NDUKO O'MATIGERE

Blog

  • It’s Good that Patriarchy is Losing

    It has already lost one of its testicles.

    And all its arguments.

    And the ground upon which it’s anchored shifting fast, disappearing never to return.

    It has no option but to transform and disappear.

    Otherwise the days of the remaining testicle are also numbered.

    It took millennia to crush and throw away the right testicle into the pit of eternal damnation and rot.

    It will take way shorter to disappear the left testicle.

    Transform or perish.

    Transform or lose everything.

    The cave ain’t coming back.

    And the title deed?

    It’s days are numbered too.

    It’s good that patriarchy is losing.

    To hell with it.

  • Who knew?

    I saw as I had seen instantly that everyone knew everything about the same thing in ways that everyone else of them didn’t know anything about on the same thing that everyone of them thought they had known in the same way

  • A Kenyan Revolution? We Must Wait Longer. Unfortunately

    What is common in all revolutions is the existence of threats to citizen’s dignity and humanity and the willingness of citizens, in their numbers, to do something about it. Not blueprints, nor clarity on steps and milestones; nor any definitive leadership; nor hard consensus about how the revolution’s results could look like.

    It’s fury first, and then urgency to act followed by a series of actions aimed at neutralizing the the threat and its source. Revolutions don’t even begin as revolutions.

    Revolution is not the realm of managerialism, gentrification and Project Cycle Management. It’s not a neat affair, fuelled by energy or isotonic drinks. Neither is revolution defined by auras of deodorant and exquisite parades of a nation’s notables.

    Revolution is never announced. When its moment comes, it sweeps the land and its leaders emerge organically to consolidate its energy into a force that creates new realities to correct the overthrown system.

    A Kenyan revolution? We must wait. Unfortunately.

    Because the endemic socialisation of seeking private remedies to public threats and indignities caused by the state is still strong and intact. It’s beloved and occupying.

    That’s why your uncles and aunties are angrier with you for not sending them money in time for their next hospital visit than they are with the kleptocracy overseeing the death of the public health system. That’s why you’re probably struggling to please them more than you’re trying to find a way to strangle a lonesome looter at the Intercon, Stanley, Norfolk, Serena or Panafric urinals where they safely frequent – same places where some of your ‘community patronage and salvation’ breakfast meetings take place.

    We, the self-declared change-makers of Kenya must live, for a long time to come, with our strategic plan/annual report/capacity building/position paper/concept paper/op-ed/social media/workshop/seminar/conference/retreat/NGO/CBO/donor/network and occasional-half-hearted-fearfully planned public protest revolution for a long time to come. And sadly, the bandits in power know that these are our only ‘revolutionary’ spaces and they know how to indulge us.

    Our public fury, rage, urgency and agency are all anaesthetised, some euthanised by permanent mental and intravenous injections of a self help, mchango ethos for public problems and threats designed, executed and maintained by the ruling bandits.

    So we like remembering Mau Mau and other heroes of our liberation struggles but continue to hide from drawing meaningful inspiration from their courage and rage. We refuse to adapt their tactics and enrich them with present opportunities to topple a small bunch of thieves ruining our country. We detain their memory again, as artefacts and add slabs to their graves by paralysing ourselves to preservation, postponement and voluntary foolishness that somehow Bunge or DCI or Mahakama or EACC or ODPP or Uhuru or Raila or, or, or will be our liberators.

    Why are we still asking Uhuru Kenyatta and the intergenerational organised criminal system he manages for solutions to the many national problems and crises they’ve built since so-called independence?

    Look at us…

  • That Night

    That night when we found love from our wounds

    The night when our tears birthed hope

    Under the yellow moon that gently lit that pond

    The pond into which we held and tossed in a pebble together

    From one little rupture on the soft silky golden waters

    I remember the ripples that formed and spread and enchanted our eyes

    How they smoothed our souls and warmed our young bodies

    Smiling at us from the center of the pond to the edges

    Little, soft, too strong and numerous for the little pond to take in

    I remember how our eyes smiled

    How our lips met hungrily

    And kissed urgently to satiate a waiting of a thousand years

    How our bodies heaved and craved for each other

    How we desired what we had only heard of but didn’t quite know what it was

    I remember how we silently made our vows and prayed about them

    Our wounds healed

    Our tears inked the love we’d stumbled upon in our guts and hearts and minds

    I remember how we held and walked in the night as if to find more secrets

    As if leaving a holy site we’d just anointed

    It was time to part

    I remember the resistance

    The wishes

    And just like that

    Our love and journey together had started

    That night I will never forget

    When we found love from our wounds

    When our tears wedded us

    And the yellow moon and still waters of the pond witnessed and smiled

    And the ripples the choir that sang and danced and cheered

    That night was a special night

    That night is special

    I miss that night

    That night is all we needed

    That night is all we had

    Keep resting and smiling and dancing

    That night is all that matters

    Still does …https://youtu.be/_Sz2HOAb54w

  • Rain Therapy

    Today it rained heavily my end of the city.

    Looking outside I marveled at the nourished raindrops. A sense of nostalgia about the rainy days of my childhood set in and quickly overwhelmed me.

    I wanted that downpour on me. And it was urgent.

    So I decided to get out, embrace the rain, kiss it, hug it and get wet and totally drenched.

    I dressed down to my shirt and track pants, then stepped out excitedly and strolled into the rain. No inhibition. No turning back.

    The nourished rain drops, interspersed with feebler companions greeted me in a decisive frenzy of direct hits and passing smooshes.

    The larger drops hit me like forgiven stones recently turned into water in their new sin-free life. The feebler ones touched my clothes, face and hands like tiny angels guarding the water stones for triumph on occasion of sin.

    Initially the hits on me were loud, rowdy and bouncy. Within seconds, I was all wet, shirt and pants clinging onto my body in an indecisive copulation of shock and excitement. The hits changed tone and manner and they now fingered my body like a distracted lover.

    I stood in the middle of the small field outside and let the raindrops have me and soak me all they wanted, how they liked.

    Oh the strokes. The nourished ones hit me with oomph. The feebler ones caressed me with gentle sprays of wetness that appeared to merge and disappear to irrigate and resurrect any dying cells and nerves deep inside me.

    Or may be the feeble raindrops were just tricking me into forgetting their hopelessness and failure in delivering the kind of strokes that would leave me gasping in awe and pleasure. But their gentle manner actually worked.

    My body quickly noticed and danced in tipsy swings from its warmth a moment past to the cold hugs, kisses and strokes from my beloved raindrops.

    In the rain, the child in me took over. The rain drenching me triggered ticklish sensations from head to toe. I soaked it in gracefully and relished in the delirium spreading all over my inner cosmos.

    These sensations got me laughing freely as I started strolling across and around the little field to interact with more diverse raindrops and experience a more pluralistic drenching and stroking.

    I laughed at my foolishness of thinking that I could collect all the rain in the palms of my hands and create a lake to water the seed of revolution.

    I was lost in the bliss of being rained on. I did not notice neighbors wondering if their fellow earthling had an issue of an undisclosed type.

    My present joy hypnotized me. My childhood soul with all its memories of being rained on from school filled me. I am a child of the nourished rains of Kericho and the kinkier ones of Koru Farm in Kunyak.

    Spending ten minutes under the spell of the kisses of a heavy downpour was the best way to end my day.

    The wetness, the internal warmth of my body and heart and the cold caresses of nature outside. The spread of these sweet sensations all over my soul and body, the which I have no words for.

    My teary laughter in the rain remembering my childhood, and the blending of the tears and the raindrops, streaming down my cheeks to find the edges of my lips and tempting my tongue to a tasting festival.

    I walked back to the house feeling refreshed, cleansed and happier.

    Rain therapy. That was my evening.

  • A dream and a fight

    In my dream I felt a sharp itch on the side of my rib cage. When I reached to scratch I noticed the source was a wormlike lifeless creature that was leisurely snacking away on my skin. A painless uncomfortable sensation is what I felt, spreading from the surface of my skin, inwards and sideways in all directions.

    Then I tried, urgently, to pull out the lifeless wormlike thing. I believed this would end the itchiness and discomfort. But the wormlike figure reacted fast, it’s mouthlike end spreading like a gush of jet fuel on nylon all over my body. I kept pulling it off my skin but its reach already effortlessly clung all over my body like a cocktail of a wet tee shirt, lubricated latex and kitchen cling foil.

    I escalated my urgency to peel off the cocktail that had now engulfed every inch of my skin. Nothing was spared, even the difficult contours and folds and intrusions and extrusions that capitalism invented clothing for.

    At once I arrested the wormlike figure in a good grip in an effort to peel off the clinging film off my skin. Then the film suddenly broke at my elbow where for the first time I realized it had been a constituent of my skin. I was left with a mass of film in my hand as I reacted to the shock of my now bleeding skin, painless at the point, on my elbow where the transparent film had broken.

    Then right before my eyes, scales, like those of fish or snakes or lizards started forming as if to instantly repair the bruised, bleeding skin. But the scales formed fast and moved in a frenzy to cover all parts of my body that I had liberated and firm up those I had not reached yet.

    Hurriedly, I pinched a yet to be scaled up portion of the cling film on my loins to launch a new liberation attempt and zone. It snapped quickly and bled, this time more viciously but still painlessly. My loins were attentive. But fearful.

    Then I woke up in a feat. I quickly explored every touchable inch of my body to ascertain its state. Was there cling film anywhere? Scales? Bruises? Bleeding? A wormlike creature? Anything’s cocktail?

    Nothing. There was nothing. Except a generous spread of perspiration. Maybe out of fear or I had overestimated the state of the weather outside before I gave in to sleep. Also a full bladder from my devoted hydrating habits even when there’s no apparent reason.

    I jumped out of bed and off to the loo with the sole objective and urgency to empty my bladder. But not so soon.

    A spider and a cockroach were in a vicious fight, roiling and tumbling over each other in murderous rage, right there before my pressed self. I had never seen this before and probably will never see such, ever again. The creatures fought, each taking a turn to disentangle for a fresh maneuver or flight. But the determination was of equal measure.

    Did these two creatures have a mutual desire to make dinner out of the other depending on who succumbed first? Or was it a mere flexing of muscles by two exoskeletal idlers? What would they be fighting over? Territory? Water points? Access to poop? What?

    I watched in creepy amazement as the duelers schemed, angled, attacked and tried to disentangle for a fresh round or for surrender. Who could tell?

    Then suddenly the two dashed off in different directions as if ashamed of being caught in a stupid fight, in a loo. Was it my shadow? Was it my sweaty odor? Or was it the smell of my own adrenaline being as it is that I had just come from a weird, clingy, scaly, bruising and bloody dream – a daymare?

    The two desolate fighters scampered and vanished before either could win or lose the duel they seem to have promised their all until one was minced and dispensed with. Is this what they always do in the loo when I’m away? Was this one a chance encounter or was it a sign?

    What if my loo is also an arthropoda gladiatorial arena although capitalism sold it to me as real estate square feet? What if that’s the ruling party and the opposition in their arachnid forms roiling for access to public resources? Don’t they always stampede away to hide and reposition whenever citizens stumble upon them in the act?

  • In Your Eyes

    In your eyes I have seen the universe

    Its dazzling brightness and sombre gaze

    Its good and its bad

    All woven in one

    A tidy messy roll

    Deep in your eyes I’ve seen the universe

    Its threesome of black, white and grey

    And soothing music and drunken growls

    And caressing whispers and stinging rage

    All dripping in one gush

    A cocktail of love and hate

    Sweet, sour and bitter

    Desire and disgust

    Hope and despair

    Truths and lies

    Laughter and sobs

    I’ve seen the universe in your eyes

    The which I want

    And the which I don’t

    In these your eyes

    I see the universe

    And I miss me

    – nduko o’matigere –

  • Not a bird. Not a worm

    My resistance to tuck in early is directly proportional to my easiness to tuck in until I’m fully sleep satiated. Unless there’s an emergency.

    The fear and pain of sometimes having to wake up unnecessarily early because a market designed by slavers said so is something I don’t quite easily get over for a long time. But eventually I forget.

    It always feels like I’d lose my mind and the world if I closed my eyes to sleep as early as the market recommends.

    It also feels like – and I fear this one – that waking up so early is how people die and let the market win.

    Markets can be bullish, yes. But they know nothing about what I know about the pleasures of my sleeping and waking up when I want or need to.

    I’m more of friends with sleep that comes late in the night and refuses to leave early until both it and I are on the same page.

    I’m neither a bird nor a worm. I’ve all my life resisted mortals who tried this on me. Let birds be birds and worms be worms.

    And I’m neither a night person nor a morning person. Such people don’t exist.

    The market likes to play many tricks on earthlings. There’s only a moment to retire for sleep and the necessity to not wake up until wakefulness takes over decisively.

  • Who Knows?

    who knows?

    the secret of the mystery of your life could be a lonely sand particle in the desert’s expanse

    why do you fear getting out to go try find it?

    who knows?

    the answers you seek may be tucked in the ocean’s wave?

    rushing to the shores as if to be in time to find you and kiss your feet

    angsty and restless every day for finding you long gone

    rising to hug you but finding rocks instead

    losing strength and collapsing to be drawn back again to try again another time

    why do you fear joining the wave for a hug

    a dance

    a swim

    and flow?

    from where you’d open pages full of the answers you seek?

    who knows the sand particle soaked in your mystery and secrets

    and the wave laden with answers to your many questions

    ain’t me?

    who?

  • i now remember

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    when this dew dries

    and the grass withers

    when the chirping of the morning bird stops

    and the smoldering morning smoke clears

    when the earth dries up and swallows life

    and the singing children go quiet in exhaustion

    i will remember

    the soothing ache of loving

    the transient perpetuity of hope

    the huddling sullenness of loss

    the hesitant urgency in time

    the hypnotizing vanity in certainty

    the dew is drying

    the grass is withering

    the chirping of the birds is fading

    the smoke clearing

    earth is drying taking with it life in urgent gulps

    the children stop singing

    they snooze off in exhaustion from labor they knew nothing about

    i now remember