One Day I Will Write About This Place (26 page)

Voting day was probably the quietest day in Kenya’s history. From Nairobi, I took a
matatu
to my hometown. There was virtually no traffic; all the streets were empty. The tin-­shack cities were ghost towns, as were the pyrethrum plots at the fog-­dark, freezing height of the escarpment. I looked down and saw little patches of green and brown, tea and coffee and pyrethrum and cattle: fields of dreams.

A few days later, the largest crowd in Kenya’s history gathers, in Uhuru Park, to inaugurate a new president. Moi’s car is pelted with mud. When he stands up to speak, he is booed, and mud is thrown at him.

If, before this, we had wondered whether we could easily become a non­country if we challenged the status quo, this fear died that day.

We began to become something resolute and possible. We started to want again. But wanting, too, brings its own risks.

There is a stake now, and people are passionate.

…

I have never been to Pokot before, so I can’t really say I am looking for familiar things. I know this road, have seen these sights change so many times. When you are locked in your room, sluggish and lost inside yourself, the person you were who lived in the world is vague and distant to you. Standing in the world now, I can feel the echo of my long sleep—­small familiar movements are startling; memories excite, everything is just a little too bright, my Umtata room is already far away. I tingle at the most mundane things, and I am still wary of hanging around people I know: friends, and family.

The
matatu
drives past the turnoff to Kabartonjo, and the road rises a few thousand meters in minutes. To our left are the Tugen Hills, which run all the way to Kabartonjo; from there you can look down from a great height on the Lukeino triangle, on the lakes of this area, the massive Kerio Valley.

…

When I got into the
matatu
this morning, the conductor, a young, shabbily dressed man, had been slapping the vehicle, eyes narrowed and shrewd, sometimes urging people on with a hand on the back, sometimes grabbing people from the side of the road, all the time in Gikuyu—­bawdy and rustic, laughing hoarsely when somebody shrugged away in annoyance. We left, and he marinated chatter in Gikuyu, and in Gikuyu-­accented English.

We had just passed the police post at an industrial area when the driver turned to the young man sitting next to the door in the backseat of the fifteen-­seat Nissan and addressed him in Kalenjin, and he replied in the same language. I was so startled I turned back, and his eyes caught mine and he laughed, then broke into Kalenjin for the benefit of the passengers, swinging his chin to point at me, laughing softly, his smile now open and friendly, teasing, rather than mocking. It is an excellent way to defuse our present political tensions—­he is telling us all is fine. He has good reasons to do this; there have been clashes between Kalenjins and their neighbors every election since 1992.

It is marvelous to watch. The man’s body language, his expressions, his character even, change from language to language—­he is a brash town guy, a Gikuyu
matatu
guy, in Gikuyu, and even in Kiswahili. When he speaks Kalenjin, his face is gentler, more humorous, ironic rather than sarcastic, conservative, shy eyes. By the time we pass Kabarak, the newer passengers are helped in with more courtliness and less rush, things piled on the roof; one older woman is helped in, his eyes respectful.

Some frail old threads gather as the woman sitting next to me sighs, long, in the middle of saying something to the driver. Her shoulder slumps, and she says, “Mpslp, ai, aliniuthii”—­the
mpslp,
a sort of pulling in of saliva, a completely familiar movement, and one I haven’t noticed since I left, years ago. The thing about it is how complete it is, how Kenyan it is, not just the sound, but the way her neck swings, her shoulders move up the droop quickly, as she says, “Oh, that man!” He really offended me, her slack shoulders say. Even now she can only soften and succumb to this offense, for like me, or you, she suggests, we are vulnerable to being offended and being defeated by the offense: and this moves us all, for she has told us all too that she trusts our common reaction enough to know that we too would not put up a wall of pride at offense, or begin an escalation of conflicts. We sigh with her. For a moment we become a common personality, and she is chatting back and forth with people all over the
matatu.

Her name, she says, is Prisca Cherono. It is possible to be alone, says her shrug. I am always afraid of falling into and getting tangled by my messy shapes. When I wake up to an awareness of place and time, I find I have gone far away from others, and I do not have the confidence to make my way back. In a way, writing keeps me close to people. I feel comfortable taking huge leaps of perception, and knowing that I can come back to what I have written, and build it into a defendable shape.

These simple shrugs bring me back.

If, in the soft quiet after Prisca’s shrug, she turns back to me in the fifteen-­seater, and asks me some small intimacy, which my individual person would not appreciate—like, why are you so fat? your body remembers­—she has made a community by sharing her vulnerability, and my community person will find himself being gracious and open.

I say, “Oh, I lived in South Africa. They have a lot of fast food.”

“Oh,” she will say. “I heard it is like America there,” and the whole car will pause and picture this.

We live by these acts, in any part of this country, where neither our anthem nor our tax base nor our language nor our view of the world is in any way universal.

It often feels like an unbearable privilege—­to write. I make a living from simply taking all those wonderful and horrible patterns in my past and making them new and strong. I know people better. Sometimes I want to stop writing because I can’t bear the idea that it may one day go away. Sometimes I feel I would rather stop, before it owns me completely. But I can’t stop.

I look out, and there is a horizontal placenta of cloud, dirty pink and brown, and somewhere in this distance, shafts of cloud-colored rain are falling. On both sides of me, there is a wall of blue mountains, the escarpments of the Rift Valley. There is a trail of goat shit on the road.

Grace is a funny thing, and I don’t mean just the grace that refers to swans. Let us imagine that as Prisca begins to speak to the whole now-open vehicle, a Bavarian tourist in the car says something poisonous, like, “Please shut up, madam. Can’t you see I am reading?” The moment this happens, this man senses the small shifts and stiffness inside the vehicle, the sudden silence of fifteen chattering people. His confidence in his body evaporates. His fingers do not know what to do as they fidget, and his throat clears, gurgling defenses. He knows exactly what he has destroyed, but not at all what she said or did, or what that meant.

He could go quiet and look fiercely into his book, face red, and soon he will be lost inside it, and the open chatter will rise again and seal him off. Or he may choose to be brave and stretch out an arm, which we are all so suddenly acutely aware of—­it stands outside our common experience. If this wiggling thing cannot read the common body, its actions are unpredictable. It is so easy for people to turn on you. Here in Kenya, where only our interactions keep us together. Now that the state is failing, we are held together by small grace, by interpersonal relationships, by trusting body language.

I lean back and let my fantasy loose. We are tense, as this foreign object reaches forward. Perfectly physically familiar, this hand becomes an immediate animal threat, an inhuman object. It is no longer a warm symbol of a proferred greeting. It is a thing that can hurt flesh. We may choose to hurt it first. It knows this and is tentative, and those long pale wrinkled things that spread like a fan from a palm flutter for a moment, and then pat the shoulder of the woman, too hard or too softly, self-­consciously, and the woman jerks sharply with an inhaling of breath to catch his eyes, and we inhale sharply too, and his eyes are jumping now, clueless, and he looks down and his shoulders have slumped, and this immediately releases our tension. He mumbles, “Sorry, sorry mama,” and there is silence for a moment as we let him marvel with us, at his own bravery, for he has found his way to us blindfolded. We avert conflict every day with the smallest of things. If there is no law, no order, what keeps us together? Faith in the future? Not really. But we have built a common body language of a sort. We have to be alert and extra considerate to each other. That thread is what we hang on to.

So now, somebody, the conductor maybe, and this becomes a truly appropriate word—
­conductor
—his job is to speak all our languages, move his body to arrange us, persuade us, collect from us. He takes charge and sends us all into a new series of patterns by saying, “Hallo mzungu,” and jerking about in a deliberately simple-­patterned way, a parody, close to our idea of a television Bavarian clumsiness, and we all burst out laughing at this joke with no punch line, constructed only out of movements that are incongruous, a word I am already associating with my brief religious ideology, based entirely on patterns and conductors. So many innocent people have died in this Rift Valley, killed by neighbors. We can’t just trust the moods of moments, the memories of love and life.

During these minutes, we climbed up a whole wall of an escarpment, which every year yielded to scientists more and more ancient hominids and early human permutations, and ten or twenty languages hidden in the hills out there. In this distance many languages are spoken whose history is unwritten, things are known that have yet to be shared. We drive past lakes and parks and towns, and these remain invisible, as we register with no conscious attention little sighs and slumping shoulders and a pat on a shoulder.

And so, I register the irony of a swaying conductor, moving to be irreverently German; achieving this is only doing it ever so slightly wrong. He is confident enough to use the smallest of signals to suggest that he is not proposing violence or offense by this parody, but is defusing dangerous awkward patterns, killing their threat. And we all get it; even the imaginary cliché Bavarian leans back and laughs. I want to wander, and see people and places. I want to move and watch and not stop.

…

I spend the night in Baringo town. The next morning, I hire a private taxi and wander past the tarmac to Pokot. All around us are mountains and dust and rocks—­stones, rocks piled as far as the eye can see. The Pokot, 150,000 in number, are farmers or herders (often not the two together), and live mostly in this hostile land. The altitude changes rapidly, from three thousand meters above sea level to eight thousand feet. Everything around me is a memory of water. The dry riverbeds, the millions of dried petrified trees, the camels. Hot dry wind. Water-carved gullies and channels. The stone dams look silly and useless. Every few years, when the rain comes, this is a green place, lush and impassable. Bridges, cars, people, cattle, and camels get washed away.

We stop at a small village center to buy cigarettes and consult with the chief. The Pokot elders congregate around the car, and all burst out laughing when they see me. They are convinced I am a woman, even though I have a beard. Only Pokot women dreadlock their hair. I am astounded at how healthy they look. Not a sign of sickness or mal­nutrition. They are all lean and beautiful. The women are well oiled and gleaming, with twisted locks, and the married women have enormous disks of beadwork around their necks. Some wear old leather smocks, beaded and earth colored. One older man has a round disk of beads woven into the top of his head. The rest of his scalp is bare. I see another man with a plug below his lower lip—­this I know was traditionally meant for lockjaw.

Here, outside the tarmac, they ask us if we come from “Kenya.”

The second-longest bone in our bodies is called the tibia, a Latin word that also refers to the musical instrument by the same name, as flutes were once made from the tibiae of animals. There are two bones in our lower legs, the fibula and the tibia.
Fibula
means “clasp” or “brooch” in Latin. The idea, among the Latin-­speaking ancients, was that the fibula was the clasp, and together they made a brooch.

In Pokot, an essential word,
korok,
allows me to glimpse, in a small way, how this landscape is seen through Pokot eyes. The word
korok
is three things: the tibia, a unit of physical space, and a unit of social space. It is not clear to me, or to the anthropologist who first wrote about this, Francis P. Conant, whether the tibia as a concept in Pokot has anything to do with the other versions of the same word.

There are two clear features of land here: rocky mountain, in the not-far-­off distance, long walls of mountain height, running vertical in folds, and intensely flat, parched land, covered in small rocks.

Each fold is a shoulder of sorts, and in between the shoulders, rainy-season streams and channels of rainwater will run to the plains, fanning out as they descend, making them wider at the base than at the top of the mountains. This is a
korok,
and a fundamental unit of measuring society and physical space. A
korok
can also be a slight elevation between two streams of water. So, a
korok
can equally be a shoulder rising a thousand feet and bordered by water and a slight slope of twenty or so feet marked out by flowing water. I am reaching here—­at the possibility that the way these physical spaces lock into each other is similar to the idea of
korok
as the tibia, the brooch. Maybe the lesson here is opposite to this: a simple reminder that words carry such pungent worldviews.

The car swoops down into a riverbed, surrounded by trees, and my skin is assaulted by thousands of shadows of leaf petals.

George, the taxi driver, says the people here get a lot of food aid from various international donors. He also says that the Pokot have been much less affected by modern life than their cousins the Maasai—­and that the Pokot have remained away from the usual tourist beat.