THE EASTAFRICANPOET

That last Sunday of 2007, just a few days before Jimmy Gikonyo’s eighteenth birthday – when he would become ineligible to use his Nairobi Orphanage family pass – he went to see his old friend, Sebastian the gorilla. Jimmy sat silently on the bench next to the primate’s pit waiting for Sebastian to recognize him. After a few minutes, Sebastian turned his gaze on Jimmy and walked towards the fence. The gorilla’s eyes were rheumy, his movements slow and careful. Their interaction was now defined by that strange sense of inevitable nostalgia that death brings, even when the present has not yet slipped into the past. Jimmy removed the tattered pass from his pocket and read the fine print on the back: This lifetime family pass is only for couples and children under eighteen years of age. There was a sign on the side of Sebastian’s cage: ‘Oldest Gorilla in the World. Captured and Saved from the Near Extinction of His Species After the Genocide in Rwanda. Sebastian, 56. Genus: Gorilla....

I knew that if Ma found out about Boeta and me, she would probably lock me up. My mother had never liked the Groenewalds. She always said that they were evil people and that we shouldn’t mix with that sort. ‘Meng jou met die semels en die varke vreet jou op’ — that’s what Ma says about people she thinks are sinful. Boeta used to hand me letters under the desk in Afrikaans class. I never guessed that I would fall in love with ‘Boeta the Mail Boy’. But nou ja, I do not question our stolen times together. It was so secret neither my sisters nor God knew. He told me that he wanted to build houses like his father who had built the klipkerkie in Dempers Street. I liked talking to him and listening to his ideas about life. Sometimes we just went to go and sit at the vlei and talk. No one visited it anymore and it was close to church so I would always have an excuse if Ma asked. For a long time we only held hands. Then, after a few weeks, Boeta let me rest my head on his shoulders or som...

(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? Mu...

I had meant to summon my father only long enough to see what his head looked like, but now he was here and I did not know how to send him back. It all started the Thursday that Father Ignatius came from Immaculate Conception in Kitgum. The old women wore their Sunday frocks, and the old men plucked garlands of bougainvillea from the fence and stuck them in their breast pockets. One old man would not leave the dormitory because he could not find his shikwarusi, and when I coaxed and badgered, he patted his hair and said, “My God, do you want the priest from Uganda to think that I look like this every day?” I arranged chairs beneath the avocado tree in the front yard, and the old people sat down and practiced their smiles. A few people who did not live at the home came too, like the woman who hawked candy in the Stagecoach bus to Mathari North, and the man whose oneroomed house was a kindergarten in the daytime and a brothel in the evening, and the woman whose illicit brew had blinded fi...