Grow (for Wangari Maathai)

Poetry: Wambui Kamiru, Photography: Jerry Riley. Copyright Koroga II

Her knees pound hard onto the soil beneath me.

She drops to place me within the earth.

Breathing heavy, she works the soil for room for me.

Breath a kiss upon my leaves.

Embraced in her cupped hands, into the warmth and moisture of the earth.

This is my prayer.

My roots flow down, deeper.

I find my place within, holding tight, engaged.

“Grow.”

She whispers to me.

She stands tall above me.

I look beyond her to the sky.

I reach up to her.

Until I stand over her.

My leaves shielding her.

My roots embracing her.

white butterfly

M sat down heavily on the soft earth.

She watched as her toes dug into the cool red soil, granules streaming between them. She spat in her right hand and rubbed the burning skin on her right leg, made hot by the rising sun. Her hands felt rough against her hot skin. Beside her lay a jembe.* She turned to look around at the half acre she had already tilled. She was hungry and thirsty. M reached for the kiondo*, the same one that had once carried a gun and felt around inside it for the roasted ndoma* she had saved from the night before.

She broke it open in her hands, a half in each and began to peel back the skin of the one in her left hand with her teeth.

A gentle breeze broke through the banana leaves above her, beating back the midday heat. “Something had to change,” she thought. “Something has to happen.”

M narrowed her eyes and looked beyond the field at the other ridge, dotted with other women like her, tilling land. Their voices spilling with juicy gossip about the preacher and his mistress, rose in the air.

M shifted her eyes back to the awaiting field. The land they tilled was theirs. She was tilling for money to buy food.

A white butterfly fluttered past her left ear across her face, daring her gaze and settled on the purple flower of the potato plant right infront of her.

*jembe: digging hoe, kiondo: woven basket, ndoma: arrowroot

a million fathers and daughters

I’m mad. I had to hear about this campaign from a friend…three days before the dinner.

For such a wonderful campaign, they have such a poor web presence. Puff and pass along this brilliant strategy that turns gender based violence into a societal issue.

How do you feel when your girlfriend, wife cries?  What happens when it is your daughter and the pain is over something that another man has done to her.

Most men don’t know how to deal with a woman’s  tears. Here is a chance to do something.

Support the Nairobi Women’s Hospital through M-pesa on your phone. Click Pay Bill and enter account number 100700

The vendor is GVRC and enter your amount

If you can attend the dinner here is the Facebook Event page

If you are a blogger, blog about it. Get a million men to donate money to Nairobi Women’s Hospital.

While sadly it is still a reactionary program it is a turning point on how we as Kenyans view violence against women. It is not a women’s issue. It is everyone’s issue and in particular, only a father (and a father to be) can make a lasting and great impact.

We need more fathers, husbands and brothers to stand up and hold their fellow men accountable.

The Gender Violence Recovery Centre (GVRC) is a non-profit making, non-partisan, charitable trust of the Nairobi Women’s Hospital.  GVRC main purpose is to mobilize resources to provide free medical treatment and psychosocial support to survivors of gender based violence.

watoto wa kwetu – “watoto ni wetu”

It is always amazing and inspiring to come across someone who has taken their dream and through it made it possible for others to see their own dreams. Jacob is one such person and through his center, Watoto wa Kwetu Trust in Mathare, he gets kids to paint what they see and imagine. Can you imagine that, a child has expression through art in a space that might not have been open for them to do that. In this space too the children can open up about the 2008 post-election violence.

Life ain't alway....s easy

The kids also take photos. There is an exhibition opening on the 24th of June 2009 at the Ramoma Gallery in Nairobi. Please go by and see the work. Or online here: http://www.myspace.com/watoto_wa_kwetu_trust

Bi Kidude

I stood in awe as my grandmother played the drum, her voice echoing though time. Her firm legs planted steadily on stage.

In the DVD about her life, she says that there are no men nowadays. That women have to work doubly hard to provide for their families and men. Who am I to question what she has seen in her 105+ years of living.

Her voice is strong and her spirit transcends all space and time. I am in awe of the woman who sings about what she has seen and is not afraid to speak about what she sees.

the other day in a matatu

I’m sitting in a matatu, heading from Westlands to Lavington, a 48. I am waiting for the matatu to get full and have sat on the first seat in the second half of the mini-van. Out of the corner of my eye I see a woman approaching and she is carrying a basket on her back. She places the basket on the seat and then swings two white live chickens under the seat. She then gets into the matatu and puts the basket of about 11 live white chickens on her lap. I look at the woman and notice the wrinkles on her face, new wrinkles of a woman beginning to age. I guess she may be in her 40′s. She apologizes when one of the chickens goes as if to peck my hand. As the matatu swings down Waiyaki Way, she asks other passengers to open their windows so that the chickens can get some air. White feathers are flying everywhere, as she fluffs the chickens’ feathers. She mutters under her breath, alittle embarrassed, that she has to make sure that they get to the market alive. 

I ask her where she got the chickens.

 

kuku

 

 

The woman got them from a fryer, they are the rejected chickens because they are too small and she is off to sell them. 

She gets to her stop, Valley Arcade and alights, swings her basket onto her back and grabs the two chickens under the seat. A man, maybe in his late 30′s, brown teeth and the faint smell stale alcohol on his breath, gets on. The man begins to talk to the conductor as the matatu swerves back onto the road.

He tells the conductor he is on the way to FIDA. The conductor asks him why he would be headed to the women’s lawyers league. He grins at me as he says that his wife is suing him for half his salary. He is on the way to complain and to try to stop the proceedings. The conductor asks him what he will do should he not succeed.

He grins at me again. “There is nothing else to do but to quit working. I will look for my two hundred shillings a day and then she can see where she will get the money she is suing me for.”

The conductor chuckles.

I think about the woman with the basket of chickens on her back and about the man’s wife. I wonder if either of them have children. 

At James Gichuru, I get off the 48 and board a 46.

Action by Storm

It seems as if this month is filled with one name. Ory Okolloh. In the last month, I have come across her name several times and finally I decided to do what Google allows me to do best. I looked for her.

I am glad that I found her. Atleast virtually. If you haven’t had a chance to listen to this inspirational woman, mother, sister and African, I suggest that you click here (or on the side bar, to the right). In her talk about her life, being African and being subject to gazes full of pity, I felt myself speak. When she talked about being in the Diaspora and the pull of

the Diaspora, I knew she was speaking not to me but about me.

Her brainchild, Ushahidi, “bearing witness” was home for me when Kenya was on fire. Together with a team of revolutionary Africans (David, Juliana, Eric and a team of volunteers), they are providing this valuable resource to NGOs, for free, to monitor emergency situations. Her team is handing power to the masses, because through their mobile phones, they can create change come war, rain, flood and drought.

Ory, by her move to change things has re-stirred something in me.

Equity and equality

It is perhaps not by chance that I find myself embroiled in discussion concerning the face of feminism. While there are various ways to undertake change for the good of the community through the empowerment* of women, one that strongly takes center stage is the idea of equality. Please see my post “Circle” and resulting comments.
Feminism to me goes beyond equality into the realm of equity. Only because through equity do I see an “equal” and mutual respect for all the roles played by the different members in society. Through equality solely, I have no so far seen the respect for a “stay-home mom” as I have through equity which in my perception entails a respect for the role played by a “stay-home mom” that say, a CEO of an oil company might receive. Both roles are important in sustaining the economy and should be rewarded along similar lines. Notice that I have not said a “male” CEO rather, it should be taken that it is not the sex of the holder of the position but the structure that causes disempowerment of “stay at home moms.”
Therefore as per my earlier post “Circle” it is not the fact that I was being “bid on” as a woman, that would disempower me, rather it would be the structure under which that negotiation process and surrounding practices, was carried out. In my perception of the structure of bride price and the surrounding rituals, it serves a purpose and that being to hold a family together. There have been other negotiations that have torn families apart, however it is not the fact that the negotiation was over a woman that caused conflict. Rather it was the spirit (therefore structure) under which the negotiation was carried on.

Now to open up a can of worms so the cliche goes…what do you think about female circumcision/ FGM?

*a word that I am yet to fully decipher

Nyambura

This poem is from a deep soul and supporter of kati ya wanawake – a tribute to a sleeping sister:

Silence

Storming into our lives
At a tender age,
You weaved another God’s umbilicus
Among friends and strangers
Offering what was beyond us,
A first born to our first borns,
A sibling to the only child,
A sister, an auntie, a friend,
To those who know kinship beyond flesh and blood
Sealing the bond
With the quietest of smiles
The beauty of your soul
Invisible in the eternal depth
of Silence
that was the hallmark of your presence

It is well my baby girl

Circle

Last weekend saw the move from one phase of my moon to another. In completing the first 4 steps (of 5) in the Kikuyu marriage process. I am now the mother of my father-in-law, the worker within my in-law’s homestead and the first wife to my husband. Traditionally.

I never understood why brides cry in that moment when they are handed over to the other family…until I burst into uncontrollable tears. I can’t even explain why it happened. It just did.

So now each morning when I wake up, I think about my husband and the family we will have together. And about the work that is still left undone so that my daughter will carry on the pride of her mothers before, in being an African woman.

Then I remember Saturday, just last Saturday and how religion played a large part in the day. How the ceremony was seen as part of God’s way.

And it seems okay.

In my home as the bride price was being exchanged I thought about the bad publicity that this ceremony gets. And as the items were shared out among my relatives, I remembered the role that this process plays. It is not about greed or commodity exchange but an actual appreciation to the other family for the raising of a woman who will become the ground for the future of the Agikuyu.

Or as I was told, “Ciana nii cia agikuyu. Ti cia muhiriga wa aiicakamuyu, na ti cia muhiriga wa aangari.” The children belong to the Kikuyu (my ethnic group) not to the house of Aiicakamuyu (his clan) or to the house of Aangari (my clan).

The brideprice which will be paid throughout my lifetime will be the link between my mother and her son-in -law. Through it my mother will maintain a relationship with my husband and through it she will know that I am well taken care of. She is to protect him as his father is to protect me, because I am now his (my husband’s father) mother. My first son will be named after my husband’s father.

In it, I see a ceremony that brings a circle to it full circumference.

Which is why I cried.