/ I’m back in my room in a court in Umoja, Moi Drive, listening to the first line of Yasiin Bey’s Supermagic. what a grand and delusional way to start my day, the first line of the Holy Book, although now it’s late afternoon when the day is dead, the afternoon of a Balthus painting, when the voices of children playing outside remind you less of joy and more of the hums that haunt you as you try to find your way out of a dream maze / the antonym for my maze is not a dreamless night / the music of distant light
/ on the walls are names of flowers, and of birds. I’d like to explain why they make me smile. not the material or actual objects as they witness themselves, and not that I want to call them material, or objects, or even actual, because they do not mourn their dead, or grief, what some teach us to be… – what do the anthropologists teach us?, but that I understand in their existence they have their own ideas about language and naming and nomenclature and whatever way they chose to grief is a language I’m happy not to learn /
what I’m considering is the simplicity of the words, their Greek and Latin roots. here I curse that while other roots exist this is where I must come to. so, the words. their meanings and sounds, especially on my tongue, which carries the th and the dh as the same sound, the g and k as if they are related, the s and c as familiar cousins. I don’t even know what the w sounds like because I spell it as I see it and not as anything phonetic.
when my mother first spoke to me in Sudanese Arabic and I replied in sheng I wondered if we were ever going to learn how to love each other.
here are some flowers I like – I only mean the sound of their names:
dahlia: reminds me of dania, how it was always overcooked at home. a lover in my dirty room.
Antonio: because my baptism name at age thirteen should have been Antonio but the priest, an Italian, reckoned it is no fit for a black child.
rhododendron: because I cannot pronounce it.
lobelia: makes me happy. mountain vegetation. failed geography exams.
anemone: looks nothing like it would in the sea. also reminds me of Au Revoir Simone, who I liked in Twin Peaks.
carnation: this sounds like a useless british royal ceremony, or something like when the prince has his first homosexual dream.
/ what I am is metadata, dream text. mathematics without the science. fuck roots. these names continue to mean nothing. I’m a blue, underlined link to a page of useless language / I’ll love this place even when, as I ignore all the senses, the festival continues / I shall adorn my garments for the masquerade / outlast David when he danced.
Clifton Gachagua is the author of Madman at Kilifi. He writes from Nairobi.