The Art of Writing Between Worlds
Whenever I try to determine the path I should take to realize my dream of being a profound writer, I am racked with angst about which literary tradition to work within. The decision is made difficult because of the complex composition of my cultural and national identity. Both my paternal and maternal families are an amalgamation of different East-African ethnic groups and races. My mother is a mix of Ndorobo, Kikuyu, Maasai, and British, and my father is half Kalenjin and half Italian. Each ethnic group harboring either ancient or colonial antagonism for the other. As of age three, I commenced my life as a global nomad. Due to my father’s United Nation’s occupation, my family lived in the Middle East and South East Asia. My parents sub- sequently divorced, and after a bitter custody battle, custody was awarded to my mother who had by then moved to the Netherlands. At 19, I foolishly got engaged to an Iranian-Russian in Brighton, UK. Two years later, I went to study in Toronto, Canada. Subsequently, I’ve moved to the francophone province of Quebec. Here in Montreal is where I have decided to settle. Yet, though I for the first time feel homesick when I have to journey to elsewhere, the concept of home remains nebulous. I am a patriot of more than one nation; my people have no uniting commonalities. It is these multiple loyalties that are at a tug of war within me; each of their causes jostling to be given priority.
As a witness to Dutch white supremacism, I owe it to the friends, family, and acquaintances that I left behind to ensure the world knows of what is going on there. Holland is not the utopia of tolerance that they imagine it to be. I want to reveal the lives of Holland’sallochtoons because visible minorities remain ghosts in Europe’s cultural identity narrative.
I however feel an obligation to Kenya. Guilt inducing images on the screen show Kenyans struggling with poverty, dying of preventable diseases and avoidable famines. Many, if not most, of the would be chal- lengers to the rule of the pot-bellied, corrupt, political elite, live abroad. It’s a terrible irony that while western volunteers travel to Africa to aid the underprivileged, Africa’s talents leave to cement the west’s hegemonic economic position. A platform which makes it possible for the west to exploit Africa. Nevertheless, I believe there has to be a better motive than guilt to prompt a return to the motherland. It is not just that guilt cannot sustain creative passion, it is that guilt is a selfish emotion. It stems not from love and responsibility for your fellow person, but from a desire to maintain a moral image of yourself. And diasporans seem especially apt to harbor images of themselves that are disconnected from their true selves.
In order to deal with their contemporary crisis of fragmentation, diasporans tend to cling on to a romanticized ideal of their homeland. Often those who have lived most of their developmental years abroad, believe they are more connected to their parent’s culture than they are. It is hard for a diasporan to deter- mine which part of their ethnic and national identity is a natural stable self, and which is due to fortuitous travel and recontextualization. Though perhaps instead of philosophizing on the particularities of national identity, we should instead be reevaluating the entire concept of the nation state. In this age of globalization, it seems like an outdated concept. All sovereign states have been subsumed by multinational interests and international governing bodies, and are at the mercy of foreign stock markets.
Today, border crossings rather than being divisions are merely intersections of cultural osmosis. But even prior to globalization, it is a bit strange that Africans maintained nations that were artificial creations fabricated by Europeans. Maybe part of the decolonizing process should have included erasing colonial borders. After all, what did all the different ethnic groups in individual African countries have in common other than a shared brutal history of colonialism? Whether that has been sufficient for national unity has been questioned, for example, by the sort of tribalism that led to Kenya’s 2007 post-elections violence, which killed over a thousand people and displaced a further 200,000.
During this time, family members and Kenyan friends would try to persuade me to pledge allegiance to one ethnic group that I am member of, over the others. Experiences from my childhood in Kenya had taught me however that being accepted by any of the ethnic groups of my heritage wasn’t as simple as merely align- ing myself to them. I’ve always been treated by most Kenyans as an ethnic and cultural oddity. My physical features would prompt strangers on the street to call out ‘’Waria !’’, a derogatory term for Somalis. Agemates were perplexed by my love for rock music, which I had picked up from living in Israel. This, coupled with my accent, which depending on the international school I was attending in Nairobi was either British or American, prompted people to say I was too white; that I was an oreo cookie or bounty chocolate bar, brown on the outside and white inside. My piercings, atheism, and sexual orientation have in recent years led to being la- beled by some Kenyans as lost, confused and westernized. But in reality, I find that it is they that are lost and confused. Their fears of being unable to categorize me in one of their pre-established boxes caused them to project. The truth that these ‘’authentic’’ Kenyans were unable to swallow is that my homosexual experiences and questioning of religion began in Kenya. I have come to realize that even the Kenyans with one ethnic identity who have lived their whole lives in Kenya, do not have a concept of Kenya that is more real than mine. Because theirs is just as much an invention and production based one sort of experience, as mine is.
Paraphrasing critical theorist Homi K. Bhabha, Edward Said postulates in Culture and Imperialism that nations are themselves narrations. Writers accordingly are pivotal to national cultural production. As a per- son who embodies the confluence of some of the disparate parts that make up Kenya, adding my story can hopefully revise what it means to be Kenyan in today’s globalized world. This is one of the ways Afropolitans – cosmopolitan Africans - can uniquely benefit their motherlands. Because as Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu puts it:
What distinguishes this lot and its like (in the West and at home) is a willingness to complicate Africa – namely, to engage with, critique, and celebrate the parts of Africa that mean most to them. Perhaps what most typifies the Afropolitan consciousness is the refusal to oversimplify; the effort to understand what is ailing in Africa alongside the desire to honor what is wonderful, unique. Rather than essentialis- ing the geographical entity, we seek to comprehend the cultural complexity; to honor the intellectual and spiritual legacy; and to sustain our parents’ cultures.
That last bit though is problematic, because like many aspiring Kenyan writers I am haunted by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s sermon on language’s centrality to culture. In Decolonizing the Mind, wa Thiong’o’s last book written in English, he condemns ‘the fatalistic logic of the unassailable position of English in our literary being’. African literature, wa Thiong’o further writes, can only be written in an African language, that is the language of peasantry and the working class.
When we write in a foreign language that alienates the masses of our parents’ culture, we cannot in all honesty claim to be sustaining it. For language carries culture, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world.
So where does that leave people like me? It seems I am damned either way, since it is nigh impossible to master the four African languages of my heritage from a beginner’s level, as well as Kiswahili – the lingua franca of East and Central Africa - from all the way in Montreal. (To fill a void I felt in my Africaness, I did begin taking Kiswahili courses in university, but it is still far from proficient). It is a hard pill to swallow that I will then probably always remain alienated from my parents’ cultures.
In retrospect, I am almost bitter when recalling protesting and crying as a child because I was forbid- den to speak Kikuyu and Kiswahili. I had been enrolled in kindergarten at an International American school in Jerusalem, and I had to pass as a native English speaker.
Art of Writing
I reluctantly adapted, but after discovering the extensive English literary canon, I fell in love with the language. My mum says that when I read, it was the only time I’d smile. Literature has always been my temple. It is where I heal my pain, where I find solace and the holy. It is where everything comes together.
With that in mind I think I shall have my writing practice reflect my reading practice: not bound to any particular genre, or literary tradition. I will write what stirs my passion. Just as I am judicious when selecting which research material I will take the time to read in-depth. I will ensure my language fits the purpose of my politics. If my aim is to write African or Quebecois resistance literature, then I shall write in an African language or French. If I want to make the world know about Dutch racism then it is permissible to write in English, the de facto world language. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o points out, the other function of language is communication. If one is privy to different lines of communication because of being multilingual, then by all means why not take advantage of it?
This world would be a better place if the world’s diversity of voices could be heard, just so that people everywhere would know, that they are not alone. Growing up I never saw myself fully reflected in lit- erature, just parts of my identity such as being a black female or queer. It would have been therapeutic to have comrades on the bookshelf who could have helped me get through the identity crises. For this reason I want to foremost write about cultural and clandestine diasporas, and transnational cosmopolitanism. Toni Morrison instructs that ‘’if there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it’’. There exist few stories about multi-ethnic people who are Third Culture Kids and live behind enemy white lines, because we are a recent phenomena in history. There can never be a blueprint to navigate being between worlds since every individual struggle is unique. However, for those who will inevitable be journeying on a similar path, I want to tell them and the world this much: though we might seem and feel fragmented, we are not made of fractions. We are the embodiment of layers of identities that belong together.
