Binyavanga Wainaina, Africa is a Country
(A lost chapter from One Day I Will Write About This Place)
11 July, 2000.
This is not the right version of events.
Hey mum. I was putting my head on her shoulder, that last
afternoon before she died. She was lying on her hospital bed. Kenyatta.
Intensive Care. Critical Care. There. Because this time I will not be away in
South Africa, fucking things up in that chaotic way of mine. I will arrive on
time, and be there when she dies. My heart arrives on time. I am holding my
dying mother’s hand. I am lifting her hand. Her hand will be swollen with
diabetes. Her organs are failing. Hey mum. Ooooh. My mind sighs. My heart! I am
whispering in her ear. She is awake, listening, soft calm loving, with my head
right inside in her breathspace. She is so big – my mother, in this world, near
the next world, each breath slow, but steady, as it should be. Inhale. She can
carry everything. I will whisper, louder, in my minds-breath. To hers. She will
listen, even if she doesn’t hear. Can she?
Mum. I will say. Muum? I will say. It grooves so easy, a
breath, a noise out of my mouth, mixed up with her breath, and she exhales. My
heart gasps sharp and now my mind screams, sharp, so so hurt so so angry.
“I have never thrown my heart at you mum. You have never
asked me to.”
Only my mind says. This. Not my mouth. But surely the jerk
of my breath and heart, there next to hers, has been registered? Is she letting
me in?
Nobody, nobody, ever in my life has heard this. Never, mum.
I did not trust you, mum. And. I. Pulled air hard and balled it down into my
navel, and let it out slow and firm, clean and without bumps out of my mouth,
loud and clear over a shoulder, into her ear.
“I am a homosexual, mum.”
July, 2000.
This is the right version of events.
I am living in South Africa, without having seen my mother
for five years, even though she is sick, because I am afraid and ashamed, and
because I will be thirty years old and possibly without a visa to return here
if I leave. I am hurricaning to move my life so I can see her. But she is in
Nakuru, collapsing, and they will be rushing her kidneys to Kenyatta Hospital
in Nairobi, where there will be a dialysis machine and a tropical storm of
experts awaiting her.
Relatives will rush to see her and, organs will collapse,
and machines will kick into action. I am rushing, winding up everything to
leave South Africa. It will take two more days for me to leave, to fly out,
when, in the morning of 11 July 2000, my uncle calls me to ask if I am sitting
down.
“She’s gone, Ken.”
I will call my Auntie Grace in that family gathering
nanosecond to find a way to cry urgently inside Baba, but they say he is crying
and thundering and lightning in his 505 car around Nairobi because his wife is
dead and nobody can find him for hours. Three days ago, he told me it was too
late to come to see her. He told me to not risk losing my ability to return to
South Africa by coming home for the funeral. I should not be travelling
carelessly in that artist way of mine, without papers. Kenneth! He frowns on the
phone. I cannot risk illegal deportation, he says, and losing everything. But
it is my mother.
I am twenty nine. It is 11 July, 2000. I, Binyavanga
Wainaina, quite honestly swear I have known I am a homosexual since I was five.
I have never touched a man sexually. I have slept with three women in my life.
One woman, successfully. Only once with her. It was amazing. But the next day,
I was not able to.
It will take me five years after my mother’s death to find a
man who will give me a massage and some brief, paid-for love. In Earl’s Court,
London. And I will be freed, and tell my best friend, who will surprise me by
understanding, without understanding. I will tell him what I did, but not tell
him I am gay. I cannot say the word gay until I am thirty nine, four years
after that brief massage encounter. Today, it is 18 January 2013, and I am
forty three.
Anyway. It will not be a hurricane of diabetes that kills
mum inside Kenyatta Hospital Critical Care, before I have taken four steps to
get on a plane to sit by her side.
Somebody.
Nurse?
Will leave a small window open the night before she dies, in
the July Kenyatta Hospital cold.
It is my birthday today. 18 January 2013. Two years ago, on
11 July 2011, my father had a massive stroke and was brain dead in minutes.
Exactly eleven years to the day my mother died. His heart beat for four days,
but there was nothing to tell him.
I am five years old.
He stood there, in overalls, awkward, his chest a railway
track of sweaty bumps, and little hard beads of hair. Everything about him is
smooth-slow. Bits of brown on a cracked tooth, that endless long smile. A good
thing for me the slow way he moves, because I am transparent to people’s
patterns, and can trip so easily and fall into snarls and fear with jerky
people. A long easy smile, he lifts me in the air and swings. He smells of
diesel, and the world of all other people’s movements has disappeared. I am
away from everybody for the first time in my life, and it is glorious, and then
it is a tunnel of fear. There are no creaks in him, like a tractor he will
climb any hill, steadily. If he walks away, now, with me, I will go with him
forever. I know if he puts me down my legs will not move again. I am so
ashamed, I stop myself from clinging. I jump away from him and avoid him
forever. For twentysomething years, I even hug men awkwardly.
There will be this feeling again. Stronger, firmer now. Aged
maybe seven. Once with another slow easy golfer at Nakuru Golf Club, and I am
shaking because he shook my hand. Then I am crying alone in the toilet because
the repeat of this feeling has made me suddenly ripped apart and lonely. The
feeling is not sexual. It is certain. It is overwhelming. It wants to make a
home. It comes every few months like a bout of malaria and leaves me shaken for
days, and confused for months. I do nothing about it.
I am five when I close my self into a vague happiness that asks
for nothing much from anybody. Absent-minded. Sweet. I am grateful for all
love. I give it more than I receive it, often. I can be selfish. I masturbate a
lot, and never allow myself to crack and grow my heart. I touch no men. I read
books. I love my dad so much, my heart is learning to stretch.
I am a homosexual.