CHRONICLE 3 The Worlds We Make and the Lives We Leave on the Fringes
CHRONICLE 3 The Worlds We Make and the Lives We Leave on the Fringes
by
Egara Kabaji
On this day, I woke up to a deeply emotional message from a friend and colleague in Kenya. I know her well enough to understand that the words she had written came from deep reflection. She is a single mother of two daughters. She, too, was raised by a single mother who brought up six children, two sons and four daughters.
This morning, she was reflecting on her own tribulations as a woman and a mother. “Today I woke up a bit thoughtful... reflective... Just wondering about my life as a person... as a mother… wondering if I have done my best. I gave my youth to parenting... thinking when they grow slightly older it would be easier, but unfortunately it's harder.... Like I have to re-parent. Start all over again and it tires me. Sometimes I wish, even for a moment, I could live without having to worry about anything else apart from myself. Just take care of my needs for a minute. Does it make sense? Do I sound ungrateful?”
I felt the weight of her words. She has, indeed, given so much of herself to her children that she is now asking whether she has done enough. Even her desire to take a moment for herself seems to require justification! She wonders whether admitting exhaustion makes her ungrateful. I responded before leaving the house for my office.
I told her that her reflections had touched me. They revealed her love for her daughters and the sacrifices she continues to make for them. I described this as the true love of a mother. That is a love that keeps giving and caring. I also expressed the hope that she would one day bring these reflections together in a book on motherhood.
I left the house, but her words still lingered in my mind. They took me somewhere I had not expected to go. A title from my university days came back to me: Bertolt Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan. Why should this play have come to mind in Germany? Was it because I was now in the country of Brecht? No. The memory had visited me before, many years earlier, at Lurambi market, near Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology, where I teach.
I had stopped to buy vegetables from the women who sell their produce at that busy junction. The market is popular with students. It is a good example of what we have come to call the kadogo economy in Kenya. Cooking oil, salt, soap and other commodities are repackaged into small quantities. In such a market, buying and selling is not a silent transaction. It is preceded by negotiation and, quite often, storytelling.
Whenever I stop at such a place, I find myself drawn into conversation with the women. Our people live on stories. A market is not merely a place where goods change hands. It is also a place where people exchange wisdom and observations about life.
On that particular day, I joked with one of the older women that she should add a few more bunches of vegetables because I had many children. I suggested, humorously, that my wife did not know family planning.
The woman did not receive my words as a joke. She looked at me and said, “Young man, every child who comes to this world comes with his or her plate and luck. Here, I add you three bunches. Never regret.” I have never forgotten that response.
Standing beside my car at Lurambi market, I began thinking about writing a play I would call The Good Woman of Lurambi. I was thinking of Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan. The project never took off, but the woman selling vegetables had said something that opened my eyes to a reality I had encountered in literature but had perhaps not fully appreciated in everyday life.
What does it mean to be good in a world where people must struggle to survive? How much can one give before giving becomes an unbearable burden? And why do we sometimes celebrate people's generosity without asking what that generosity costs them? In Brecht's play, Shen Te, a poor woman in Szechwan, is rewarded by visiting gods for her goodness. She uses their gift to establish a small tobacco shop. Her desire is to improve her circumstances and help others. But her generosity attracts people who take advantage of her kindness. To protect herself and her livelihood, she invents the identity of a supposedly hard-hearted male cousin, Shui Ta. The contradiction between her desire to remain good and her need to survive becomes increasingly difficult to resolve.
I have found myself thinking about my colleague through the questions Brecht raises. Her experience is not identical to Shen Te's. But both invite me to consider the burden placed on people who are expected to keep giving. A mother can love her children deeply and still become tired. She can be grateful for them and still long for a moment in which she does not have to carry everybody else's worries.
I have started thinking that one of the injustices of the world we have made is that we sometimes expect goodness to be limitless. We admire sacrifice but rarely ask whether those who sacrifice have enough support. We praise mothers for their endurance but may fail to acknowledge their need for rest.
This reminds me of another play by Brecht that I encountered at university, Mother Courage and Her Children. Mother Courage struggles to sustain herself and her children by trading with soldiers. Her livelihood depends on the conflict that also places her family in danger. She is determined to survive. But the very world within which she pursues survival exacts a terrible price.
The circumstances of my Kenyan friend and Brecht’s character are definitely different. However, the question remains: what kind of world forces people to negotiate their humanity against the demands of survival? Brecht's plays encourage me to look beyond individual conduct and examine the conditions in which people make their choices. Sometimes, what appears to be a personal failure is connected to a larger world that leaves people with painful alternatives.
As I reflect on this predicament, I remember Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, another work from Germany that I read as an undergraduate at Kenyatta University. This one makes me laugh. It is not that Gregor Samsa's experience is amusing. Rather, I suddenly see a connection with an experience from my own life that I had never considered in quite this way.
There was a time when I served as a chief executive. My telephone was constantly ringing and my email inbox was busy. Messages arrived almost continuously. People needed my attention, and my days were filled with communication. When my term expired, however, the noise subsided. The telephone became quiet. The emails and messages that had once seemed endless disappeared. I remember the contrast. How quickly the world around a person can change when the position that connects them to others is no longer there!
In Kafka's story, Gregor awakens to find himself transformed into an insect. His physical transformation alters his relationship with his family. His place in the world changes. Before long, his inability to work and provide exposes the conditional nature of his place in the household. I don’t want to equate my experience with Gregor's extraordinary suffering. But the silence that followed the end of my term as a chief executive makes the story meaningful to me. The world that had once demanded my attention seemed to have moved on. I began to wonder how much of the attention a person receives is directed at the person and how much is attached to the office they occupy.
My memories of these literary works feel so alive in Bayreuth. I first encountered them as an undergraduate student, but life has supplied experiences through which I can return to them with different eyes. The books have not changed, but I have. And, yes, the world around me has changed enough to reveal aspects of the books that I had not previously noticed.
This brings me to what brought me to Bayreuth. Here at the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence, I am engaging with the idea of worldmaking from the vantage point of Africa. It is an invitation to think about how worlds are formed and how relationships and structures determine the lives we lead. My colleague's message, the old woman's wisdom at Lurambi market and the silence that followed my executive tenure are not isolated personal memories. They are windows through which I can examine the worlds we create.
Come to think of it, what kind of world makes a mother feel guilty for wanting a moment for herself? What kind of society depends on the kindness of the vulnerable without adequately caring for them? What kind of institution or community makes a person feel visible while they hold an important position, then allows them to fade into silence when that position ends?
To be honest, I do not have answers. But I am beginning to understand that remaking the world must start, in part, with questioning the assumptions we have accepted as normal. I think it requires us to reconsider how we value people and how we care for those whose labour and generosity sustain our lives.
In Bayreuth, I am not simply remembering Brecht and Kafka. I am meeting them again through the life I have lived since my undergraduate days. I am discovering that the agony of living on the fringes may take many forms. These experiences belong to different worlds, but they meet in a common human search for dignity and a place to belong.
END