A City’s Troubadour

“The Boxer,” by the folk music duo Simon & Garfunkel usually gives me nostalgia. A boy leaves his home and family scared. I usually mimic this shuffling desperation and my artistry — which is a cacophony of poetic lines woven in displacement — becomes a temporary moratorium. There is always an implacability to art, which makes it a representation of frenzied emotions: an ardor for and also the embodiment of the negative and the repugnant. Dwight Garner talks of this being because art might be a place of maximal danger, saying it endangers the soul of the artist no less than the soul of the reader or viewer or listener.

In my city, Nairobi, I remain a person who endeavors to first reconcile with his declivities, and maybe try and gasp for breath, although it remains that I try to love a world that doesn’t see the need to love me back.

The night before I left my hometown and moved to the city, in my father’s house I had sat at my mother’s knee as she reconciled with what this ostracism meant. “In the city, my son shall make his family name great.” A blessing she proclaimed. My two sisters had looked on silently in admiration. A father did not drink that day.

They all felt the need to be there.

I was heading for a place choked with lurchers, street urchins with babies, and malnourished youths trying to sell shoestrings in the mud of the East African rainy season. To live in a studio apartment which reminds you of amateur porn shoots. And in addition, have tattooed, squat neighbors who spout open contempt for any village accent.

I also moved to the city at a time when my country currently wilts in the hands of fabulist leaders and a head of state who carries his affinity to false narratives like a badge of dishonor he is unashamed of.  It is also at the beginning of a political era reminiscent of a previous one that lasted 24 years and left my forebears scathed. Kenya is a country currently at its worst version. This happening, to me, serves as a thesis both for my people’s derision of critical thinking, and my bad luck in life.

A city at the height of economic turmoil is like Hell here on earth. Especially for a newcomer. But on my calls back home I do not allude to my struggles at all.

Instead, I subconsciously endeavor to make the arc of my poetry a reflection of the intimacy I as a creator put into my work. I carry an encyclopedic grasp of how the act of artistic creation is inherently emotional and personal. I am an urbane intellectual. A page poet. I use ballads as a whetstone to sharpen the blade with which I pierce my loneliness in this city.

I write a poem: In this place I have embraced being a misfit /

                             for hope at times is taken — a poison that kills one slowly.

And Kendrick Lamar, my favorite rapper, in his single “Rich Spirit,” sings on how he glitches from the face as thoughts grow sacredly. Further inspired by this, I undertake to try and love this place.

But Nairobi always taps into your most libidinal sentiments; this city’s hollowness is its own kind of criticism. It constantly loses me somewhere in-between having a pearlescent sentimentality, and the feeling of living in a conflagration that generates no ember. To survive, I tiptoe to the brink of impropriety, and hope that when I write about it, the city may eventually love me back.

Photos by Joseph Ndungu