You remember the chilly mornings when you would awaken to Grandma’s voice as she sang songs of praise at the top of her lungs at 4 a.m. You always wondered where she got that confidence, that manner of existing like there was no one else in the world. You remember the transition at 5 a.m. when she would switch to intense prayer and mention each of you by name. She always prayed for you to excel in school, and you thought it rather general, a prayer for academic excellence, for it was made for almost everyone who was still in school, but you loved that it was personal, that it was her prayer for you.
Luckily, the great migration from the city to the countryside only happened once a year during Christmas. It was an arduous trip that required weeks of planning and heaps of money to make. You never liked the trip. You hated the very foundation it was built upon; that the 25th of December had ceased to be the day to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, the son of God, and was instead a day to go and eat meat at Grandma’s home after paying double the fare on the day before. You hated the journeys too, in old rusty matatus with live chickens beneath your seat, briefcases on the roof, and bags on your lap that weighed you down upon seats so stiff that you always arrived with numb buttocks.
You disliked the window seat passengers when you found yourself in the middle seat. You disliked how they opened the windows just a bit to let enough air in to cool themselves while smirking at the rest of you who were slowly becoming lightheaded from the heat. You hated the road too, with dust so nimble that it found its way into the seams of your shirt and a terrain so rough that the matatu would rock up and down, and the roof squished your afro. You also hated the scenery of banal earth and dried husks of maize because Christmas always came after harvest season when the fields were bare.
You hated the blankets at your Grandma’s house; old, musty, scratchy, and dusty, and they always triggered your sinuses, leaving you to sneeze and blow a runny nose all through the festivities. You always wished that everyone else had sinuses too. It was not because you wished them suffering but because you hoped that they could understand that it was possible that dust, the very essence of the earth, could make one sick.
You feared the darkness of the windowless maize storage room that served as your bedroom when you slept at Grandma’s. You always felt as though something was crawling or slithering in the room, so you would scour and scan the room with the thoroughness of a customs officer before you decided to fall asleep while sniffling mucus back up your nostrils on the creaky bed your mother had told you used to be hers. You liked that your brother was also in the room with you, on a bed right beside yours. It gave you comfort and a false sense of safety in case the sounds you heard were not just all in your head.
You hated how he snored, though; that deep grumble that ended with a little high-pitched whistle always kept you up for a while as you stared into nothingness, waiting to fall asleep and awaken to Grandma’s singing at 4 a.m. The mornings were always deathly cold, but you would get out of your room as the sun arose because the aunties loved to sneer when you got up late, and your cousins would mock you, saying that the president had finally woken up.
You were inherently in charge of pegging the goats on the farm’s pasture section as the last born to your mother, and your cousins had nicknamed you ‘Bill Goats’ because of it. You loved goats, although the wide rectangular pupils on their eyes always freaked you out a little. You never liked the sogginess of the ropes that tied them to beams in their shed. It was not really the sogginess that upset you but what you knew the ropes were soggy of. It would stick with you, that smell of ammonia on your palms, regardless of how much soap you used. You were never strong enough to restrain the goats, and they would pull you along with them, leaving you to perform a walk-run movement that made your cousins laugh, and you felt out of place.
It always made you long for the Christmases when they had to visit you in the city, and it was you who had to show them how to flush the toilet, and you saw that I-know-not-what-I-am-doing look in their eyes as you closed the door and left them longing for the pit latrines in the countryside.
Breakfast in the countryside was always taken outside on benches and stools, and you all squinted to look at each other under the shining sun. Tea, if the mixture of soya, cocoa, and tea still qualifies to be called so, was always served too hot in cream-coloured metal cups with blue rims that you would place on the ground. You always had to ward off the curious chickens that would come close and bend their heads near your cup with curiosity.
Cooking the Christmas feast was always a frenzy. There were aunties moving all over with lesos around their waists and uncles wielding knives for the numerous slaughters and dissections of the day. You would always be on the farm splitting firewood with a blunt axe until your Grandma sent your cousins to ‘assist’ you because you were too slow, and they would only end up laughing at your stick arms as your bicep muscles twitched.
When all the boiling and frying was done, you would all sit in Grandma’s living room in awkward silence that was only broken by small talk about the price of fertilizer, the cattle rustling in the village nearby, how corrupt the new government was, or Uncle Kimani’s first time having pizza in the city. Your mother, your brother and you, the city guys, would then become the topic. They would always ask your mother to move back home where there was land to farm and sell that little parcel that barely fit her house in the city.
They would ask about the university experience and when you and your brother were graduating. They loved asking about your brother’s experience more, but how could they not? Everyone loves a doctor in the making. They never asked you much, for they had been told that you were in university doing something in the media. It was a big word that your mother used: media. It allowed them to manoeuvre within it until they had the perception of you that they wanted. However, what bothered you the most was how Uncle Kimani nudged your cousins into speaking and forced them to confess what they were ‘ashamed’ of.
“Njoroge, tell Auntie about how you got a D in Biology because you refused to join a boarding school.”
“Mbugua, tell your cousin Mwangi about how you left school to become a mechanic at John’s repair shop.”
You sympathised with Mbugua that day when he was forced to look at you and tell you about his ‘failure.’ You wondered why he was forced to confess that which had already been said as if he owed you that information.
The general meeting would end, and the ‘children’ would be sent outside, leaving the adults to converse. Your cousins, brother and you would sit under Grandma’s great avocado tree in awkward silence, with those unlucky enough to have been mentioned in the meeting often wandering off on their own. You remember that one particular day when you wandered off with Mbugua to the bottom of a mango tree where he sat thinking to himself. You were intrigued, confused at how it was possible to leave school.
“School just wasn’t for me, you know?” he said.
You wondered who school was for, but you did not ask that. You just sat there in silence, examining his palms that were darker than you remembered. You hated that silence. It reminded you of your remoteness, for there you were, seated beside your cousin, and yet all you knew was his name and, thanks to Uncle Kimani, his occupation. You wished you knew him well, well enough to talk to each other about anything. You wish you knew what he liked and whether he was happy doing what he did. You wanted to ask him how he got the courage to throw away the script of an African child - to study to the highest level - and instead decided to mend cars. You wanted to ask him whether he regretted it, whether he would do it all over again if he could, but you didn’t. You couldn’t. You were two strangers under a mango tree, and all you shared was the disappointment of your parents.
When it got late and the darkness began to creep in, you always had to untether the goats from their pegs on the farm and bring them back to their shed in Grandma’s homestead. You would then rush to the kitchen where Grandma would share stories about all the things that had happened in the village since you were last there. It was more like listening in on her conversation with your mother than a narration to all of you, but you loved it nonetheless.
You loved that she called your mother by her name, Wambui, and it made you realise that she, just like you, were but the child of another. Grandma would speak of the maize harvest as she shoved maize cobs into the fire until there was more smoke in the kitchen than there was air. She would speak of her husband briefly, and she always looked at your brother as she did, the one lucky enough to carry his name, and she would thank God for his rebirth as a doctor.
You often wished you could say something to make you part of the conversation, to ensure you were not just a bystander, and perhaps Grandma would look at you a little more. You often thought that you would tell her about that time you won the debate contest in high school or about your school trip to Mombasa, where it was so hot that you had to sleep with the windows open while on top of the bed cover with your arms stretched out and the fan at full speed. You always thought it would make her laugh. She loved to laugh. You wanted to tell her that you play for the badminton team at your university and that Film Studies is a noble degree but she only understands Kikuyu and you can hardly speak it.
You remember when you asked your mother why she did not teach you Kikuyu, your mother tongue. You asked her why she denied you communion with Grandma.
“We have over forty tribes, Mwangi. Our neighbours do not speak our language, most of the kids at your primary school did not speak our language, and you are human; you needed friends. You had to learn a language you could all speak; one you could use when you would need to get a job someday.”
“Why don’t we start learning now?”
“You know they always laugh when you try to speak it. They say you speak from the nose, like a mzungu who learnt a few sentences of the local language while on safari.”
You knew she was right, that your language was not practical, that it needed to be more than just a tool of communication to compete with English. It needed purpose. It had become vestigial, like the human appendix; it was a part of you, it was within you, and it had a name, but you did not and could not use it. You feel guilty that you have let your ancestors down. It is because of you and others like you that the Kikuyu language is slowly withering away. Perhaps that is why you hate that yearly trip to the countryside; because your inability to speak Kikuyu makes you feel so disconnected from your own family that you feel as though you were in the presence of strangers.
You are sad that Christmas will always feel like this, like an expedition to another planet with a language you can only partially understand and can barely speak. You wish you could speak Kikuyu and take part in the evening conversations inside Grandma’s smoky kitchen. If you could, you would have told Grandma about the videos you make on TikTok. You would tell her how much you love it and that one day, you will be famous enough to advertise Coca-Cola and make movies. You would ask her to add that to her prayers every morning: may Mwangi become a famous filmmaker and be paid to advertise Coca-Cola.
You would want to hear about her life, about how things were when Kenya got independence, and whether she fought in the Mau Mau rebellion. You would want to know about her favourite things and what your mother was like growing up. You would want to hear her narrate folk tales in Kikuyu, which you always imagined would be much better than the imitations that teachers of English would set in your high school English tests that were always so assiduously scrubbed of meaning that they lost their appeal.
You wish you did not need a reason to visit Grandma and that you could pop by anytime, just like you imagined they did in the old days. You wish the visit did not have to be so grand and expensive where the goods brought were the metric of your financial standing, and you and your brother were presented as trophies and evidence of good parenting. You wish you spoke your mother tongue well enough and had more time with Grandma, your cousins, uncles, and aunts, enough time to allow camaraderie to stew into love, but how much love can be created with those whom you only see once a year?
Very illuminating and thoroughly enjoyable. You have a way of articulating that which we all feel but cannot quite express.
This is amazing and relatable!! Love the use of second person too!