When I learned of the death of Rasna Warah, I opened Telegram and wrote, “Rasna Warah died.” In an attempt to capture what I was feeling at that exact moment, I added a broken heart emoji. To be honest, I could not name this thing I was feeling. There was grief, of course, but there was this other thing, a sense of finality, the kind that comes with death, the kind that says, that thing you hoped for is gone, forever. I had hoped to meet Rasna, and, perhaps, like the many writers in my life, to know her. But that was never going to happen. And so there I stood staring at my phone, waiting for something to happen, feeling the weight of loss, and the realisation that I may never get to answer the question: Who was Rasna Warah?
Scrolling through my X timeline, tributes came in from people who knew her, who loved and respected Rasna and her work. The words floated on my screen: unwavering, fearless, beacon, gallant, strong, complicated, controversial, fierce, feminist, woman. It felt like I was watching intimacy through a window, standing outside, close, but not close enough. I wanted to be part of this thing, to know, with certainty, who Rasna was. To be able to say, this is who Rasna was, to me. And then I remembered a book I had read in school, and in it a story I had loved. None of my friends had a copy and so I bought one the next day, and as I skimmed through the chapters, I found the story, and a way to answer the question that still haunted me: Who was Rasna Warah?
In the penultimate chapter of Triple Heritage: A Journey to Self Discovery, titled, The Woman’s Place in Asian Society, Rasna tells the story of a woman who broke tradition by lighting her father’s funeral pyre. Religious leaders were against it as it was not the woman’s place to perform the final rituals of death, but the woman’s father had no son, and so she volunteered to do it, an important act, an act which is believed to release the person’s soul to eternity. Rasna writes, “The spectacle so moved the mourners […] that when the ceremony was over, many admitted that they had never seen such a sight, and that the deceased was indeed lucky to have daughters who played the role of sons.”
This story is important, because it begins the story of Rasna Warah for me. I appreciated her journey to self discovery told through the history of Kenyan Asians, and how she navigated her multiple heritages, but it is this story that remains. It is the story of the brave and courageous woman who did the unthinkable and stood in the face of tradition and culture. And, it is also the story of the writer she was, a gifted storyteller. As she tells the story of this remarkable woman who took it upon herself to usher her father from this world to the next, she ends the chapter with a reveal: “I should know. I was that woman.”
“This is it!” I think, “This is what I have been trying to understand. This is who Rasna was!” But I’m not convinced. It still feels incomplete. I want the story, the thing behind the thing: where she was born, where she grew up, who her siblings were, where she went to school, what her achievements were–the story. Searching the internet for this story proves futile. There is nothing much, only the books she wrote: her ideas, her thoughts, her bibliography. Keguro Macharia writes, “Bibliographies are not typically listed in eulogies, at least not in Kenyan eulogies.” He continues, “Bibliographies tell stories of how we have imagined and with who we have imagined. Of how we understand the s/places we inhabit and how we seek to transform them. Or how we navigate the everyday while trying to live otherwise. Of how we map our relations to temporality, to the pasts we have inherited, to the presents we live, and to the futures that might happen.” Perhaps Rasna’s bibliography could be her story.
To answer the question of who Rasna Warah was, to know her, is to read her. It is to read Triple Heritage: A Journey to Self Discovery (1998) to follow how she maps her history across geographies and cultures and claims her personhood and her Kenyanness. It is to go through the pages of Somalia: Mogadishu Then and Now (2012) and see her understanding of the places we call home, and how we exist within them, and how we can transform them to what they once were, or what they could become.
It is to read Red Soil and Roasted Maize (2011) and move with her through her meditations of the writer’s life, identity and ethnicity, the post-election violence of 2007/8, the exploitative aid industry, and her love for her city. It is to read War Crimes (2016) and to hear the clarity of her voice and her ability to point at power, to call out foreign governments and humanitarian agencies conspiring to keep African countries (in this case Somalia) in a permanent state of poverty and conflict. It is to read Unsilenced (2016) and Lords of Impunity (2022) and to witness her integrity, how she spoke about her personal experience at the UN, how she was harassed when she accidentally uncovered misappropriation of funds, and revealed the UN’s failures across the world. It is to see her unwavering sense of justice even at great personal cost.
It is to read her many opinion pieces on various publications and see her undying love for Kenya, her commitment to pointing at the emperor and reminding us that he is naked, and to imagining better ways of being together. And it is to read her tweets to see all these things carried over, but also to see her vulnerability at the face of a failing nation, and her experience with cancer, constantly reminded of her mortality. It is to see her blindspots and be reminded that even our best are not beyond reproach. To read Rasna, is to know Rasna.
I loved Rasna’s work because she wrote well, with clarity and depth. I also loved her because she would make me clutch my pearls. And even when some of what she wrote made me angry, it was always clear that there was a human being behind the words, and that this human being cared, even when she was wrong.
The image of the woman at Nairobi’s Hindu Shamshan Bhumi crematorium on 16 February 1989 stays with me. It is an image of a woman who refused to be told no. It is the image of the woman who knew that what needed to be done had to be done by her. It is the image of a woman who believed in dignity. But most importantly, as I imagine the woman, Rasna, lighting the funeral pyre to usher her father into the next world, I hope our reading of her work does the same for her.
