Coming Home

Binyavanga Wainaina

G21 AFRICA Correspondent

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Binyavanga Wainaina

The Nandi woman still rules the corridor. After 10 years, I can still move about with ease in the dark. I stop at that hollow place, the bit of wall on the other side of the fireplace. My mother's voice echos in the corridor.Ý None of us have her voice. If crystal was water solidified, her voice would be the last splash of water before becoming solid. My stomach lurches with missing her. Yet I am home.

Light from the kitchen brings the Nandi woman to life. Rings on her anklesÝ and bells on her nose, she will make music wherever she goes.

I was terrified of her when I was a kid. Her eyes seemed so alive and the red bits suggested wildness. Her broad, ethnic face brought panic to the pit of my stomach. Why? Did I sense, so young, that her face could never translate to acceptability? That however guised, It would remind of the embarassing place we came from?

In Kenya there are two sorts of people. Forward and backward.

Forward people will wear third-hand clothing till it rots. They will never cross the line. Backward people inhabit an old and rich ecosystem. One that is disappearing. In some cases, that ecosystem isn't there, and they wander about displaying their pride for coffee table books. In every way you can look at it, Backward people are more mature than forward people. Forward people just have bigger guns. They own the waterholes.

In my teens, fired by Senghor and Okot P'Bitek, the Nandi woman became my tigritude. I pronounced her beautiful, marvelled at her cheekbones and mourned the lost wisdom in her eyes. But I still would have preferred to sleep with Pam Ewing, or Iman. It was a source of terrible fear for me that I could never love her. I covered that betrayal with a complicated imagery that had no connection to my gut. She moved to my bedroom for a while, next to the kente. But my mother found her and took her back to her pulpit.

Over the years, I learned to look at her amiably. She filled me with a lukewarm nostalgia for things lost. I never once again attempted to see beyond her costume.

She is younger than me now. I can see that she has a girlishness about her. Her eyes are the artist's only real success. They suggest mischief, serenity, experience and a weary wisdom. I don't need to bludgeon my brain with her beauty. It just sinks in, and I am floored by lust. It makes me feel like I have desecrated something.

Then I see it.

Have I been such a bigot? Everything: the slight smile, the angle of her head and shoulders, the mild flirtation with the artist: I know you want me, I know something you don't.

Mona Lisa. Not a single thing says otherwise.

The truth. The truth is that I never saw the smile. Her thick lips were such a traumatic event, I never noticed the smile.

The artist is probably white. Not because of the obvious Mona Lisa business. For the first time, I also realise that the woman's expression is wrong. In Kenya, you will only see it in girls from private schools. That look, that toying slight smile never happened. She is sitting on a vast sexuality, and is so coolly, so subtly suggesting it. The artist's got the dignity right, but the sexuality is European.

I turn, and head for the kitchen. I put the tea on and continue reading my book. I picked it out in Johannesburg. Francesca Marciano, Rules of the Wild. She can write. I like the ruthless honesty. No resemblence to Kuki, that silly woman who wrote I Dreamed of Africa.

I catch the milk before it bubbles over and put in some tea leaves.

I am now annoyed. What is it? How can you live in Kenya for so long, face yourself with such truth on paper; how can you dissect a way of life so expertly and be so incapable of reading any black person? It's the worst sort of literary betrayal. I finish the book feeling us like not alive things. Things. As unreal as stick pictures.

I have stopped being annoyed at this sort of bigotry in popular fiction. From a good book, it is unbearable. She makes it seem like my life, our lives have no force. Only piles of our bodies will awaken her humanity. She will smell the horror. The smell of death has no colour. This way we come alive for her.

But our lives will remain always dead.

Like the Australians, she will love us much when we are all gone, and are a memory in the vast empty spaces she loves so much. Ah then we will become great mystics. We will be celebrated. How they will mourn: paint, write and see us. Play our dijeridoos.

Later in the book, fuelled by a liberal imperative, she finds a venerable, wise Kamba mechanic.Ý A too-good-to-be true guy, with no flaws. Her trophy. I have no bigotry. He probably exists, making much money by giving a face to her lot that they want to see. She will never visit his home. She will never ask anything of him that will show her who he is. The sort of white person who needs her own personal Mandela. A person to weave a fantasy around, to make them feel that it is them, the masses of savagery; the Kikuyu's drunkenly killing one of them. It is them that are the problem. But I'm not racist, I love Mandela!

Many will empathise. Yes, a new Blixen to worship. Blixen, so famed for her eye for character. Blixen, who speculated in one of her short stories, that the Kikuyu, my tribe, had very intelligent children. More intelligent in fact, than white children. But at age 9, their minds froze.

They remained like children.

At around this time, my family lost their land, and were moved to a Reserve. My Grandparents managed to send all 12 of their children to school. Most went to University.

I put the book down, and 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, bulimarexic, microwavable, fast-tracker. The words soak into me. America is the conductor. We just watch its baton and follow.

There is a word there: skanking. It is defined 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 some brief flash of ourselves in forty years time, in some generic Dance studio. We are practicing for the Dance Championships. Plastic smiles are plastered on our faces as we skank across the room. The tutor checks the movement: shoulder up, arms down, move this-way, move-that. Claw, baby. Claw. Skanking that is only a photograph of itself. Sad thing is, I'll probably enjoy it.

On my way back to my bedroom, I can feel the Nandi woman looking at me. I turn and face her. She looks at me. For a moment I am the artist, white, and looking for a trophy.

I know, her eyes say. I know.