The Language we have learned to carry in our Skin

Black 

“It started when the wazungu came,” Nyanya says, scooping some sukuma with a piece of chapati perfectly folded between her fingers. This is how she starts a lot of stories worth listening to: like the time Mum went to the Chama and didn’t make it through the second interview. Nyanya’s reasoning was measured and, to her, made the most perfect sense in the world.

“Ati, they did not know whether you would make enough money as a teacher to be trusted to make the payments? Ala, were teachers not the most respected members of our society before the wazungu came? Of course it started with them. Those Tanzanians with their mwalimu president knew what was what, us we have forgotten,”  Nyanya said.

Mum responded. “But their economy failed.”

Nyanya said, “Economy this, economy that. Did we even know what an economy was before the wazungu came? Ha. We did not need one, and si we were doing just fine?”

Mum was too tired to argue then as she is most times Nyanya goes on her rants.

This time we are watching a documentary about Idi Amin and Baba pauses the video tape when the comment comes out of Nyanya’s mouth.

“Ayii surely, some things at some point we have to stop blaming the white man ehh? Even us Africans, we are not lifting ourselves out of poverty. We are the cause of our own demise.”

Nyanya insists as she always has, “That does not negate that it started when the wazungu came.”

Nyanya’s long silvery-white dreadlocks reach just above her buttocks, and she often talks about how she was in the guerrilla resistance with the famous Field Marshall when they made a pact never to cut their hair until Kenya was free. But freedom is not just independence.

A thing I know now because she ingrained it into me.

“Ayii, but they left Mama Mkwe, did they not?” Baba argues back. “What excuses did we have after they left, even now decades later, what excuses do we have?”

Nyanya’s brown eyes sparkle the way they do when she has a secret to share hidden in a story. “That is the trick, is it not? That they left.”

Baba mumbles something incoherent and presses play, unwilling to indulge her. A British man fills the screen,  his voice droning on about the atrocities of Uganda’s second president and how he went so far as to cut people’s heads off and put them in refrigerators. The presenter makes a dark joke about a midnight snack, and that is enough for me to check out. I am more interested in Nyanya’s secret story anyway, so I scoot closer to her in the corner of our small sitting room and ask her to tell me more. That is all the encouragement Nyanya needs.

“Well you know the wazungu brought many things, like closing your eyes when you pray.” She shakes her head. I have heard this particular version of the story before, but I let her continue.

“Why do you need to talk to God with your eyes closed? Us, we would look at the mountain where the great elder sat and slept and ate and shat when we were praying. That is how you talk to someone you are appealing to. What kind of god is it that does not want you to see him when you are asking him for something. Ayiii, kuna venye some things just do not make sense. When you ask me for something mpenzi, you must always look me in the eye, okay? That is how I know you are being honest.”

I nod emphatically, taking in everything she has to offer.

“You know that they were tricking us, ehh?” she smiles, expecting me to respond with the quote she has told me many times before.

“They told us to close our eyes and pray, and when we opened them, they had stolen our land away.”

Nyanya, with her cheeky smile, liked to say she thought of this all by herself. It would be years later that I’d learn she paraphrased Desmond Tutu’s famous quote,

“When the missionaries first came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.”

It will always astound me how Nyanya could turn any big concept she came across into something so simple. And now, sitting here, she proceeds to say, “Ehe. Do not close your eyes for anyone, not even God. Because a God that cares will want you to see what is happening. Now nilifika wapi? Ohh yes, how this vita began when the wazungu came.”

“War?” I ask.

“Listen kwanza, but yes yes they had to swallow it.”

“Swallow what?”

“The thing with many names; ukatili, vita… brutality, war, violence.”

I wait for her to say more, but she chews on her inner lip, waiting for the words to present themselves to her. Then she starts up again.

“Actually, your Baba is right to some degree; it started when they left. Remember what I said, ehh? That independence does not equate to freedom. So now, that will be useful to understand this story. When Uhuru’s father took the seat for presidency, you know there are all these photos of him smiling and shaking the hand of the British Prime Minister. Like almost every other president that chased the wazungu out of their countries during those last days, the wazungu were still here. After they had packed all their suitcases and cried about leaving their big farms and their workers who they had grown to love, their governors made a promise that they would always have something to come back to in the colonies.”

“What does this have to do with the photos?” I ask breathlessly.

“Ayiii, kasichana. Wait for the story to finish, before it finishes you. I am getting there.”

This shuts me up. If the cost of interruption is an unfinished story, I know well enough to hold my questions.

Nyanya continues, “Now all these wazungu governors thought to themselves, the only way to keep something for ourselves is to make these black people more like ourselves. So they conspired and debated and finally came up with a plan, neh, a very smart plan that would not tie back to them. They got every African president who was willing to meet in a room with them privately to make an agreement. Of course, some of the new leaders, the ones who were wise like Nyerere and Sankara and Nkrumah, them they knew to refuse. They knew that talking to the mzungu behind closed doors is like praying to God with closed eyes. There was no trust. But others, including our own Baba Uhuru, were delighted to see how much they could bargain for themselves under the guise of saying it was for their people, so they agreed. The photos are what the public has, but what happened behind closed doors… very few people will tell you the truth.”

Nyanya lingers here, reveling in the suspense she has built up for me but I do not dare interrupt.

After enough time has passed she says, “They spit vita into their mouths.”

And this is where the story comes full circle.

“Behind those closed walls, the wazungu put away all their politeness and civility and they gurgled all their vita and spit it between the lips of the new leaders of our nations.” Nyanya recoils as if the memory is attacking her, a visceral thing she carries in her body.

“And there are no claws as sharp as that of vita. It scratched their throats, drawing blood that could not be seen; it forced itself down their esophagus, tearing and gnawing the pink flesh off at every point until it found a place to settle in their bodies, a place that would give them access to their host’s tongues. Have I not told you life and death lie on the tip of a tongue?”

I nod but say nothing. She continues, “Ehe, that is what happened. So now when the wazungu left they felt satisfied because they had left with us their ukatili, a tool so we could never truly be free.”

The documentary is coming to an end and Nyanya seems to remember in this moment how the story started. “Now that man, Idi Amin, him he swallowed a lot of vita, it is as clear as night and day that it controls him, but nobody will say that that is where it came from.

Skins 

I see a newspaper headline on my way to tell my boss I am quitting my job. It is over a decade since I first heard Nyanya’s story.

Teacher finds pupil cheating, ‘beats’ him to death.

It should be a semicolon. That’s my first thought. If I were editing this, I would have placed the semicolon after cheating instead of a comma. I sigh and put the newspaper I picked off of the matatu seat next to me back down. This is why I am quitting, why I have to quit.

He says no, of course; my boss. He says I’m too good to let go. “You know Kenyans these days don’t read, let alone write. How am I supposed to find someone who knows how to edit a fucking story? Ehh? Have you seen the graduates siku hizi? They can barely spell their own names.”

I tell him he is a fairly competent man with good judgement and that he will be alright. There are enough jobless Nairobians looking for any kind of work, more than willing to endure his micromanaging abuse for the security of a job. I do not say this last part out loud.

“I’ll give you a raise.” His last hail mary. I look at the old typewriter on his desk, a tribute to the old ways/days of writing. He is the type of man who believes that the British canon is the only measure of good writing, the type of man who treasures the old methods of getting the words on the page. In the age of laptops and computers, he clings to the idea that nothing true can be written unless a typewriter is involved in the process, but every once in a while if it is written longhand, it may pass.

I shake my head.

“Why? Will you at least tell me why you are leaving? Is it another job? I swear if Nation poached you, I will break someone’s bones.”

Ever so briefly, I see a flicker of something sharp in his mouth. I rub my eyes, squeeze them shut and then open my laptop. I show him.

Every story I’ve been editing. Every brutal headline where I’ve inserted a comma, deleted a colon, switched out a question mark for a period when it should have remained a question. But it is not our job to question; it is our job to inform and write objectively what is, without asking why it is the way it is.

What is it

The question is all over his face. “The stories you’ve been editing.”

“I can’t do it anymore. It is too much pain, violence, brokenness.”

He shakes his head. He tells me no, it cannot be too much. He says that this is the calling of journalism, the heart of the matter. We must sift through the hard shit and share it with the world because if we don’t, who will?

I shrug and say somebody else.

He calls me a coward.

I tell him goodbye.

***

I dream that night. I dream of a little boy. His mouth is open, and something is trying to get out… or in? I walk towards him; there are wounds on his body. They won’t stop bleeding.

Let me help! I cry, but he cannot answer. The thing in his mouth is choking him. When I reach for it, it cuts, drawing blood from the largest vein in my wrist. I scream, knowing it is the type of wound that will never heal. My blood drains. My skin turns pale.

Yt

December 28^th 2007

We all held our breath. I remember, as clear as glass, the smell before tear gas and bullets. And as much as I miss Nyanya every day, I am grateful she was not alive for that, or what came after.

I should have quit then, but I was naïve enough to think that truth mattered. That nothing too bad could happen if we held onto the truth.

I like the term bated breath. I find ways to add it to stories that don’t necessarily need it, but this is the privilege of being a writer. Your favourite kinds of words make it onto the page

We wait with bated breath.

Raila is in the lead.

That was the truth, no? We had two candidates running for the presidency. Different tribes, not very different politics, different ideologies maybe, but we could hold on to truth with bated breath.

December 29^th 2007

We wait with bated breath

ODM has declared victory for Raila Odinga

December 30^th 2007

We wait with bated breath

The Electoral Commission has declared Mwai Kibaki the winner of the general elections, with a lead of 232,000 votes

We wait with bated breath

Odinga accuses Kibaki of fraud, urges Kibaki to concede defeat, calls for a recount

We wait with bated breath

Kibaki calls for the verdict of the people to be respected and for healing and reconciliation to begin.

We

Wait

With Bated

(our)Breath

was taken; over and over and over with their words on their podiums, fighting over who got to wear the crown. Our breath was taken. Hungrily. Violently. By acquaintances, friends, lovers, spouses. Our bated breath became a tool, a word, a weapon, a prayer, a clean cut through jugulars.

My mother called. “Are you safe?”

“Yes.”

“You know those people…”

I sighed, “…our people too, Mum.”

She was quiet. I do not know if she interpreted it as those people were our people too or our people too were murdering without cause. I didn’t care to explain.

“If you weren’t safe…”

“I’d come home.”

I poured over the stories brought to my desk. Buildings burned, children and women murdered, spouses killed by each other. No one called it what it was. Riots, protests sure, but not vita, who says?

Let’s play a game.

Name an African country that has not seen bloodshed.

I’ll wait,

bated breath and all.

The truth doesn’t didn’t matter. Who won? Who cares? The damage was done. We were pieces on their board as they played prayers and peace. I should have quit then; instead I wrote and edited line after line, replacing punctuation, adding commas, subtracting question marks, offering hovering quotation marks when they “supposedly” said this and that.

Soon, I started seeing it. The flickering of their tongues. Quick quick. I blamed it on exhaustion. I tried to sleep. I couldn’t. How could I when everyone was dying around me?

Nyanya’s voice played in my head. It started when the wazungu came. But these were not wazungu. These were us.

Masks

Barely two days after I quit my job, I get a call from my friend Eric, offering me a new one. I’ve always been lucky that way.

“The politician’s speech writer left; maternal leave. It could transition into a more permanent role if you work smart.”

I have the volume down on my TV as the headline flashes in front of me.

So and so shakes hands with So and So. 

A show of solidarity.

When they open their mouths to speak, I see the sun reflecting (glinting) off of something sharp. My wrist aches and the dream of the boy viscerally returns to memory. I’ve missed most of what Eric was saying on the phone.

“Sorry, what?”

“You’ve been an editor at that newspaper for what, ten years now? I know you have always wanted to get involved with politics. This could be a way in.”

“No.” I say. Which covers the multitude of other things I want to say, like how disillusioned I am with words, sentences, paragraphs, articles. I want to say that yes, there was a time I thought it made a difference; a time where I thought if we just told the truth, everything would change. I would have jumped at any opportunity to be closer to where the decisions were made because I was taught that’s how I could change the decisions being made. But I’ve watched it all repeatedly, enough times that I can’t see why any of it matters anymore. That’s why I quit, why, in this moment, I hung up mid Eric explaining why this could be a life-changing move which would positively alter my career trajectory.

No.

***

I dream again of the boy. I’m sorry, I want to say, and I know it is not enough. Words will not give him his life back. The thing in his mouth has settled inside him. I see it crawling underneath his skin. I do not go to him. The wounds on his body have scarred over, but every so often, the thing under his skin scratches at them from the inside out and blood oozes out. His breath carries louder than the silence of my unspoken apologies. He walks to me. I shake. I cannot help that I am terrified of him, of everything he shows me about who we are. I shut my eyes.

“Please…” I whisper, not really knowing what I am asking for.

His icy breath chills my cheek.

“Do not pray with your eyes closed,” he says, and it is not just him talking—it is all of them.

I open my eyes, and I am awake.

The next day, I call Eric back. “I’ve changed my mind. I will take the job.”

He does not believe me at first, but I am adamant.

The man who will be my new boss is on my TV screen. He is talking about the issue of homosexuality and how it is causing the drought that is bringing hunger and starvation to the people. I audibly laugh even though there is no one here to hear me. The man has been investigated severally. He was even written into the Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation Commission of Kenya Report, yet the crowd in front of him cheer at the foolishness of his haphazard speech. The crowds’ cheers rile him up, and I can tell he has gone off-script.

I stop listening as I pay attention to the thing crawling under his skin. Every time he speaks, a little glimmering knifelike tongue appears and disappears. He closes his speech by asking the audience to close their eyes. I watch as the thing slithers out his nostrils, pulling blood from his veins. It jumps into the crowd, splattering them with red drops they do not notice. It multiplies, finding person after person after person to inhabit. Eyes closed, mouths open, they receive.

Katika jina la ukatili… Amina. 

I let go of the breath I did not realize I was holding as the crowd dissipates and the newscaster takes over once again.

“A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.”
― Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks

Inside parliament, everyone has a little creature under their skin. But they all move as if it does not exist. I think of Nyanya often. I feel her stories hovering as I greet my new boss, so and so. He invites me into his office, which is filled with pictures of his wife and kids. He is the politician whose cheating scandals have been buried under his hustle culture bravado.

Rags to riches… it is important that he resonates with the rags. That’s his whole brand, and he says so directly. He tells me they had to let the other speech writer go, juu alipata ball, but it worked out great for the politician. The truth was, he needed someone younger, more in touch with the youth, who could speak to their poverty, directly. That is the only way he would make it to the big league. The old men have sat there for too long playing tribal games that do not serve this generation’s needs. The real power is class solidarity, he says, as he plays with the unnecessarily large gold ring on his left forefinger.

He says he has read some of my articles in the paper and winks. I don’t believe him. I smile. I wonder where he was during the post-election violence? Had he flown his family out of the country for refuge? Did he hide in the untouched suburbs of some Karen estate? I make a mental note to research what I can find on that part of his history later.

His assistant interrupts him. I can see his agitation. He does not like being in a room empty of his voice. The thing crawling under his skin settles in his neck; it hums with his pulse, making him look grotesque. He starts to wheeze and then clears his throat. “We have a tradition when we hire a new person: we dedicate them to God. Would you pray with us?”

I nod, and his assistant gets up to leave and closes the office door behind her. Closed doors, closed eyes.

He stands up from behind his desk, saying, “you are very beautiful. I’m sure you have a lot of men telling you that.” He reaches for my hand, and I flinch. He looks betrayed. He says usijali, it is better that we are connected as we come before God. The people are looking for unity; he tells me this is important to know in my new role. He looks for a reaction, and I don’t have it in me to give any.

He is vile but that is my secret to hold, until I get what I want.

He sighs and tells me to close my eyes. I do and feel his breath against my cheek. Unlike the dead boy in my dream, his breath is hot. He starts to pray prey and I hear the sharp hiss.

I open my eyes, and the creature is more visible than I have ever seen it; an unnaturally white spider with knives for legs and a snake’s tongue. It drags itself out of his throat… slowly… with every word, scraping the inside of his mouth. He is in pain. I know it, but he only shows it by getting louder and more performative with his words as the creature cuts his tongue and the inside of his cheeks. All of its eyes focus on me. It crawls, drinking blood as it tugs its knife legs to the tip of his tongue, getting ready to jump.

I pull back, the weight of what I am about to do cutting to my core. So and So squeezes my hand tighter, his words accelerating; volume increasing. The creature’s sharp tongue flicks in and out, sucking up the blood it has drawn. I steel myself and hear the dead boy’s voice in my head.

I open my mouth, but I am no fool. I keep my eyes open.

***

I smile and perform niceties that feed the creature living underneath my skin, an offspring of the one so and so spit into my mouth. At first, it is subtle, barely there. An itch that cannot be scratched, a sting beating blood against veins, a bite infecting my muscles and tissue with a deep unsatiated hunger. I feel it growing, wanting full control over my skin. I do not let it take over because I know where it is, the creature crawling between my hypodermis and dermis. I call it by its many names. It feeds off of respectability, and I give just enough to keep it satiated. Niceties and lies. But it knows I know, I saw it, I control it… for now.

So and so has taken ill unexpectedly, mere days after I have been hired. Right before his first big campaign speech too, where he was to announce his intention to run for the presidential seat. His team ask if I can present the speech on his behalf. Since he has prayed with me, he trusts me to represent him. Of course, the crowd does not need to know that. More inexplicable things have happened in the game of politics.

I am ready, I tell the team.

I am ushered to a stage in an open field. The creature crawls up the inside of my arm, I still it. Not yet, not yet. I walk towards the podium and notice the cameras and journalists all crowded together. I wonder if my old boss is among them. The rest of the audience is made up of what so and so would call “watu wa ground”-his fan base: the mechanics, security guards, wamama wa mboga, and various vagabonds, all look up at me expectantly. I see variations of the creature growing in all of them, the exploited police officers who murder the vagabonds who beat and abuse their wives who curse out and shit on queer people. The thing underneath their skin that they swallowed with their eyes closed. It is eating them inside out.

I let the creature climb up my shoulder; it gashes at the inside of my collarbone, and the pain is blinding. “Vita,” I whisper.

“Ukatili; the language we have learned to carry in our skin,” I say louder, into the mic. “Fungua macho.”  It is a command they have no choice but to obey. Their eyes are all on me, and I see the ones they have lost. The dead, murdered by the state, in between the living. They are everywhere. Their eyes are open, and the creatures under their skin are hungry. Then there is Nyanya. She nods at me and smiles. The living people are horrified.

I clear my throat. “It began when the wazungu came…”