One Day I Will Write About This Place: A Memoir

When I think about describing this book the phrase, “utterly delicious”, comes to mind. Initially I had a hard time getting into the book. Wainaina has a unique way with language. While the story is linear, the prose is borderline stream of consciousness. Once I gathered in the rhythm of the language, the harmony emerged. Certain passages were pure umami tantalizing the brain much like a morel does the tongue.The Kenya described therein is an olio of languages.“There are many understood ways to address someone: sometime you shift quickly into English; often you speak in a mock Kiswahili, in an ironical tone, simply to indicate that you are not dogmatic about language, that you are quite happy to shift around and find the bandwidth of the person to whom you are speaking.”The book is like this too. It weaves in little snippets of African languages that give you a feel of time and place. Many words seem to be a mash-up of English and a tribal language.This is a memoir. It is a coming-of-age story. It is a story of a troubled young man finding his way as writer, initially against his family’s wishes. It is a story of Kenya after the British left and turmoil that ensued. It is a story of a land trying to overcome its tribal traditions, and failing in many ways. It is a tale of a nation attempting to come into the 20th century Western world and not really succeeding with that either. Perhaps my picture of Africa comes for old movies, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and news clips from South Africa. Wainaina paints a much more nuanced picture that comes across as a kaleidoscope of images.I found myself underling passages as I read. Either because the language was so rich, the imagery so beautiful, or it encapsulated a thought I found meaningful.“After school, I spend a term at Kenyatta University, doing an education degree and majoring in French and literature in English. I am terrified I will end up becoming a schoolteacher. A fate worse than country music.”And another:“Everyone 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 your were lunching with Nelson Mandela.”Some introspective moments:“I am afraid. If I write, and fail at it, I cannot see what else I will 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.”“Cloud travel is well and good when you have mastered the landings. I never have. I must live, not dream of living.”“He sounds tired. I wonder if I will ever manage to survive having children.”Like a book of poetry this is a book to put down for a while and then pick up and reread.

Stung by the raw violence that clears wide swathes of the population every election season, Kenyans are waiting with bated breath for the next Kenyan General Election in 2012. Writers came together in the past to become the institutional memory of our tattered electoral process, and one of these Kenyan writer/editors, Binyavanga Wainaina has stepped in front of the drawn lines to tell his side of the story.In his book currently flying off the shelves and e-readers we meet, a Kenyan writer understanding Kenyanness. Selling swiftly as one of Oprah's 2011 Summer Reads and ranked 9th most popular memoir on Amazon at this posting, this book is billed as a telling of the stories of `tribal unrest and Western influences on his homeland'. More than that, however, the story he tells, sometimes in rapid-fire fits and starts, becomes a loud voice portraying what many do know about him - writer, traveler and thinker; and what we do not really know very much about - son, student and comrade in culinary exploits and more.Opening this book, I found out many of the things that I know to be Kenyan were tattooed on its pages. The searing hatred by tribal lines that erupts every other year, the delicate fabric of polite society in Kenya that he translates as the society that says "Who runs things. Who can. Who Can't, and Why not". Many times I could feel the tension running through, indicated in the consistent question Wainaina receives about what is his tribe, really, and why he has such a seemingly strange first name. And before that is answered, it also names the things that we value the most, land, and success - sadly two of the most elusive things for any Kenyan especially today.In a tale that meanders through Binyavanga's early years, and his coming of writing age, we start to understand why his unending thirst for books led him forward. It is scary that his book writing could have become another tome on Africa edited by development experts for appropriateness. How apt that while we heave a sigh as his life-story starts to take form, we cringe as we understand how writing about Africa, while wearing your African dress and your multilingual manner is so fraught with interference. Such is the path that Wainaina beats through his life, a life he continues to examine and put to paper.One of the most striking things about this book is that it does not follow the `formulaic' way to write a memoir. There are no full-stops in the development of his thoughts. The characters are as vast and come dangerously close to being illegible. As I read it, I remembered only too well that when you start to write about those who have made a mark in your life in Africa, you have a rich cast of characters to represent.The author paints detailed portraits of his life, succeeding in extracting our stories and our own Kenyan roots in his wake. A riveting read from cover to cover.

As part of my project to read more global literatures, I reached out to one of my African connections about what to read on Africa. Now, of course I know that there is no one African literature as there are fifty plus countries with a complicated history of colonization, but I am glad that my friend pointed out Wainaina’s text. What this memoir allows is the reader to see the post-colonial continent on a broad scope through the eyes of one young man – he grew up in Kenya and lived for a time in South Africa and we get to see a visit to west Africa and then we see America though his eyes as he moves here to teach writing. What the reader sees is a set of vibrant and distinct cultures, plural – a helpful reminder not to essentialize a whole continent to the savannah in Tanzania. I think Wainaina’s story is a tragedy of a small scale though, as he never really finds a place that seems like home to him. Kenya is home, Uganda is the homeland of his mother, America is some sort of promised land with a failed promise, but he’s never at a place where he can be himself. Not sure how much of this is him or how much of it is the fake borders the colonialists drew (or does that give the dead too much agency over the living).

Perfect, it's like a new one