One Day I Will Write About This Place (33 page)

Too much hope, too little reform.

While our baggage is being checked, I overhear a conversation between
the baggage handlers. Even here, everybody is split. Orange Democratic
Movement people stand around their radio. Party of National Unity
people stand around their radio. After a dispirited argument about the
elections, one of the baggage handlers sighs and says, “These days Kenya
is like England.”

I laugh, and ask her why.

“I don’t know. So many things like England. Now even here in Lamu
you see more Kenyan tourists than British… ”

Her colleagues are nodding.

“Even food in the shops is like England. They way they package it
like it is imported. Things are expensive.”

“
Mpslp
,” she says, blushing, and all politics is silenced for a common
moment. “You know what I mean.”

The plane lands and we head to board. We are all nervous. It says on
the radio that Kibera is burning. There are riot police all over Nairobi.

The final results come out tomorrow. Rigging is rife in both main
parties. All the supermarkets have run out of knives and pangas. We
are worried. We are not worried. Tourists still frolic on the beach. It
is hard to imagine the chaos all those pangas promise. After all, things
have been worse before. We don’t do all that Uganda stuff, we tell ourselves.
It is going to the wire, unfolding live, cameras all over the country
bringing the hottest reactions, the angriest protests; they are neck
and neck. Kibera is always causing trouble anyway. No sport ever has
been so thrilling. Under this constitution it is winner take all. Half the
country will feel cut off whoever wins. All monies and plans come from Nairobi, from the central government. It is possible we will not know
who has won until the very last votes are in. The airline steward passes
me today’s newspaper, and winks.

…

We are sitting in an apartment, a group of friends, artists, watching
the election collapse live on television, together with the rest of Kenya.
There is pizza, beer, and drama. Politicians and their agents, from both
sides, are crowding the electoral commissioner. Kenyatta Cornflakes
Center, where the main count is taking place, is surrounded by riot police.
We still believe it will be all right. We hear rumors that some close
to the president came in at night and fiddled with things. Last night
Raila was a million votes ahead. This morning, we woke up and Kibaki
had caught up. But we knew it would be close. People do not understand
numbers, we say to ourselves. Kivuitu, the head of the electoral commission,
is still cracking jokes, so things will be fine. Many key constituencies
have not yet delivered their numbers. The commission can’t
raise them on the phone. It turns out that they are waiting to see the
numbers before fiddling with their own numbers and sending them in.
Everybody is rigging, and now we are telling ourselves that the media
had agents in all constituencies, so they will keep things honest. It is
still only just riveting television. Five years ago we had a good and clean
election; this one can’t be much worse.

It is evening when a sudden energy gathers. Kivuitu clears the room
and disappears. A few minutes later, in a small room, without having
announced the remaining results, without anybody from the independent
press, he announces that President Kibaki is the winner. The whole
room is quiet; the whole of Kenya is quiet. Then, suddenly, all screens
shift to State House, where a few grim people are seated, as Kivuitu
inaugurates Kibaki. No millions of people this time.

Then, there is no news. There is music. Cartoons, and the sun sets
and Kenya goes dark. Al Jazeera survives for a while and all we see is
numbers, fifty dead, eighty dead, one hundred dead. We hear later that,
the moment the president was sworn in, you could hear the screams of people as they rushed down hills and valleys to kill, and all the mobile
phones of Kenya were jammed up with text messages full of rumors and
threats.

These next few weeks, it does not matter that you have known
her all your life and she was the first girl you loved in primary school.
Your wife of another tribe. Your blade will cut through her stomach,
tear through the Tupac T-shirt, and you will clean that blade and move
to another room to look for her baby.

Several Kalenjin militias are marching on foot to Nakuru, and
Baba won’t leave. I am on the phone with him every hour, begging him.
Paraffin and matches cost less than a dollar a day. The ants have crawled
out of the logs of Kenya; some will set their own city, Kisumu, on fire,
watch it burn and cheer.

You will all sit stunned and watch as your nation—which
has
broadband and a well-ironed
army and a brand-new private school that
looks exactly like Hogwarts castle in Harry Potter—is taken over by
young men with sharpened machetes and poisoned bows and arrows.
As you sit in your living rooms, they will take over your main highway,
pull people out of cars and cut their heads off. In Nairobi, they
will lift up your railway, the original spine, and start to dismantle it.
For days there is no news. We are told the generals are about to take
it all over. That Raila has the army and Kibaki has the police and the
air force. Television news has been silenced. Our president is silent.
He is afraid, we hear. There is a joke that he is under his blankets, in
Marks & Spencer pajamas, reading P. G. Wodehouse with a torch, and
every few minutes his head pokes out and he asks, “Is it over? Have they
gone away?”

Last night a whole small army with bows and arrows were killing
people a few hundred meters from Pyrethrum Board. There were
battles in the lakeside suburbs of Nakuru. “I am not leaving,” Baba said.

It is 1983. I am twelve. In two months I write CPE, the national primary school examinations. I spend a lot of time in my room pretending to study. I read a lot of novels. I am in trouble all the time with Mum.

When I masturbate in my bedroom, I do not like to think about people I know. I know I am in love with Khadija Adams, who was Miss Kenya and who is an international beauty star and uses Lux soap. But I can’t imagine her breaking glamour and writhing about. I am also in love with Pam Ewing of
Dallas
—but she is too good for sex ideas, and she is sweet and cuddly. I hate Bobby Ewing and really hate Jenna Wade. Alexis Carrington of
Dynasty
makes me giggle when she talks all pouty.

This afternoon, while kids ran around outside the lines of classrooms during games, I used a paperclip to break into Andrew Ivaska’s desk. Andrew’s parents are Baptist missionaries from America, and he has a whole library of novels. Mum won’t let me go to the library. I have been itching the whole day to do something malicious, to jab somebody with a pen. Inside the desk is a brand-new, unread copy of
The Black Stallion
by Walter Farley. I put it in my bag, between the textbooks. As soon as I get home after school, I rush to my room and lock the door.

I am under my orange bedcover. I need forty-five minutes before Mum comes knocking. The kid in the book is called Alex—he is quiet, stubborn, and lonely. One of those people who quietly go about their business, grittily working, scrubbing stables, loving horses and not showing off, and depending on themselves. So then Alex is stuck on this island with a giant black stallion—a wild beast that wants to kill him. In his mumbling cowboy way, Alex decides to ride Black Stallion. Alex has decided to want something impossible. And he wants this impossible thing so much he is prepared to lose everything. He will not admit this, so he pretends to make his lust a mechanical problem: he will find fix-it solutions. How to jump on the back of the animal, how to rig devices to keep him on the back of the beast, how to bribe the horse with various tidbits. As he goes about his business in his fatherless and lonely way, rigging devices, we drip with his want. He will not say how much he wants to conquer the horse. We want to conquer the horse. We want that horse more than anything. I want to be thrown, fall on my back, and limp for days.

The evening chill has landed. I stand and look outside the window. The lake and hills are foggy, like a movie—there are no tin roofs or sudden fields of illegally grown maize to disturb the English countryside look. I can almost imagine horses. Not a cow in sight, no random goats; even our goat is not yet out to pasture. I put on the radio, rush to find General Service. We have two main radio stations, General Service and National Service. General Service is in English. Every morning after the news, they play soft music like ABBA and Boney M. and Kenny Rogers and Lionel Richie. Sometimes an orchestra called James Last, which plays soft misty versions of famous songs. The news is all about President Moi. James Last is good music to masturbate to: I can lie down and see misty television bodies doing naked misty things in the screen of my head.

Ten years ago, this suburb had been, for sixty years, the carefully built illusion of settler bureaucrats. All white, no black Africans allowed to live here. Only servants who would be beaten if they were seen wearing shoes—it made them uppity. The settlers moved out fast after Independence. So fast, their houses were cheap. Baba bought a cottage in Nairobi that is our most valuable family asset. By 1972 Mum could drive us to town and all we would see were kids like us, living in a landscape like this, which was made for people who wanted to imagine an English spring in a stolen land. Kenya from my misty dawn bedroom with General Service seems ageless and ours. The only problem is National Service radio, all those songs in so many languages that suggest some other pungent reality, songs complicated enough to suggest mess and history. This music does not want to conveniently fit the shape of thrusting forward and shaping yourself like the next opportunity; it throbs with undefined past sounds, and shapes and ideas, and it is inconvenient,
if only because the Anglo-Kenyan garden does not look like that music sounds.

The one Kenyan musician who is allowed regularly on General Service is Kelly Brown. He has an Afro, glittering clothes, and an R&B dance hit in Germany. He comes from Mombasa but has changed his name. Abdul Kadir Mohammed does not work in 1980s Europop circles. As people disappear into Kenya’s newly engineered dungeons, as people die of hunger and disease and roads crumble, we are feverishly passing exams and dancing to Kelly Brown, his Afro bobbing, sequins glittering:
Me and my baby tonite-ah, we hold each other tite-ah, she gives me evuh-rythang, coz she’s ma best thing. Oooh ah. Ooo ah. Ah cant gerrinuf of your luuuurve.

I am supposed to be studying. This is why I masturbate. If I don’t masturbate, I will have to spend the day trying to hide my hard-on and never know if people can see it or not, and then my nose gets all sweaty, and then I have to LOOK AWAY from all breasts, and it seems that all the girls have breasts. What can I do to avoid them?

General Service radio is easy to find on medium-wave radio. Exactly at 800 using the dial. National Service is somewhere around 200. I know this because I try as much as possible to avoid it and its kimay sounds. I don’t know why that Congo music and that bad Kenyan guitar music so distress me; they just do.

The truth is I am not good at pictures; I am much better at words. Any kissing or touching in any book is very powerful. I don’t feel the same with television or movies. Films are for everybody, they make you feel what the whole watching world feels. To a film, I am an outsider, a witness marveling at the spectacle unfolding in front of me. The novel’s erotic world is not alive on a screen—on glass and plastic and metal. It is not alive on the page either, those are only squiggles cheaply stamped onto dead trees. The whole world of a novel unfolds inside the head, fully entangled with the stinging eyes, the tight chest, the galloping belly. It is fully mine, 100 percent private. When they touch and kiss, the kiss belongs to me, it does not belong to other readers, to the author, to the couple. If it is a well-written kiss, it will be carried in a small, coiled place under the hard bone below my nipples.

I wonder sometimes if there is a third kind of human being. There are real flesh and blood people. There are television and radio people. There are people in books. People in books do not have an actual voice for your ears. You cannot see them. You, the reader, work with a good author to make them move around your head, toss their hair, hate and love, and need things urgently. Russet is an emotion inside me that comes from reading things about horses, and manes, and many hairs tossing, and autumn, a set of impressions, movements, lights. These are my concerns.

It will be years before the dungeons are opened, and we find out the truth. In 1983 every day, several times a day, I play Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” and feel myself brimming in compassion for his sensitivity. We know enough to know things are going on out there, beyond the mist. There are whispers. But there is also
Dallas, Dynasty, and Falcon Crest.

Michael Jackson is beautiful. The nose has not yet fallen. He has managed to make himself into a perpetual present tense: no lineage, no history; he is the maximum of sound and movement and nowness. In 1983, while I read novels, Moi is building his Big Dick Building in secret. Every dictator has to have one. His is called Nyayo House. He knows already that to rule Kenya, he is going to have to shed blood. All those years, we thought he was just hapless, that he tortured because he was floundering. Later, we found out that there was an underground chamber, designed by his people, designed for torture with Nikolae Ceauşescu’s help, in that tall tall building. Nobody in the West complains. Moi is a good friend of the West. While we dream shoulder pad dreams, inside those chambers, intellectuals, activists, writers are beaten, waterboarded, testicles are crushed, people are deprived of sleep.

…

It is autumn 2009, as I write this in my bed and breakfast room in Red Hook, New York, near Bard College, where I work. I took a long walk this evening. I walk and step on crushed leaves, watch the first golds and reds in this glorious light. It is such a charismatic season because it looks and feels like the ripening of things—but the leaves are not ripening, they are dying.