To the Mother I Outlived
You died 15 weeks after I was born.
You and I, we breathed the same Nairobi air for 110 days. Hospital, home, clinic, maybe a church or two: These were the only places we saw together. Before that, I was a living thing awaited, monitored, and unnamed, while you were a teacher, a mother, a wife living in a Nairobi house with red sofas where you welcomed guests, a coffee table on which you sorted your sewing patterns and fabric, and a formica-topped dining table on which you wrote letters to your parents and siblings. I was born two weeks before your 34th birthday. Then, three months later, you were dead.
It took me years to recognise how my body subconsciously clung to these countdowns, these anniversaries of loss, marking them with quiet gloom and rage, resenting birthday texts, calls, birthday songs, and birthday cakes.
I don’t remember anything about you. All I know are the things I’ve been told—you had a big afro, you had been a CRE teacher, you liked ABBA—and the place you were buried—close to the house in Kakamega where you’d been photographed celebrating either Dad’s new job or his new motorcycle. In the photo, you’re smiling in a long-sleeved mini dress, standing in a single row with some of your friends and family, close to your mother-in-law’s thatched round house.
Photos of you were not hung on the walls of our house in Nairobi, unlike other people’s homes which had pictures of their dead relatives on display. They were safely stored away in photo albums in a drawer in Dad’s bedroom. I suppose Dad couldn’t keep prominently displaying your photos while also building a new life for us and for himself; what would the person he would marry think?
“It took me years to recognise how my body subconsciously clung to these countdowns, these anniversaries of loss, marking them with quiet gloom and rage.”
Sometimes we brought out these albums and looked at your photos, never really talking about the stories behind the images. As I looked at them, I inserted myself into memories that weren’t mine. In one photo, you and my older siblings—David, Louis, and Janet—are seated on a woven mat on a patch of grass in front of the house. You’re all smiling with empty cups laden in front of you as if you’d just had afternoon tea. I imagined myself a toddler, seated in the middle, in that woolen red dress I wore more often than I liked because it assured protection from the cold. I imagined Dad holding up the camera urging us to smile while I turned around and looked at everyone instead of facing the camera.
In another, you and Dad are both looking at the camera, concentrating on the lens. Dad is standing behind you, your heads slightly tilted to each other. I imagined myself waiting for my turn to join in, mesmerised and out of shot, being asked to keep still by the photographer.
You don’t know about the women who replaced you, or tried to. Dad got married three more times, and each time he did, we moved into a different house, replaced the furniture and cutlery. We learnt not to be possessive of our favourite mugs and combs, or sentimental about picture frames whose contents were supplanted to reflect the day’s iteration of my family. We took new family photos each time: a new step-mother, a new family. But they weren’t you.
I wonder what I would have called you had you lived long enough to hear my first words: Mum, Mama, Masa, Mathe? Can I call you by your first name, Bilha? I never called anyone else by names that would have been yours.
At ten, and in a new school, I was a curiosity to my classmates. I told them my name and where I came from. When I said my mother had died a long time ago, one girl asked me to explain why I still plaited my hair. She insisted that members of my community shaved their hair and didn’t plait it again when their relatives died. I’d never heard of such a tradition. I mumbled something about being Christian, and being modern, willing the moment to disappear. I avoided that girl for the rest of the term.
At that school, my hair was outgrowing the perm my father’s soon-to-be ex-wife had funded. My teachers asked who took care of my hair, why it was breaking. They suggested things to do about it. Even then, I sensed they weren’t especially worried about my split ends. They were asking why I had arrived at school looking like an untended house plant—all chaotic roots, branches, and shoots. I strove to be a good girl every day, convincing myself, if no one else, that nothing was missing from my life.
When I was thirteen, the new girl again at a bigger school, a teacher—looking at my face, and reading my surname—asked if I was related to you. She had been your classmate in college. Puberty had done something to my face, changed its shape and its complexion, made it much less of Dad and much more of you. My hair, growing out longer and now less often trimmed, was thick, unresponsive to gravity, and impossible to hold in a ponytail all day, but afros were out of fashion. People I didn’t know saw you in my face more than I wanted them to. Each time they recognised you, some placing their hands on my face and hair without asking, it announced to me that there were people who knew a lot more about you than I would ever know.
I became obsessed with the sound of your voice. What did you sound like? There are no cassettes or recordings of your voice. I wondered if you sounded like me. I wondered if you’d been soft-spoken or if you’d had the kind of voice that would have grated my ears. I wondered if you sounded like your sisters. Was your voice as steady as theirs? Was it as cheery? Did you linger on your m’s when being dramatic, as they did, so lemon became lemmmon? Did your d’s turn into t’s? Dense into tense? Did you laugh at yourself when this happened? I loved your mother’s—my grandmother’s—laugh, loved how cheeky and hearty it was, and how her body shook with mirth. Were you like her?
The problem is that you are forever thirty-four and I am forever a child wandering this earth, searching for you. You are forever maternal, never professional, never single, never grumpy, never elderly. Your agemates are in their seventies and I am older than you ever were. I’ve attended the funerals of people who grew up with you. What could you teach me about life now? If you were a character in a work of fiction, I’d say you were boring and stilted, not sufficiently fleshed out. What were your dreams, what were your pet peeves, what were your worst memories, what did people dislike about you, who were your enemies?
“You are forever maternal, never professional, never single, never grumpy, never elderly.”
Unlike the grieving families in the movies and sitcoms I watched, and unlike the characters in the books I read, we moved around that ground as if you weren’t there. We didn’t bring flowers to your grave or sit beside it reminiscing about days gone by, or update you on events you’d missed. You were buried, and we left.
A few days into my first year of university, I was summoned to the student loans office and accused of fraud. The loans officer claimed that I’d forged your death certificate. For seconds, what I felt was relief. Hope. What if he was right, and you weren’t dead? The error resulting from our family’s forward motion was something only Dad and a pile of documents could fix. They didn’t believe I was yours.
Once, I was told that I was stuck in the past and I needed to forget about you. Somebody else claimed I was conjuring your spirit and unsettling everyone by asking questions about you. When I got a scholarship to study in America, I was more than relieved to get away from the suffocating silence that hovered over your non-existence.
On the day of my graduation, I was the age you were when you had me. Dad’s cousins and their children attended the ceremony. My name was pronounced correctly when it was called out. We went to Plato’s Dinner just near the campus and had a mid-afternoon breakfast. I wanted that. In my black gown and tasselled cap, I felt so much less accomplished than you had been. So anxious about the future of being older than my mother.
I wonder, Bilha, what you’d think of all that's happened since. I moved back to Nairobi, to a flat that was walking distance from the school where you’d been a teacher. I registered to vote there, each time wondering if the old buildings and trees remembered you. Did you like working there? What type of teacher were you? The place I live now is brighter than any place I’ve lived in since I came back to Kenya. Somebody in my neighbourhood has three ducks, and from my kitchen window, I see them walking to the river in the morning and returning home in the evening. I have a dining table, a remedy for the unease I had when your dining table was given away. Perhaps what I longed for was a ritual, for the certainty of a place at your table.
It’s an exercise in ridiculousness, being older than your mother. There are now more people who know me than those who ever knew you. I once went white water rafting, and fell out of the raft. I had a life jacket on, so I didn’t drown. I made a playlist of songs that I was told you liked, and though I do not like some of these songs, I listen to them anyway. Last year, I confessed to your brother that when I was a teenager I stole a book from his bookshelf because it had your name in it. We laughed, and he said he had other books to pass on to us, your children. I didn’t know these existed. What an arc, your books becoming mine. Fewer people now ask to know about you so they can place me on a map that starts with you and Dad as my true north. I have my own map now, and most days I play pretend that I know where it’s leading me to.
About the Author
Lutivini Majanja is a writer from Kenya. Her writing has appeared in Transition Magazine, The Republic, A Long House, and elsewhere.
Read Lutivini'’s “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Edited by Carey Baraka.
Header photo by Leighann Blackwood.
