How to Write About Africa: Collected Works by Binyavanga Wainaina

Author:Binyavanga Wainaina [Wainaina, Binyavanga]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2023-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

16

An Affair to Dismember

There is this game I play, a game Mrs. Green, my late adopted mother, taught me. She would fold a piece of paper, while I watched her hands, watched the piano tendons ripple, the strange blue veins. Then she would ask me to draw what pattern the paper folded into. I never failed to get it right.

Last night, dizzy with head-fuck after reading Wole Soyinka’s play The Road, I lay in bed and closed my eyes, and conjured an enormous piece of paper and folded it this way and that, folded it in ways I have never attempted. Then I sprayed it with something to make it brittle. I opened my eyes and put on some music: Moses Molelekwa on piano, the piece he played at the North Sea Jazz festival in Amsterdam, where he got sucked into a hurricane of his brilliance, then burst out crying after waking to find himself surrounded by a standing ovation.

I closed my eyes again, and breathed in, and let the paper open slowly. The pattern unraveled in my mind’s eye: angles and triangles shining and shadowed. I laughed, and let it break in every brittle seam, and the shards of patterns flying high like the first crescendos of the piano. Then, with ease, I made them fall into place again. I threw them high again, and lost the pattern as they came tumbling down, as Moses crouched over his piano working through something intricate, caught in the most fragile of places, trying to juggle things at the far reaches of his ability. I could almost feel his relief as he passed the threshold and mastered himself. I joined him in his giddiness, throwing the jumble of patterns up again, and marveling at how my mind so effortlessly put the brittle paper together again. Then that crushing, tearing sound of tape getting caught in the cheap recorder, and the song whining to a halt. I swear I heard glass break as the shards came tumbling down, tearing into me as I tumbled. I slept with Mrs. Green in my mind.

I was eight years old before she came to my school in Murang’a, Kenya. I lived in a tranquil bubble, with hungers, agreed communal rumblings of belly, as normal as the surround of unripe maize plants. Coffee beans bought schoolbooks and fertilizer. I had never worn shoes.

Then she arrived, and asked me to come and live with her. My parents let me go, awed by what she offered; awed by me, now that they had discovered I played with numbers and words no primary schoolteacher in the village could understand.

The magic Mrs. Green brought was powerful. As we drove off, I saw the maize plants around us take off in a stomach-curling whirl, blending into the porridge I was drowning in. Dust, wind scraping against the Land Rover, my first car ride. Speeding as we did, through the dusty road and onto the tarmac, it seemed like this car was something that defied time and space.

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