Coming to birth by Macgoye Marjorie Oludhe

Author:Macgoye, Marjorie Oludhe
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Women teachers, Married women, Young women
ISBN: 9966462708
Publisher: New York : Feminist Press at the City University of New York
Published: 2000-10-19T16:00:00+00:00

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though she herself had dared to go up and take the hand of the widow when she visited the house, and pour out what phrases of consolation she could manage in SwahiU (for mourning was something you ordinarily did only in the mother tongue and had to be rethought if your sympathies lay outside), people had thought more of themselves than of the dark terror of those moments, the betrayal by friends, the gradual chopping off of fingers. But Chelagat, a strapping young woman and single, was within her comprehension, cut off from friends and constituents, humiliated in the cell, sent out to dig, kept from the news of other sufferers which she had been demanding before anyone remembered the incitements said to have occurred so many months back, when she had not yet addressed the press conference or posed the awkward statements and the defiant questions.

‘We must do something,’ Paulina howled at Martin.

‘Don’t shout at me. I’m not the High Court of Appeal. What do you think we can do?’

‘Write to our MPs, make processions, sign petitions, strike . . .’

‘You going to strike against Mrs M.? To persuade her to do something she wouldn’t have wanted to do?’

‘Well, of course I don’t have to, but you know what I mean.’

‘I know you can’t do anything. Anything at all. Only government can do it.’

‘But we are the government. Mrs M. says . . .’

‘If you are the government, you get Mr M. to queue up to put his cross on a bit of paper with your symbol on it: fig-leaf or something, or a militant crochet-hook. I don’t see . . .’

‘We put them there and we help them to act.’

‘Paulina, will you be silent, for I see myself that there is nothing for us but “can’t”. I used to go to meetings, as you know, and classes, as you know, and read books such as we still have here, but what is there for me to do? When I married you I was selling envelopes and now I am still selling envelopes, maybe a few more and a bit dearer but that’s all there is to it. Yes, I have a better suit and eat meat more often, but what of it? If I had six sons to keep I should have less for myself than I had then. And no more to say.’

Ill

‘You have the shop.’ What could she answer to questions about sons?

‘So I do have the shop at home, or a half or a third of the shop with my brothers. What do I get out of it?’

‘You get the feeling that a bit of Nyanza is yours.’

‘If I have no shares in anything I don’t fit into the new society. And if I do have shares in it, how can I change it?’

‘Then you could . . .’

There would have been no end to it except that they both had their work to do, their separate circle of acquaintances. Their time together was limited,

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