09/09/2024
Daughter,
Hide this letter. It concerns your father. Undressed. Before a world knowing so little of a big scandal about which I write to you.
This week, what I have worried about all my life confronted me thrice. Then images of old aging people started flooding my mind. Should I blame or thank the early morning ride I took in a packed electric METROTRANS from Embakasi to the CBD? My mind started racing with awe and rage soonest a grey-haired man who is pretty in a worrying way, perhaps in his sixties or beyond, boarded at Cabanas. He rushed clinging to the handgrips near me because younger people occupied all seats. In vain, you wait for someone to leave a seat for him. His struggle to remain standing as the bus danced to potholes and bumps resembled a person desperate to remain planted in a disinterested world. Only when he alighted did I start thinking about what people in Mwakingali A mean saying “wazee vijijini, vijana mijini”.
Now I remember words your grandfather, my father, told me some years ago. Maybe you recall that we visited him when you were about five. You cannot remember how troubled I remained for the days after listening to him when he pulled me to the edge of the hill outside my grandmother’s home. Did he know how deeply his words cut me? The imagery he utilised did not sound rehearsed. It was natural. From the deep of a defeated heart. He said, “Aboo, ndoo yapo yakamba.” Miserable English cannot faithfully render what he told me in Kidawida. May some illustrating help cure the rift due to carrying, to any other language, what he said.
His Kidawida words translate as “Fellow, my earth is at dusk”. What he is talking about here means a time that is difficult to understand. It is the time before total darkness. When one wonders why it not black dark yet the sun has gone to sleep, completely. It is a moment of the day’s final struggle against darkness. Like when deep sleep inches around its victim. When one vaguely discerns the blur between living and sleeping. It must be the same with when the body is between life and death. When the spirit refuses to give up physical life, yet it is sure of entering the next stage. Did his language not capture the exact minute when unity of spirit and body makes its last futile attempt? That dad said these words when the day was exactly at that hour makes the words dignified. Loading his utterance with meaning. Had he appointed to tell me those words at that hour? Unfortunately, metaphor rarely plays itself out to help our understanding. All these merged a profound coincidence to make that moment and statement a microcosm of dad’s entire life—a summary of all good and bad projects in his life. At once, it was a giving up. I stray.
Two days after our first encounter, at around the same morning hour, our city old man boarded the matatu I was travelling in at Tusky’s Embakasi. Again, his presence speaking to me intensely. Perhaps because of my newfound mind of picking pieces from your aging grandparents. Again, I remember a day my father returned to a home wailing and growling. Due to hunger. He had left at dawn to scratch and search a morsel for family in the scorching Taita/Taveta. His search took him to the Voi Safari Lodge, from where he staggered home. With half a sack of Irish potatoes bruising the large bones then protruding from his aging spine. Daughter, what inviting soup or meal can one make from potatoes transparent with lack of an onion or tomato? That meal achieved only two vital ends: it saved us, my siblings and I, from starving; and caused in me a standing hatred of potatoes. Sorry, I strayed.
The old man’s second ride with me was of one used to public transport. Maybe he works somewhere along Lang’ata Road. I was watching him as he walked away after alighting at Nyayo Stadium. Then I picked a detail, a humiliating one, that I did not notice the first time he clung on the straps of METROTRANS all the way to Bunyala Road. He has a stroke on his left side. He walks with a limp and tilt, like a man who had wasted his life in the city. Each of his steps are a trespass into his many years on earth and Nairobi. He is a lesson, that our walking is all we are. Our gait declares what we face or fear. Why could this elder not afford a personal vehicle to shield him from the shame of public glare? What mistakes would he repeat if given another life? Did he drain his youth and money in indulgence? Did ancestors inherit him vanity? Is it the providing for siblings and family?
Nevertheless, Daughter, maybe he is many lessons at a glance. He tells us that parents are even more authentic while at their weakest. For their offspring, they put down their life with truth and finality. Parents die as many times as the number of their children. Our case equals eight deaths for your grandparents, excluding their end that fast approaches. I have seen in my parents, your grandparents, how the problem of one child takes the whole parent away. Not that they forget how the other children need their help. No! Your parent is ready to die for each of your siblings. Let any other among you get into problem and see whether daddy gives her a fraction attention. It is always my all and whole. Perpetual cycles of life. Did I depart?
The old man struggled past the small shops and trolleys of young men hawking eggs and sausages at the start of Lang’ata Road. He could be a parent to any of the hawkers. However, each pushed him away as search for customers heightened. The young hawkers symbolised his children elsewhere in the country. They are struggling for their daily bread. No malice, no hatred. To remind parents that we can procreate for nothing. No returns. Just to suffer decline. In him were all bits of decline captured. His life represents an erosion that has danced as a clown and a fraud before all generations. Such old people remind me that I have made mistakes similar to theirs. What I fear even more is the reality that I cannot defeat the mistakes that thrives on a chain I seem to have sworn to keep for my lineage. Maybe you want to try to break the chord that ties you at end of my life.
Then my object of admiration disappeared as the matatu took its last trot into the city. I hoisted my neck to catch what I hoped would be the last glimpse of a man whose silent presence had so taught and affected my life.
Daughter, I am always and deeply worried of old age. My dad’s statement and the old man’s struggles in the bus invade me at once. My opinion has this to tell you: old age is scary, ugly and angry. The urge to father and husband heralded Oedipus to tragedy. For you, it will be to mother and wife. These seem humankind’s greatest undoing, sanctioned by fate.
Daughter, here is a last deviation: I sat in the Ambassador Hotel one evening, on the side facing Archives. Then an old woman rushed down Tom Mboya. My awe at aging persons called my mind to her because I knew she was returning to the village to start a new ugly life back there. The start of her end. With nothing, for nothing. Aged and edged out of the city. Time has gone through her and left her lifeless. She has given her all to life in a city whose only reward is a mean expulsion. She was running after a trolley that must have been carrying the summary of her entire time and possession in Nairobi. Signs she is a Legio Maria adherent sneaked beneath her white headscarf, her quick steps mimicking the tumult that is the drums of that movement. My mind insisted other details: she was from Kawangware or Kibera; none of her children completed education; and some are in early marriages and pregnancies.
The problem was her age. She could not keep pace with the porter rushing her to Country Bus, or Temple Road, to board a bus to Western Kenya. She would shift to trots and hops behind the trolley lest her entire life melted into the path to nowhere. Who does not know that porters are always hunting what their clients have hunted all their life? Whoever winks first knows that the city owes no apologies. There is no tolerance for her type in the city. The city humiliates the old and illiterate. Yet, somehow, they cling hence adding to the many old people whose presence in the city wonder and worry us. Our Legio Maria old woman reached a revelation wondering why people cannot just go back home, sorry, to the village. Why work at that age? Could she wind back time to her youthful days? Would she make better choices?
Back to my last encounter with the old man. This morning. The reason I have rushed to write to you. Today he sat next to me. Tension. I kept feeling his urge to tell life off, scream from his heart and then sink into despair. Tears saying his life in the city was an involuntary futile strive against a tide wanted to burst out. Only some moral law seemed to hold him from outright despise of whatever people claim is the meaning of life. He has inspired me to petition God to reverse the order of existence. We should come to this world while old and age younger as we approach the end. Maybe that way we would not strive with the weight of grey hair, lost sight, unwanted presences and a conscious appraisal of life.
Anti-creation starts, or overlaps with, creation. What some call coming to birth—writing or telling the story of becoming—is the futile attempt to silence the authentic and innocent subtext. The subtext is death, the unbecoming. Dying. Life is dying. We are always on the verge, ending. Disintegration is creation. The beautiful things and beings we meet are the very tail end of a process of decline. We are just lucky that we meet pieces headed to the dustbin. Our sad, true, and permanent, swimming against the tide of life is valid. Those who refuse to imagine themselves happy in the Myth of Sisyphus are not sadists.
As the engine of the matatu went off at Kencom, a premonition that I will become insane at old age assailed me. It is not the insanity of picking s**t along streets. I fear the apparently stylish yet subtler, hence uglier, type of insanity: forgetting the names of people close to me, losing the smell or taste of sugar and salt, and getting lost on my way home.
Now my mind has clearly laid out my sunset days. I see each of my evenings take the shape of a metaphor of things wished, complete with ghosts of dreams abandoned halfway. With my unfamiliarly stiff and painful knees, accompanied by a blinding furrowing on the face, as I frown gazing at each sunset, this is to tell you that you owe no one pity or help due to his or her old age. Yours approaches fast.
Why do I confide in you when these matters may still be abstract to you? Maybe they could help us make our relationship meaningful. You could use my ranting to study life and rationally bind yours. When despair besets you, these words will be our shared situation—comfort from the solidarity of our estate. Maybe they will make you innovative enough to find ways out of this serpentine conveyor. Above all, I write to you because I hope to find some last-minute dignity in your victory against life. You are my last claim, that life can favour some people. If you want, as says Butler Yeats in “When You Are Old”, unleash this letter and turn to it when the perpetual enemy of our bones says it is your turn.
To Dear Daughter, On Decline, Rants of Apa Mwambeo.
