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away from home—the home of the
future, a not yet place called Kenya. We
are Milimani kids [from a well-to-do
neighborhood], speaking English and
Swahili‖ (51).
Everything comes into focus when
considering this dual temporal track of
then and now. Global pop objectivity is
crafted by the writer who situates us
alongside him in a room in Red Hook
where he writes his memoir. We learn all
we need to know when he evokes his
tears in recounting his experience at a
reading at Williams College. We know,
too; we were there. Bard, Williams,
where are we now– Philadelphia or is it
New Haven? Tomorrow it will be
Amherst or maybe Berkeley. The New
Kenya of today that he describes belongs
to all of us now, especially as we have
access to his emotions when he observes
voting for a new constitution in a Kenya
that is ―suddenly all soft and gooey.
People smiling, looking you in the eye
and saying mushy things like ‗as a
Kenyan…‘ or ‗in this New Kenya‘‖ (251).
We move with complete ease between
the objective world of that New Age
Globe and the writer‘s evocation of his
own years of ―soft-focus trash‖ (251)
when he tells us that he has learned he
will need an operation to correct his
vagueness!
The trope on which this figure of the
global will coalesce is, ironically, world
music. Here it is called benga, a music he
can now access, like a music video, on
CD, and whose meaning he can grasp
with the documents that accompany the
disk. Benga, the original, authentic,
World Music tape of what had once been
pre-colonial Kenyan nyatiti and orutu
music, uses stringed musical instruments
that Wainaina, our guide now, identifies
as having ―a wooden bow and string
rubbing a fiddle made from a gourd‖
(251). It was in the absence of those
instruments that Kenyan soldiers during
World War II fashioned a substitute with
the use of a Spanish acoustic guitar.
He tells us the guitar recreated the
sounds of home, but did so by
subordinating the music to the language,
and most of all by ignoring the original
qualities of the instrument, using it ―with
impunity,‖ so as to express, in poor
simulation, the ―noble nyatiti and the
noble orutu‖ (252). Using these new,
reterritorialized global sounds, Olima
Anditi and John Ogara created ―a whole
new idea‖ (253). [i]
Tracking the musical instrument
back to the nyatiti and orutu would be
the work of the area specialist.
Transforming it into the final and central
trope of this memoir is to refigure the
instrument in World Literary terms. It is
to situate kimay and Michael Jackson in
the same breath as figurations of a global
subjectivity that is marked by its
contemporary worlding. There is no more
ethnicity in its language; it is Youssou
Ndour singing in English; Fela recreated
on Broadway; Soyinka and Achebe
monumentalized before their passing to
the point that Things Fall Apart and Death
and the King’s Horseman have become so
completely integrated into the current
curriculum that their original language,
which we might as well call African, has
become reinscribed into that most
powerful marker of the economy in
culture, World Literature. That is now a
language without native speakers: it is
called a global language, and its speakers
reproduce the sounds of all languages in
its form.
Wainaina calls that language kimay,
that is, people talking without words or
exact languages, ―the guitar sounds of all
of Kenya speaking Kenya‘s languages‖
Saraba | Issue 13 | Africa 72