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I grew up with the Bible and the Quran, as I’m sure many people have, the former because I was raised Catholic and the later because my brother, busy at the time with madrassa, was to continue his father’s family legacy. Mine was never a home of books. They did not exist. It was Shi Huangdi’s China. It was a house of music. Brother’s father a guitarist, a bass player, and a pianist. I was in awe. Music still escapes me, that big library of the soul. Maybe it was this stretching of the imagination that led me to text, to sound and text, to books.
Outside the sacred texts there were no other books at home, not even newspapers, or the Reader’s Digests and National Geographics my friends would mention. Even more surprising at the time was when these same friends came to school with books with a home library stamp, date and all: this is the property of so and so’s home library. Such a foreign concept. I’d never thought I’d keep a record of anything.
Still, I liked the illustrated children’s Bible, the sadness in the Virgin’s eyes, always there, something she had in common with my mother, and Jesus’ benevolent face, like that of a librarian’s.
They were less about instructions on the building of the new church than they were about adventure and dungeons; Samson to me was Hercules.
It would be decades later that I had the chance to find my own stories in books, that I was able to make my secret reliquary where the books around me were simply mine, whether divine or sacred, yet still maps to the worlds that continue to offer a safe harbour to me every waking day of my life. The library would become sacrosanct. An altar. All this sounds crazy, no doubt.
It would take me decades to think of the Japanese master of the haiku Basho as spiritual; of all the Tao and Buddhist texts I could find for myself as possible; of what autumn means to someone who only experiences rain and dry weather; of translation; of Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī as divine; and this home-making, this archive making, this wanting to be in a house in Eastlando karibu na reli, keja yako tu pekee na internet mwitu ukianza maisha; all these possibilities come alive from a desire to read my own books; and this with music and food and with my favourite writers; all things that I didn’t even know I was seeking. It would take me ages to realise the love of poets, their work and agency.
In Rita Dove’s Canary I find some uses for the written word. I want to think of Billie Holiday’s burned voice as burned text, think of it in the very literal and wrong interpretation. The oral tradition is the first library of man. While burned, the words keep burning. It is in the internal, the candelabra, the bracelet, all these words, all that music in whatever gardenia, whatever signature. How do we talk about Nina Simone as library?
Chavela Vargas’ La Llorona is playing when I move into my new house in my mid-twenties. I was in love. Sounds like the beginning of a dirge, or not, hymn and lament and lullaby and prayer meaning the same thing. There’s all of this in Vargas’ voice. And how to describe it, the meeting of Cubano and the Swahili sea, Pablo Neruda and Fridah Khalo, there’s the sadness, all the blood shed by the conquistadors, all the cathedrals that were never built heavy on her tongue.
As I listen to her I’m taken back to the few times books have been gifted to me, beginning with Love in a Time of Cholera. I’m still thinking of Florentino playing the violin, of heartbreak, of patience, and here I am, at twenty-four moving into a new house with my own small library.
I had maybe less than a hundred hardcovers. A room in a fourth floor apartment. In thinking about spaces we create for ourselves, it is with Dionne Brand’s Theory that I must first prematurely begin in this house in disarray, a fire hazard, not for a library, but for a dissertation: I know where every primary reference, every footnote, every chapter, every comma is, Dionne says, one of Canada’s best poets and novelists and thinkers. Domestic. Middle class. Home, still. Intrinsic, every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memory.
Unpacking his library, Walter Benjamin begins his Illuminations just after moving into a new house with this feeling of settling into a new space. As for me, Vargas somehow shuffles on the player to Florence and The Machine and then to Buena Vista Social Club as I return to the time after childhood and my anxieties about reading. I’ve been neurotic and greedy about books since my pre-pubescent years, and although I’d like to say this has made me intelligent, that might not be true. Walter Benjamin is elated at the idea of ordering his books, crates strewn on the floor. A collector.
Over the last decade I’ve had what I might call three personal libraries, and maybe the access of a couple of others from close friends. In particular, though, libraries and archives have become more important this year when, among others, I found myself having to research Kenyan history in various domains, which led me to the only three public libraries in my life; the Kenya National Library in Upper Hill, the MacMillan Library in downtown, and the Buru Buru Library. In this last one I found a copy of Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch, a novel you can read in two different ways. Apart from this gem from Buru, and their Heinemann African Writers Series and spacious spaces, there’s nothing much else I can say about Kenyan public libraries.
As both a reader and a writer, I have had such a strange and difficult relationship with books, hence the distinctions into three of what I call my collections. The worst of it was perhaps more than five years ago when I realised with dread that I couldn’t write. And if I couldn’t write, then what was the purpose of books in my life?
This was my first library, one that I had been building up since I left undergrad. Unlike Walter Benjamin’s carefully ordered collection, mine was all over the place. I was the infidel in Jorge Luis Borges’ The Library of Babel. Infidels claim that the rule in the Library is not “sense’’ but “non-sense.” Borges says, and that “rationality” (even humble, pure coherence) is an almost miraculous exception.
Building up this first library, my collection was less informed by aesthetics than by the availability of books at the time, by what’s left behind, especially during the time second-hand books became really cheap in Nairobi. There is something to be said about accidental archives. Unlike [Alexander the Great and Dewey’s] libraries – conditional, ideological, argumentative – the geriza is a simple refuse pile, unafraid of its own collected contradictions.
Mine was a refuse. I’d go book hunting all over the city. Not sure if I was unafraid, or if I was building a refuse pit. Tom Mboya Street. Moi Avenue. Muthurwa. In Gikosh you could get copies of (Margaret) Atwood at twenty bob. Books in various states of decay and disarray, it didn’t matter. They were cheap and available.
I picked up a copy of Patrick Süskind’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, unaware that years later I’d be listening to Tom Tykwer (the director of the film adaptation of the same book) in Nairobi during a screenwriting workshop, unaware that even further later I’d be watching Ben Wishaw (the lead actor in the same film) in Queers and London Spy and dreaming of writing monologues and scripts. Fates and coincidences, the infinites of a library.
X, a poet who became a good friend during those years, bought a lot of poetry in Muthurwa and when I mentioned about coming across a copy of (John) Ashbery’s Houseboat Days and my falling in love with his work, he offered me more poetry. He had better connections. So I amassed and amassed! At the time, I was fueled by this greed so I wrote more.
As earlier stated, this was all chance. My education in tastes was limited, so apart from the editions with stickers for Man Bookers and Pulitzers and African Writers Series and the National Book Critics Circle Award, I bought anything that was cheap. For years and years I created my collection.
It is true that with time I became more selective in what I acquired; started buying more expensive books. A salary meant I could afford them. I remember buying a copy of (Haruki) Murakami’s Tsuzuki Tsakara for twenty pounds from a bookshop in London, delivered to me by someone who had invited me for a reading in Stone Town. And this after I’d read almost all of the Murakami I could find on the streets of Nairobi and on the internet, so many hours in front of the screen, messing up my eyesight, falling in love with his characters, who were somehow always making noodles and drinking sake and were unable to sleep.
So when I say as time went by the collection became more deliberate, I mean for instance I was moving towards a different canon, trying as much as possible to find books by writers such as Yemi Amada, Fuminori Nakamura, reading haikus and trying to experiment with haibuns. Let me also say that the books I owned were almost entirely fiction. A few poetry volumes, some gifted to me by friends like X.
At this time my relationship with books was still an easy one. Predicated mostly by the fact that I was also writing and publishing. I was also employed at a publishing house. There was no end to access to books.
The foregoing notwithstanding, I had never believed in the need to possess a book, to own it. There are those gems in home libraries we don’t give away, those that are dear to us, those gifted to us by lovers, with inscriptions of undying love, those we have bought at festivals and book signings, a copy of a Binyavanga Wainaina Discovering Home with your name autographed. Those are the ones we keep close to us. These, too, held no sentimental value to me, especially once I’d read them. Not because I did not adore them in my own way; I just didn’t let them take over me in that way.
Yet still, I can never fully understand why I gave away that first library. My first burning of a library. I say burning to mean an erasure from my life, dramatic as it sounds. We carried the books down in bed sheets onto a Marsabit-bound pickup truck. It felt liberating, coming back to a house without any books. Granted, there were a few borrowed copies I kept that were not mine to give away. It could have been that I was no longer writing at the time, and found no joy in writing or reading at all. The low tide of my world.
When we fall under the spell of death, E. M. Cioran says, everything occurs as if we had known death in a previous experience, and as if now we were impatient to get back to it as soon as possible. Getting back to it. How good that would be. I wanted to get back to a place of not knowing. It meant giving up books, it meant looking at the mirror and seeing nothing reflected back. And the longer the books stayed the more I suffered. They had to go.
Writers often talk about the difficulties of writing. I’m unhappy, mostly, when I’m not writing, unless I’ve just written something, in which case I’m euphoric because I don’t have to try and write something again, Louise Glück goes on to say in a Paris Review interview.
The unhappiness for me became much deeper, more pervasive, more unrelenting. I simply wanted all the books in my life gone. I am no longer K, in Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart, listening to Sumire go on and on late at night. I was also giving up on being alive, and especially being alive in Nairobi*, on loving the city*. I’m rethinking this place that I’m in, it is informed by sound and text and the visual, smell and touch, but mostly what cannot be known. And the more this went on the more I disliked reading. I was getting no joy there. I had given up on writing as well.
Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method, Walter Benjamins says. Some praise had come and gone, became useless. At this time TV became a solace, a loyal companion. Old reruns of Twilight Zone and Law and Order and The Real Househelps of Kawangware. Giving away a library became a flick of the finger, a blink. And the beautiful bookshelf I’d bought in Buru, walked with the mkoko(teni) guy as we made our way through Mutindwa? That was sold to (Frankline) Sunday, a close friend. Reading means approaching something that is just coming into being, Italo Calvino writes. How do you do that when you yourself are busy unbecoming, tearing at the seams?
After a while, of course, I returned to reading.
I rediscovered, and became more deliberate in the work I consumed, started reading outside my strict disciplines, and experimented more. I returned to Katia Kapovich: Forgiveness and forgetfulness, my darling /oh my Carmen! My life is also scarce/ and made of paper.
After such efficient devastation I found it difficult to tolerate frivolity or indulgence, Rita Dove writes in her introduction to The Best American Poetry (2000), after lightning struck her home and the resulting fire and flood destroys most of her library. She’s talking about how she has come to select the poems for the year’s best poems anthology, taking more care in her curatorial practice. Dove and her husband take up ballroom dancing after the consistent frustrations of rebuilding. Abandoning a library also means trying to find yourself in another way. What did I take up? Well, more drinking perhaps. But slowly I started returning to myself, returning to a new archive-building, loving the city, seeing it with new eyes, learning to live with the perpetual heartbreak of it all.
My poetry editor’s library has just sailed across the seas to reach him in Nairobi. He’s just finished school somewhere north of London and moved back home, and we are talking about what it might mean if this library never reaches him, if it gets lost at sea, what it means to attach so much meaning and importance to the books in our lives. We joke that the container might get lost, that some kids along the Strait of Gibraltar or in Hargeisa will get to read his Slyvia Wynter and M. NourbeSe Philip, get to enjoy Jerich Brown’s The Tradition.
The books eventually arrive. He covers them in white sheets against the Nairobi dust, safe as they were in container ships crossing the Suez Canal, unopened, untouched, smelling of graduate school, burning. I mention his library as an intermission, because of the wealth of thought he brings into my life, the kindness and insight he offers in the reading of my work.
By extension, (Frankline) Sunday’s library became a kind of second library to me, his home a second home. Incidentally, he acquired his collections from two different writers who for various reasons were also getting rid of their libraries. We all know each other. We are all writers. Nairobi ni ndogo.
The strange thing about the library from Gorilla, one of the two writers, is that I know how meticulous he is in his reading, his writers. Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipul, Kojo Laing. The one from IOA is also quite staggering. All have works you will not get for cheap in Nairobi bookshops. They are all libraries that are particular and crafted, from two very distinguishable and talented minds. In the collection I find gems. (Frankline) Sunday’s library is more inclined towards nonfiction, rigorous work I am not used to. In a way in this library, I am outside my comfort zone.
Here, I should mention that I do a lot of reading on the screen, both on the computer and Kindle, I’m practising Rita Dove’s meticulous curation, and for my satisfaction, I’ve found online places (some whose domains have gotten seized by that federal government) where I can get the books I want and love. I’m curating my poetry: June Jordan, Michelle Cliff, Yuseff Komunyakaa (the first Black poet to win the Pulitzer for poetry), Dionne Brand, Carl Phillips, Lucille Clifton. The Life of Zora Neale Hurston, by Valerie Boyd. I’m finding comfort in the memoirs of my favourite poets. Saeed Jones. And I’m under the spell of Zora in Haiti, divining the devil, Zora and that old couple and Langston Hughes.
Finally, I can be in Ramallah and Jerusalem and Cairo and Beirut and Nyali and Kikambala escaping with poets who write how I want to write. Roja Shehadeh in Palestine, who can fathom love. I’m reading (Rainer Maria) Rilke’s extensive Diaries, trying to copy them unsuccessfully. I’m with (William S.) Burroughs in Tangiers, which he doesn’t like at first, a fucking racist if ever there was one, born of money and American comfort, of whiteness, but the drugs finally open up his eyes to the Mediterranean splendour, of the colonial. I’m finally reading (Albert) Camus, E. M. Cioran; their talk of suicide and delirium and the mad delight of letting go.
After giving up that first library, I am gradually returning again to the shores of my mind, to those mornings in the beaches of Kilifi where the sands are white and the tide is with God. And although I am broke, the writing is some form of joy, the journalling a grace. With Bernadette Mayer I’m learning and learning, making mad lists every day.
At the time of the second library, Sunday and I are working on Ritual, the second issue from our cofounded literary journal Down River Road. Part of the project is to open up the library to the public. First to catalogue it, which I find to be a very useful activity, this mild boredom of order, as Walter Benjamin puts it. We write to the African Poetry Book Fund (APBF) and the good people there gladly agree to send up books. We write to my previous employer and the people there have lost the last APBF catalogue.
It’s a terrible beauty when the APBF books finally arrive. My secret ambition is to have the biggest poetry library around, then open it up to the public. What delight it was, those early days, coming across (Dambudzo) Marechera’s Cemetery of Mind for fifty bob. The scope for me has now changed; I’m no longer thinking of the library as the personal.
The Accidental Library is what I’ll call the third one, although I am more its caretaker than anything else. It’s a library, not my library. Echoing the departure of the first one, this one arrives in a pick-up truck. Loads and loads of books in crates. More books than I fear will be able to fit into my space. This time there is no music. Strange. There’s the remaining almost empty shelf of the first library. It takes four men to get all the books to my fourth-floor apartment. They have to leave the books outside so that I can find a way to make space before they are ushered into the house.
For an entire night, I haul the books in, piecemeal, dum them on my living room floor. My mind is not it; I’m not aware of myself, the work mechanical and backbreaking. It takes me another three days to arrange the books into seven crates. The books have come to me as a result of something unfortunate and tragic.
Beautiful as they are, they feel more like orphans. How do I find delight in harbouring them in my small rooms? Yet in this new work of classification, I find some form of comfort. The National plays as I spend hours setting up the books, taking breaks to do my own writing and preparing meals. It’s an intrusion, arranging another’s library. Book by book. The marginalia, inscriptions, annotations, secret love notes. I feel like a child who has entered the parent’s forbidden bedroom. There’s no delight in it, only mild curiosity. I divide up the collection into fiction and nonfiction, art books, recipes, lit mags, journals, gardening books, postcards. The poetry I keep separate from the APBF collection.
A lot of A. E. Housman. John Berryman who I have always loved but never understood, whose biography resembles my life, whose demise I fear to be a premonition of mine. Eye open on the sea/ eye open, of the prodigal/ upward to heaven shoot/ where stars will fall from. I find Christopher Okigbo’s Labyrinths. Aminata and Amezidi and Songs of Lawino find their way back into my life. (Taban) Loliyong is translating (Okot) p’Bitek. Coming to Birth. Encounters from Africa. Heinemanns find their way into my home.
The gem that is the Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. A copy of Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry that is as much use to me as the wok and grater and bicarbonate left behind by a lover in my kitchen cabinet. All useless. So many books. An Everyman pocket book of Wallace Steven poems, from whose Esthetique Du Mal I’m tempted to appropriate a phrase to use as the title of some poems I’m writing. I carry the book to a date at the National Museum, to meetings. And much like the owner of the books, some defy classification.
Every day I need to remind myself I am only a custodian. This house of muteness, of shy ghosts. They can never teach me anything. Not that I have ever gardened or crocheted or scrapbooked or used a recipe. Before this, I’ve found letters and marginalia and library cards in used books by strangers in faraway places. Those meant nothing. To find them in these books displaces something in me, knocks me sideways. You read the correspondence between, say, Henry Miller and Anais Nin, or Burroughs and Ginsberg, and these are simply literary traditions, letters between the dead. What happens coming across the letters of the living, those known to you?
A few months earlier I’d lost notebooks at an event, with some poetry, scraps of prose and some journal entries. I always cringed at the thought of the stranger who would read them, these notebooks where I have curated my thoughts and dreams. Is this a memory or a sensation of loss? A radiant hole? Eileen Myles asks in For Now, this after losing quite a large amount of her work while moving.
I should mention that it is in this third library where I finally get to have books by people I know, peers and contemporaries. It is also the only one that came with a dictionary and the Bhagavad Gita. (Frankline) Sunday’s has an African Bible and the Quran. The Kindle has the Kamasutra (Oxford World’s Classics).
I have ideas for a collective library. But who wants that? Although to be honest, not everyone shares my ideas about book ownership or sharing. It might stem from a misreading of Borges. The library is infinite. I prefer to dream that burnished surfaces are a figuration and promise of the infinite. What would it look like? A railway road. A shared, ever-growing catalogue. And while I understand that books will never give me solace, perhaps if they are a home to others then that’s enough.
In this tumultuous history/being alive is rawness and alertness/bitterness. Dionne Brand writes in Nomenclature for a Time Being. Who but the rhythms of Bessie Head’s difficult Maru, in all of that is desolate, and we are finally in the company to and of the difficult prophecy, a time for elegies, for laments, for the too much, for the common grief-pouring.
It is while thinking with Josué Guébo’s Thinking of Lampedusa that I’m able to imagine the terrible replica of drowning, of books in tow… the sinking boats. Throughout this text, I’m able to make sense of some things. The intrinsic nature of these libraries, do they tell me anything, about what they are, who they belong to, if I’m a voyeur, and the extent of shame?
***
*Here’s a diary entry of the time I gave up/out the first library:
I have given up on loving Nairobi. To give that up means to stop asking it for favours; to stop asking it to be livable; and to stop defining it in my sleep fiction. Also, to stop loving it in my new poetry of history mnemonics memory annotations long sentences no commas in between lesser and lesser full colons the smell of mornings and the sound of anthems in the early ‘90s when everything was quiet and I mistook this to mean peace. It is to stop wishing for more trees and more park benches, to stop wishing for the violence to stop, for the loud noises to stop.
Yes. That’s how I will no longer love Nairobi. To love it, and this is the way I love, means to need it and to assume it needs my footfalls and wide gazing and my body. I have made my love err* by way of obscuring the city through the years, a fault I have no one else to blame for. Yet the refractions and many colours provide a basis for my love.
I don’t know when I started loving the city. For as long as I can remember, it has always been far and uncaring. My very first memories include teargas smoke, a lady with blood sipping in or out from under her fingernails, the General Service Unit beating up a man, my mother carrying my brother on her back and holding me with her other hand, and all around us people running running running.
At that point I was standing at the intersection of the state and a woman protecting her two children, and that woman remains my mother. I cannot therefore really say why I love the city and I’m more at a loss for words trying to convince you that it’s possible to stop loving it. I should say I love my mother instead. All I am hoping for is that you like a good love story with a tragic ending.
I have given up on loving Nairobi. I need to state this as often as I can. Such is the unreliability of memory, the transient immaterial that is always taking and not always giving back in equal measure. This reaffirmation, the ritual, the goodbye of over and out all over again, the statement of halting, this is evidence for myself and an echo for you.
The city goes on and on without me. I accept this. I have given it up as a collective city, as this big pleasure dome and pleasure garden of bureaucracy, sex, secret meetings, and imported gadgets and sensibilities.
I have also given it up as a place of detail. I have given up on its promises of factory-floor coffee (best when stepped on by barefoot workers), cocktails, cake, chocolate, red roses, pleasure temples, long walks, reading a book in traffic, bad restaurant service (to mean beautiful people with too much on their mind), loud matatus and cheap second-hand books.
I know enough of folklore to know they had to delimit and censor the monsters and bloodletting, in fact I know enough to want to wrongly protect myself from the alternative narratives of the city, where people die every day, to create my own space, or at least force myself into un-being and existing only in the grayscale places that seem fit for the moment. This need to censor myself is why my love is imperfect. To change that I have to completely stop loving.
Or I need to move to a different city. I could go south to Mombasa or west to Kisumu. I could live outside Kampala. I don’t know enough about Dar (es Salaam) but I could go there.
It is very easy to imagine another city, different from the city you live in; it holds the things that you lack now. Another city is another country. It’s a promise.
Remember, which is not to say don’t forget, because I have no way of knowing how you create and archive your memories. Remember, there’s no way of me knowing if this is already inside you the same way it’s in butterflies migrating north. Remember, a city continues without and outside you and a city does not bow to anyone, it consumes everything and lets out nothing. A city is a bad child. It stores up the dead bodies of birds and hides them from view.
There is the city you imagine, a place of trees and open spaces, chocolate and burgundy walls, banking hallways because you have just enough cash, but most importantly there is a city that continues after you sleep, to mean a city that doesn’t depend on imagination, and one that is a selfish monster that goes on consuming even the air you need to pulverise nightmares as you sleep.
It is a stark city of concrete and dust and full of other sleeping bodies probably having the same nightmares as you. A city that loves you back by reminding you that death is very very possible and language cannot stop it. Actually, language can enhance it and prepare a way for it.
A city has to exist outside the collective consciousness, it has no choice, and it has no structure as much as we protect ourselves by giving it our own definitions of structure.
That’s one way we the sleeping bodies can have a thing that ties us all together, to appreciate that the city goes on without us, it continues outside structure. We have to find the things that connect us, not to mean we have to be connected, for our journeys and ends are different, but if we can accept that this city continues after sleep, that will be important although I won’t tell you how or who taught me that. We need to let go. Maybe I learnt it from the city I am trying to forget.
When we travel to a different city what we are carrying with us are the fictions of our first city, what we are searching for and hoping to find are the fictions our first city has denied us. We are already forming other fictions about our second city, unfurling like a gentle animal before us.
This is not to mean the animal of the other city has always been asleep, but we want to imagine and impose sleep on it so that on that first dawn of arrival and mist and fresh morning air what we see in front of us is not the real city but the city we have conjured through six hours of bad roads.
If we travel to this other place and find it most uninhabitable and all its museums empty we will say at least not in the ways of our first city, a form of coping that equates variations in absence to find the least romantic and the easily culpable.
We have the fiction of our first city next to us as we walk in this other city, we need the first city to understand the second city, which is not the best way to find peace in another city. It’s possible to forget the first city. Possible yet difficult and tiresome.
If I can forget Nairobi I can stop loving it. For loving is the memory of yesterday and those cotton candy days at Luna Park where my brother and I watched as the other children created a fiction of fun, complete with a Ferris wheel and the parking lot lights of the Serena (Hotel) right there behind us, not forgetting the Intercon(tinetal) when the government still ‘owned’ it.
Children are the majority shareholders of fiction about what a city should be. The stakes are highest for them because they have no idea what’s in store for them. They do not know one day they will need to forget in order to stop loving.
I am not a child any more, despite my protests and fairy-making ways and the beautiful veils in front of my eyes. The central place of the Ferris wheel is replaced by a crumbling building and government propaganda and the one-week-old memory of dead bodies.
Many bodies can become one body can become a single memory that unfurls in front of you and in the middle of a park to replace the cotton candy machine that you still had not stopped loving because your mother tried as much as she could to get you to Luna Park but what you did to define fun was entirely up to you.
I am now more aware of the many forms of violence this city uses, I don’t know how I can unlearn that. I find myself a lot of times taking myself to the middle of the city and creating what is fun and ideal as a stop-motion film I will never show to anyone.
To be fair, my heart is breaking. I have no way of remembering this city therefore I must forget not the city itself but myself as a child and adult, forget I ever lived here. I must go back home and hug my mother and tell her she reminds me of what love really is, and it does not involve limits or definitions or fiction.
My mother’s love is not in language and it is not in any form of gesture. Her love is not parking lot lights and easy mornings of pancakes and tea with too much water and not enough tea leaves, but all this made bearable by too much sugar. No. Her love is not that at all. Because she has really loved me in the most silent ways and she is the city I carry with me even when I am forgetting and searching and dying a little every day.
I used a lot of imagination as a child to understand how simple it was for others to be happy. I made excuses for them and myself, next to their happiness I placed angels of my own making and next to my unhappiness I martyred myself by placing the monsters of their sleep and senseless definitions of a word like ‘lexicographer’ right next to me.
I grew up and gave up the business of manufacturing angels. Now I make and read poetry and think about poets like Komunyakaa who have a really beautiful voice. I even read the conceptualists when the truth is I can’t stand them and I have taken them up on the offer and made myself one of them as one of the things I make myself to be every day.
To adapt I have found it useful to assume the forms of the things I do not like. I don’t know if that is irony or fluff. I knew for sure life in a city can be beautiful. What language has done is that it has given me the means to understand violence and finally give up the possibility of a beautiful city life.
