane objects. The Refuge, for example, is the very real home of the novel’s protagonists and the “venue” of their storytelling. Viewed from another angle, the Refuge might be seen as a microcosm of contemporary Kenyan society. The tree is another image with multiple meanings, which sometimes shift and collide with one another. The “image of the dead tree” (3) that Rahel recalls in old age might stand for the neglected and abandoned traditional culture. Later, when the sorrowing young woman Jane, whose boyfriend has been killed, thinks a vision of the cross beckons her to give her life in service as a nun, the tree segues into the Christian symbol: “After John died, I just wandered about at home, when I had time off, and I always seemed to come on a tall tree, with branches like a cross, calling me. I think that is what it meant” (128). The novel closes with the dying Rahel again seeing “the fearful tree,” but shorn of its menace; now, “clothed in blossom” and with “birds . . . singing in the branches,” it becomes a symbol of hope, even triumph (155).
The novel’s structure creates space for social “voices from below” of the marginalized in more than one way: these are not only women’s voices but also the voices of the poor. Most often, these voices are drowned out, and these people are spoken for by the privileged—the educated, moneyed, politically powerful—who dominate the means of communication in any society. This has been especially true in authoritarian Kenya both under colonial and postcolonial rulers. Spice notes of the novel’s protagonists that the text “bears witness to the predicament of a true underclass” (4).
Macgoye is quite aware of what she is doing in providing a “forum” in her novel for those voices of the “underclass”—old, poor, homeless women, the least powerful or noticed in society—as they tell the stories of their lives. Through her central character, Wairimu, the author characterizes these stories:
The stories we learned when we were children were all about big people—braver, stronger, fiercer, cleverer, even wickeder, than anyone we knew. The ordinary people got passed off as hares or hyenas or birds. But if we knew the secrets of those little people, or the littleness of the big people—what they were afraid of, what they were mean over, what they wasted—then there would be the true story of our people. (88)
Important, too, is that in recalling their past lives, the old women re-
create themselves, give a shape and significance to what most would regard as lives of meager import or interest. With their stories and memories, the old women build a figurative structure around themselves—a structure which confers dignity on them even as it creates an inviolate interior space for meaning, privacy, and peace. This “structure” is at the same time the novel and Macgoye’s own art—the weave of memory, experience, history—at work:
Each of [the old women] had woven through the years a framework of shelter, as the Boran woman keeps the folded structure of her house on camel-back beside her, so that the tent fabric of the Refuge . . . could stretch above it without encroaching on the private place within. (150)
The novel’s form assumes importance in another way. Through her characters’ stories, Macgoye dramatizes how “the present moment” has been shaped by historical constraint and opportunity, by individual circumstance and choice. Part of the challenge “the present moment” poses to readers—particularly to Kenyan readers—is the challenge of nationhood, of living in a pluralistic society. They are confronted with issues such as the need to balance competing loyalties to clan, class, and community with the vision of an inclusive and just society; to create a Kenyan mosaic from numerous ethnicities, cultures, and histories. Macgoye’s heterogeneous weaving of the historical and personal, in addition to demonstrating the interconnectedness of Kenyan lives, creates just such a mosaic.8
Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the polyphonic and the dialogical inheres in the very structure of The Present Moment.9 The women’s stories, individually and collectively, refract each other and provide a different angle from which they and the reader can view a single historical event. Each story modulates and extends, adds to, even at times undermines all the rest. History is not monolithic, but variously experienced and endured. In coming to understand this, the characters are better able to accommodate their individual selves to a relatively harmonious existence within the heterogeneous community of the Refuge. For example, Rahel, a Luo, concedes that the brunt of colonial dispossession and oppression fell on the Kikuyu. Referring to the harsh time of the Emergency and the Kikuyu insurgency against the colonizers, Rahel remarks to Priscilla: “But I admit it was a tough time for you in the fifties. . . . We were taught to feel superior to [the Kikuyu freedom fighters] and with their jobs and houses falling our way it wasn’t too hard” (35).
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