It beats. Stopping. Drumming and then thumping. Staggering.
Dead now.
Run over by the train.
Train that it let itself stand infront of.
Last beats.
Trembling.
Bleeding.
Broken.
Heavy and not sure it will make it between the beats.
Dead.
Not enough tissue to dry up the flood.
Its blood, tears.
Split. Torn. Shredded.
A long time ago.
Lightness lived there.
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It pains this place where you live.
This place where the world collapsed deep inside leaving me hollow.
Tears salty, bitter, warm then searing my face.
Cutting across my cheeks and dropping in the well in my chest.
I miss you.
Even though you are right here.
I miss you.
My eyes don’t see you the same.
Rolling weep inside my throat.
Crushing my voice so that I can’t tell you.
I love you.
My chest is locked over this hollow.
Breathing tight suppressing my words.
I miss you.
War scars not borne on the face of the one who fights a private battle.
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How can something bleed every month and not die?
Red river, cup of blood.
Red river, promising to flood.
Young girls in villages need pads so that they can go to school.
Red river, sealing handicap.
Red river, intellect nap.
Always Pads have to be scented to hide the smell.
Red river, hidden scorn.
Red river, cast when born.
9 months is a break from the menstrual mental breakdown
Red river, feeding life.
Red river, value rife.
Bleeding not from a wound but from a womb.
Bleeding life raised from a tomb.
Hail Mary.
Weaving alongside: Renee Mboya and Marziya Mohammedali
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He asked me a couple of questions when I was done. He caught me off guard. His eyes dark, gentle and then suddenly hard.
His family had registered him as a refugee when he was five years old. They registered him because they thought they were doing something right by him. They fled across the border and handed their child to Kenya and the various NGO’s. Praying that he would get a better life.
That was twenty years ago.
He went to school at Catholic University – a Finance Degree. A scholarship. He says he is grateful because he got something he would otherwise have not got.
His eyes grow darker. He was now unemployed. By law, Kenyan law, he can only earn Ksh. 5000. Nothing more.
That is less than minimum wage.
He is waiting to be resettled. He has been waiting to be resettled. He will have to continue waiting to be resettled. Somewhere. Maybe in that place in the land of milk and honey.
He speaks Kiswahili. He grew up here in my Kenya. He only knows Kenya. We know Kenya, but in different ways.
I’m looking at him and he is looking back at me.
“How come I can’t get employed here. I would like to be able to even contribute to the Kenya government…”
I don’t know what to say. Images of a “shiny black laughing (heartily) Otieno Kajwang” flash through my mind.
He is stuck waiting for something he has been waiting for, for twenty years.
It’s the immigration that K’Naan talks about here:
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I met a woman who had made it across the border. Across DRC, across Uganda and into Kenya. On foot. Fleeing. With nothing on her except the clothes she wore.
She now lives in Umoja.
She was pregnant last year.
She went into labour and asked for help at a city council hospital.
They turned her way.
She is tall, has a beautiful face and long dark hair. As she tells me her story through her interpreter, I look at her.
Who was she before she started running?
What was her favorite food?
Did she like earrings?
What did she imagine she would grow up to be?
I look at her hands.
What have they held?
Have they wiped tears from her eyes?
I thought about what it is like (could be like) to run. To be a woman on the run with no money. I thought about how quickly as a woman, my body becomes a commodity. How it becomes a political battle ground for some men. How I would lose it to the countless faces who demanded it.
She speaks a local dialect of DRC.
When the city council hospital turned her away last year, she tried to make it home.
She gave birth on the side of the road.
In Umoja.
To a child who will not gain Kenyan citizenship.
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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.
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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.
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