Illustration by Victoria Chepkoech
Dear Professor Brown,
I’ll get right to it. On our first day in your creative writing workshop, you told us you would let us in on a secret, your cumulative experience of thirty years as an author and an academic. You sat at the head of the rectangular conference table—rightly so—in all your professorial glory. I was seated across from you in the left corner seat, shyly and slowly adjusting to my new world, observing—learning. You had on a pearl snap shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and I still remember the white stain at the corner of your mouth, where red skin was crusting and breaking down. I also recall how slow and confidently you spoke, as if to assert your presence in the room
“The big stories,” you began, “that’s where it’s at.”
You paused, as if to evaluate the faces before you, “I know that many of you came to this class with preconceived ideas of what writing is. So I’ll tell you: if you want to be as visible as the writers that have come before you—ones that you all so fondly look up to, if you want to be as visible as your professors, to make a living doing something you love, if you’re here to be remembered–”
I inched forward. I wanted to know.
“–write the big stories. Research—look at the stories and the writers that have come before you—see their impacts, their visibilities, their literary reputations, and then ask: How are they successful? How have they withstood the test of time, the test of erasure? And so, in a single sentence, I will wrap up all I have learned during my time as a novelist and a professor: forget the small stories, stick to the big ones.”
Then you projected Martin Seymour-Smith’s Authors List of The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written. None like me.
My father once told me that writers, certain writers, possess an innate force that pushes them to keep writing, that such writers write not because they want to, but because they have to. He said that once you submit to the feeling, every word, every letter, flows from mind to pen to paper. He never told me that there were big stories, or small stories, just stories to be written, and that there was still a lot to write, and much more to rewrite. But then my father, considering present circumstances, would never make it on that list.
The Big Stories. That’s where it’s at.
Forget the small stories.
Small stories.
I want you to read my small stories, to meet my small characters. I want you to know me, and to know them, like I know you.
Still, knowing you, you may be asking, why does she simply observe? Why doesn’t she just speak the fuck up?
Which brings me to my small stories:
Mine is the cultural conditioning of growing up around authority figures that keep fucking up how I define my values, beliefs, and ultimately the way I perceive myself in the world. I have witnessed great inequalities and injustices in the ripple effects of colonialism. I have seen how revolutionary voices have been historically forced into silence, once vocal now stifled. So I speak through my written words, my loud silence.
If I stand on the shoulders of men and women that came before me, then that means they are still here—somewhere, even though I cannot see them.
And that brings me back to them, back to why I write the small stories, the ones that somehow keep persisting through the years despite several efforts to erase.
✺
To my grandparents, it felt as if the whole white globe descended upon them, and decided to take their land, their lives. These homesteaders stonily plucked them out of their land, the way you pluck your wild turkeys once or twice a season. Then came the labor problem: the very plantations that were snatched from them needed tilling, planting, maintenance. So came the native reserves—strikingly similar to the ones Native Americans were forced into. 800 crowded squatters were surrounded by deep spike-bottom trenches and barbed wire. Overall conditions resulted in starvation and malnutrition, such that the only option they had was to work in the plantations.
Yes, people died. Not one, not two, but over 160,000 and that is just the official version.
My grandmother told me about the time she and her sister managed to sneak out of the reserves in an attempt to join the MauMau fighters living in the forest, only to be captured in the next village. She was thirteen. This is her story, and the story of her sister who looked like me. Words cannot describe to you the guilt that follows my grandmother to date. Initially, she’d done everything right:
She had studied the abandoned village, aware that a few soldiers would be scouting its environs to look for deluded escapees, women with whom they could do with as they please. My grandmother and her sister, convinced the soldiers were leaving the village, ran from the edge of the forest into a hut that had just been scouted. Once inside, she studied the tall man who stood not far off from the hut. She saw him notice a girl who had been hiding inside a deserted latrine. My grandmother stood so close to the door, she was practically one with it, and then she broke. She felt the anger resurface as she watched the men violate the girl, who kept screaming. The girl looked like my grandmother’s sister, who was standing behind her. The girl looked like me. Then my grandmother wavered. She became involved, even though my great-grandmother had begged her not to. My grandmother became a vocal one. For the young girl outside.
“Hide,” she whispered to her sister, before stepping out of the hut, shouting, “Mshindwe!”
A few minutes later, when they were done with the young girl, they descended on my grandmother—who had been silenced by a gun pointed at her left breast—and her sister who they had found hiding in the back room.
After raping the two of them, one of the soldiers stood, zipped up his pants, and started to walk out of the hut.
“What do we do with them?” he called to the other.
They couldn’t just leave them naked on the bare floor. As of that moment it wasn’t such a big deal, but rumors had been going around that the demonstrators—some loud Africans who could not be shushed—were now demanding the rapes to stop, refusing to show up to the plantations, even if that meant flogging. So the soldiers decided to slash them with machetes. What the vocal ones don’t know won’t hurt them. My grandmother still swears Ngai visited her, and said that He would only spare her if she kept telling everyone about the brutalities that took place.
She woke up hours later with her dead sister on top of her, eyes open, hands unnaturally reaching downwards, outwards.
One dead girl.
One live girl.
The dead girl, and the live girl stayed still and voiceless.
The soldiers’ voices outside were distinct and clear: one was a soft, low baritone—the other a raspy bass. The live girl focused entirely on the voices as the men exchanged another joke.
“Knock Knock,” the bass went.
“Who’s there?” The baritone replied.
“Cargo.”
“Cargo who?” The baritone burst out laughing, giggling like a small child.
“No, silly. Car go ‘beep beep.’”
The one thing my grandmother says she cannot forget is how loudly she was breathing. That, and how her world sagged, under the crushing weight of her dead sister.
✺
Brown, the reason I tell my grandmother’s story is because the official version of this narrative, the big story, published and valued by scholars throughout keeps hinting at how colonization allowed for deeper integration of Africans into world relations. Yes, there was some level of barbarity, as expected in any colonial history. But at least by the end of it, the European supervision in the country led to Africans thriving and standing on their own as soon as power was given back. But at what cost did the Africans want to be part of these imperialist aggressions and invasions, and what is the point, really, if we’ll all be dead? And if not dead, empty, bitter, and angry?
✺
Next up, I write for a man who is around 80-years-old, a man who had never seen a pen or paper for the first 65 years of his life. It was a beautiful thing in some way, to know that I served as the connection between the oral and written history.
The old man does not know when he was born. This explains his obsession with dates. He could be 77, 83, or neither. While alive, his mother did little to memorialize the day he was born.
The old man’s defining moment was the time he lived in The Aberdare Forest as a member of the MauMau Freedom Fighters between January 24, 1953 and December 12, 1963, dates he recalls with such ease, now that he has a calendar.
He told me of a time during the climax of their rebellion: the genocide was at its peak: 1959.
When he speaks of that night, the old man knocks on his three-legged stool three times.
“They will regret this,” the old man remembers Dedan Kimathi, who was their senior military and spiritual leader, assuring them. Kimathi paced back and forth in the small clearing deep within the thick forest.
“They will regret this,” the men wailed.
The old man glanced at his simple bed, aching to be there more than elsewhere. His make-believe bed—a light brown branch, only a few feet away—hung like an outstretched limb under the sprawling boughs of an ancient Mugumo tree. The branch was furry with ivy tendrils covered in dark green leaves that sparkled under the setting sun. The upside of the branch was thickly thatched with coarse straw, and the other branches of the Mugumo tree reached upwards, outwards—an imploration to Ngai not to forsake His people.
The effect of that evening was to linger long in the old man’s memory.
A red fire sputtered and blazed as Kimathi spoke. He stopped pacing and sat on an elevated log, as the bottom stack of bonfire beside him groaned and creaked. The three-foot logs, which were wired together so they stood perpendicular to the ground around the base of a towering center pole, set into motion five-foot crackling flames that seemed to lean in Kimathi’s direction. The old man sat on a rock close by, with his chin on his hand and his black eyes intent on Kimathi, as he reminded them of their oath and their loyalty to the tribe. They spoke in low tones as they waited on updates from the reserves; they wanted to know if their conditions were being met, if freedom was coming soon.
Beyond the forest and to the north were the native reserves that the Kikuyu had been forced to move into, surrounded by a thick envoy of British soldiers who only allowed children and young women to cross the boundary and play at the edge of the forest, oblivious to the fact that this was how the Kikuyu sent messages and communicated with the MauMau in the forest, oblivious to the fact that this was how Muthoni Kirima—the woman who would later become Kimathi’s right-hand—would sneak into the forest and join the fight.
With great trepidation, the old man faced the warriors, scanning the faces of the men and women, gauging to check whether the hope of the tribe could be rekindled, at which point, he realized that the Kikuyu, the men and women around him, would forever be unfazed by the colonizers who stole their land and took their dignity. Not even the possibility of death would intimidate them.
As the old man’s father had told him many times, far away, across hundreds of kilometers to the west of the forest, the old man knew that other Africans would be pacing, and wrought up as well, but unquestionably springing into revolutionary action. Survival was insufficient.
✺
Brown, I write these stories because, for just a moment, despite all the creative works and literature classics I’ve analyzed, tussled with, and obsessed about in your class, I often feel relieved when I write my stories.
I’ve heard hundreds of them.
✺
Meet Mekatilili wa Menza, prophetess of the 1913 Giriama Revolt, the woman I aspire to become:
Born in the 19th century, she was the only daughter in a poor family of five. After her brother was snatched by slave traders at nine years old as the two were playing, she swore to never submit to the colonizers. Years later, after her husband died, she was finally allowed to directly address the council of elders. She protested the British recruitment of Africans in World War I; the British responded by firing at the crowd she had gathered.
Nevertheless, Mekatilili persisted and succeeded in her campaign. She later credited the women who all individually convinced their husbands to listen to her strategy and fight beside her. Small stories.
Although she was arrested by the British six months later, Mekatilili escaped from prison, and walked a thousand kilometers—from Mumias, an agricultural town in Western Kenya to Kilifi, a town situated along the Indian Ocean coast in South Eastern Kenya—to return to her people.
I should be quick to point out, though, that a long period of time passed between the first female head and the second one. And the two came from completely different tribes. Kikuyu and Mijikenda, learn their names.
Fast forward to Muthoni, the MauMau fighter who snuck into The Aberdare Forest and became the revolutionary group’s only female Field Marshal. She saw and heard that the soldiers had obliterated and redacted the true accomplishments of Mekatilili. Of the two stories that went around, one reported that Mekatilili led her men straight into battle, bringing roses to gunfights, where they all died. The oral version, a counter-narrative, said that she succeeded in blocking the British attempts to hire Africans to work on their plantations and hindered the baseless idea of British collecting hut tax—a move that was supposed to force Africans to work for them, to improve their overseas colonial economy.
✺
Brown, many times I heard you blame the media for reporting fake news, but not once did I hear you criticize yourself for not searching for the truth that is sometimes so damn easy to find. You always talked and acted as though the possessors of real news hide themselves in some unreachable, unattainable dimension. Yet we walk in plain sight, beside you. My mother says these media houses only report what the big-story-people cannot admit they want to hear.
When Muthoni would come to fight for her tribe, imploring her people to speak in their mother tongue, she would wonder when exactly her tribal language—Kikuyu—had started to mean not just something, but nothing to the colonizers. Was it when the first Europeans showed up? That night? Or when the first African to study abroad arrived at the shores of the Indian Ocean with a handful of English texts from Britain? Was it the fact that Africans, despite speaking three languages on average, were still willing to learn a new one? Perhaps there will never be a definite answer. But before you attempt to respond, I insist that you sit still and listen to Mekatilili’s story:
Upon her birth, you could see the sign of the prophetess in her eyes. Everything about her was powerful. Oshun-like body. Serena Williams arms. She did not do it frequently, but when she prophesied, her visions came true. This is not magical realism, some fantasy bullshit. This is real. These things happened, Brown; Mekatilili existed. Fucking Google it.
Her hair was extremely coarse and dense, thick and kinky, and she had very dangerous, very black eyes. Black as the night.
Black.
Pure fucking Black.
And I want to be known, Professor Brown. I want to be remembered, to be as visible as she was.
Baby steps, right?
Why do I stay here? Why do I keep writing?
The first month was the hardest.
Every night, I would lie awake and try to imagine how it was humanly possible to long for a place—for your home—more than I do. If this shit suffocates me—now, here, today, then can you imagine how much worse it must have been for them, boys and girls younger than me—boys like Mekatilili’s brother, snatched from their villages, and forced onto ships, knowing they would never have a voice again?
Some days, I would clutch at my phone, fully believing that if I held it tight enough, close enough, Baba—on the other side—would feel me. Those days, he would tell me to go back into my dorm room, close my eyes and wait a minute. Baba (who does not give a fuck about the eight-hour time difference) would stay up with me, and play me a ngoma through the phone. After a couple of minutes under my blanket, I would sit up and hum, my toes clenching with excitement as I thought about an idea for my next story. It was as if Baba knew that the ngoma could speak to me when words failed. While I was sitting through your lectures on how to appeal to a universal reader, I often found myself grinning stupidly as I daydreamed of home.
In hindsight, when you wrote to me and said that my stories were unreal, and that my characters were unbelievable, you should have been asking me why I write stories that may never be listed as influential. And instead of agreeing politely, instead of conceding to your demands in the class, I should have told you: This is my story, and it does not have to be believable to you for it to be heard.
This is my fucking story.
I am a Nandi, sub-tribe of the Kalenjin, one of the 42 tribes in present-day Kenya. I grew up in Ndalat town, living with many aunts, and uncles, and relatives, at a place where the phrase ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ holds both a figurative and literal meaning. I come from a place where prophets, blacksmiths, and medicine men walk among us, a place full of oral stories—unwritten histories—begging to be documented and remembered. And I have listened to every single one they’ve told me, but they are not done telling their stories, and I am not done writing.
As with most small African towns, Ndalat is filled with people that are mostly, if not entirely, related in one way or another. Before my time, it was a town filled with poor people—as to be expected in almost every African town, despite the apparent rise of coffee and tea exportation under the British rule. Poor sides of the country existed, and so did the rich ones. Growing up, I was always determined to be Agui Kiprop’s best friend. A 53-year-gap made no difference to me. The fact that we are related was all that mattered.
During our annual reunions, we create a long-lasting cohesion among us as relatives and neighbors despite long distances that separate us. When we come together, the sense of time that has elapsed vanishes as we eat, drink, and make merry. At the end of such nights, Agui Kiprop, who was a highly sought-after storyteller during his formative years, approaches the center of the circle where we gather, delighted to listen to one of his proverbial recollections of his life as a young boy. More than just merry-making, these are sessions of wise ladies-and-gentlemen making.
No. No, I will not give you the misguided satisfaction of knowing one of Agui Kiprop’s small stories. I will not speak up because you want me to. I will speak up when I want to, when I am ready. I want you to understand that I come as many, even though I write as one. I come as many, and out of them, me. So while you were busy instructing us to keep off the small stories, you should have been reviewing the university’s mission statement that promises to recognize and respect historically marginalized voices.
I hope I never fucking see you again.
You may think that the reason I write is finally coming into focus, but you don’t know the half of it. Trust me, Professor Brown, my small stories are coming, and when they arrive, you will lick them like honey off a thorn, and I will keep on buzzing like a queen—a queen bee.
For now, I press send.
I will not unsend.
I must not unsend.
I refuse.
