When preparing for a ten-day
sojourn to my home country two weeks ago, I packed the correct garb for summery
days, the perfect shoes for my bridesmaid outfit, and contentment steeped in
the marrow of my bones.
It was my second return back home
in one year, a rarity. The first had occurred
in July, when I was more orthodox in my packing, as I joined a constellation of
relatives to lay our beloved Uncle Job to rest.
December 17, 2011 was the excellent
occasion of my older brother’s reaffirmation ceremony after twenty-three years
of marriage. That day, I smiled at everyone, so as not to offend relatives who
had slipped my memory.
Now, as circadian rhythms reset
to my American time zone, cheerless admin-and-litigation hours at work have taken
the place of the happy-go-lucky days in Nairobi.
I revisit photographs. I
scrutinize faces, bodies, locations; they are adequate restoratives that stave
off the evaporation of recent excitement, when family and friends from faraway
places – Afghanistan, America, Canada, England, and Germany – temporarily intertwined
in a collective embrace; immigrants with panoramic lives.
Twenty-eight years have elapsed
since my first leaving home to attend Hunter College in New York City. Almost three decades, during which the narrative
of my life has evolved from a focus on life in Kenya to exclusion, shifting to
life in America and Kenya, in duality. My multiculturalism is my current
preoccupation as I discover truths and views of life I would have shunned
during my first years in America. In
fact, this first-person account is an adaptation to western individualism; most
people in my family still have a cultural aversion to personal
revelations. However, I no longer shun
autobiography; I am Mama Shujaa, after all.
I did not plan to separate myself
from home for more than four years. Modest
dreams carried me through, and culture shock, anxiety and loneliness soon gave
way to love and comfort. I met a young
man from Nigeria, the son of a career diplomat who was accustomed to uprooting
and rooting. In his companionship, I
began to see more clearly the place I had left; I began to understand rifts,
major and minor, physical and psychological, and their convergence into systems
of being, into ways of life. We fell in
love, married and started a family in New York’s tri-state area.
December 17, 2011 presented the additional
occasion of my husband’s first visit to my home country. Two days earlier, as the plane lifted off
from U.S. soil, we sat side-by-side and watched structures fading into tiny
specks, the terrain disappearing, as we ascended into the wide emptiness of
altitudes of 36,000 feet above sea level.
Thousands of miles and several
hours elapsed, and with minds attuned to first impressions, (his of Kenya, mine
of my relatives’ opinion of my husband), we landed at Jomo Kenyatta International
Airport.
“Africa is Africa,” he commented,
as we proceeded through immigration, customs and baggage claim. In his mind, this brand-new rendezvous was
not brand-new after all. Meanwhile, I
had ascribed unique values to my home country and I rejected his valorization
of this land as no different from any in Africa.
***
As first-born daughter of my father
and mother, I bear the names of my maternal and paternal grandmothers’,
respectively. For decades, I have lived
in one place and remembered another. My parents have loved me from afar, their
love stretching beyond the limits of geography.
Which is why, my focus repeatedly turns to the photo pictured above
(taken last week, when I set foot into my bedroom for the first time after twenty-eight
years).
It is a photo of a wall in my
bedroom after the fire that destroyed my childhood home and gallery in 1997. A fire whose flames licked relentlessly at
the 100-year-old stone structure, and what remains are ruins that
interestingly, have become a popular spot for photo shoots by Kenyan models.
In that room, I spent countless
hours tucked under the covers of my bed on chilly wet afternoons, lost in Nancy
Drew or Hardy Boys. And when I entered the sizzling phase of Mills & Boon
romances, I explored awakening pubescent sensibilities, all in the safety of my
bedroom.
The fire consumed my room and its
contents, but left a pattern, worked out of the wall, a panel that seems to be
explicit, and its content deeply symbolic; maybe an approximation of the map of
America? A tracing of my adopted home, locating
my existence?
Have my ancestors been keeping an
eye on me, over the course of these years? Or, am I reading too much, seeking
traces?
It is a beautiful piece of
relief.
Mama Shujaa.
