warning: unavoidable
spoilers
The joy of reading every sentence in this memoir, at least
for this reader, lies in the feeling of connecting directly to a strange and
familiar mind. The joy of reading the entire book lies in seeing the title
fulfilled at the end. It starts with the sideways, blurred, and myopic views of
the author as a child, and proceeds through vivid difficulties across several
nations and through dozens of meetings and partings.
I had difficulty at the beginning deciding if it was a novel
or a memoir. The view from the author’s mind was hard to distinguish from
surrealism. In retrospect, he seems to have been aware of his difficulty
relating to people, even to reality, and aware that people viewed him
differently as well.
It is worth quoting the beginning here:
It
is afternoon. We are playing soccer near the clothesline behind the main house.
Jimmy, my brother, is eleven, and my sister, Ciru, is five and a half. I am the
goalie.
I
am seven years old, and I still do not know why everybody seems to know what
they are doing and why they are doing it.
He runs into the distance when the family parks for a rest
on the side of the road. He is looking for the place in the distance where the
world becomes fuzzy and indistinct, and is disappointed that when he gets
there, it’s all hard-edged, just like where he started.
While the interior life of such a child would be interesting
enough in any situation, it reaches a higher level in newly-independent Kenya,
where anti-colonialism gave way painfully to post-colonialism, and terrors and
divisions lurked around every corner. The unity with which Kenyans achieved
independence shattered under the force of the colonial divisions, layered on
top of precolonial divisions. Further problems erupted among people when
neighboring Uganda’s president, Idi Amin, led his country to slaughter. Among
the refugees were the author’s mother, whose name flitted into and out of his
life.
The author flits into and out of the life of Kenya as well,
passing through the South African bantustan of Transkei, the United States,
Nigeria, and Togo. His travels and his maturity correspond with his engagement
with the world and people, though not always harmoniously. Still, he achieves a
level of normalcy and even accomplishment alongside his increasingly confident
interactions with people. The world is not less dangerous, but he has put down
his books, stopped seeking the blurry distance.
A recurring theme is how to feel Kenyan. Binyavanga Wainaina
is almost autistic in his capacity for focusing on details. This makes for a
blizzard of novelistic data that may make a reader feel not up to the task of
comprehension. My accustomed diet of manga
and YA fantasy novels as a break from editing and writing chapter books for
struggling readers may have degraded, or at least reshaped, my reading skills. The
author wraps his character’s narrative in recurring and evolving observations
on small cues to national identity, and large shifts in public sentiment.
This should not sound like something precious and coy. What
emerges from the pages is a hard-won realization of what it means to be Kenyan,
both in contrast to other nationalities and in contrast to internal loyalties
of language, colonially-recognized tribe, and class.
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