urbanwasanii

1450hrs, Tuesday, June 24th.

Somewhere on the Southern Mainland

Finally, a cold beer. It is not as cold as I like it, though; not cold enough that, as we say in Nairobi, it is ’sweating’. When a beer is ’sweating’, lines of water form on the bottle and cascade down it the moment you pull it out of the fridge. But most importantly, the label, when you pull at it, doesn’t tear but peels off with such ease it brings succour to the sexually deprived and closure to the anally retentive. I am not quite sure which of those it is that I am, but what I know is that a beer at that temperature sure does work miracles for me.

I am sitting at the front section- right next to the door and facing the street- of a large pub christened Harambee Club. At 85 Kenya Shillings, this is the cheapest Tusker lager I have had not counting the one at High Class Pub, a hovel fashioned out of rusted teen and with barely enough room to stand in, yesterday. High Class Pub is in Barsheba right next to where Otieno Kota is building a gate. The beer there was 80 Kshs and I remember thinking what a cool place it was to make Public Art but seeing I was not making any, I had to settle for a lukewarm Tusker and watch Otieno Kota work.

The first thing that got to me at Harambee Club, seeing that the wait staff were dozing off in the smoky kitchen and I had to go rouse the barman out of his siesta to get a beer, was the flies. Like I have seen flies, many many of them in one place, but there is something about how the small things bring the most life to the scenes we write. So it is those things that i tend to look out for because they can define a universal- In case you want to create a stock scene say of a bar in small-town, Kenya- but also a specific by transporting the reader to a time and a place that you as the writer have been to through its sites, smells; peculiarities.

And the painting of scenes, just as writing in its entirety does, can tell you a lot about a place; a space as well as its chronicler. My scenes, for instance say a lot about where most of my writing gets done or where my stories begin: in the bar. Of course my bar scenes as I experience them are a far cry from how I render them in the written word. When I am in the bar, I am cognitive of a lot of things and they register in my mind, but I am too lazy a writer to put them down because I hate the revision process. (Maybe that explains why I am not widely published). Take the following scene for instance from two Fridays ago, it is a rough sketch I did, on the back of a supermarket receipt, in which a space filled with great writing fodder is wasted:

It is Friday night and I am sitting on a wobbly stool at Stage View Pub in Kangemi. Stage View is a brick and cardboard affair with a tin roof. They do not have a Senator Keg ‘pump’ as you would expect in this kind of place so I have had to settle for a Citizen. The thing about a Citizen is that though it comes in a deceptively small 300ml bottle, it packs more kick than two bottles- a litre- of Tusker. The label on a Citizen beer says: Strong Beer, and with a listed alcohol percentage of 7, it does not disappoint. The best part is that with the new budget continuing the steep taxation of malt, the 35 Shillings recommended retail price of a Citizen should not change seeing that it is made from un-malted barley.

I am seated by the heavily barred window where a length of off-cut timber nailed to the wall serves as a table. This position, the dirty and chipped glass not withstanding, presents me with a great view of the busy Waiyaki Way a few meters away and the coming and goings of this neighbourhood. Somehow, sitting in this bar, I feel connected to a part of me that, no matter how much I have tried to fight it these last few months, is dwindling: Every-day-Nairobi. Most importantly, though is the fact that this bar, with its fourteen inch TV screen playing Salim Junior remakes of every Kikuyu song that I used to know, has yanked my memory back to that period two or so months ago when- finding myself…

Clearly, as the story quickly turns to be about me, the bar becomes less than a backdrop to my own musings and is reduced to a gratuitous object that does not take or add anything to the story that I end up writing.

That said, it is no small wonder that the only things that I have written that found any manner of success, which is to say that it got published and people called me and emailed me to talk about it and other places it could go, is two pieces that open with bar scenes. I am sharing those on this blog.

“My name is Kamau.”

That was the lanky English volunteer introducing himself to me. He wore Maasai bracelets (made from Brazilian beads), the ubiquitous Bob Marley T-shirt and what I call Volunteer Denim (jeans perfectly worn out and dyed an even shade of dirty.)

His hair, as is common with that of white folk who try to appropriate the dread-locked look on a backpacker’s budget, was caught somewhere between dishevelled Merino and the Dagoretti Market’s official madman.

The way his eyes squinted and lingered on and caressed every swinging backside (said backside being clearly swung for his exotic attention) on the dance floor told a tale of the taste for black pussy that he had recently acquired. After eight months of drinking warm beer in the intrusive heat at Kakuma Refugee Camp where in his sober moments he was expected to palpitate the distended bellies of refugee girls, he had acquired a taste for the distended backsides of local women.

“I love the way people, wherever you go, give you a new name.” I responded.

We swigged our Tusker Malts then looked into each others’ eyes, smiled and nodded in unison. At that moment I knew that if these had been our great-grandparents, his ancestor would have asked mine that they be blood brothers and soon after asked him to put his thumbprint on the deed of blood brotherhood- a deed that the quick passage of time would hold as evidence of his signing away all our ancestral land from here to EnoKumamayo.

“So, yourself, have you been places?” he asked. “Been given a new name?”

“Yaa, mmmhh…of course,” I muttered a wee bit distracted by the red haired Canadian who had moved to the seat next to mine and was trying to tell me something. “When I went to America, Kamau…” I began, “When I went to America they called me Crow. Jimmy Crow.”

That wiped the grin off his face and while he fumbled in search of a vacant spot on the bar’s walls to stare away his embarrassment, my ears staggered closer to the cutely perky mouth of the Canadian. But if those home made gaffs/cigarettes she is smoking taste as awful as they smell, I thought to myself, then there is no way I am kissing this chick.

“I hear you write,” stated the Canadian. “So what do you write?”

“Words, mainly,” I answered. “Sometimes I get lucky and manage to write sentences and even paragraphs.”

Excerpted from Voluntary Drinking Overseas, Published in Farafina 11 (Kachifo Limited, Nigeria, 2007)

***

Ndeto ndiikagio ta njuguma/ issues are approached with caution is something my

grandfather used to say. I need to have some burning questions answered but first

I have to set the pace. So I get a couple of old kikuyu men together and buy them

a couple of drinks to loosen their tongues.

I am sitting at Mwalimu’s place, that is the wines and spirits store, listening to

the reminisces of Baba Mbote a.k.a Munio ‘John Walker’ and Bwana Kamau. ‘A

man like me…’ Baba Mbote is saying, ‘…you know why they called me John Walker?’

At that moment his son walks in. You can feel the pent up tension as Mbote walks towards us.

‘gura kiindo…wee!’/ buy something you! Mbote growls at me.

A can of Kane Extra is fifty shillings here, I buy him one. He doesn’t bother

asking for a chaser. Mbote just swigs, nay, guzzles the entire 205 Mls in the plastic

can in one motion. The effect of the alcohol is immediate, what you would expect

on an empty belly, and Mbote staggers away.

He spots the outrageously unattractive barmaid.

‘K–!’

The expletive he hurls at her is unprintable and yet it is received with indifference

by the revellers; even Mbote’s own father doesn’t winch. His father takes a liberal

sip from a bottle of the newly re-launched Citizen Special and surveys the scene

with decided nonchalance. Somehow I get the feeling that Mbote is nothing but a

chip off the old block. After all as Gikuyu said, wega umaga na mucii—Charity, or

the lack of it, begins at home.

As it turns out, Mbote’s expletive will have to serve as his own version of

famous last words, for he is soon passed out, collapsing against the inebriating

fumes, warped tables topped with moulting Formica and sweaty bodies attached to

foul mouths like a gunia of warus from the Wangige Market that is across the debris

strewn gutter.

Nobody pays him any mind; everyone has grown up here—a grown up man,

lest you forget the emphasis. Even Mbote, who is his father’s son, has a son of his

own. Actually he has four and please do not ask if this is the way to raise sons. It

is none of your business, I have been told—‘you imwana (lads) of today… many

questions…’

Yes, Yes, but Mbote whose son was a year ahead of me at the University now

lies on the liquor stained concrete as the incontinence that is the bane of all those

irresponsible drunks who litter every alley and cattle path from Kabete to Ruare,

marks his crotch.

That is all the seed he can sow. A man like Mbote, a once upon a time proud son

of Kiambu, do you think he wanted to stop at four? Surely, he must have wanted

to try for a daughter, a Pajero as Wahome Mutahi was wont to say, to be the apple

of his eye. But how could he when the fruit of his loins is this dribble that would

out-smell Mama Njeri’s chang’aa distillery?

Everywhere across the land, the voices of our womenfolk, our mothers, rise;

the grumblings can be heard in Muranga, Kangemi and all those other places

that didn’t make the nine o’clock news, the ferreting out of shebeen queens, the

picketing of off-licence bars. But in between times, what do the womenfolk, our

mothers do, raise sons?

Excerpted from Kikuyu Dialogues, published in Kwani? 04 (Kwani Trust, Kenya, 2007)