The great writer Joseph Conrad typifies the Kenyan villager-turned-Nairobian in sharing in the fate of the wanderer who becomes successful far away from home.
And like many, when they finally settled, they were surprised, and a bit saddened, by what they found — that they couldn’t shake off their sense of alienation in their newfound homes. Sometimes they are just as desperate to stay away, and just as desperate to return home — with emotions just as confused from upbeat to deep melancholy.
Conrad left his homeland of Poland for Britain though it is said he never really shook off his thick Polish accent (much the same way some Nairobians can’t shake off their accents, no matter how hard they try!).
Conrad must have been thinking about this when he wrote his saddest short story entitled Amy Foster. Edward Said writes that, “‘Amy Foster,’ the most desolate of his stories, is about a young man from Eastern Europe, shipwrecked off the English coast on his way to America, who ends up as the husband of the affectionate but inarticulate Amy Foster.
The man remains a foreigner, never learns the language, and even after he and Amy have a child cannot become a part of the very family he has created with her. When he is near death and babbling deliriously in a strange language, Amy snatches their child from him, abandoning him to his final sorrow… It is difficult to read ‘Amy Foster’ without thinking that Conrad (away from his native Poland) must have feared dying a similar death, inconsolable, alone, talking away in a language no one could understand”.
The Nairobian is faced with the same threat Conrad faced — loss of a home — and the resulting debilitating sorrow of estrangement.
To mitigate this, every December, Nairobians and many Kenyans from other towns, “return home” to their villages. And for many such Kenyans travelling to the villages for the holidays, the road is paved with nostalgia.
Nostalgia has its benefits; one of which is that it plays a significant role in literature. Eric Sandberg of the University of Hong Kong notes that “literature is an inherently nostalgic art form… The literary act is almost inescapably nostalgic. That most cliché of opening lines — ‘Once upon a time…’ — signals the plaintive longing for time past that is emblematic of nostalgia”.
Remembering people and instances of a bygone era is what is used to build great literature. They say that home is where the heart is, with its special memories. All this is the stuff that makes nostalgic literature.
For me, it’s always nostalgic going down the road to Mombasa, past Mtito Andei, the expansive spaces of Voi to the impossibly lush Savannah grassland of the Taita village of Buguta I grew up in.
The azure blue sky with its luminous beauty. The undulating hills. The half-moon hiding in a corner of a dark sky.
Or the setting sun, angry and as fiery as a ball in the horizon. The late evening cast of light beaming over my father’s grave — a sad reminder that all things come to an end — a final confrontation with the inevitable, the inescapable. Sometimes something in the air smells like an evening from my childhood — the luscious scent of blossoms after the rains mixed with a whiff of a faraway smell I cannot name. The short staccato bursts of laughter and enthusiasm — the joy of finally being home.
Even in the songs there, the vowels are sadder, like epic heartbreak anthems, almost seasick, dancing in Coastal Swahili not with the hard metallic ring and pronunciation of the impure Nairobi version of Swahili that initially baffled me with its rough, stumbling and hesitant vowels!
Writers and readers can turn such nostalgia into literary gold. Going down memory lane is ready content for personal memoirs or fiction. The smell of a vehicle’s exhaust from a school bus could summon memories of the first day of school if one used a bus then. The smell of an ink’s pen could bring back memories of school. All this is material for memoirs or novels.
For readers, nostalgic literature is enthralling. There are writers of novel-length nostalgic literature like Marcel Proust with his tome, In Search of Lost Time.
There are also many nostalgic poems like A Letter from a Contract Worker by Antonio Jacinto in which the persona (working away in the mines) is alienated from his lover and cries out, “I wanted to write you a letter my love/that would recall the days in our haunts/our nights lost in the long grass/that would recall the shade falling on us from the plum trees/the moon filtering through the endless palm trees/that would recall the madness/of our passion/and the bitterness of our separation…”
As we travel home this holiday season, let’s enjoy the souvenirs, the desolate places, and the memories. Let’s enjoy the early morning fog and the crispness of the village air away from ringing office phones and the endless stream of e-mail messages in the city.
Let’s enjoy the sunsets when the light becomes muted and gray, and the cool air rolls in. Let’s also enjoy nostalgic literature whether in reading or writing it. May we all enjoy the break.
