This Story of Ours

 

The Sunday before last, I spent a long morning on a stone terrace in Nairobi listening to the stories of six people working together on an oral history project. It was a collaboration between students and staff at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the University of Nairobi, and these six were a bright-eyed, coffee-loving bunch whose stories swelled at their lips. They had just returned from the coast, where they interviewed people who were displaced -- officially, "resettled" -- by a major mining initiative. I was in turn interviewing them for an article. The cycle of that morning was not lost on us: their re-telling of the pained stories they heard, and connecting it with their own stories, was an act of collaborative authorship. My own re-telling adds altitude to this literature of empathy. We are storytellers and we are listeners at once. This is metaphor made manifest: the greater brilliance that comes from the simultaneity of our multiple truths.

I've come back to Michigan since the terrace morning of storytelling. Many people ask me "how was Kenya." Often, answering "Great!" is enough to satisfy the asker's interest. They have enough trust in that quick accounting to leave things be. Still, when there is a larger opening to share, I often fumble with my responses, trying to find the right anecdote to tidily serve as synecdoche for the soaring, tumultuous, glaring, dry-mouthed, dusty, sweet-hearted experience of the last half-year. I haven't found it. And if I stretch out my stories with the day-to-day plotlessness of my time in Kenya -- how to run across Wayaki Way without colliding with a matatu, the way the pied crows woke me from sad dreams, what it was like to dance to Gikuyu love songs at a nyama choma place -- if that, then I still find myself distracted by what's missing, what I can't communicate even as I ache to share. Because this is my brimming bloody heart, and it is bigger than my two hands can hold.

I've come to think that the reason these stories feel so slippery to me is that they are not my own. These are stories that want to be told with more voices than my one. It is an interesting realization for someone who went to Kenya to work on her writing. But it's true: others who saw, others who were there, others who know what those late afternoon Nairobi rains are like -- these stories need them too if they are to be told truthfully. I say this without losing my grip on my own presence here. My memory, my telling, matters. But singularity and collaboration are not opposites. Our literature needs both if it is to remain in motion. I need both if I am to remain in motion.

 

About the image: Baby elephants on the move at a sanctuary in Nariobi. To thrive, African elephants develop elaborate system of communal bonds, individual interactions, and solitary time. Family ties are extensive, compassionate, and lifelong, though interaction with other groups is fluid. Memory is key to defining the social behavior of elephant communities. As elephants grow older, they become more adept at using their auditory skills and their ability to call to each other over long distances.

Comments

[margosita]

Beautiful post! This is so interesting and feels very real:

"I've come to think that the reason these stories feel so slippery to me is that they are not my own. These are stories that want to be told with more voices than my one."

In some ways that applies to every sort of literature and story. But especially to your experiences in Kenya. Nice, nice work.

[Anna Clark]

Thank you, margosita, for your kind words!