Naomi Nduta Waweru, Swan XVIII, writes her poems, short fiction and essays from Nairobi, Kenya. Her writing has been published in Lolwe, The 2023 Best Spiritual Literature Anthology of Orison Books, The Weganda Review, Ubwali, The Tribe, Poetry Column-NND, Clerestory, Down River Road, Pepper Coast Mag, Olney, Paza Sauti and elsewhere. She made the 2023 Kikwetu Flash Fiction Contest longlist, is a Best of the Net Nominee, an alumnus of the Nairobi Writing Academy as well as the Ubwali Masterclass of 2024. Reach her on Twitter and Instagram @_ndutawaweru.

Isaiah Adepoju: Hello, Nduta. You are a graduate of The Ubwali Masterclass. What does this mean for you/your art? 

Naomi Nduta Waweru: Hi Isaiah. The Ubwali Masterclass came to me at a point when I needed to understand where I stood in my writing. I began primarily with poetry. Short fiction made sense to me especially when I encountered Kabubu Mutua’s “A matter of time,” and I gave it a hand. Then there was non-fiction, which was a way of giving my poetry an extensive, unrestrained language. The classes were distributed to cater to every of my writing needs. The tutors met each one of us right where we were, and I began to realise that perhaps, I could thrive in the three genres. The classes made us pay attention to the very tiny details of craft, down to the line level and eventually, word choice, and I am beginning to approach my writing from a craft angle. The work has been putting the lessons to practice. I write often, from a point of truth, and so, I hope to attain the clarity on what genre can best relay whatever truth I intend to put across.

Isaiah Adepoju: How does community, whether of artists or otherwise, contribute to your craft?

Naomi Nduta Waweru: It is a way to keep me grounded. Just for the thought that someone has me in mind. I am a part of the Swan Collective and was recently inducted into the Omenka collective. Prior, I had only ever written in isolation. When I write under a community of creatives, I achieve some sense of creative direction. I have access to opportunities and ideas that I would not have if I was working in isolation. There is always one more way to probe and re-evaluate my writing. I am attuned to what is relevant to the development of my craft. What is relevant in the literary space? What is urgent to me as a writer that I should pay attention to? What possibilities await me on the other side of my comfort zones? I can pass my writing through a fresh set of eyes, which in turn reveals uncomfortable but relevant truths about my craft. And of course, community is just one way to spice this turkey. I am accepting that the real work begins right where the community’s input ends – when I am alone on my writing desk. The difference now is that, under a community, I am approaching my solo writing moments with a guided mind.

Isaiah Adepoju: The body is a motif in your poems. What is it about the body that distinguishes it so clearly in your writing?

Naomi Nduta Waweru: I think of the body from a point of care, the body as a dwelling place, as a repository for memory and all this myriad of emotions, as the point I begin before I meet other aspects of my individuality. I think of Lidia Yuknavitch saying that the body is a real place, where you go to, where you inhabit, and I imagine it has to matter, the body, to the extent that it is depicted as a home. I am fascinated by how the body responds at any given point in time; to pain, to joy, to horror, to strangeness and familiarity. It is an extension of my experiences. It is preserving my stories. The idea that when I am moving through the world, I am not without my body, makes it necessary to represent it in my writing as my closest companion.

Isaiah: In one of your poems, “The More Things Die,” on The Weganda Review, you write: “The more things die, the more I question the stability of what remains.” In another of your poem, “My name and a cavalcade of other bodies,” on Ta Adesa, you write: “This body’s urgency to be held came from / the outstretched palms of certain dying things.” How do you conceive of death, in all its nuances, in relation to the body?

Naomi: This is a little complex for me to dissect. I can only speak from the context of these lines by saying that I grappled a lot with the idea of impermanence. How at any one point, the body in these poems is bargaining its existence. In “The More Things Die,” I am testing what remains against how much longer it can endure in the face of all the uncertainty. What is the body’s reaction to the unpredictable weather? In “My name and a cavalcade of other bodies,” I am asking myself, what happens when the body, active and alive as it was, ceases to feel? I am looking at the inanimate and trying to bring it to life; by giving it breath, a body, my grandma’s gravestone suddenly has arms in my poem, they outstretch, and it is capable of sustaining/supporting another living thing; the salamander, tendrils.

What awaits our bodies at the other end of death? How do we continue living? How do we carry what has left? Again, I am questioning how the living come to terms with loss, grief and impermanence, and how these translate on the body. I am looking at grandma’s gravestone with a longing, almost tricking it into giving her life back. What is the body’s ability to witness all this tragedy and still persist? Adedayo Agarau said something in a past interview that has stayed with me, “When something that we love leaves, something like a twig or branch of a tree breaks in us. And it takes watering and silence to rebuild or re-grow.” The poet talks of trying to situate their poems in that silence. I can say the same of my poems. What is going on in this breakable body? In the space between loss and grief? How is the absence manifesting on my body? What does it take to cater to the needs of my grief? Am I looking at a gravestone to a point of thinking that I could perhaps bring what has died back to life? How am I preserving that which is no longer alive? Basically, in these poems, I am saying, take this ritual as how my body makes sense of death and impermanence. How it attempts to preserve memory.

Isaiah: Which African poet do you think is doing extraordinary work with their poetry, and how do they influence your writing or your idea of what a poem can do?

Naomi: I am currently of the school of Maryhilda Obasiota Ibe. I am talking of “Object Permanence” and “Homecoming” as poems that I have returned to from time to time when I want to remember the extraordinary work she is doing with language. How well one line marries the next, how she holds my hand as I move from one line to the other. The poems that occur to me as extraordinary at the end of the day, are those employing the experiences that are closest to them to relay the shared universality of our realities. Those that engage with texture at its best. Their ability to transport me to their setting to the extent that it is almost familiar to me. Lines like “The Ixora and Red Acalypha are quiet and satisfied like mothers on the front porch” and “It is evening in his voice,” that uphold the metaphor as the one element of transcendent poetry. Those aware of their objects, their images and their portrayal of the ephemeral. Poems that teach me how to imagine. Other poets at the top of my mind doing this work for me are Clifton Gachagua, Michael Imossan, Roseline Mgbodichimna Anya Okorie and Praise Osawaru.

For Lydia
After Rahma O. Jimoh’s Playacting

L – promise me the lip knows its way around desire,
the way the hip knows to find its joint. That here,
where we are stuck with the ordinary rhythms of days –
the wind sweeping leaf after leaf onto the carpet, 
the lawnmower outside humming for what it trims
and what it scatters, its music, both nuisance and litany –
we are fragrant and fear is an afterthought. It matters
that you breathe from my mouth. That your words –
filtering over the thorn of your wounds, the half-laugh
stuck inside in your belly, your hand gestures – clawing
at my mouth as a substitute for language, is how you
grow room for me. I am terrified of the wind. The pouts
it plants on your lips. That in asepsis class, the nurse says,
you heal a flower by breathing back its pollen, 
cuts a section of back tissue to demonstrate how
the cuts are accidental but that we can step in just in time
to stop the bleeding, and I think of how easily you bruise,
the frailty in your bones that is in the way of how
you breathe. L – I want nothing but to stitch you. 
I want for you a love that waits with you
for the tenderness after the ruin.

Suspension
After Tryphena Yeboah

Somewhere between my reading of the care manual and you
browsing the Internet for “How long to boil bone soup,”
is the silence disguising as fear – that I am running out of
the tenderness with which to carry you, that you are growing
tired of holding back your laughter, because your bones crack
from the pressure,
and your frowns, your raised brows, your joints,
are metaphors for how accessible you are becoming to pain.
The storm is upgrading, and you think the heating will suffocate
you before the freezing wears you out. 
I was used to the storm breaking down everything that was outside.
I forget that breaking also happens inside us.
That your crack is internal, and try as much as I can,
I cannot always stretch my palms where it hurts.
That the weather is so fluid, we cannot help how it penetrates.

Balm

The morning filters through the flooring on the porch 
and creeps into our bodies like the miracle we have
been waiting for.
The thing about waiting too long for goodness is,
some mornings will arrive like an ointment singing to
a fresh wound and we will curl from the inside out.
The roof will crack from too much heat and we will
mistake it for the first drops of rain.
I forget that worry sometimes wears our bodies 
like a favorite shawl. 
That the air has darkened right outside our door, 
and that is how we know that darkness has a texture.
One pain, Jericho Brown writes, can ease the other.
The petals are opening up 
like an offering. What matters to us is that time has not
robbed us the familiarity with which we ease into
our rhythms. The song is abundant on each beak that
pecks for the pollen. One joy can pour into another. Your
petals are opening up like an offering. 
Can you not pattern their loosening back to me?

For Lydia, Again

L – even here, where the fluidity of the confession defeats
the practicality of it, I love you. Empty the ash off the
urn so we may begin to burn again. Dust is returning to
dust. Ashes to ashes. And God is detailing the storm by
spitting the thunder back into our bodies. Like Ocean,
I touch you to prove you are still here. 
I re-bandage your sprain,
and you think my index finger is two inches short of the
length of ordinary mercy. Everyone asks,
How far was what you were reaching for? The doctor asks,
How heavy? The janitor animates the crack sound, 
looks into your eyes
for a sign that he got the magnitude right.
I am right next to you, at the tip of your nose, I begin
right where you end and still, the distance between us
breaks us. I re-bandage your sprain.
To say the blood clots at the ends look like cotton clouds
holding onto a loose sky is to admit to wanting the difficulty 
in a flowery language. I love you, and I am not afraid
of your fragments.