SEX AND THE FUNERAL

“And devout men carried Stephen to his burial and made great lamentation over him.” Shiru reads from the Acts of the Apostles.

I stare at her and wonder if my tears are running as fast as hers; if hers are as hot as mine.

The Reverend Dr. K_ approaches the grave. His face is set in a scowl that says that he didn’t get his DD for purposes of burying miscreants. Abominable misfits who even the Good Lord Jesus Christ, with his basketful of mercies, would give a cold shoulder. Hopeless. Bangi people… phthuu…Mungiki!

The Reverend stands as far as he possibly can from the coffin. He doesn’t even glance at it. When he begins to speak, he doesn’t look at a central spot, as you would expect, with alternating nods to the left and to the right for emphasis. No. He stands at a ridiculous angle all his attention, his sermon and all the glory of the almighty God emanating from him, directed at the people to his right.

To his right. To his right where the so called watu wazima and such young people as have ambitions of being referred to as that, stand. The youths to the right are unlike the rest of us. So unlike us: the juvenile delinquents. They are youths, youths with a capital Y.

Church Youth.

And most of them are decent fellows I must say. But amongst them there are devious characters. Like those choir guys… aih… apana!

The choir guys hold bashes kila Friday that would be like the Last Supper but for the fact that when the guy at the head of the table gets kissed, he doesn’t open his mouth to say, the hour has come but kisses back and says, wee kamu. Their bashes would be as tame as kiddie birthday parties if only they would end when the Britannia and Bamboocha are over and if all the bouncing on the Bouncing Castle didn’t have to happen horizontally.

Their parties are meant to be a remake of the Kesha. I guess it is the New and Improved Kesha (sms the word KESHA and win). Here they come in with leather bound bibles that are only opened to admire and exchange the cute little bookmarks within. Bookmarks inscribed with biblical verses. Verses from the Songs of Solomon are preferred.

Their keshas are music heavy. But you will not find their music in the hymn book you bought from Uzima Press. After all these are young people and they weren’t colonized by some self-righteous limey who found Amazing Grace in the pitiful wails coming out of the slave deck. These youths are from a new generation colonized by the descendants of those slaves and not their masters. These ones are colonized by T.D. Jakes. So their praise music is inspired by the discordant screeches of Kapuka acts with names like: Gospel Gangstaz and Thugs 4 Christ.

Their praise and worship sessions go like this:

Worship Leader: “D.J weka traki…!”

D.J: “Can I get a muthafuckin’ halleluiah!”

Worshippers: “Yeah… Oh Baby!”

Song: Mikono juu…. Mikono juu kwa yesu

Tingisha hiyo kitu… hiyo bibilia tingisha

Kaka shika huyo dada… shika kwa jina lake

Zamani nilikuwa nawasha… sasa Yesu ameniosha

Nilikuwa napenda madame… sasa napenda his name

Then somewhere in the middle of the night the angel of the Lord appears before the choir girls, only, and many of them end up pregnant without having known any man. They are not sinners you know.

The sinners are to the left of the good Reverend. The sinners are us. We, the low-lifers and our bevy of hood rats. I can see Bobo, and she is desperately trying to catch my attention and I am grateful, for a moment, for all the people pushing about trying to stand next to me and who are shielding me from her. Well I know some of those people pushing about, Danso in particular and Vaite of Vaite’s Veve Base just want to pick my pockets but that is better than Bobo getting anywhere close to me. Damn bitch will definitely try to kiss me. Eeewww. Kissing her is like sucking my own dick… and Johnnie’s, kama’s… What the fuck, am I getting paid to list who she been with?

***

Grrrrr… okay now I have run out alcohol so I cannot continue writing this scene. It has been raining since five in the morning and it still is so I cannot get to the supermarket…yes I said supermarket and not One Love Licker Store, for a refill. I know my dead friend will understand. I mean I poured a bottle of expensive alcohol into his grave while everyone else was pouring drops of Napshizzle grudgingly. I gave that fallen soldier a send off bigger than a vain jango’s. Maybe if I can get some alcohol soon I will finish this, get down to the eulogy part.

Man that eulogy, it was like Anthony's eulogy to Brutus, only better. And I gave it…

Oh damn it, I really need a drink but in lieu and as I wait for the rain to ease up let me go abuse myself.

Oh fuck, I am bila gaffs… now that one there is no negotiating, I will just have to walk in the rain. Man there is no such joy than a post orgasm gaff… even when the orgasm is self induced.

Sawa wacha I walk to shoppie. I will get a Ka-quarter of something decent, which is too much to ask from some of these neighbourhood kiosks, and finish this narration there. Sawa?

***

Hiyo ni how much?

P: Sawa nipe hiyo na lights…

P: Ati ngapi… si pako, Kwani?

P: Eh, na unakaa poa…

P: Kwani?

P: Hapa per day wewe humake mangapi…

P: Sawa si nikugee mshande yako ya leo alafu ufunge duka…

P: Ehh funga duka tuingie kejani…

***

Ati bado ma fans wanangoja story ya mazishi, maumbwa; mi niko juu ya vitu. We nani, hata sijui jina yako ninani… ebu sema jina yangu.

Sema tena!

***

Aii Aii Potash!

IN BABYLON I TRUST

I have been called a fraud. A child of privilege trying to pass himself as the voice of the scions of the Proletariat- the herald of Nairobi’s dispossessed majority. A product of Kenya’s most elite academies- the best schools in the Republic- claiming to be an alumnus of the Streets; a self made pseudo-intellectual. That and many other things that remain the inconsequential opinion of The Few who suddenly finding me holding my own in their circles desire to drag me into the exclusive folds of their glorified embrace. They endeavour to claim me as one of their own but first, as they say, I have to drop my bullshit stance and face up to the stark realities of my yuppiness.

How do I make them understand that I come as a package; that what I bring with me is not mere baggage but the sum total of my heritage?

Yet in other circles, the circles of the Insignificant Others where I cut my teeth, my name is no longer praised but spat out like last night’s tuksin. “Behold,” they chide, Potash the sell-out riding shotgun in the cream SUV and the exotic bitch not seeing her stick shift for that self publicising dick. But the dick cannot see beyond the bottle of Jack Daniels.” Maskini hapati…, they murmur to each other punctuating their snide vitriol with gut wrenching gulps of Napshizzle …na akipata… si unamuona!

But you know what I have resigned myself to? It is the fact that I can be many things to many people but only one thing to myself: me. A certain Latina Academic- or whatever that gorgeous creature of Boricuan extraction might want to call itself- tells me that my street voice is my real voice. So whose voice is this I speak in now, my doppelganger’s?

I am sick and tired of this talk of Potash lost his voice. Like what the fuck was I destined to be, Vox Clamantis in the Ghetto? When I declared myself a voice crying out in the wilderness, preparing the way for the messiah, I meant that I was preparing the way for me, myself and I. I was the messiah to come and now that I am here, I say verily unto you: I was sent by me to save me.

I cannot save the ghetto. What, and keep the North’s surplus labour out of employment? Who am I to fight the onslaught of the development industry as they, armed with all the poverty eradication jargon that the conscience of Global Capital can buy, scramble for a corner of my street to raise their mayday flags from? Saving the Wretched of the Earth is the White Man’s Burden. (Remember Kipling?)

The best I can do is allow myself to be a foot soldier in their communications departments and save myself by taking a pittance for working under a Communications Consultant who earned his Save Africa credentials from his many years working as a janitor in the offices of the Bullamakanka Gazette in Nowhere, Australia and who cannot tell Kenya from a map of Kenya.

But I haven’t taken that NGO job yet. All I am saying is that I wouldn’t turn it down. I have said time and time again that I am not a believer. Believers die poor, a situation that would be in my case a waste of one of the most entrepreneurial minds of our generation. A generation that doesn’t have much time left to live if the jeremiads at the United Nations can be taken for their word on our life expectancy. A generation that has no chance of bearing successors if all those women screaming for the abolishment of our beverage of choice- Napshizzle- are to be seen as a testament to our libido or the lack thereof.

Maybe I will not live to see forty three but I can increase my chances by getting out of the way of stray bullets. That still leaves HIV/ AIDS to contend with and as that goes, even though I still cannot afford premium brand condoms, I can now have women who can afford to buy condoms in the flavour they want to have me in on any given night. Besides, the great difference between leisurely coitus sans interruptus in a yuppie’s boudoir and frantic sex in a phone booth is that, in lieu of a condom, you can always take a hot shower a la Jacob Zuma- he is negative you know- afterwards.

The important thing to me in the end is that I never romanticised poverty. I never glorified the streets. I spoke about it all because that was the life I knew. Those who want to stand there and mourn the angst-ridden tales cannot possibly claim to be my well wishers. It might seem, to many of you, that somewhere I began to sound too aspirational, nay, pampered. That is not because I have become those things but simply put, somewhere in this literary journey my anger began to dissipate as gradually the light at the end of my tunnel became, seemingly, more than the flaring torches of rampaging mungiki.

I soldier on, the lure of Capital guiding me on like a pillar of smoke to a manna sated Jew in the Sinai, grappling for every tool, through means foul and fair, that will help me navigate Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. There isn’t a thing that changed in my philosophy. I still will not rant and rave about Them, Babylonians, vs. Us, whatever we call ourselves. I still refuse to appreciate the concept of babi and still maintain that it is the most superfluous word in our urban lexicon.

I continue to insist that babi in its usage on the street or the slums (damn I hate the word Ghetto) and low income neighbourhoods of Nairobi is a metaphor for diminished self-worth and a nod to communism. And I am not a communist- damn I hate communists- and only poor Kenyans seem to subscribe to communism, well and some lazy Muslims who continue to wait for Idi.

***

My heart bared and my feet numb with genuflection I now lay prostrate before the god of lucre. “I have said my three Holy Shillings and pray thee Great Capital, accept my humble offering: my writing.” I have no pretensions. I refuse to suffer beneath self-imposed glass ceiling of Babi. I want to look, to reach out beyond my corner of the street into the other side. Into the Westside. The Best side.

Maybe, as you said, I do not write as well these days as I used to. It could be that the greatest words I ever wrote were the scrawls I made with shit streaked fingers on the walls of Choo Namba Nane: Kanjo Mavi! Or the charcoal squiggles on the crumbling cardboard walls of my lean-to. The unmetred rhymes pencilled on the back wall of Mama Pewa Pewa’s shebeen as we shared a wank, a joint, a gaff while we peed and or abused her prepubescent daughters; my dirges to dignified life. But who cares? Who would have read all that apart from you and I as the wit and turns of the phrase continued to languish, in myriad bits of incoherency, in the ossified brain cells of the semiliterate Urban Detritus we knew? Not that anyone has read it yet, but at least they now know it was written. Because they listen when I tell them it was.

Maybe stripped off the angst, my writing is nothing but a god with feet of clay propped up by those who discovered me. The words that I once layered with meaning are now mere handholds for a grappling, vacuous mind. Suddenly the word Come has no ‘Viral Transmission’ and ‘Yet Another Unwanted Pregnancy’ encumbrances. It is just another keyword to keep the fan mail coming: Shag me Savage, the Mancunian redhead will scream… on and on ad infinitum.

I started blogging because I was angry, now I blog for the fans who need their dreams of being my future sex partners kept alive. I am not yet custom paid or custom laid, I know, but I am close enough to that place to smell the plastic in my wallet by the bedside and the smell of friction as my dick meets yet another willing pussy.

SHIBBOLETH II

(The Second Potashian Epistle to The Adept)

Part the First

Behold I have risen

Kasha Omoka the- Holy of Holies; Excalibur; The Holy Grail- zenith point of our dreams stands before me.

Let Judgment Day dawn on me now. I will stand fearless before Anubis, Baal, Osiris, YAHWEH; whatever the duty God might be.

I have paid my dues to The Canon.

I am ready to die;

to shed this vessel of mortality.

I will not have died in vain

Ave Potashius:

Noblest of Nairobi’s sons.

He liveth.

Deified

Potashius Nairobus

I am who I am!

Part the Second

My Narcissus Vs. Your Nemesis

(As it was written in the scrolls of the Butterfly People- there will be wars and bloggings of war.)

Because in the circles of writers my name is mentioned,

You traded Wadua the Necromancer for Nemesis.

On her steed you ride charging at I that is Narcissus.

Nemesis- puny goddess not fit for the least of my orgies;

Where I do all races and complexions, screaming:

“If my penis were a chameleon, I would be shooting rainbows!”

And the world over beyond the embrace of the Literati-

Who have learnt to say my name in scholarly ways:

Nairobus, Potashius, (Circa Unknown BCE to Immortality).

And the name spread, not through the phalluses of conquistadors,

To be drank from more vessels than the Lachryma Christi-

Deflowered damsels suck you in memory of me!

I called out for the intercession of the tribunes,

But they all lay beneath masochistic clouds of dragon smoke.

Valiant soldiers with promise now by Napshizzle emasculate.

As you asps gnaw at my feet, my rod twins with Asclepius’-

I become the Light Bringer; the Ghetto’s Illuminati.

Behold, unto you a prince is born!

PART THE THIRD
(If you my kindred spirits put the Con into Consensus)

VOLUNTARY DRINKING OVERSEAS

“My name is Kamau.” That was the lanky English volunteer introducing himself to me. He was wearing authentic maasai bracelets: beads from Brazil and craftsman from Kikuyu-land, on each arm, the ubiquitous Bob Marley T-shirt and what I call Volunteer Denim (Jeans so perfectly worn out and dyed an even shade of dirty.)

His hair, as is common with that of mzungus who try to go the dreadlocks way on a backpacker’s budget, was caught somewhere between dishevelled Merino and Dagoretti Market’s official madman.

About him was a lingering smell of pussy- black pussy- and the way his squinty eyes 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 he had recently acquired. After eight months (never mind the prolonged periods of Rest and Recuperation spent lying on top of a local bitch… sorry, lying on a local beach) of drinking warm beer in the intrusive heat of Kakuma where in his sober moments he was expected to palpitate the distended bellies (though he could swear by Hippocrates that breast cancer was the bigger risk that he should have been examining for) 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 (he that couldn’t read or write) to sign 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?”

“Yay, mmmhh…of course,” I mutter a wee bit distracted by the red headed 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 avuncular 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 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.” She stated. “So what do you write?”

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

“That’s so cute.” She laughed pursing her lips and clogging my nostrils with acrid smoke.”

“Not as cute as you are…!” I choked and managed a wink. Of course I was winking at myself for having managed to have a corny moment. (The Word Smith needs those to avoid taking his trade seriously and calling himself a writer id est: a boring fellow with an ego inversely proportional to his ability to use words.)

“Thanks. You are so nice.” She responds and I marvel at her ability to swallow my non-garnished lumps of corny. Though it is rather early in our conversation, I cannot help approaching the conclusion that she is one of those girls who are so stupid it is cute. Like really, the kind you want to shag as a service to mankind because you once read in a respectable journal of Sexology that: Ceteris Paribus, intelligence can be sexually transmitted.

“Oh, Potash writes a blog.” That is the German guy interrupting. He is still nursing his first beer. Maybe he cannot afford another- the poor guy is a UN Volunteer. What surely can one do with that 100 USD a day stipend? This business of saving the millions of Africans living on less than a dollar a day is such a thankless pursuit. Only heroes like our friend here, Individuals blessed with a great spirit of volunteerism can get that work done.

“Hey, you are Potash…Like, The Potash… Potashius Nairobus?” A Belgium girl buggers into the conversation and suddenly I realise that I am the only local on the table. The strange feeling that gives me can only be shared by that Savage Woman with her engorged pudenda flung wide open to the scrutiny of the civilised world. Noble (savage) Potashius put upon a pedestal; representing at this moment every African from Cape Town to Cairo- even though he has never met them.

“I cannot believe I am meeting you… you know, like this. Like when you said your name was Potash, I thought it was a common Kenyan name…” The Belgian rambled. “…But really, I love your blog… and when I was planning my trip to Africa…”

“Africa…?”

“Hehe… vintage Potash.” She laughs. “Kenya, I mean. I was planning my trip to Kenya and I was thinking: I want to meet this guy. I want to be a character in his blog…”

“But it takes lots more personality than you have to be a character in my blog.”

“Oh, that’s great! Now you have gone and blown away all the chance you had of getting laid by me.”

“Oh, and you just took away- from a world already devastated by the effects of Britney Spear’s hair cut on Global Warming- a most anticipated moment of succour: The sequel to the White Maasai!”

***

And that’s how another white chick, personality- the lack thereof, precisely- not withstanding got to become a character in my blog. It becomes clear then that events on this blog happen ‘in the cutting of a drink’ so let’s meet at the bar about 9.30. AM of course, who knows, in the PM I just might be getting laid!