"Oil exploration activity in Eastern Africa hit a notch higher on Monday [June 1, 2009) after two international exploration firms, signed joint venture agreements to explore black gold in the arid northern Kenya region and parts of Ethiopia."
Africa Oil Corp- a Canadian oil and gas company with interests in exploration licenses in Puntland, Somalia- signed an agreement to jointly seek for oil and gas resources in Kenya’s Anza basin with oil exploration firm, East Exploration Limited (EAX). (EAX) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Black Marlin Energy who run offices in Mombasa, Dar es Salaam, Antananarivo and the UK from their headquarters in Dubai.
Read more here...
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Friday, June 05, 2009
WIKILEAKS WINS AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL AWARD FOR KENYA STORY
The Black Campaign reports that "Wikileaks won in this year's Amnesty International's Media Award, New Media category for their expose on Kenya's extrajudicial police killings. The report titled Kenya: The Cry of Blood - Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances, was posted on Wikileaks' front page for an entire week beginning November 1st 2008."
Read the rest of the story here.
Read the rest of the story here.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
THE BLACK CAMPAIGN
The Black Manifesto
Africa needs you. No it doesn’t:
As a First World citizen, you have tremendous power. What platitudes you choose to buy or not buy can change your life and your conception of the self. What you cannot do, though, is bring social change to Africa.
For Africa:
Social change is not an agenda that you can set;
Social change is not an ideology you can impose;
Social change is all the little things you do to take yourselves and others closer to a decent human reality.
Social change is not about wishing the best for Them, it is about making the best of yourself and letting Africans draw inspiration from you.
Social change is not travelling halfway around the world to dig a well, it is pausing first to ask the African: ‘But what do you need to solve your water problems?’
Social change is not about making decisions for Them, it is about making a conscious decision to let Africans make up their minds, define their hopes and dreams and then allowing them access to the tools that will help turn their dreams into reality.
Social change is not about what you do for Them.
Social change is about what you do for you.
Social change is not about going to right the wrongs in Africa.
Social change is about changing what your government does in Africa. And if you cannot, changing your government.
Social change is not about the globe-trotting do-gooders- degrade their noise.
Social change is not about switching to Black, but we urge you to switch anyway.
Get Black because you, unlike the impoverished millions in Africa, have the right to choose.
Black is the new Red.
I invite you to join me and others at The Black Campaign, today.
Africa needs you. No it doesn’t:
As a First World citizen, you have tremendous power. What platitudes you choose to buy or not buy can change your life and your conception of the self. What you cannot do, though, is bring social change to Africa.
For Africa:
Social change is not an agenda that you can set;
Social change is not an ideology you can impose;
Social change is all the little things you do to take yourselves and others closer to a decent human reality.
Social change is not about wishing the best for Them, it is about making the best of yourself and letting Africans draw inspiration from you.
Social change is not travelling halfway around the world to dig a well, it is pausing first to ask the African: ‘But what do you need to solve your water problems?’
Social change is not about making decisions for Them, it is about making a conscious decision to let Africans make up their minds, define their hopes and dreams and then allowing them access to the tools that will help turn their dreams into reality.
Social change is not about what you do for Them.
Social change is about what you do for you.
Social change is not about going to right the wrongs in Africa.
Social change is about changing what your government does in Africa. And if you cannot, changing your government.
Social change is not about the globe-trotting do-gooders- degrade their noise.
Social change is not about switching to Black, but we urge you to switch anyway.
Get Black because you, unlike the impoverished millions in Africa, have the right to choose.
Black is the new Red.
I invite you to join me and others at The Black Campaign, today.
Monday, February 02, 2009
PICTURES OF STARVING CHILDREN SELL PORNO
Once in a while a story comes up that is, admittedly, beyond the imagination of the sexually perverted moron that authors this blog. A story so up his alley- the purveying of sleaze and the bashing of the Save Africa brigade- that it is shelved.
Well, but let us face it, the reason why I did not blog about the Porn for Charity story when I first had it was because:
a) I was angry I had not thought of the idea first;
b) I could not believe that they shot this in Kenya without me
c) I had to spend weeks and weeks of, elusive, internet time trying to find a bootleg copy of the video.
And now that I have slightly got over the first two issues, by abusing myself to the titillations of Japanese AV (yes Nana, you didn't hola at this tribesman but know that his seed is spattered over all corner workstations in every cybercafe in downtown Nairobi), I can write this.
Okay this is where some people take a deep breath or others sing Kumbaya but I will watch just one more Japanese schoolgirl action take before I can write the next sentence.
Back!
Now where were we... Yes, issue three has not been fully resolved yet. The first thing I did when I learnt of the existence of the video was to email several Japanese girls of my sexual acquaintance asking them if they would be kind enough to send me the video. Unfortunately none of them replied and it is understandable considering the language barrier seeing as to how all the conversations I ever had with them begun with:
“You. Me. Jiggi... Jiggi?”
And ended with:
“Africa Jiggi good, No?”
“Africa Jiggi gooood, Yeeeesssss!”
Okay, the truth is that one responded. In Japanese. (Readers Voice: How resourceful!) But reader doesn't know what I know, that Google Translate is the one true International Postman- delivering smut to those who hanker after it, across language and geographical barriers, to even places beyond that point its sister, GoogleMaps, says be dragons. So I hit translate and:
“You dirty little monkey.”
You have a right to your own reading of her response but you must remain cognisant of how much of the nuance of meaning is lost in translation. Besides most of this software is written by Indians who got to America in shipping crates and ended up in Silicon Valley having miraculously evaded the TOEFL. So to every man his reading, mine being:
You: refers to me, silly!
Dirty: refers to the things I made her do, or the place I made her do it
Little: I do not know what that refers to but what it does not refer to- a part of my anatomy
Monkey: The reader can Sambo this to absurdity but I was recently informed that Monkey is a term of endearment in certain cultures
But I am yet to receive the video from her so I assume she is still trying to copy out my name and address, or (because a man can hope) making a video of herself to send over as bonus footage.
The upside of my weeks long search is that I have had a thorough recap of Japanese porn and been amazed at how much non-pixelleted stuff has come out since I been gone. Dude, the girls are even shaven now! But not even Time magazine could lure me to what they refer to as Japan's Booming Sex Niche: Elder Porn. Not, even with a turn-on title like Maniac Training of Lolitas because, prejudiced I am not but a porno featuring a 74 year old Jap is nothing more than a Viagra ad. I mean, honestly, who can survive Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Yakuza and still get it up? But I will keep an eye out on this Kamikaze and hope that one of his dives might give us a snuff film that will, while lacking any erotic appeal, have a comic one.
But you know, I really should be surfing this city for a couch to crash out on tonight rather than surfing the net for bukake!
Well, but let us face it, the reason why I did not blog about the Porn for Charity story when I first had it was because:
a) I was angry I had not thought of the idea first;
b) I could not believe that they shot this in Kenya without me
c) I had to spend weeks and weeks of, elusive, internet time trying to find a bootleg copy of the video.
And now that I have slightly got over the first two issues, by abusing myself to the titillations of Japanese AV (yes Nana, you didn't hola at this tribesman but know that his seed is spattered over all corner workstations in every cybercafe in downtown Nairobi), I can write this.
Okay this is where some people take a deep breath or others sing Kumbaya but I will watch just one more Japanese schoolgirl action take before I can write the next sentence.
Back!
Now where were we... Yes, issue three has not been fully resolved yet. The first thing I did when I learnt of the existence of the video was to email several Japanese girls of my sexual acquaintance asking them if they would be kind enough to send me the video. Unfortunately none of them replied and it is understandable considering the language barrier seeing as to how all the conversations I ever had with them begun with:
“You. Me. Jiggi... Jiggi?”
And ended with:
“Africa Jiggi good, No?”
“Africa Jiggi gooood, Yeeeesssss!”
Okay, the truth is that one responded. In Japanese. (Readers Voice: How resourceful!) But reader doesn't know what I know, that Google Translate is the one true International Postman- delivering smut to those who hanker after it, across language and geographical barriers, to even places beyond that point its sister, GoogleMaps, says be dragons. So I hit translate and:
“You dirty little monkey.”
You have a right to your own reading of her response but you must remain cognisant of how much of the nuance of meaning is lost in translation. Besides most of this software is written by Indians who got to America in shipping crates and ended up in Silicon Valley having miraculously evaded the TOEFL. So to every man his reading, mine being:
You: refers to me, silly!
Dirty: refers to the things I made her do, or the place I made her do it
Little: I do not know what that refers to but what it does not refer to- a part of my anatomy
Monkey: The reader can Sambo this to absurdity but I was recently informed that Monkey is a term of endearment in certain cultures
But I am yet to receive the video from her so I assume she is still trying to copy out my name and address, or (because a man can hope) making a video of herself to send over as bonus footage.
The upside of my weeks long search is that I have had a thorough recap of Japanese porn and been amazed at how much non-pixelleted stuff has come out since I been gone. Dude, the girls are even shaven now! But not even Time magazine could lure me to what they refer to as Japan's Booming Sex Niche: Elder Porn. Not, even with a turn-on title like Maniac Training of Lolitas because, prejudiced I am not but a porno featuring a 74 year old Jap is nothing more than a Viagra ad. I mean, honestly, who can survive Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Yakuza and still get it up? But I will keep an eye out on this Kamikaze and hope that one of his dives might give us a snuff film that will, while lacking any erotic appeal, have a comic one.
But you know, I really should be surfing this city for a couch to crash out on tonight rather than surfing the net for bukake!
Monday, January 26, 2009
WRITING QUEER KENYA
A public service announcement in the spirit of this blog's continued pursuit (even when seeming more lewd than learned) of a public discourse on sex and sexuality. A discourse that revolves around pleasure and choice rather than the ubiquitous sex is immutably tied to death and disease paradigm of the religious and development industries.
Start of Message
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Writing Queer Kenya
Editors: Keguro Macharia and Angus Parkinson
We lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex individuals, in a word, queers, have had the distinct un-pleasure of being told we don't exist—in official government statements, historical documents, and contemporary statements. Well, we do.
We want Kenyan stories by Kenya-based and Kenya-born queers. About everything. We want writing about the dailyness of our lives, the good, the bad, the weird, the indifferent. If you have lived it, we want to hear about it. We especially want to reach beyond Nairobi, Mombasa, and other cities to all corners of the country. And we know the rest of Kenya, Africa, and the world wants to hear these stories as well.
Formats
We have three distinct formats. Choose what appeals to you.
1. Interviews: Tell us your story. Get in touch with us and we'll arrange an interview. We value your time and your confidentiality. Not sure you want to meet us directly? We have phones and email and all manner of ways to make this happen.
2. Letters to Kenya: Write (or unearth) a 500-1,000-word letter. To whom? Parents, pastors, the government, best friends, former friends, present lovers, former lovers, the person you really want to tune. Get personal, get intimate. Say what you really want to say!
3. Personal narratives: Write (or unearth) a 2,500-3,000-word narrative about the dailyness of being queer. The high points, low points, the endless plateaus, the quick glances, indrawn breaths of desire, domestic thrills, sexual boredom, beginnings and endings. If you write it, we'll consider it.
All submissions should be typed, double-spaced, and submitted electronically to queerkenya AT gmail.com. If you can't type, don't want to, or can't get hold of an email program that functions, get in touch with us. We can help.
How You Can Contribute
1. Get the word out. Convince your friends with hidden manuscripts or stories that must be shared to un-closet them.
2. Send us encouraging emails. We need your good wishes, your fabulously good wishes.
3. Volunteer time! We need all the help we can get.
4. Take ownership. We're editing, sure, but these are our collective stories.
Important Dates
April 30, 2009: Deadline to Receive Submissions
June 30, 2009: Selected Contributors Contacted
Publication: December 2009.
Questions? We're glad to answer. Please contact us at queerkenya AT gmail.com
End
Saturday, January 24, 2009
OBAMA RESCINDS MEXICO CITY
I generally do not do news and links on this blog but seeing that, I am creatively challenged this week due to a series of unfortunate events lately, I am posting this. Also in lieu of two blog posts I have been meaning to write since Obama's election last november:
The implications on Public Health Service delivery in Kenya of:
a) California's Proposition 8;
b) The Mexico City Policy
I will get round to it, someday, but in the meantime, and if only to keep my online footprint, here goes:
For those who have followed the politics of The Reagan- and successive rethugs- administration's ban on US funding for 'abortion' programmes abroad, it will come as no surprise that Obama rescinded the Mexico City Policy also known as the global gag rule within the first few days in office.
It is important, though, to note that while the tradition is to reinstate or rescind the policy by presidential decree on the 22nd of January, Obama held out until the 23rd. The 22nd of January is the anniversary of the landmark US ruling on Abortion, commonly referred to as Roe Vs. Wade and both Clinton and Bush have used this day to sign executive orders on the Mexico City Policy and make a statement of their views on Roe V.s Wade.
Obama, who signed the decree with little media fanfare, while choosing to be less combative noted that:
Obama also reinstated America's payments to UNFPA, who the Reagan and Bush administrations accused of supporting imposed abortions in china's one child policy.
And now we can sit back and await the fallout.
And from Kenya, he can expect a letter from Dr. Jean Kagia
Only this time, the chairperson of the Protecting Life Movement of Kenya might feel inclined to attach pictures of aborted foetuses floating down the Nairobi.
A study- I cannot find the report online- results of which were released in 2004 and that involved the Kenya Medical Association, the Kenyan chapter of the Federation of Women Lawyers, and the Ministry of Health suggests that 300,000 women procure abortions annually in Kenya and of this 2,600 die from complications.
Bottom line is that those are not all fourteen year olds, there are many married women amongst them. So question is not whether that woman in Kibera who has ten kids and finds herself pregnant again and the mzee (who has totally refused to use a condom) tells her 'that is your shauri', needs an abortion or not but where she can get access to safe and affordable sexual and reproductive health information and
services.
In other news, there is a very queer anthology in the works, whispers of are beginning to become loud murmurs, whose details I will be posting here soon. All I can say now is that it is to be Edited by Dr. Keguro Macharia and Angus Parkinson. Now if I could just dig up that call for submissions....
The implications on Public Health Service delivery in Kenya of:
a) California's Proposition 8;
b) The Mexico City Policy
I will get round to it, someday, but in the meantime, and if only to keep my online footprint, here goes:
For those who have followed the politics of The Reagan- and successive rethugs- administration's ban on US funding for 'abortion' programmes abroad, it will come as no surprise that Obama rescinded the Mexico City Policy also known as the global gag rule within the first few days in office.
It is important, though, to note that while the tradition is to reinstate or rescind the policy by presidential decree on the 22nd of January, Obama held out until the 23rd. The 22nd of January is the anniversary of the landmark US ruling on Abortion, commonly referred to as Roe Vs. Wade and both Clinton and Bush have used this day to sign executive orders on the Mexico City Policy and make a statement of their views on Roe V.s Wade.
Obama, who signed the decree with little media fanfare, while choosing to be less combative noted that:
"For too long, international family planning assistance has been used
as a political wedge issue, the subject of a back and forth debate that has served only to divide us. I have no desire to continue this stale and fruitless debate."
Obama also reinstated America's payments to UNFPA, who the Reagan and Bush administrations accused of supporting imposed abortions in china's one child policy.
And now we can sit back and await the fallout.
And from Kenya, he can expect a letter from Dr. Jean Kagia
Only this time, the chairperson of the Protecting Life Movement of Kenya might feel inclined to attach pictures of aborted foetuses floating down the Nairobi.
A study- I cannot find the report online- results of which were released in 2004 and that involved the Kenya Medical Association, the Kenyan chapter of the Federation of Women Lawyers, and the Ministry of Health suggests that 300,000 women procure abortions annually in Kenya and of this 2,600 die from complications.
Bottom line is that those are not all fourteen year olds, there are many married women amongst them. So question is not whether that woman in Kibera who has ten kids and finds herself pregnant again and the mzee (who has totally refused to use a condom) tells her 'that is your shauri', needs an abortion or not but where she can get access to safe and affordable sexual and reproductive health information and
services.
In other news, there is a very queer anthology in the works, whispers of are beginning to become loud murmurs, whose details I will be posting here soon. All I can say now is that it is to be Edited by Dr. Keguro Macharia and Angus Parkinson. Now if I could just dig up that call for submissions....
Thursday, January 15, 2009
RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW
[...]
Now whatever I did over the next few days drained through the ever widening cracks in my memory. Lying here scribbling this, I can, through my legendary deductive skills, arrive at two conclusions: a) I have a numbing pain on my left arm and my left knee is badly grazed which means that I must have taken a mighty fall; b) I have an itch like I swallowed a tin of kukumanga and that is to, without a doubt, say that I did not get laid. Yet again.
As to the question of whether I drank or not, I will take the trouble to remind you that that is, in my profound view of life, a purely ontological question long addressed by Descartes: I drink therefore I am.
Now if you will allow me a moment, I need to scrummage for a cigarette. That while congratulating myself for not having spilt my alcohol. This is an assessment easily arrived at easily by noting the fact that only my left arm and knee are injured. Is it not funny how a can of Kanee can be not only a metaphorical clutch but a literal one too?
Yet at this point I must beg your empathy. See, wherever and whenever it is that I fell, I must have picked myself up and finished my drink. Pretty commendable, even fortunate, I agree but only for that time and terribly unfortunate for now because from where I crawl there is no alcohol in sight. And, obviously because misery loves company, I cannot find even a bloody cigarette butt.
What, pray tell, did I ever do to deserve living through such interesting times? (Interesting, of course, in the Chinese curse's sense).
For now though, I have told you all- yes, all it takes is a few sentences- that I know about my life at this moment. What else is there to say while you know I cannot afford the luxury of the future tense and my past is a couple of inferences. I could hazard a peek at an immediately conceivable future, filled with Kanee and cigarettes, but haven't we been through that heartbreak already?
Yes, I hear your pontifical advice: “Why don't you at least try to sleep those injuries off, for now?”
I do hear you, but you know what? It is fucking New Year's eve and I just realised someone stole my mattress!
[...]
Well, and now that the new year is upon us and with this blog celebrating its third anniversary this Sunday, all I can say is that I have a new drink, a new crew and a desire to tell you about life in my neck (noose, policeman's boots and all) of the woods. Stay tuned!
Now whatever I did over the next few days drained through the ever widening cracks in my memory. Lying here scribbling this, I can, through my legendary deductive skills, arrive at two conclusions: a) I have a numbing pain on my left arm and my left knee is badly grazed which means that I must have taken a mighty fall; b) I have an itch like I swallowed a tin of kukumanga and that is to, without a doubt, say that I did not get laid. Yet again.
As to the question of whether I drank or not, I will take the trouble to remind you that that is, in my profound view of life, a purely ontological question long addressed by Descartes: I drink therefore I am.
Now if you will allow me a moment, I need to scrummage for a cigarette. That while congratulating myself for not having spilt my alcohol. This is an assessment easily arrived at easily by noting the fact that only my left arm and knee are injured. Is it not funny how a can of Kanee can be not only a metaphorical clutch but a literal one too?
Yet at this point I must beg your empathy. See, wherever and whenever it is that I fell, I must have picked myself up and finished my drink. Pretty commendable, even fortunate, I agree but only for that time and terribly unfortunate for now because from where I crawl there is no alcohol in sight. And, obviously because misery loves company, I cannot find even a bloody cigarette butt.
What, pray tell, did I ever do to deserve living through such interesting times? (Interesting, of course, in the Chinese curse's sense).
For now though, I have told you all- yes, all it takes is a few sentences- that I know about my life at this moment. What else is there to say while you know I cannot afford the luxury of the future tense and my past is a couple of inferences. I could hazard a peek at an immediately conceivable future, filled with Kanee and cigarettes, but haven't we been through that heartbreak already?
Yes, I hear your pontifical advice: “Why don't you at least try to sleep those injuries off, for now?”
I do hear you, but you know what? It is fucking New Year's eve and I just realised someone stole my mattress!
[...]
Well, and now that the new year is upon us and with this blog celebrating its third anniversary this Sunday, all I can say is that I have a new drink, a new crew and a desire to tell you about life in my neck (noose, policeman's boots and all) of the woods. Stay tuned!
Friday, January 09, 2009
ATAVISM OF HIGHER INEBRIATION
[...]
It must have been about 3 pm the next day when I received a text message from an old friend. Well, not friend as in friend, as the Gikuyu say, of the front seat but, you know, one of those people from the collective masturbatory days of Oh-Potash-is-Like-a-So-Amazing-Writer-Man!
The text message serves no other purpose in this narrative beyond waking me up to the realisation that I was sprawled in a ditch and the world was spinning around me, scratching and howling, as though God had learnt his physics from the M.O.B DJs. I looked this way and that way hoping to lay sight on my true boy and ask him what holiday the rest of the world was celebrating and there he was slumped against a tree.
It was obvious to me that he was unconscious and the two guys standing over him were trying to rob him. “Hey you!” I yelled and trying to dig myself out of the ditch but, merely, managing to prop myself up on one leg, spin and fall back into the ditch. Well, butt first, this time round, if it makes any difference for you to know.
With one arm slumped over the edge of the ditch, the other, a crutch, wedged firmly on the floor of the ditch, I posed for a moment to collect my wits. I took a deep breath- I at least recall doing so mentally- shook my head vigorously and with one hand started to pick out muddy bits off my chest, knees and face and all the while trying to figure out where the fluid on those places had come from seeing that the ditch itself was as dry as my throat.
Anyho...
I hauled myself out of the ditch and saw that my true boy was still right there- slumped under a tree. With two guys still looming over him. Obviously, the guys are robbing him, I said to myself. “Hey you!” I yelled. The two fellows turned towards me with the mechanical slow-motion lean, silly grin and all, of the happily drunk. Two jets of urine clashed somewhere between them, their grins exploded into the loudest of guffaws and they, ignoring me, went back to their good-humoured peeing into my true boy's mouth.
I kicked myself for having taken them for thieves and, penis in wobbly hand, joined them in their oh-so-exhilarating-in-a-lumpen proletariat-sort-of-way sport.
[...]
***
Giving it deeper thought now, as I peek through this rapidly-turning-opaque window of sobriety, I do recall that what crossed my mind then was that the the alcohol buying world was celebrating the day of Pentecost. Even as I sought my boy to ask him, my mind had long concluded that the good lord had done gone and finally sent us a helper. Like for real. A drunken helper. A helper to drunkenness. Whatever. But, a guy, all I can say is that long before I ended up in that ditch and him by that tree, it had been raining alcohol all sorts. All things nice. In fact, what I can tell you now is that my last memory was of everyone in the wines and spirits speaking in tongues.
Mother tongues, I tell you. And we were all mighty fluent.
I mean, it is funny- and I know you have laughed parallel with me- but what is this thing about Gikuyu men getting drunk and immediately reverting to Gikuyu and particularly to the tone deaf howling of Gikuyu gospel songs?
Me, I have a theory, but first allow me to down this Kanee.
Ahh, man, my throat is like a burning bush. Everything is illuminated.
My theory is... wait, wait, let me light a cigarette; a torch to guide me through the murky depths of theory formulation.
Eish, I have a light but no cigarette. Will be back in a sec...
Allah is beneficent, I went in search of a cigarette and got a full one- yes a full, virgin stick- and a level (half a can of Kanee).
So, we were where? My theory... indeed!
My theory is that part of the tranquillity that this consumption of alcohol business- business of consumption alcohol(?)... consumption of business alcohol (?)... wtf?- brings is achieved through taking you to a place of primal instinct; a place of either childhood or the most bestial rationality encoding.
Now this place, if you will allow me to borrow from Freud and Nietzsche (two random guys one Jew and one normal dead white guy- the better if we haven' read them- is more than sufficient academic homage for our theory construction, no?) I will call the Atavism of Higher Inebriation (AHI). When the Gikuyu man arrives at the AHI- a place where the lone brain cell remnant contains only the basic life support (my yet to be pee reviewed data suggests that basic life support, unfortunately, does not include bowel movement)- he reverts to his earliest cultural/ civilising encounters: lying on a dirty lesso choking on his own stool, and that of other toddlers, and surrounded by the wails of mothers too drunk on the blood of Christ to remember their diarrhoeic offspring.
Quite an unbecoming state of affairs, you say, if only to be seen to be a man after my own heart.
Unfortunately, there is a (and quite the rare sort it ought to be noted) kind of Gikuyu man who, Nubian gin totting (the mental picture of tots or shots needs to be banished because you know we quaff it by the glass-load), cigarette butt dangling, arrives at the AHI to find nothing. This is the sort that- and I will gladly let you call me a heathen if it means that you understand that I am that sort of Gikuyu man- having been successfully indoctrinated, goes on, in later years, to attempt a reversal of the process.
A successful reversal of the process has immense, and particularly positive, real world implications. These kind of men make great drinking company. This not because they supply the alcohol but because they bring to an alcohol laden table the camaraderie born of argumentation, polemics and controversial turns of the alcohol-laced point that is the glue that best binds alcohol to the human brain cell. (It is a documented fact that every man, Kikuyu or otherwise, of a certain age imagines himself a bar-room intellectual, or as with most African traditions- marked as they are by the anthropologically proven lack of Rationality in the Africa- where the notion of intellectualism is unimaginable, non-existent and intolerable: soothsayer; diviner. Whatever it is Africans have that is analogous to the Western notion of intellectualism).
Now, I do not know if you are following my drift but what I can tell you for certain is that I do not...
[...]
It must have been about 3 pm the next day when I received a text message from an old friend. Well, not friend as in friend, as the Gikuyu say, of the front seat but, you know, one of those people from the collective masturbatory days of Oh-Potash-is-Like-a-So-Amazing-Writer-Man!
The text message serves no other purpose in this narrative beyond waking me up to the realisation that I was sprawled in a ditch and the world was spinning around me, scratching and howling, as though God had learnt his physics from the M.O.B DJs. I looked this way and that way hoping to lay sight on my true boy and ask him what holiday the rest of the world was celebrating and there he was slumped against a tree.
It was obvious to me that he was unconscious and the two guys standing over him were trying to rob him. “Hey you!” I yelled and trying to dig myself out of the ditch but, merely, managing to prop myself up on one leg, spin and fall back into the ditch. Well, butt first, this time round, if it makes any difference for you to know.
With one arm slumped over the edge of the ditch, the other, a crutch, wedged firmly on the floor of the ditch, I posed for a moment to collect my wits. I took a deep breath- I at least recall doing so mentally- shook my head vigorously and with one hand started to pick out muddy bits off my chest, knees and face and all the while trying to figure out where the fluid on those places had come from seeing that the ditch itself was as dry as my throat.
Anyho...
I hauled myself out of the ditch and saw that my true boy was still right there- slumped under a tree. With two guys still looming over him. Obviously, the guys are robbing him, I said to myself. “Hey you!” I yelled. The two fellows turned towards me with the mechanical slow-motion lean, silly grin and all, of the happily drunk. Two jets of urine clashed somewhere between them, their grins exploded into the loudest of guffaws and they, ignoring me, went back to their good-humoured peeing into my true boy's mouth.
I kicked myself for having taken them for thieves and, penis in wobbly hand, joined them in their oh-so-exhilarating-in-a-lumpen proletariat-sort-of-way sport.
[...]
***
Giving it deeper thought now, as I peek through this rapidly-turning-opaque window of sobriety, I do recall that what crossed my mind then was that the the alcohol buying world was celebrating the day of Pentecost. Even as I sought my boy to ask him, my mind had long concluded that the good lord had done gone and finally sent us a helper. Like for real. A drunken helper. A helper to drunkenness. Whatever. But, a guy, all I can say is that long before I ended up in that ditch and him by that tree, it had been raining alcohol all sorts. All things nice. In fact, what I can tell you now is that my last memory was of everyone in the wines and spirits speaking in tongues.
Mother tongues, I tell you. And we were all mighty fluent.
I mean, it is funny- and I know you have laughed parallel with me- but what is this thing about Gikuyu men getting drunk and immediately reverting to Gikuyu and particularly to the tone deaf howling of Gikuyu gospel songs?
Me, I have a theory, but first allow me to down this Kanee.
Ahh, man, my throat is like a burning bush. Everything is illuminated.
My theory is... wait, wait, let me light a cigarette; a torch to guide me through the murky depths of theory formulation.
Eish, I have a light but no cigarette. Will be back in a sec...
Allah is beneficent, I went in search of a cigarette and got a full one- yes a full, virgin stick- and a level (half a can of Kanee).
So, we were where? My theory... indeed!
My theory is that part of the tranquillity that this consumption of alcohol business- business of consumption alcohol(?)... consumption of business alcohol (?)... wtf?- brings is achieved through taking you to a place of primal instinct; a place of either childhood or the most bestial rationality encoding.
Now this place, if you will allow me to borrow from Freud and Nietzsche (two random guys one Jew and one normal dead white guy- the better if we haven' read them- is more than sufficient academic homage for our theory construction, no?) I will call the Atavism of Higher Inebriation (AHI). When the Gikuyu man arrives at the AHI- a place where the lone brain cell remnant contains only the basic life support (my yet to be pee reviewed data suggests that basic life support, unfortunately, does not include bowel movement)- he reverts to his earliest cultural/ civilising encounters: lying on a dirty lesso choking on his own stool, and that of other toddlers, and surrounded by the wails of mothers too drunk on the blood of Christ to remember their diarrhoeic offspring.
Quite an unbecoming state of affairs, you say, if only to be seen to be a man after my own heart.
Unfortunately, there is a (and quite the rare sort it ought to be noted) kind of Gikuyu man who, Nubian gin totting (the mental picture of tots or shots needs to be banished because you know we quaff it by the glass-load), cigarette butt dangling, arrives at the AHI to find nothing. This is the sort that- and I will gladly let you call me a heathen if it means that you understand that I am that sort of Gikuyu man- having been successfully indoctrinated, goes on, in later years, to attempt a reversal of the process.
A successful reversal of the process has immense, and particularly positive, real world implications. These kind of men make great drinking company. This not because they supply the alcohol but because they bring to an alcohol laden table the camaraderie born of argumentation, polemics and controversial turns of the alcohol-laced point that is the glue that best binds alcohol to the human brain cell. (It is a documented fact that every man, Kikuyu or otherwise, of a certain age imagines himself a bar-room intellectual, or as with most African traditions- marked as they are by the anthropologically proven lack of Rationality in the Africa- where the notion of intellectualism is unimaginable, non-existent and intolerable: soothsayer; diviner. Whatever it is Africans have that is analogous to the Western notion of intellectualism).
Now, I do not know if you are following my drift but what I can tell you for certain is that I do not...
[...]
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
THE OLD LEAVES THEY ARE A TURNING
On the first day of Christmas my true boy said to me, “But Potash, don't you know it is Christmas?”
“Aaaish, nini...” I said to him my eyes, one moment fluttering open and quickly crinkling shut the next as a ray of sunlight hit them square-like through that ever growing space where the wall and the roof have sworn never to meet, “of course, I know it is Christmas, I just cannot afford it.”
“Clearly,” my true boy said to me kicking a can of Kanee into a pile in the corner. The can flew over the short distance and, save for a momentary clutter, soon settled into the eerily impotent silence of emptiness amongst its peers. It became like them: returned soldiers from the futile battle of escapism; carrier corps broken by a war that was not theirs to begin with. Cannon fodder. And we, with our human battles- sub-human, it could well be argued- quickly forgot them our hearts and desires yelling: “can them brew master, can them and we will kill them quick!”
I turned round to face him and with an instinctive flip of thumb and index finger: “Choma hiyo fegi!”
“Wacha moto,” the boy aaaahed, “Beggars point is bados.”
“You guy you malizaed my Kanee,” No, I was not complaining, boys don't play that way, I was just pointing out the obvious.
“There was bilas hapo,” he stared me down his bearded face devoid of emotion, its eyes sunken, its cheeks hollow. A face that only a new can of Kanee could lit up.
“Sasa unatakaje?” I asked while thrusting my hand into my cut-off jeans shorts, tugging at my penis (inadvertently dislodging a few pubic hairs in the process) and bringing the hand to my nose. “hmmm.”
“Hmmm.” He nodded ambiguously which was all the confirmation I needed to the fact that I was not in dire need of a birth, yet.
“Sasa aje?” I prodded and reached for the cigarette for which he obliged me this time.
“Ajee? Aje?”
“Manze si Kanee imepanda” I mumbled just to drill into his head what exactly were meant to be thinking about. I mean, like there could be anything else?
“Hauskii”
“Itakuwa aje sasa?”
“Ah,” shaking his head, “si hivo tu... lakini kuna vile Sir Godi atatumind.”
Where we live, God is good all the time. And even though he does not come through for the big things- jobs, money, self esteem- he is reliable when it comes to providing you with means to forget that you do not have those things: drugs, alcohol and, if you are so inclined, litter upon litter of progressively younger pussy.
“Kuwasha ni ka everyday,” I observed with conviction, “Hivyo ndio maboyz tunaishi”
“Ehh,” he agreed but the first trace of emotion crawled into his face to betray a lack of conviction, “lakini vile kumesota raondi hii, naona tukirudia mudi.”
“Eish, mudi si ni noma!”
“Dai tu hivo boy...” he reached into the corner and grabbing one of the empty cans turned it around, idly, on his hands. I stood back waiting to see him turn into Gollum. “Wee, dai to hivo...”
[Pause]
“Aih,” he started, flinging the can back into the corner, “Potash uko na mbao hapo?”
"Zii,” I replied upturning a chipped coffee mug to reveal all the money in my possession: a twenty shillings coin, “niko tu na mbao ya mafegi za kudoze.”
[Pause]
“Kwani ulikuwa unataka aje?”
[...]
“Aaaish, nini...” I said to him my eyes, one moment fluttering open and quickly crinkling shut the next as a ray of sunlight hit them square-like through that ever growing space where the wall and the roof have sworn never to meet, “of course, I know it is Christmas, I just cannot afford it.”
“Clearly,” my true boy said to me kicking a can of Kanee into a pile in the corner. The can flew over the short distance and, save for a momentary clutter, soon settled into the eerily impotent silence of emptiness amongst its peers. It became like them: returned soldiers from the futile battle of escapism; carrier corps broken by a war that was not theirs to begin with. Cannon fodder. And we, with our human battles- sub-human, it could well be argued- quickly forgot them our hearts and desires yelling: “can them brew master, can them and we will kill them quick!”
I turned round to face him and with an instinctive flip of thumb and index finger: “Choma hiyo fegi!”
“Wacha moto,” the boy aaaahed, “Beggars point is bados.”
“You guy you malizaed my Kanee,” No, I was not complaining, boys don't play that way, I was just pointing out the obvious.
“There was bilas hapo,” he stared me down his bearded face devoid of emotion, its eyes sunken, its cheeks hollow. A face that only a new can of Kanee could lit up.
“Sasa unatakaje?” I asked while thrusting my hand into my cut-off jeans shorts, tugging at my penis (inadvertently dislodging a few pubic hairs in the process) and bringing the hand to my nose. “hmmm.”
“Hmmm.” He nodded ambiguously which was all the confirmation I needed to the fact that I was not in dire need of a birth, yet.
“Sasa aje?” I prodded and reached for the cigarette for which he obliged me this time.
“Ajee? Aje?”
“Manze si Kanee imepanda” I mumbled just to drill into his head what exactly were meant to be thinking about. I mean, like there could be anything else?
“Hauskii”
“Itakuwa aje sasa?”
“Ah,” shaking his head, “si hivo tu... lakini kuna vile Sir Godi atatumind.”
Where we live, God is good all the time. And even though he does not come through for the big things- jobs, money, self esteem- he is reliable when it comes to providing you with means to forget that you do not have those things: drugs, alcohol and, if you are so inclined, litter upon litter of progressively younger pussy.
“Kuwasha ni ka everyday,” I observed with conviction, “Hivyo ndio maboyz tunaishi”
“Ehh,” he agreed but the first trace of emotion crawled into his face to betray a lack of conviction, “lakini vile kumesota raondi hii, naona tukirudia mudi.”
“Eish, mudi si ni noma!”
“Dai tu hivo boy...” he reached into the corner and grabbing one of the empty cans turned it around, idly, on his hands. I stood back waiting to see him turn into Gollum. “Wee, dai to hivo...”
[Pause]
“Aih,” he started, flinging the can back into the corner, “Potash uko na mbao hapo?”
"Zii,” I replied upturning a chipped coffee mug to reveal all the money in my possession: a twenty shillings coin, “niko tu na mbao ya mafegi za kudoze.”
[Pause]
“Kwani ulikuwa unataka aje?”
[...]
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
DON'T ASK WHAT OBAMA CAN DO FOR KENYA
I am excited for Obama and for America but I am saddened for Kenya. While the 'fierce urgency of now' must see Obama resuscitate the ailing American economy we, Kenyans, are celebrating his election to that duty by ruining our own economy.
What, pray tell, was the Government of Kenya thinking when it declared Thursday, 6th November a public holiday?
The best way for all progressive thinking Kenyans to celebrate Obama's victory is to work on bringing political change to this country from the bottom up. To not just sit and grumble about the inanity of our political discourse and the Bush-esque tyranny and divisive stance of our tribal chieftains but to rally one Kenyan at a time towards the embracing of a new political dispensation.
The time is now to move away from the press conferences and donor driven palavers; the yelling of empty threats at politicians from the shelter of posh NGO offices, by the 'activist-elites' and speak directly to our families and friends.
If America can, why can't we? We cannot because those who purport to preach the change gospel love to write concept notes, strategic plans, jingoistic communiques, jargon ridden country reports and Op-ed columns from here to new York City while the opponents of change are out in the field- face to face with the 'real Kenyans- handing out machetes and vitriol.
If you love Barrack Obama, spend your public holiday tomorrow talking to Main Street- tell them that, even here in Kenya, WE CAN!
To bastardise JFK, ask not what Obama can do for your country but what you can do for it.
What, pray tell, was the Government of Kenya thinking when it declared Thursday, 6th November a public holiday?
The best way for all progressive thinking Kenyans to celebrate Obama's victory is to work on bringing political change to this country from the bottom up. To not just sit and grumble about the inanity of our political discourse and the Bush-esque tyranny and divisive stance of our tribal chieftains but to rally one Kenyan at a time towards the embracing of a new political dispensation.
The time is now to move away from the press conferences and donor driven palavers; the yelling of empty threats at politicians from the shelter of posh NGO offices, by the 'activist-elites' and speak directly to our families and friends.
If America can, why can't we? We cannot because those who purport to preach the change gospel love to write concept notes, strategic plans, jingoistic communiques, jargon ridden country reports and Op-ed columns from here to new York City while the opponents of change are out in the field- face to face with the 'real Kenyans- handing out machetes and vitriol.
If you love Barrack Obama, spend your public holiday tomorrow talking to Main Street- tell them that, even here in Kenya, WE CAN!
To bastardise JFK, ask not what Obama can do for your country but what you can do for it.
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
END OF AN ERA?
I gave a girl a flower...
Unless I have sex with two Jersey bulls and write about it, this blog and Potash as you have always known him is dead.
Unless I have sex with two Jersey bulls and write about it, this blog and Potash as you have always known him is dead.
Monday, October 27, 2008
YOU BECAME
We walked.
We walked and talked.
Talked about things- life; everything.
By the dark village paths we stopped.
We stopped, stopped to dream.
We dreamed of the city.
The city.
Bright lights.
Tin lamps that never ran out of kerosene.
We talked.
We walked and talked.
Talked as we walked.
Talked and made plans.
Plans.
Plans to leave.
Then we left.
The next day we left
Walking.
Walking away.
***
How come we do not talk any more? You. You do not talk to me any more. Is it because you are rich and famous now? Famous, huh!
I remember back when. Back when we had been back in the city two years. (Back from six months of lying low in the village. Lying low while everyone- from that crooked Constable Rono, who kept buying us Napshizzle with fifty bobs he had taken off us, to four OCPDs- sought us. Sought us over the matter of certain disturbances at the Dandora bus stop Circa 1997. That when, even though most of my witnesses are long dead, I had never even been to Dandora... Eish, dadi, in 1997 I used to think Dandora was a rap group...). I was sitting at Mutua's kiosk reading the paper. I was reading the paper when I saw you.
I saw you that day. Saw your face. Your face peering back at me from beneath the headline. You were the headline. You were the news and I, I was still a statistic: 2 million youths lack ID cards or such and such. I was still a statistic and you were the news: “Wanted Gangster Kills Again.”
That was you.
You, a wanted gangster? At least they wanted you. Such a joy it would be to be wanted. Rich or poor; dead or alive, it must feel good to be wanted. No?
We had dreams of being. You became. We, we still merely exist.
It has been two years now since I saw you. Saw your face in the paper. It has been three years since we talked. Three years of wishing we still talk. Two years of wondering: do they still want you?
Want you dead?
We walked and talked.
Talked about things- life; everything.
By the dark village paths we stopped.
We stopped, stopped to dream.
We dreamed of the city.
The city.
Bright lights.
Tin lamps that never ran out of kerosene.
We talked.
We walked and talked.
Talked as we walked.
Talked and made plans.
Plans.
Plans to leave.
Then we left.
The next day we left
Walking.
Walking away.
***
How come we do not talk any more? You. You do not talk to me any more. Is it because you are rich and famous now? Famous, huh!
I remember back when. Back when we had been back in the city two years. (Back from six months of lying low in the village. Lying low while everyone- from that crooked Constable Rono, who kept buying us Napshizzle with fifty bobs he had taken off us, to four OCPDs- sought us. Sought us over the matter of certain disturbances at the Dandora bus stop Circa 1997. That when, even though most of my witnesses are long dead, I had never even been to Dandora... Eish, dadi, in 1997 I used to think Dandora was a rap group...). I was sitting at Mutua's kiosk reading the paper. I was reading the paper when I saw you.
I saw you that day. Saw your face. Your face peering back at me from beneath the headline. You were the headline. You were the news and I, I was still a statistic: 2 million youths lack ID cards or such and such. I was still a statistic and you were the news: “Wanted Gangster Kills Again.”
That was you.
You, a wanted gangster? At least they wanted you. Such a joy it would be to be wanted. Rich or poor; dead or alive, it must feel good to be wanted. No?
We had dreams of being. You became. We, we still merely exist.
It has been two years now since I saw you. Saw your face in the paper. It has been three years since we talked. Three years of wishing we still talk. Two years of wondering: do they still want you?
Want you dead?
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
MY TEN MINUTES OF SOBRIETY
Dear Timi,
Coherence eludes me. So much to do these days and very little time to do it. Well, maybe it is not the time that is lacking but the motivation. Because, lets face it, I am an unemployed writer- how can I not have time? But if no one is paying me, for anything, in the here and now, can't you just see how hard it is to think; write- work?
Anyway...
Now that I am back to our- yours, mine and those others that we shared it with- 'reality' (Nabokov, says this is “one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes” and I agree); this furtive place of 'always trying', I find myself thinking of you a lot.
I constantly wake from one of my increasingly frequent inebriated slumbers with a letter to you clawing at the tip of my fingers. Too bad that I can never get up and write it because, truth be told, it is not the gnawing letter that wakes me but that sick feeling at the pit of my stomach brought on by an over indulgence in cheap alcohol. So instead I turn, ever so slightly, and retch blood, bile and the remnants of many missed meals.
Sad is what all this is. And such a pity it is that being back in this place reminds me of you. In this dire place rather than a year or so ago when I felt that our shared dream- that of making our indelible marks on the Kenyan Canon (lol.... we used to say that Kenyan Canon will quit being a paradox when we were done with it)- was attainable. How sad that I forgot all about you when I was strutting my stuff on the theatre of dreams and only sneak you back in as metaphorical crutch and muse when I am returned to our theatre of broken dreams.
Now my mind staggers and I am Prometheus reaching out to grab that literary fire and bring it to the motherland. But divine hands intervene; thwart me. And here I am bound to a rock (some hideous monstrosity; a relic from an inglorious era; the Nyayo Monument perhaps) and life, shrouded in despondency; hateful leer turning into the curved beak of an eagle, lunges at me. Lunges at me. Consumes me. Frightful wings flap, the heat of my fire to sap. Destiny, I say, this is not. Vicissitudes, perhaps?
I write this here wary of what others will have to say. I mention destiny and emphasise that it is not at play here because recently an academic of my acquaintance accused me of having a teleological view of life... (Such cunt, er, I mean, how Kantian!)
But now I begin to lose my train of thought or rather than train finds itself dithering in the wake of my urgent need to reach for another can of naplam (if it quacks like a duck...) to blunt my senses.
Till my next ten minutes of sobriety (or its simulacrum) and hopefully, eloquence, Rest in Peace my dear friend.
Me
Coherence eludes me. So much to do these days and very little time to do it. Well, maybe it is not the time that is lacking but the motivation. Because, lets face it, I am an unemployed writer- how can I not have time? But if no one is paying me, for anything, in the here and now, can't you just see how hard it is to think; write- work?
Anyway...
Now that I am back to our- yours, mine and those others that we shared it with- 'reality' (Nabokov, says this is “one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes” and I agree); this furtive place of 'always trying', I find myself thinking of you a lot.
I constantly wake from one of my increasingly frequent inebriated slumbers with a letter to you clawing at the tip of my fingers. Too bad that I can never get up and write it because, truth be told, it is not the gnawing letter that wakes me but that sick feeling at the pit of my stomach brought on by an over indulgence in cheap alcohol. So instead I turn, ever so slightly, and retch blood, bile and the remnants of many missed meals.
Sad is what all this is. And such a pity it is that being back in this place reminds me of you. In this dire place rather than a year or so ago when I felt that our shared dream- that of making our indelible marks on the Kenyan Canon (lol.... we used to say that Kenyan Canon will quit being a paradox when we were done with it)- was attainable. How sad that I forgot all about you when I was strutting my stuff on the theatre of dreams and only sneak you back in as metaphorical crutch and muse when I am returned to our theatre of broken dreams.
Now my mind staggers and I am Prometheus reaching out to grab that literary fire and bring it to the motherland. But divine hands intervene; thwart me. And here I am bound to a rock (some hideous monstrosity; a relic from an inglorious era; the Nyayo Monument perhaps) and life, shrouded in despondency; hateful leer turning into the curved beak of an eagle, lunges at me. Lunges at me. Consumes me. Frightful wings flap, the heat of my fire to sap. Destiny, I say, this is not. Vicissitudes, perhaps?
I write this here wary of what others will have to say. I mention destiny and emphasise that it is not at play here because recently an academic of my acquaintance accused me of having a teleological view of life... (Such cunt, er, I mean, how Kantian!)
But now I begin to lose my train of thought or rather than train finds itself dithering in the wake of my urgent need to reach for another can of naplam (if it quacks like a duck...) to blunt my senses.
Till my next ten minutes of sobriety (or its simulacrum) and hopefully, eloquence, Rest in Peace my dear friend.
Me
Monday, October 13, 2008
BOOKS OF MEMORIES
Dear Timi,
These tears have been flowing since yesterday. I have tried to wipe them off with jug after jug of Senator but the only thing I have managed to still is my cash flow. Now I am sitting on the dirt floor surrounded by books and half drowned in my own tears. I am holding a dog-eared copy of The Complete Shakespeare with one wobbly hand and writing you this note with the other, more wobblier, hand.
Surrounded by books, huh? You must be wondering who died (apart from you...hehehe...) and made me an owner of many books,eh? No one really. It is just where I am now. I am the proud owner of volumes upon volumes of- brace yourself buddy- new books. Books, man, that only I have read since they left the bookshop. Books that have only had one owner: me. Books with covers- dust jackets too. For crying out loud. Books with all the pages in them and where they are meant to be.
Books. Books. Books.
Two piles of books: (a) The new; (b) the old.
a) The new: Zadie Smith, Ishmael Beah, Doreen Baingana, Piri Thomas, Edward P. Jones, Jeffrey Euginedes, Chinua Achebe, Azar Nafisi, Ryszard Kapuscinski, this one... that one... the other... etcetera.
b) The old: The Complete Shakespeare (a Front and back cover, frontispiece, indices, The Tempest, the first scene of Troillus and Cressida, one act of Much Ado About Nothing, the last two acts of A Comedy of Errors and ten sonnets short of complete). The New King James Bible (Beginning at the Third Chapter of Deuteronomy and ending in the middle of the John 10).
Only you know what those last two books meant to us. Only you understand why so many of those early blog posts yelled: I was raised on Shakespeare and the Bible. Shakespeare and the Bible, between us the only two books we had. But that seems like a long time ago. A long time before you left us. Left me.
If there is an afterlife, I hope you are sitting out there in its library. Sitting there, ye that died book-poor, surrounded by books. Reading. Reading and sipping on something finer than that Napshizzle that we shared.
Till we meet again.... do not quit believing that I loved you!
Me.
These tears have been flowing since yesterday. I have tried to wipe them off with jug after jug of Senator but the only thing I have managed to still is my cash flow. Now I am sitting on the dirt floor surrounded by books and half drowned in my own tears. I am holding a dog-eared copy of The Complete Shakespeare with one wobbly hand and writing you this note with the other, more wobblier, hand.
Surrounded by books, huh? You must be wondering who died (apart from you...hehehe...) and made me an owner of many books,eh? No one really. It is just where I am now. I am the proud owner of volumes upon volumes of- brace yourself buddy- new books. Books, man, that only I have read since they left the bookshop. Books that have only had one owner: me. Books with covers- dust jackets too. For crying out loud. Books with all the pages in them and where they are meant to be.
Books. Books. Books.
Two piles of books: (a) The new; (b) the old.
a) The new: Zadie Smith, Ishmael Beah, Doreen Baingana, Piri Thomas, Edward P. Jones, Jeffrey Euginedes, Chinua Achebe, Azar Nafisi, Ryszard Kapuscinski, this one... that one... the other... etcetera.
b) The old: The Complete Shakespeare (a Front and back cover, frontispiece, indices, The Tempest, the first scene of Troillus and Cressida, one act of Much Ado About Nothing, the last two acts of A Comedy of Errors and ten sonnets short of complete). The New King James Bible (Beginning at the Third Chapter of Deuteronomy and ending in the middle of the John 10).
Only you know what those last two books meant to us. Only you understand why so many of those early blog posts yelled: I was raised on Shakespeare and the Bible. Shakespeare and the Bible, between us the only two books we had. But that seems like a long time ago. A long time before you left us. Left me.
If there is an afterlife, I hope you are sitting out there in its library. Sitting there, ye that died book-poor, surrounded by books. Reading. Reading and sipping on something finer than that Napshizzle that we shared.
Till we meet again.... do not quit believing that I loved you!
Me.
Monday, September 29, 2008
RETURN OF THE SLEAZEMEISTER- Unhappy Endings
It all begins with a smell.
Silence stands tall between mother and I. Once in a while, the silence leans back and the fire cackles, a log burnt to embers splinters sending sparks flying all over the kitchen. Some sparks find our clothes- our dirt clothes- and drill holes onto the ageing fabrics. Mostly, I ignore them but mother, always with reflexive gestures, brushes them off. She reaches for another log but all the wood is gone. She rummages in the dirt around her and gathering a handful of tinder, throws it into the fire. It bursts into flames.
Smelly flames.
A breeze creeps in through a gaping hole where, with all their discordant shapes and sizes, the flattened out tin cans that make our kitchen's walls refuse to meet. The breeze sends a plume of smoke in my direction. I choke as the strong smell of burning Meru oak imprints itself into my childhood memories.
We lapse back into inertia. Silence stands up straight. The smell hovers.
Silence leans back again. The sufuria on the fire boils over. Mother sticks a calloused thumb under the lid and flips it over. It clutters over one of the three hearth stones and on to a corner. She reaches for her cooking stick, stirs the contents of the sufuria. She turns the cooking stick around and uses its handle to poke the fire.
The moon gapes at me through another hole this one high up where a section of the the wall shies away from the roof. I lean back- playing peek a boo with the moon- but she spies me through a constellation of holes and tears on the tin roof. In a few minutes, yet another bland dinner will be served. But this one I will have to miss because my phone rings and yanks me out of my day dream and into the _ _.
I did not name this place. She did. The white girl leaning over me. I ask her how I got here all the while trying to crane my neck and check the place out. My neck is immobile. Held in place by a neck brace.
Suddenly, things race through my mind. The strip bar. A stripper with her legs around my neck. An out of body experience. A drink with John the Apostle. The beginnings of a story ... the middle of a story... an end blurred out.
That day was the 10th of April 2008. I had, once again, lived to die another day.
***
The challenges of being a blogger who is not anonymous, and yet chooses to tell real-life stories, has finally caught up with me. I wrote the final three episodes of the Sleazemeister series, throughout last night, on note paper while lying on the floor of the kitchen described in this episode. Those three episodes were, in order of appearance: White Chicks; Miscegenation and Coitus Interrupters. Those episodes covered my experiences over the period May- August 2008. (August being the time when I wrote the first Sleazemeister episode.)
But as I lay there watching the kerosene lamp flicker, and eventually go off, my mind raced through the last one month the culmination of which was an episode titled Paradise Lost. This episode, written this morning, was a sort of afterword to the Sleazemeister that reveals me to be recently returned to Kiambu. Again.
So where are the posts? They will not be published here but I hope to turn them into a chapter in my memoirs. At that point, assuming I will finally make some money out of all this writing, I will have someone to deal with the legal issues- my publishers- and enough resources to not bother about pissing off some hoodlums and a string of lovers and sex partners both past and present.
The import of all this is that the Sleazemeister series has had to end prematurely and on a rather lame note here. I can be convinced though to make a limited edition PDF of it. But that is just a thought.
In the meantime, now that my return to the blogosphere has been firmly established, look out for new stories from the here and now. I might be back in the city by the time I write the next post or I might still be in Kiambu. Wherever I am, I promise to write. So see you all next monday.
Silence stands tall between mother and I. Once in a while, the silence leans back and the fire cackles, a log burnt to embers splinters sending sparks flying all over the kitchen. Some sparks find our clothes- our dirt clothes- and drill holes onto the ageing fabrics. Mostly, I ignore them but mother, always with reflexive gestures, brushes them off. She reaches for another log but all the wood is gone. She rummages in the dirt around her and gathering a handful of tinder, throws it into the fire. It bursts into flames.
Smelly flames.
A breeze creeps in through a gaping hole where, with all their discordant shapes and sizes, the flattened out tin cans that make our kitchen's walls refuse to meet. The breeze sends a plume of smoke in my direction. I choke as the strong smell of burning Meru oak imprints itself into my childhood memories.
We lapse back into inertia. Silence stands up straight. The smell hovers.
Silence leans back again. The sufuria on the fire boils over. Mother sticks a calloused thumb under the lid and flips it over. It clutters over one of the three hearth stones and on to a corner. She reaches for her cooking stick, stirs the contents of the sufuria. She turns the cooking stick around and uses its handle to poke the fire.
The moon gapes at me through another hole this one high up where a section of the the wall shies away from the roof. I lean back- playing peek a boo with the moon- but she spies me through a constellation of holes and tears on the tin roof. In a few minutes, yet another bland dinner will be served. But this one I will have to miss because my phone rings and yanks me out of my day dream and into the _ _.
I did not name this place. She did. The white girl leaning over me. I ask her how I got here all the while trying to crane my neck and check the place out. My neck is immobile. Held in place by a neck brace.
Suddenly, things race through my mind. The strip bar. A stripper with her legs around my neck. An out of body experience. A drink with John the Apostle. The beginnings of a story ... the middle of a story... an end blurred out.
That day was the 10th of April 2008. I had, once again, lived to die another day.
***
The challenges of being a blogger who is not anonymous, and yet chooses to tell real-life stories, has finally caught up with me. I wrote the final three episodes of the Sleazemeister series, throughout last night, on note paper while lying on the floor of the kitchen described in this episode. Those three episodes were, in order of appearance: White Chicks; Miscegenation and Coitus Interrupters. Those episodes covered my experiences over the period May- August 2008. (August being the time when I wrote the first Sleazemeister episode.)
But as I lay there watching the kerosene lamp flicker, and eventually go off, my mind raced through the last one month the culmination of which was an episode titled Paradise Lost. This episode, written this morning, was a sort of afterword to the Sleazemeister that reveals me to be recently returned to Kiambu. Again.
So where are the posts? They will not be published here but I hope to turn them into a chapter in my memoirs. At that point, assuming I will finally make some money out of all this writing, I will have someone to deal with the legal issues- my publishers- and enough resources to not bother about pissing off some hoodlums and a string of lovers and sex partners both past and present.
The import of all this is that the Sleazemeister series has had to end prematurely and on a rather lame note here. I can be convinced though to make a limited edition PDF of it. But that is just a thought.
In the meantime, now that my return to the blogosphere has been firmly established, look out for new stories from the here and now. I might be back in the city by the time I write the next post or I might still be in Kiambu. Wherever I am, I promise to write. So see you all next monday.
Monday, September 22, 2008
RETURN OF THE SLEAZEMEISTER- Jesus Wept
[The Story So Far...]
“In the beginning was the word.” the ancient Hebrew yelled.
“Take the word and stick it up your Kike arse.” I yelled back. “It all started with a smell.”
“What in heaven's name are you talking about Potash?”
“Listen here John,” I said to him as I lit up my third cigarette of the hour blowing smoke into his face. “It don't mean a thing to me that you have sold over a hundred million and I do not even have a bloody book yet, but you got to let me tell my story...”
We were seated at the terrace of a bar on the seedier side of heaven.
“Keep it down, out there,” shouted the barman his voice following his scraggy beard and screwed up face out of the window, “I am not licensed.” He looked the type that had started out as a bootlegger in Vanity Fair and through an oversight of Divine Bureaucracy or using a forged visa on Pilgrim's stolen passport had got into the Celestial City. John made a victory sign at him which in my newly enlightened state I knew to be the 60 AD equivalent of showing someone the finger. The barman jumped onto the window sill and pulling out an upstart penis wagged it at John. That I assumed to be a Masonic sign because, their type not being allowed here, I had no way of interpreting it.
The terrace faced a slow moving body of water that was, to my Nairobian's eyes, too clean to be a river. Nairobi River must have looked like that once long ago before even the do-gooders at UNEP gave up on it and decided to spend their money on duty free Hummers, I mused. Then my eyes were drawn to something on the river's west bank: Hyacinth? Detritus? Before I could figure out what it was I heard a series of loud bangs coming from that side of the river. The kind of loud bangs that you quickly learn to sleep through if, like me, you have lived in Kiambu or certain areas of Nairobi.
The sound of gunfire.
John: “Bastards!”
“What?”
“They just delivered a fresh bunch of virgins to that side”
“No shit!”
“If I had known that there was more than one way to heaven do you think I would have bothered to give up fishing?” John lamented. “I mean, look at fuckers like you, for all his vengeance who would have known God could give out guilt-free-passes?”
“Wacha I pee.” I dismissed his rant.
The toilets were at the back of the building. Down a dimly lit corridor. NAPOLEON WAS HERE! A squiggle, in dark coloured shit, on the wall informed me. HITLER TOO! Another, in a sloppy hand that was trying so hard to steal my attention from the other, insisted. “Who would have known?” I mumbled at the wall and reminded myself to sign this guest book on my way out. (Unfortunately, hard as I tried, a shit was not forthcoming so those of you that pass by that way in future might feel inclined to call me a liar but that is yours.)
As I walked back through the bar, a couple of medieval Popes beckoned me over to their table. “Hey moor,” one of them extended an avuncular smile at me, “you are new here no?”
“How about a glass of Roodeberg for two old hands who need it?”said the other.
“If you fuckers had bothered to store your treasures up here,” I said leaning against their table with all the weight of Sunday School behind me, “You would be drinking vintage Lachrymal Christi up in here instead of trying to cadge some cheap South African crud.”
“If we had known they would let Caliban in here we would have signed up for the other side.” one Pope yelled.
“Devil's dam, if you know your Shakespeare, Leo,” the other said to his friend, “every one of these bloody moors. I am so glad that in our time there was a sea between us and them. These days an honest to God man cannot afford decent neighbours for a lifetime of trying.”
Leo, returning to fiddling with the TV in an attempt to catch an illegal channel: “They even make the world turn now...” The TV screen stopped flickering to reveal one of porno's greatest moments: Bobbi Bliss deep-throating Mandingo. “... and just look at what the world has come to- a hot babe like this can only find fame by deep-throating that horse sized savage? Like who is this Mandingo anyway- Othello or something?”
“Fuck Othello,” Leo's friend retorted, “that son of Caligula ravished Maria, my youngest Venice mistress... caught the bastard negro jumping out of the window as I stepped into my lady's chamber and as I...”
I never heard the rest of that Pope's story because having shaken hands around the bar and stopping to show Kapuscinski where his arse was so he would know where to shove his Africa stories, I stepped out into the terrace.
“You know, “ I said to John, “those losers in there... the Popes... they remind me of some crafty Kenyans in America. Fuckers who hang around and wait for new kids to arrive from home with harambee money and welcome them with hearty smiles and before the kids can tell a quarter from a dime, it is all gone.”
“Forget those small timers, Potash,” John said shaking his head. “I have seen Kenyans here in heaven who make me think I am in the wrong place.” He paused and beckoning a waitress, ordered another drink for himself. On my tab. (It is surprising how much wealth a guy like me who cannot tell God from Adam has got stored up here. For those who like a moral with their story all I can say is that there is no rhyme or reason to God. God, like I have said before, works in mysterious ways his blunders to perform.)
“There are, er...” John stammered when I caught him staring at the retreating backside of the waitress. “There are Kenyans living up on Kingdom Hill and playing golf with God that have been damned by millions on earth. It is easy to be down there and see someone rob an entire country blind and say: 'That one is going to hell' but then you get here and you marvel at how much stock they bought up here.” He paused to commend the waitress, as she brought him his drink, on her good looks. “Potash, man, it is like there is some insider trading going on here.. it is as though the Nairobi Stock Exchange is the eye of the needle that you have to pass through to see the kingdom of heaven.”
“So how did I get in,” I asked him, “if as you say blessed are not the poor”
“Potash, have you seen the records office here?” He spat. “It is worse than a court registry down in Nairobi; even Jesus cannot find his own file if he tried to.”
“Ah, well... talking of Jesus,” I segued, “I am sure he is a spoilt brat... the type I know how to pull drinks out of...”
“He is a regular kid, I must say,” John said with a smile, “You know me and him go way back from when he was setting up his hustle down there...”
“I know man,” I responded, “I read your book a thousand times... it is one of my favourite books of all time...”
“Thanks, Potash.” John said raising his glass and clinking it against mine. “But you know I have had some people come up to me here and say I didn't write it. That I was just a fisherman who couldn't know better...”
“Hehehehe! Some people say Timi wrote the early posts on my blog; that Potash was a character N.M. created and formed a committee- the so called Potashian Book Club- to write fictional memoirs... and I am not saying that you and me are on the same level, but all I am saying is that once your work is out there then people are bound to say all manner of crass things.”
“But I wrote that book, Potash,” John said and I could fell a tide of tears assail him, “I want you to know that.”
“John, I am your number one fan.” I put my hand over his and he turned towards me. I looked him straight in the eye and said: “Forget Jane Austen and Tolstoy, you have my favourite first line of all time: In the beginning was the word...”
He rubbed a wee tear of his left eye and stared across the river as yet another salvo was fired to celebrate the arrival of more virgins. A rocket propelled grenade flew through the air and landed dangerously close to our terrace. As it exploded I wondered what happened to the virgins when they were virgins no more. Did God have a recall system and a warehouse full of 'virginity' creams or did the men just use the virgins and toss them into the river to float their useless way, alongside the spent mortar shells, towards hell?
“But Potash, if you liked that line so why were you disputing it?”
“I like it because of the metaphysical punch it packs... I am told that it has something to do with that gnostic stuff you were up to that almost had the Popes showing you where to get off... But, let us not miss the point, which is, that was your first line; your story, but it is not mine. All I was saying is that my story begins with the smells.”
“But which story, Potash?” John wondered. “The one about your death in a dingy strip club or the one about your resurrection?”
“Look here Hebrew,” I glared at him, “I am not dead. All I know is that for some weird reason I am stuck in this gaudy looking city listening to you bore me to death and wondering how the hell I got here.”
“You broke your neck, Potash.” John explained. “Well, sort of.”
“When...? where...? how...? What do you mean sort off?”
“Luke is the doctor not me.” He laughed. “Don't you know your bible, Potash.” I did not even humour him with a rude retort.
“So,” John started, “it was about 0230hrs East African Time and Jesus, some angel called Dino and I were on duty at The Panopticon...?”
“Hey, hey... easy on the jargon old man,” I interjected. “Panowhassat?”
“Oh, The Panopticon,” John explained, “a newfangled observatory this Frenchie faggot Foucault built for God in exchange for a visa into the Celestial City. Turns out later this Foucault guy had stolen the idea from some long dead English dude so visa got revoked.” John paused, cackled. “You should have seen the amount of water- straight out of this here river, I tell you- that Jesus turned into wine that day to celebrate and spite a bunch of his detractors here who say like to say that he, and the rest of us boys that hang with him, is queer.”
“Be easy on the faggots man,” I said to John, “God sure must have made them in his own image, no?”
“What shit you talking man?” John yelled at me.
“I am not talking,” I replied. “It is you who is telling me about being on duty at this Panopticon thingum.”
“Yes,” John continued. “so The Panopticon is not useful really, we just sit and watch the live feed from earth but there is not much we can do about it. Not much we are meant to do but watch; put the scient into omniscient; the presence into omnipresence and such things seeing that God caught the Outsourcing bug long before everyone else and men do the creation and the killing for him. Men know who to thank for small mercies: God; who to blame when they receive no mercy: The Devil.”
“Cut to the chase, old man,” I complained, “God played you, so what do I care, I have a story to write”
“So,” John carried on with his exposition on heavenly politics which, as far as I was concerned, was not only wasting my time but also messing up my word count, “there we were and I was the only one watching the live feed.
See, things have been very slack in heaven these days. Global warming means that God cannot grow his weed out in his garden any more so he spends most of his time in Hell- where The Devil has a massive grow operation going on- trying to bum a joint or two. The way I see it is that someone needs to tell God that if you give a man a joint he will get high for a day, but if you teach a man how to grow his own shit he will stay high, every day.”
“Word!” I said because I am the kind of person that will credit a good point when I see it. Even when it is standing in the way of my story.
“Anyway, God being absent more often than not has meant that no one is bothered to earn their Celestial digs. Most beings- the junior staff who need his signature to as much as sneeze, especially- cannot even get their work done even if they tried to. Jesus on the other hand has become more than a bit jaded. I mean, since people down there were able to split the atom, no one has remained impressed by some hippie who once upon a time split a few loaves between thousands of people. Who has heard of the miracle at some wedding in Canaan since men discovered 'bottomless' beer? So Jesus was on sms chat with Mary Magdalene while he should have been watching the live feed with me and Dino. (Which wouldn't be a problem if only Jesus had not been using the prayer Hotline.) Dino? Dino had fallen asleep, for the tenth night in a row, trying to read Ngugi wa Thiongo's Wizard of the Crow.
So, there I am, watching you. You had just done an impressive job with that Lolita in the 'Presidential Sweet' and were back at the bar.” John continued. I had a vague memory of being the fuckee rather than the fucker but I could not be bothered to interrupt John with small details. “Your friend Dinda and that mercenary cunt of a writer, ...N.M?”
“Yeah. N.M.” I confirmed. “More cunt than writer, I dare say...”
“Indeed. Dinda and N.M had gone off to handle business in other sections of the club so you perched your arse on a stool by the counter and ordered a yellow drink.”
“Damn, a yellow drink that soon? Yellow means I do not want to get it up again...”
John: “And you didn't. One of the girls dancing on the counter crawled over to you after a signal from the hostess.”
“I'll be damned,” I whistled the events of the previous night coming back to me, “the ones on the counter were ugly!”
“Sure was ugly...” John agreed. “The one that crawled over to you was uglier that Celie in The Color Purple. She whispered in your ear and you nodded your approval.”
“Inebriation.” I shout thumping my fist on the table and spilling our drinks. “Mitigation, sir!”
“The girl spun round and with her hands resting firmly on the counter she curled her legs around your neck...”
“Woah...” I exclaimed remembering that moment.
“Ditto.” John said. “'Check this shit out,' I said to Jesus. He glared at me and asked: 'What?' I pointed at the screen. Jesus switched off the phone- the prayer hotline mind you- and pulled a seat closer to the screen.”
“I see labia like an elephants ears lunging at me and then my mind goes blank.”
“That is when you ended up here.” John explained. “The table was wet, the girl's hands slid off it. The girl's legs were curled around your neck- Twist!”
“Snap?”
“I have seen people die in the freakiest of ways,” John laughed, “but yours Potash, yours was intolerable. An anti-climax, even.”
“Anti-climax?”
“By the time your neck snapped every one had been watching the show on their Panopticon Portable 2000s. Suddenly, phones went buzzing with blame games and buck-passing. The Fates insisted they didn't do it. Both God and The Devil were adamant they didn't do it, either- and they were each other's alibi.”
“So what the hell happened, man?”
“Baku.” John said shaking his head in exasperation.
“Baku?”
“Your guardian angel.” Said John. “He is a faggot. He has the hots for you.”
“Jesus F. Christ!”
“It is Baku that pushed the girl off the slippery table.”
“But, er... come on now,” I stammered. “What did you all do when I broke my neck? You, them, someone... Jesus... what did Jesus do?”
“Jesus,” John said a tangible solemnity taking over his voice. “Jesus did what Jesus does when bad things happen to good people.”
“Yeah, and what's that?”
“Jesus wept!”
“In the beginning was the word.” the ancient Hebrew yelled.
“Take the word and stick it up your Kike arse.” I yelled back. “It all started with a smell.”
“What in heaven's name are you talking about Potash?”
“Listen here John,” I said to him as I lit up my third cigarette of the hour blowing smoke into his face. “It don't mean a thing to me that you have sold over a hundred million and I do not even have a bloody book yet, but you got to let me tell my story...”
We were seated at the terrace of a bar on the seedier side of heaven.
“Keep it down, out there,” shouted the barman his voice following his scraggy beard and screwed up face out of the window, “I am not licensed.” He looked the type that had started out as a bootlegger in Vanity Fair and through an oversight of Divine Bureaucracy or using a forged visa on Pilgrim's stolen passport had got into the Celestial City. John made a victory sign at him which in my newly enlightened state I knew to be the 60 AD equivalent of showing someone the finger. The barman jumped onto the window sill and pulling out an upstart penis wagged it at John. That I assumed to be a Masonic sign because, their type not being allowed here, I had no way of interpreting it.
The terrace faced a slow moving body of water that was, to my Nairobian's eyes, too clean to be a river. Nairobi River must have looked like that once long ago before even the do-gooders at UNEP gave up on it and decided to spend their money on duty free Hummers, I mused. Then my eyes were drawn to something on the river's west bank: Hyacinth? Detritus? Before I could figure out what it was I heard a series of loud bangs coming from that side of the river. The kind of loud bangs that you quickly learn to sleep through if, like me, you have lived in Kiambu or certain areas of Nairobi.
The sound of gunfire.
John: “Bastards!”
“What?”
“They just delivered a fresh bunch of virgins to that side”
“No shit!”
“If I had known that there was more than one way to heaven do you think I would have bothered to give up fishing?” John lamented. “I mean, look at fuckers like you, for all his vengeance who would have known God could give out guilt-free-passes?”
“Wacha I pee.” I dismissed his rant.
The toilets were at the back of the building. Down a dimly lit corridor. NAPOLEON WAS HERE! A squiggle, in dark coloured shit, on the wall informed me. HITLER TOO! Another, in a sloppy hand that was trying so hard to steal my attention from the other, insisted. “Who would have known?” I mumbled at the wall and reminded myself to sign this guest book on my way out. (Unfortunately, hard as I tried, a shit was not forthcoming so those of you that pass by that way in future might feel inclined to call me a liar but that is yours.)
As I walked back through the bar, a couple of medieval Popes beckoned me over to their table. “Hey moor,” one of them extended an avuncular smile at me, “you are new here no?”
“How about a glass of Roodeberg for two old hands who need it?”said the other.
“If you fuckers had bothered to store your treasures up here,” I said leaning against their table with all the weight of Sunday School behind me, “You would be drinking vintage Lachrymal Christi up in here instead of trying to cadge some cheap South African crud.”
“If we had known they would let Caliban in here we would have signed up for the other side.” one Pope yelled.
“Devil's dam, if you know your Shakespeare, Leo,” the other said to his friend, “every one of these bloody moors. I am so glad that in our time there was a sea between us and them. These days an honest to God man cannot afford decent neighbours for a lifetime of trying.”
Leo, returning to fiddling with the TV in an attempt to catch an illegal channel: “They even make the world turn now...” The TV screen stopped flickering to reveal one of porno's greatest moments: Bobbi Bliss deep-throating Mandingo. “... and just look at what the world has come to- a hot babe like this can only find fame by deep-throating that horse sized savage? Like who is this Mandingo anyway- Othello or something?”
“Fuck Othello,” Leo's friend retorted, “that son of Caligula ravished Maria, my youngest Venice mistress... caught the bastard negro jumping out of the window as I stepped into my lady's chamber and as I...”
I never heard the rest of that Pope's story because having shaken hands around the bar and stopping to show Kapuscinski where his arse was so he would know where to shove his Africa stories, I stepped out into the terrace.
“You know, “ I said to John, “those losers in there... the Popes... they remind me of some crafty Kenyans in America. Fuckers who hang around and wait for new kids to arrive from home with harambee money and welcome them with hearty smiles and before the kids can tell a quarter from a dime, it is all gone.”
“Forget those small timers, Potash,” John said shaking his head. “I have seen Kenyans here in heaven who make me think I am in the wrong place.” He paused and beckoning a waitress, ordered another drink for himself. On my tab. (It is surprising how much wealth a guy like me who cannot tell God from Adam has got stored up here. For those who like a moral with their story all I can say is that there is no rhyme or reason to God. God, like I have said before, works in mysterious ways his blunders to perform.)
“There are, er...” John stammered when I caught him staring at the retreating backside of the waitress. “There are Kenyans living up on Kingdom Hill and playing golf with God that have been damned by millions on earth. It is easy to be down there and see someone rob an entire country blind and say: 'That one is going to hell' but then you get here and you marvel at how much stock they bought up here.” He paused to commend the waitress, as she brought him his drink, on her good looks. “Potash, man, it is like there is some insider trading going on here.. it is as though the Nairobi Stock Exchange is the eye of the needle that you have to pass through to see the kingdom of heaven.”
“So how did I get in,” I asked him, “if as you say blessed are not the poor”
“Potash, have you seen the records office here?” He spat. “It is worse than a court registry down in Nairobi; even Jesus cannot find his own file if he tried to.”
“Ah, well... talking of Jesus,” I segued, “I am sure he is a spoilt brat... the type I know how to pull drinks out of...”
“He is a regular kid, I must say,” John said with a smile, “You know me and him go way back from when he was setting up his hustle down there...”
“I know man,” I responded, “I read your book a thousand times... it is one of my favourite books of all time...”
“Thanks, Potash.” John said raising his glass and clinking it against mine. “But you know I have had some people come up to me here and say I didn't write it. That I was just a fisherman who couldn't know better...”
“Hehehehe! Some people say Timi wrote the early posts on my blog; that Potash was a character N.M. created and formed a committee- the so called Potashian Book Club- to write fictional memoirs... and I am not saying that you and me are on the same level, but all I am saying is that once your work is out there then people are bound to say all manner of crass things.”
“But I wrote that book, Potash,” John said and I could fell a tide of tears assail him, “I want you to know that.”
“John, I am your number one fan.” I put my hand over his and he turned towards me. I looked him straight in the eye and said: “Forget Jane Austen and Tolstoy, you have my favourite first line of all time: In the beginning was the word...”
He rubbed a wee tear of his left eye and stared across the river as yet another salvo was fired to celebrate the arrival of more virgins. A rocket propelled grenade flew through the air and landed dangerously close to our terrace. As it exploded I wondered what happened to the virgins when they were virgins no more. Did God have a recall system and a warehouse full of 'virginity' creams or did the men just use the virgins and toss them into the river to float their useless way, alongside the spent mortar shells, towards hell?
“But Potash, if you liked that line so why were you disputing it?”
“I like it because of the metaphysical punch it packs... I am told that it has something to do with that gnostic stuff you were up to that almost had the Popes showing you where to get off... But, let us not miss the point, which is, that was your first line; your story, but it is not mine. All I was saying is that my story begins with the smells.”
“But which story, Potash?” John wondered. “The one about your death in a dingy strip club or the one about your resurrection?”
“Look here Hebrew,” I glared at him, “I am not dead. All I know is that for some weird reason I am stuck in this gaudy looking city listening to you bore me to death and wondering how the hell I got here.”
“You broke your neck, Potash.” John explained. “Well, sort of.”
“When...? where...? how...? What do you mean sort off?”
“Luke is the doctor not me.” He laughed. “Don't you know your bible, Potash.” I did not even humour him with a rude retort.
“So,” John started, “it was about 0230hrs East African Time and Jesus, some angel called Dino and I were on duty at The Panopticon...?”
“Hey, hey... easy on the jargon old man,” I interjected. “Panowhassat?”
“Oh, The Panopticon,” John explained, “a newfangled observatory this Frenchie faggot Foucault built for God in exchange for a visa into the Celestial City. Turns out later this Foucault guy had stolen the idea from some long dead English dude so visa got revoked.” John paused, cackled. “You should have seen the amount of water- straight out of this here river, I tell you- that Jesus turned into wine that day to celebrate and spite a bunch of his detractors here who say like to say that he, and the rest of us boys that hang with him, is queer.”
“Be easy on the faggots man,” I said to John, “God sure must have made them in his own image, no?”
“What shit you talking man?” John yelled at me.
“I am not talking,” I replied. “It is you who is telling me about being on duty at this Panopticon thingum.”
“Yes,” John continued. “so The Panopticon is not useful really, we just sit and watch the live feed from earth but there is not much we can do about it. Not much we are meant to do but watch; put the scient into omniscient; the presence into omnipresence and such things seeing that God caught the Outsourcing bug long before everyone else and men do the creation and the killing for him. Men know who to thank for small mercies: God; who to blame when they receive no mercy: The Devil.”
“Cut to the chase, old man,” I complained, “God played you, so what do I care, I have a story to write”
“So,” John carried on with his exposition on heavenly politics which, as far as I was concerned, was not only wasting my time but also messing up my word count, “there we were and I was the only one watching the live feed.
See, things have been very slack in heaven these days. Global warming means that God cannot grow his weed out in his garden any more so he spends most of his time in Hell- where The Devil has a massive grow operation going on- trying to bum a joint or two. The way I see it is that someone needs to tell God that if you give a man a joint he will get high for a day, but if you teach a man how to grow his own shit he will stay high, every day.”
“Word!” I said because I am the kind of person that will credit a good point when I see it. Even when it is standing in the way of my story.
“Anyway, God being absent more often than not has meant that no one is bothered to earn their Celestial digs. Most beings- the junior staff who need his signature to as much as sneeze, especially- cannot even get their work done even if they tried to. Jesus on the other hand has become more than a bit jaded. I mean, since people down there were able to split the atom, no one has remained impressed by some hippie who once upon a time split a few loaves between thousands of people. Who has heard of the miracle at some wedding in Canaan since men discovered 'bottomless' beer? So Jesus was on sms chat with Mary Magdalene while he should have been watching the live feed with me and Dino. (Which wouldn't be a problem if only Jesus had not been using the prayer Hotline.) Dino? Dino had fallen asleep, for the tenth night in a row, trying to read Ngugi wa Thiongo's Wizard of the Crow.
So, there I am, watching you. You had just done an impressive job with that Lolita in the 'Presidential Sweet' and were back at the bar.” John continued. I had a vague memory of being the fuckee rather than the fucker but I could not be bothered to interrupt John with small details. “Your friend Dinda and that mercenary cunt of a writer, ...N.M?”
“Yeah. N.M.” I confirmed. “More cunt than writer, I dare say...”
“Indeed. Dinda and N.M had gone off to handle business in other sections of the club so you perched your arse on a stool by the counter and ordered a yellow drink.”
“Damn, a yellow drink that soon? Yellow means I do not want to get it up again...”
John: “And you didn't. One of the girls dancing on the counter crawled over to you after a signal from the hostess.”
“I'll be damned,” I whistled the events of the previous night coming back to me, “the ones on the counter were ugly!”
“Sure was ugly...” John agreed. “The one that crawled over to you was uglier that Celie in The Color Purple. She whispered in your ear and you nodded your approval.”
“Inebriation.” I shout thumping my fist on the table and spilling our drinks. “Mitigation, sir!”
“The girl spun round and with her hands resting firmly on the counter she curled her legs around your neck...”
“Woah...” I exclaimed remembering that moment.
“Ditto.” John said. “'Check this shit out,' I said to Jesus. He glared at me and asked: 'What?' I pointed at the screen. Jesus switched off the phone- the prayer hotline mind you- and pulled a seat closer to the screen.”
“I see labia like an elephants ears lunging at me and then my mind goes blank.”
“That is when you ended up here.” John explained. “The table was wet, the girl's hands slid off it. The girl's legs were curled around your neck- Twist!”
“Snap?”
“I have seen people die in the freakiest of ways,” John laughed, “but yours Potash, yours was intolerable. An anti-climax, even.”
“Anti-climax?”
“By the time your neck snapped every one had been watching the show on their Panopticon Portable 2000s. Suddenly, phones went buzzing with blame games and buck-passing. The Fates insisted they didn't do it. Both God and The Devil were adamant they didn't do it, either- and they were each other's alibi.”
“So what the hell happened, man?”
“Baku.” John said shaking his head in exasperation.
“Baku?”
“Your guardian angel.” Said John. “He is a faggot. He has the hots for you.”
“Jesus F. Christ!”
“It is Baku that pushed the girl off the slippery table.”
“But, er... come on now,” I stammered. “What did you all do when I broke my neck? You, them, someone... Jesus... what did Jesus do?”
“Jesus,” John said a tangible solemnity taking over his voice. “Jesus did what Jesus does when bad things happen to good people.”
“Yeah, and what's that?”
“Jesus wept!”
Sunday, September 14, 2008
RETURN OF THE SLEAZEMEISTER- Humping Humbert
Also known as: Misleading Lolita in Nairobi
[The Story So Far...]
“Niaje, Niaje!” Dinda said acknowledging the salutes of all the watchmen. All the watchmen guarding that street had left their posts to come and say hello to Dinda. Most of them just to stare. A cripple selling cigarettes, condoms and other things nice from behind an upturned carton made as though to stand and shake Dinda's hand. Dinda put his hand on the cripple's shoulder and pushed him back onto his rickety stool. Dinda leaned over and asked him something that I could not hear. The cripple shook his head and lifted a calloused arm over his head. Dinda held him by the jowls and knocked his head against the wall. His stool gave way under him and the cripple crashed to the pavement his crutches flying one way and his wares the other, down the street. Suddenly all the watchmen and a motley crew of night-runners, gathered to hail Dinda disappeared into the shadows.
We stormed up the stairs and into the club the bouncers and the ticket girl ducking out of our way.
The main section of the club was small. To the left and directly in front of us was the bar. Spread along its counter or dangling from a metal rail above it were four girls. None good-looking. Well, maybe it was the gloom in the room but the parts of their bodies I could see clearly, and that was all of their bodies, were not impressive. Neither was their act- a bored gyration to, of all things, crunk music. Several guys sat at the bar, oblivious of the drinks before them, staring at the girls as they mined their crotches with chipped nails. One of the guys was wearing a checked suit. A long abandoned lime coloured drink stood before him. One of the girls turned and pinched his face with her ass cheeks. His arms reached out blindly. I caught the gleam of a gold wedding band. He found both of the girl's thighs and anchoring his hands on them pummelled his face deeper into her.
To the right, a table with a pole through it that reached from the floor to the chipping plaster of the ceiling. A girl was perched on the table, her dangling legs splayed and her breasts- the shape, size and colour of Mombasa mangoes- curved upwards their nipples standing firm against the odds of what would soon be an early and droopy retirement. In front of her and with her face bobbing in and out of the others crotch was an intensely dark skinned girl with curves that would make King Mswati consider monogamy. Behind them a couch was cleared for us. The hostess whispered something in the ears of these two girls. They stopped their play and gave us a full frontal salute.
We did not bother to acknowledge them.
“What will you have, cocktails?” the hostess asked us.
“A cold Tusker for me,” N.M said, “and a double Viagra for Potash.”
“Go fuck yourself,” I said flipping N.M a birdie. “Why don't you order a bitch for yourself and a Rohypnol for her, you perv.”
“We will call you when we are ready to order.” Dinda told the hostess once again intervening between N.M and I.
Now, our friend Jane used to say that it is a truth universally acknowledged that a Kenyan man, regardless of his fortune, must be in want of a teenage mistress. She was talking about me. I called the hostess over and asked for two things: any blue coloured cocktail and any girl under the legal age of consent. It was a dive spot this one: no blue coloured drink and far too many under aged girls to choose from. I settled for a strawberry coloured drink and a girl in underwear of a matching colour.
We stepped up to the VIP section, then crossed the floor past miles of pulsing dicks crouching under rapidly gyrating rumps. The men's faces were blank. The girl's faces were blank. The girls groaned in unison; mumbled the same things. I looked around for a matronly madame hiding backstage of this debauched set holding a groan-script. What I found instead is what I needed most: the uber VIP room. I knew it from the sign on the door that invited you the heightened level of privilege that was their 'Presidential Sweet.'
Sweet!
I pushed the girl into the room and immediately pinned her to the wall. Like a butterfly, my fellow paedophiles, no? The rest of you readers will have to, as Vladmir says, imagine us- the girl and I- because if you do not then we cease to exist. So, the girl: Pinned to the wall of the lepidopterist. Potash: the lepidopterist with a dissecting scalpel that looks like a penis and acts like a penis.
“What's your name bitch?”
“Natasha”
Whatever... when I am humping you, your name is Lolita and I am Humbert.
“Ati what?”
“I have to do it to you in Nairobi,” I said to her knowing she wouldn't get it, “so that the millions, in tyrannous Tehran, living on less than one orgasm a day can find something to jerk off to.”
NOTE: This episode was delayed by my inability to access my blogger account. I wonder if other users of blogger have experienced such difficulties.
From a narrative point of view, this story has bored me and I do not feel inclined to tell it to the end any time soon. In the next posts we just might have to skip to the present.
[The Story So Far...]
“Niaje, Niaje!” Dinda said acknowledging the salutes of all the watchmen. All the watchmen guarding that street had left their posts to come and say hello to Dinda. Most of them just to stare. A cripple selling cigarettes, condoms and other things nice from behind an upturned carton made as though to stand and shake Dinda's hand. Dinda put his hand on the cripple's shoulder and pushed him back onto his rickety stool. Dinda leaned over and asked him something that I could not hear. The cripple shook his head and lifted a calloused arm over his head. Dinda held him by the jowls and knocked his head against the wall. His stool gave way under him and the cripple crashed to the pavement his crutches flying one way and his wares the other, down the street. Suddenly all the watchmen and a motley crew of night-runners, gathered to hail Dinda disappeared into the shadows.
We stormed up the stairs and into the club the bouncers and the ticket girl ducking out of our way.
The main section of the club was small. To the left and directly in front of us was the bar. Spread along its counter or dangling from a metal rail above it were four girls. None good-looking. Well, maybe it was the gloom in the room but the parts of their bodies I could see clearly, and that was all of their bodies, were not impressive. Neither was their act- a bored gyration to, of all things, crunk music. Several guys sat at the bar, oblivious of the drinks before them, staring at the girls as they mined their crotches with chipped nails. One of the guys was wearing a checked suit. A long abandoned lime coloured drink stood before him. One of the girls turned and pinched his face with her ass cheeks. His arms reached out blindly. I caught the gleam of a gold wedding band. He found both of the girl's thighs and anchoring his hands on them pummelled his face deeper into her.
To the right, a table with a pole through it that reached from the floor to the chipping plaster of the ceiling. A girl was perched on the table, her dangling legs splayed and her breasts- the shape, size and colour of Mombasa mangoes- curved upwards their nipples standing firm against the odds of what would soon be an early and droopy retirement. In front of her and with her face bobbing in and out of the others crotch was an intensely dark skinned girl with curves that would make King Mswati consider monogamy. Behind them a couch was cleared for us. The hostess whispered something in the ears of these two girls. They stopped their play and gave us a full frontal salute.
We did not bother to acknowledge them.
“What will you have, cocktails?” the hostess asked us.
“A cold Tusker for me,” N.M said, “and a double Viagra for Potash.”
“Go fuck yourself,” I said flipping N.M a birdie. “Why don't you order a bitch for yourself and a Rohypnol for her, you perv.”
“We will call you when we are ready to order.” Dinda told the hostess once again intervening between N.M and I.
Now, our friend Jane used to say that it is a truth universally acknowledged that a Kenyan man, regardless of his fortune, must be in want of a teenage mistress. She was talking about me. I called the hostess over and asked for two things: any blue coloured cocktail and any girl under the legal age of consent. It was a dive spot this one: no blue coloured drink and far too many under aged girls to choose from. I settled for a strawberry coloured drink and a girl in underwear of a matching colour.
We stepped up to the VIP section, then crossed the floor past miles of pulsing dicks crouching under rapidly gyrating rumps. The men's faces were blank. The girl's faces were blank. The girls groaned in unison; mumbled the same things. I looked around for a matronly madame hiding backstage of this debauched set holding a groan-script. What I found instead is what I needed most: the uber VIP room. I knew it from the sign on the door that invited you the heightened level of privilege that was their 'Presidential Sweet.'
Sweet!
I pushed the girl into the room and immediately pinned her to the wall. Like a butterfly, my fellow paedophiles, no? The rest of you readers will have to, as Vladmir says, imagine us- the girl and I- because if you do not then we cease to exist. So, the girl: Pinned to the wall of the lepidopterist. Potash: the lepidopterist with a dissecting scalpel that looks like a penis and acts like a penis.
“What's your name bitch?”
“Natasha”
Whatever... when I am humping you, your name is Lolita and I am Humbert.
“Ati what?”
“I have to do it to you in Nairobi,” I said to her knowing she wouldn't get it, “so that the millions, in tyrannous Tehran, living on less than one orgasm a day can find something to jerk off to.”
NOTE: This episode was delayed by my inability to access my blogger account. I wonder if other users of blogger have experienced such difficulties.
From a narrative point of view, this story has bored me and I do not feel inclined to tell it to the end any time soon. In the next posts we just might have to skip to the present.
Monday, September 01, 2008
RETURN OF THE SLEAZEMEISTER: The Night Watchers
[The Story So Far...]
It was mid-April, 2008. Above us: an overcast sky that was all thunder and lightening but no rain. Like a bull with premature ejaculation. The street was empty. It looked dead, but only to a stranger.
Standing there, smoking in silence and exchanging swigs on the bottle of Viceroy, we knew that from behind the shadow of darkness, more than a dozen eyes were watching the street. Lurking in alleys, peering through peep-holes on boarded up windows. They watched and waited. They knew we knew they were there. We knew it was not us that they were watching and waiting for because we knew that they knew that we, like them, were creatures of the night. At least Dinda was and because of him we were protected from them.
Them!
The police with their guns, the thieves with their bigger guns and the prostitutes with their disease-ridden bodies. They were watching and waiting for you. Waiting to take your money or your life. Most likely both.
“That blog is just a crutch, Potash,” N.M broke the silence. He was not looking at me and seemed to be addressing the plume of smoke he had just blown into the air. Dinda swigged from the bottle, hesitated and instead of passing it on to N.M., he took another swig emptying the bottle.
N.M. stared at him. For a moment.
N.M's eyes moved to the now empty bottle. Dinda shrugged and hurled the bottle at a nearby window.
“Mbwa!” screeched a female voice.
“Malaya!” N.M. laughed.
“Kimya!” A man barked somewhere up the street.
The sound of two guns being cocked, simultaneously, down the street.
Silence.
Everyone knew of the others; that they were there. Everyone knew what was needed of him or her: that they mind their own business.
Everyone returned to watching the street.
Everyone but us. We piled into Dinda's car and drove off.
“Tao?” Dinda asked, N.M. N.M was riding shotgun.
“Eee,” N.M. responded. “Tao ya chini... huko juu niko na bill?"
“Ya kuma au ya pombe?”
“Pombe.” N.M. said. He passed me a cigarette and lit one for himself.
“So what I am semaing, Potash...” N.M. said. He unbuckled his belt and turned to face me. Dinda started fiddling with the stereo.
“You are blowing smoke into my face,” he said to N.M.
“Fuck you,” N.M. responded. “Just shut up and drive. Let me for a moment tell this bastard what is real and what is not?”
“Why say it while Culture can sing it?” Dinda asked and pushed up the volume on the stereo.
“Yo!Yo!Yo!” Tony Rebel's yells tore through the car as he introduced Hungry People, his collaboration with Joseph Hill and Mighty Culture.
“Why, oh, why, poor people 'ungry again?” Dinda sang along with Joseph Hill.
With one hand on the steering while and his eyes on the glove compartment, Dinda leaned over and pulled out a half smoked joint. He lit the joint using the car's electric lighter and then stepped on the accelerator rushing us towards hell or the city centre, whichever would come faster.
As fate-or maybe the gods who watch over us creatures that run in the dark- would have it, we found the city centre long before we could reach hell. “Hell is filled with good intentions,” I muttered under my breath as I stepped out of the car. “I have bad intentions, my brothers,” I said to N.M. and Dinda, “take me to heaven.”
“You speak my mind, home boy,” N.M. laughed.
“Welcome to fornicators heaven!” Dinda said his hands in the air and his groin grinding against the air around him.
The Saga Continues in the Next Episode: Humping Humbert or Misleading Lolita in Nairobi.
It was mid-April, 2008. Above us: an overcast sky that was all thunder and lightening but no rain. Like a bull with premature ejaculation. The street was empty. It looked dead, but only to a stranger.
Standing there, smoking in silence and exchanging swigs on the bottle of Viceroy, we knew that from behind the shadow of darkness, more than a dozen eyes were watching the street. Lurking in alleys, peering through peep-holes on boarded up windows. They watched and waited. They knew we knew they were there. We knew it was not us that they were watching and waiting for because we knew that they knew that we, like them, were creatures of the night. At least Dinda was and because of him we were protected from them.
Them!
The police with their guns, the thieves with their bigger guns and the prostitutes with their disease-ridden bodies. They were watching and waiting for you. Waiting to take your money or your life. Most likely both.
“That blog is just a crutch, Potash,” N.M broke the silence. He was not looking at me and seemed to be addressing the plume of smoke he had just blown into the air. Dinda swigged from the bottle, hesitated and instead of passing it on to N.M., he took another swig emptying the bottle.
N.M. stared at him. For a moment.
N.M's eyes moved to the now empty bottle. Dinda shrugged and hurled the bottle at a nearby window.
“Mbwa!” screeched a female voice.
“Malaya!” N.M. laughed.
“Kimya!” A man barked somewhere up the street.
The sound of two guns being cocked, simultaneously, down the street.
Silence.
Everyone knew of the others; that they were there. Everyone knew what was needed of him or her: that they mind their own business.
Everyone returned to watching the street.
Everyone but us. We piled into Dinda's car and drove off.
“Tao?” Dinda asked, N.M. N.M was riding shotgun.
“Eee,” N.M. responded. “Tao ya chini... huko juu niko na bill?"
“Ya kuma au ya pombe?”
“Pombe.” N.M. said. He passed me a cigarette and lit one for himself.
“So what I am semaing, Potash...” N.M. said. He unbuckled his belt and turned to face me. Dinda started fiddling with the stereo.
“You are blowing smoke into my face,” he said to N.M.
“Fuck you,” N.M. responded. “Just shut up and drive. Let me for a moment tell this bastard what is real and what is not?”
“Why say it while Culture can sing it?” Dinda asked and pushed up the volume on the stereo.
“Yo!Yo!Yo!” Tony Rebel's yells tore through the car as he introduced Hungry People, his collaboration with Joseph Hill and Mighty Culture.
“Why, oh, why, poor people 'ungry again?” Dinda sang along with Joseph Hill.
With one hand on the steering while and his eyes on the glove compartment, Dinda leaned over and pulled out a half smoked joint. He lit the joint using the car's electric lighter and then stepped on the accelerator rushing us towards hell or the city centre, whichever would come faster.
***
The Fates huddled. Deliberated. They called God but, inaccessible to Immortals as he is to men, his phone was off. “Hello, this is God's phone. I am sorry I cannot take your call at the moment. I have gone to Hell to find a fire. Bloody Global Warming has turned my house into a freezer. Leave your name...”
They called the Devil.
“El diablo...,” a high pitched voice with a Shona accent answered. The Devil listened briefly then apologised: “I am sorry I cannot do a conference call right now. God is, down here, sobbing in my house and flooding my kitchen.” In the background they could hear someone sniff back tears while blubbering something about Kyoto and how his E had turned out quite unequal to MC2. “Which would be fine,” the Devil added, “if he wasn't trying to use another one of his sob stories as an excuse to smoke up all my weed.”
The Deities otherwise engaged, the fate of three miscreants, driving recklessly drunk through the Nairobi night, was left to, well, The Fates.
“Everyday I am ashamed I gave those farts life,” Clotho bitched. “What do we do with them now?”
“I have given them more than a full measure.” Lachesis yawned and went back to her knitting and following of the Obama campaign on T.V. “Damn, I wish I was a nymph,” she cooed. “I would go down there and fuck that Negro!”
“Let the inevitable occur.” Atropos said reaching for her shears. She was referring to the three miscreants in Nairobi, of course, but her partners could not be bothered. Clotho was slumped by the fire drinking cheap South African wine from the bottle. Lachesis was, her eyes glued to the TV, now trying to weave her vestigial fingers- past a colostomy bag and folds of skin- towards her crotch. (The last time she had ogled at Obama that hard, Stevie Wonder had tripped on stage).
“Damn shears!” it was Atropos again. She had dropped the shears down the lavatory hours before. She had been, once again, using office equipment to shave her pubes.
In Nairobi, a silver bubble of chrome and thumping reggae crossed the Tom Mboya street line and entered the Third World section of the city. Its occupants, too intoxicated to be thankful for Global warming, a lachrymal god, a devil too busy saving his weed rather than damning the world and three witches with no office etiquette, staggered into a strip bar.
***
As fate-or maybe the gods who watch over us creatures that run in the dark- would have it, we found the city centre long before we could reach hell. “Hell is filled with good intentions,” I muttered under my breath as I stepped out of the car. “I have bad intentions, my brothers,” I said to N.M. and Dinda, “take me to heaven.”
“You speak my mind, home boy,” N.M. laughed.
“Welcome to fornicators heaven!” Dinda said his hands in the air and his groin grinding against the air around him.
The Saga Continues in the Next Episode: Humping Humbert or Misleading Lolita in Nairobi.
Monday, August 25, 2008
RETURN OF THE SLEAZEMEISTER: Coke and Cum
[The Story So Far...]
“So, Potash...” Dinda drawls. He is high on shit like Martha Karua is high on power. And there is no let up as he reaches into his pocket and pulls out at least a hundred grammes of you know what, in a Ziplock bag. He spoons it out, sprinkles a neat line on the butt and grease-marked bench next to him, kneels on the dirty floor and shoots. I visualise, in graphic detail, his nasal membranes drying up like he just chugged a litre of formalin.
Dinda sits up and hands me the spoon and the sachet. I ignore it but dip a wary finger into the bag and with it bring several specks of powder to my mouth. “Looks high grade, tastes high grade,” I say to him continuing to ignore the spoon.
“Try it,” he coaxes, “if its mine, you know it is fine.”
“Is bilas,” I respond shaking my head for emphasis.
“You is a pussy, P...” He spits. “...always was.”
“Indeed.” N.M. Interjects even though the guy does not use and never did. “Trouble with this pussy is that he always gets fucked but never gets paid”
“You bastard.” I sneer at N.M. “You done fucked me a couple of times and you know it. You knew all I wanted to do was write and you said you were going to get me places but all you did was try sell my arse to tabloids.”
“Come on Potash,” Dinda is coming out of a vigorous nose rubbing session with his face crinkled by something half way between a smile and a grimace, “writing is writing... and some of us- see, those of us from where we coming from- have to work a little harder than them others; start at the lowest rungs and work our way up.”
When it comes to starting from the bottom then Dinda knows what it is all about. As he speaks my mind wanders back to those crazy years in the mid-nineties. We were all out of high school, or on our way out. Some prematurely and others with O'Level certificates that they would soon realise they couldn't use even for wiping their own backsides with. If the eighties decade was lived under Moi's political tyranny, then the nineties was lived under the excruciating pain of his economic misadventures.
Those were the post-Goldenberg years and the phrase Kenyan Economy was a paradox more baffling than President Kibaki or Nairobi Water. While the world out there had long landed a man on the moon, we were trying to land inflation there. While every one else was on the race to map the human genome, average Kenyans were mapping their ways back to, if not ignorance and pestilence, at least abject poverty and despondency. It did not help that the armchair economists at the World Bank had long unleashed their Structural Adjustment Programmes on us: Retrench; Retrench; Retrench. Cost sharing was the buzzword in the government hospitals but who could afford to be sick after that measly severance pay they so ironically termed Golden Handshake?
Our parents had nothing to begin with, and now they had lost it all.
We left school and stared at the future; an unrelenting wall of rapidly diminishing choices. Choices that came with the caveat: Do You Know Anybody? But who was there to Know: the father who took that Golden Handshake, went to Dubai and came back only to realise that every one else had been to Dubai and back bringing the same goods to a cash-starved market? The mother who spent more time ducking or bribing City Council askaris than selling her tomatoes on Tom Mboya Street?
Our parents were not worth knowing. At least not when it came to navigating the economy of a new Kenya.
We stared at the future. The future stared us down, clicked its tongue and turning, bared its calloused backside at us. The future forgot us; left us to strive for one day at a time. Left us to eke simple pleasures out of living to die another day.
For most, school was out of the question. Who could afford it. All things considered, two options remained: toiling for sub-minimum wage in muhindi sweatshops or a life of crime. Two options, two disparate sides of the law. Dinda chose crime. The rest is history. (Or fodder for yet another essay seeing how much time that mercenary writer N.M. spends with him.)
“Is true.” I agree with Dinda. “But this guy could not think out of the mainstream. Think about something like a blog. Anything that would put my work out there...”
N.M snickers and then says, “My blog, oh... My blog, oh... Negro please! That blog, Potash, is nothing but a crutch. It is like all that Napshizzle you ass holes used to drink and whatever you drink these days... Oops, sorry, I forgot you have no money now... Dinda, we need to take this fucker out for a drink...who knows, maybe even buy him a pussy so he can see and smell himself...”
“Enyewe...” Dinda agrees. “But do cut the brother some slack... though I agree that that blog has, in the broader scheme of things, not done anyone any good. There have been wars that needn't have occurred, animosity where goodwill would have profited all and alliances smashed where unity would have kept this city safe from snitches.”
I maintain the obsequious silence of the guilty.
N.M lights a cigarette, blows a plume of smoke towards the ceiling and then turning, the thought just occurring to him then, he offers me one. Our eyes meet for a moment and I do not read even an iota of malice or distaste in his.
Dinda blows his coke stuffed nose loudly. The young boy, who had disrespected me earlier, makes lewd slurping noises. Kamwana groans with yet another self-induced orgasm. Everyone else keeps their eyes glued to the 42 inch television screen as Lexington Steele squirts cum onto the faces and breasts of two white girls.
“Everything you write on that fucking blog, Potash,” N.M. hisses. “the world out there can take it for entertainment or whatever they fucking feel like... but down here, down here it makes all the difference between living or dying. Everything.”
He rises from his seat and Dinda and I follow him into the garbage streaked street.
The Saga Continues in the Next Episode: The Night Watchers
“So, Potash...” Dinda drawls. He is high on shit like Martha Karua is high on power. And there is no let up as he reaches into his pocket and pulls out at least a hundred grammes of you know what, in a Ziplock bag. He spoons it out, sprinkles a neat line on the butt and grease-marked bench next to him, kneels on the dirty floor and shoots. I visualise, in graphic detail, his nasal membranes drying up like he just chugged a litre of formalin.
Dinda sits up and hands me the spoon and the sachet. I ignore it but dip a wary finger into the bag and with it bring several specks of powder to my mouth. “Looks high grade, tastes high grade,” I say to him continuing to ignore the spoon.
“Try it,” he coaxes, “if its mine, you know it is fine.”
“Is bilas,” I respond shaking my head for emphasis.
“You is a pussy, P...” He spits. “...always was.”
“Indeed.” N.M. Interjects even though the guy does not use and never did. “Trouble with this pussy is that he always gets fucked but never gets paid”
“You bastard.” I sneer at N.M. “You done fucked me a couple of times and you know it. You knew all I wanted to do was write and you said you were going to get me places but all you did was try sell my arse to tabloids.”
“Come on Potash,” Dinda is coming out of a vigorous nose rubbing session with his face crinkled by something half way between a smile and a grimace, “writing is writing... and some of us- see, those of us from where we coming from- have to work a little harder than them others; start at the lowest rungs and work our way up.”
When it comes to starting from the bottom then Dinda knows what it is all about. As he speaks my mind wanders back to those crazy years in the mid-nineties. We were all out of high school, or on our way out. Some prematurely and others with O'Level certificates that they would soon realise they couldn't use even for wiping their own backsides with. If the eighties decade was lived under Moi's political tyranny, then the nineties was lived under the excruciating pain of his economic misadventures.
Those were the post-Goldenberg years and the phrase Kenyan Economy was a paradox more baffling than President Kibaki or Nairobi Water. While the world out there had long landed a man on the moon, we were trying to land inflation there. While every one else was on the race to map the human genome, average Kenyans were mapping their ways back to, if not ignorance and pestilence, at least abject poverty and despondency. It did not help that the armchair economists at the World Bank had long unleashed their Structural Adjustment Programmes on us: Retrench; Retrench; Retrench. Cost sharing was the buzzword in the government hospitals but who could afford to be sick after that measly severance pay they so ironically termed Golden Handshake?
Our parents had nothing to begin with, and now they had lost it all.
We left school and stared at the future; an unrelenting wall of rapidly diminishing choices. Choices that came with the caveat: Do You Know Anybody? But who was there to Know: the father who took that Golden Handshake, went to Dubai and came back only to realise that every one else had been to Dubai and back bringing the same goods to a cash-starved market? The mother who spent more time ducking or bribing City Council askaris than selling her tomatoes on Tom Mboya Street?
Our parents were not worth knowing. At least not when it came to navigating the economy of a new Kenya.
We stared at the future. The future stared us down, clicked its tongue and turning, bared its calloused backside at us. The future forgot us; left us to strive for one day at a time. Left us to eke simple pleasures out of living to die another day.
For most, school was out of the question. Who could afford it. All things considered, two options remained: toiling for sub-minimum wage in muhindi sweatshops or a life of crime. Two options, two disparate sides of the law. Dinda chose crime. The rest is history. (Or fodder for yet another essay seeing how much time that mercenary writer N.M. spends with him.)
“Is true.” I agree with Dinda. “But this guy could not think out of the mainstream. Think about something like a blog. Anything that would put my work out there...”
N.M snickers and then says, “My blog, oh... My blog, oh... Negro please! That blog, Potash, is nothing but a crutch. It is like all that Napshizzle you ass holes used to drink and whatever you drink these days... Oops, sorry, I forgot you have no money now... Dinda, we need to take this fucker out for a drink...who knows, maybe even buy him a pussy so he can see and smell himself...”
“Enyewe...” Dinda agrees. “But do cut the brother some slack... though I agree that that blog has, in the broader scheme of things, not done anyone any good. There have been wars that needn't have occurred, animosity where goodwill would have profited all and alliances smashed where unity would have kept this city safe from snitches.”
I maintain the obsequious silence of the guilty.
N.M lights a cigarette, blows a plume of smoke towards the ceiling and then turning, the thought just occurring to him then, he offers me one. Our eyes meet for a moment and I do not read even an iota of malice or distaste in his.
Dinda blows his coke stuffed nose loudly. The young boy, who had disrespected me earlier, makes lewd slurping noises. Kamwana groans with yet another self-induced orgasm. Everyone else keeps their eyes glued to the 42 inch television screen as Lexington Steele squirts cum onto the faces and breasts of two white girls.
“Everything you write on that fucking blog, Potash,” N.M. hisses. “the world out there can take it for entertainment or whatever they fucking feel like... but down here, down here it makes all the difference between living or dying. Everything.”
He rises from his seat and Dinda and I follow him into the garbage streaked street.
The Saga Continues in the Next Episode: The Night Watchers
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
RETURN OF THE SLEAZEMEISTER
Okay, so I have been out of circulation for quite a bit now. Word on the street, so my boy Dinda tells me, is that I been lying low because I have finally decided to write that book. Now I am going to sit here and give it to you straight.
Yes, I will have another drink... a blue one now... P.S: I like your arse, can I put that on Dinda's tab too?
You are my readers after all and I have to admit that I have come to like you and you have come to trust me to always tell it as it is. (Okay, cut me some slack Amber, I know there are stories I said I would finish but I didn't, but you know how this ball play: sometimes I get drunk long before I can finish the story. Yes and sometimes I write it but I cannot type it out for all the cum and alcohol spills on it the next day).
So here is the deal...
Is it not funny how some of us is just like village curs: crap, walk away with snout at full mast then turn around and eat humble poo? Look at me now, in a strip bar with NM and Dinda- and them buying me varicoloured drinks, lap dances and Extra. (Man, you know the Extra's what I am about. Out back in VIP. Playing meat to yet another sandwich).
It really sucks the way, you know, all of an easy sudden in the circles of writers my name started to get mentioned. So I went out and got me a little money, some airs and an apartment way up above all you riff-raff. Got gentrified, is what I did. Then the next thing I know, Potash is going down. Suddenly, the remnants of The Potashian Book Club- long disbanded in my haughty exit from the 'hood- just sitting at the Stone Zone speaking of me in shoulder shrugs: Sic transit gloria mundi. My guns from Nairobi's Finest, sitting in caucus and oiling their AKs under a mushroom cloud of marijuana smoke by the railway bridge, exploding taunts: Roundi hii kalikuwa kamejidai sonko...!
Potash hit the ground crawling.
So I walked over to the old neighbourhood and, well, all that knew me is long dead (Kwekwe squad was here!), doing time or helping the police with some investigation or other. There is new kids running that block now and they have no vacancy for a street sage. (Man, down here I was the Philosopher in Residence. And I gave it all up to pursue some snobbish Writer in Residence crap somewhere. Like what stories did I think I could write without these streets? The streets that made me).
So there I was, the shoulder of the street gone cold; boys I was thick as thieves with giving me one armed hugs like I was some faggot and they was scared I was going frot them. (Okay, okay... I like black boys but can't a guy swing a metaphor edgewise?). So what's Potash- yes, it is Potash now, not Potash, The- to do?
Potash makes a speedy getaway towards Kiambu.
But Kiambu offers no love. Who runs into Kiambu if they haven't robbed a bank?
In Kiambu respect comes in a crate of Tusker. If you cannot buy booze you are just a pussy so do not bother the wazee. Sit in the corner with the uncircumcised boys and behave yourself.
Oh, Misery- it does not drip, it ejaculates!
So I hang around Kiambu for about two weeks, keeping to the cattle paths and bumming Supermatch half-lifes from the Maragoli farmhands as they chug jerry cans of milk to the dairy. But soon even they are going all attitudinous on me: Aii, na si haka kamutu mimekaoneko kwa kaseti chuzi- kumbe hakana kitu!
Is of how... what's the dealie?
Now I am chilling and thinking things is thick, enyewe. So this is what I fanya: I go to Mogaka's kiosk.
“Ah, umepotea..”
“Mi niko Mogaka,” I say, “Mi niko...”
“Sawa, sema niskie...”
Stories, stories. Oh, Like this, like that. Kidogo I have pulled a soc out of him.
Nairobi; Shamba ya Mawe, Here I come.
I go back to the old neighbourhood. Kupitia tu.
I walk over to Kamwana's Video Parlour. Just at the right time- you know the time, eh, when they are showing Six Movies for One Ticket- to catch all the neighbourhood's heavy hitters. And guess who I find there? N.M and Dinda drinking Viceroy straight out of the bottle.
Am I lucky or am I lucky.
So there we are drinking liquor straight out of the bottle and jerking off. Just like old times. Place is up to the roof (which is not that high up, anyway, because this is not the Karen Country Club) in stinks: illicit brews; illicit love; illicit herbs.
Behind me is some kid who was in Standard Eight when I last saw him. He is drinking Napshizzle like it was Nyayo milk. I decide to stress the young one. “Eh, daddy. You finished school?”
“Who died and you started fucking my mother?” He asks blowing marijuana smoke into my face. Is this kid cool or what? If it was two years or so ago I would say that all he wanted to be when he grew up was me. But now I aint shit. I thump his fist, ruffle his wannabe dreadlocks and take a massive swig off his Napshizzle. “Buy your own, loser?”
Damn. What will it take to earn some respect back in this life time?
The Saga Continues in the Next Episode: Coke and Cum
Yes, I will have another drink... a blue one now... P.S: I like your arse, can I put that on Dinda's tab too?
You are my readers after all and I have to admit that I have come to like you and you have come to trust me to always tell it as it is. (Okay, cut me some slack Amber, I know there are stories I said I would finish but I didn't, but you know how this ball play: sometimes I get drunk long before I can finish the story. Yes and sometimes I write it but I cannot type it out for all the cum and alcohol spills on it the next day).
So here is the deal...
Is it not funny how some of us is just like village curs: crap, walk away with snout at full mast then turn around and eat humble poo? Look at me now, in a strip bar with NM and Dinda- and them buying me varicoloured drinks, lap dances and Extra. (Man, you know the Extra's what I am about. Out back in VIP. Playing meat to yet another sandwich).
It really sucks the way, you know, all of an easy sudden in the circles of writers my name started to get mentioned. So I went out and got me a little money, some airs and an apartment way up above all you riff-raff. Got gentrified, is what I did. Then the next thing I know, Potash is going down. Suddenly, the remnants of The Potashian Book Club- long disbanded in my haughty exit from the 'hood- just sitting at the Stone Zone speaking of me in shoulder shrugs: Sic transit gloria mundi. My guns from Nairobi's Finest, sitting in caucus and oiling their AKs under a mushroom cloud of marijuana smoke by the railway bridge, exploding taunts: Roundi hii kalikuwa kamejidai sonko...!
Potash hit the ground crawling.
So I walked over to the old neighbourhood and, well, all that knew me is long dead (Kwekwe squad was here!), doing time or helping the police with some investigation or other. There is new kids running that block now and they have no vacancy for a street sage. (Man, down here I was the Philosopher in Residence. And I gave it all up to pursue some snobbish Writer in Residence crap somewhere. Like what stories did I think I could write without these streets? The streets that made me).
So there I was, the shoulder of the street gone cold; boys I was thick as thieves with giving me one armed hugs like I was some faggot and they was scared I was going frot them. (Okay, okay... I like black boys but can't a guy swing a metaphor edgewise?). So what's Potash- yes, it is Potash now, not Potash, The- to do?
Potash makes a speedy getaway towards Kiambu.
But Kiambu offers no love. Who runs into Kiambu if they haven't robbed a bank?
In Kiambu respect comes in a crate of Tusker. If you cannot buy booze you are just a pussy so do not bother the wazee. Sit in the corner with the uncircumcised boys and behave yourself.
Oh, Misery- it does not drip, it ejaculates!
So I hang around Kiambu for about two weeks, keeping to the cattle paths and bumming Supermatch half-lifes from the Maragoli farmhands as they chug jerry cans of milk to the dairy. But soon even they are going all attitudinous on me: Aii, na si haka kamutu mimekaoneko kwa kaseti chuzi- kumbe hakana kitu!
Is of how... what's the dealie?
Now I am chilling and thinking things is thick, enyewe. So this is what I fanya: I go to Mogaka's kiosk.
“Ah, umepotea..”
“Mi niko Mogaka,” I say, “Mi niko...”
“Sawa, sema niskie...”
Stories, stories. Oh, Like this, like that. Kidogo I have pulled a soc out of him.
Nairobi; Shamba ya Mawe, Here I come.
I go back to the old neighbourhood. Kupitia tu.
I walk over to Kamwana's Video Parlour. Just at the right time- you know the time, eh, when they are showing Six Movies for One Ticket- to catch all the neighbourhood's heavy hitters. And guess who I find there? N.M and Dinda drinking Viceroy straight out of the bottle.
Am I lucky or am I lucky.
So there we are drinking liquor straight out of the bottle and jerking off. Just like old times. Place is up to the roof (which is not that high up, anyway, because this is not the Karen Country Club) in stinks: illicit brews; illicit love; illicit herbs.
Behind me is some kid who was in Standard Eight when I last saw him. He is drinking Napshizzle like it was Nyayo milk. I decide to stress the young one. “Eh, daddy. You finished school?”
“Who died and you started fucking my mother?” He asks blowing marijuana smoke into my face. Is this kid cool or what? If it was two years or so ago I would say that all he wanted to be when he grew up was me. But now I aint shit. I thump his fist, ruffle his wannabe dreadlocks and take a massive swig off his Napshizzle. “Buy your own, loser?”
Damn. What will it take to earn some respect back in this life time?
The Saga Continues in the Next Episode: Coke and Cum
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