adminThe Reader Lovemore Ranga Mataire
TRUTH has always been at the centre of literature. Yet many authors would rather present their narratives as fiction cautiously fearful that the truth tends to be rigid and sterile.
Fearful, that the truth may present the narrative as more like demagoguery and not an avenue for multiple interpretations and illumination. While fiction’s fundamental thrust is to aim for the emotional and moral truth, a memoir is by its nature supposed to embrace truth that contains certain factual data in the form of names, places, people and actual dates of important events.
In writing: One Day I Will Write About This Place (2011), award winning Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina tries to connect episodes of his life into a beguiling account of sort of coming of age in the post-colonial Africa.
The “place” that is referred to in the title of the book is symbolical of not a single entity but refers to Kenya, his country of birth; Uganda his mother’s native country and South Africa where he attained university education and where he experienced the first spasm of wanting to become a writer. Wainaina’s memoirs are compelling in that they are not just informed by the history of Kenya but in a broader sense tries to explain Africa’s situation without necessarily attributing everything to colonial woes.
In the first section of the book, one encounter the young Wainaina grappling to make sense of the images being beamed on television upon the death and burial of the founding President of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta.
The funeral is punctuated by dance and songs in remembrance of a man largely viewed as a larger than life figure.
Thus he says: “Kenyatta is the father of our nation. I wonder whether Kenya was named after Kenyatta or Kenyatta after Kenya.” The narrative effortlessly explains or rather lays bare the tensions, uneasiness, mistrust and suspicion existing between neighboring countries (Uganda and Kenya) whose borders were artificially created by European powers during the Scramble for Africa. “You Ugandans spoiled your country. Why do you want to come and spoil ours?” And so through ellipses a gradual picture of post-colonial, Kenyatta and Moi-era Kenya emerges.
The style that is employed by Wainaina is very difficult to sustain and needs someone with a unique mastery to construct vivid images of what had become of Kenya even in terms of language and naming things. Intermittently, Wainaina reverts to childlike speech to make comments like: “We are a mixed up people. We have mixed up ways of naming too…When my father’s brothers and sisters first went to colonial schools they had to produce a surname. They also had to show that they were good Christians by adopting a western name. They adopted my grandfather’s (first) name as surname. Wainaina.”
The language catches up with Wainaina as he grows up as exemplified by the book’s provocative style. He has an enthusiastic eye for the comic and contradictory and Africa is the land of contradictions with regards to ethnicity and tribal politics.
A man long thought to be dead is discovered leading a “double life in another language.” Wainaina is confronted by a Gikuyu air hostess to prove he is Kenyan, given his first name is Ugandan, named after his mother’s brother.
Although the book is described by its publishers as a memoir, it lacks the unity of theme common in say Wole Soyinka’s Ake’: The Years of Childhood or Man Died: Prison Notes, about his time during the Nigerian civil war.
Disappointingly, this book is too experimental in style and plot as it is not even about discovering one’s cultural heritage or about departure, return and exile. It is a loosely connected sort of coming of age narrative, partly biographical [portrait of an artist as a young man and the rest becomes more of commentary and critique which to his credit is erudite.
Commenting about Wainaina’s background influences, Zimbabwean educated Alexander Fuller now a resident in United States says:
“Wainaina was catapulted into the literary spotlight when his autobiographical novella “Discovering Home” was awarded the 2002 Caine Prize, sometimes called “the African Booker.” The work arose from a long, late-night e-mail to a friend, and it retains an unedited familiarity.
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