A Conversation between Logomaniacs: On Words, Resilience, and the Sacredness of Writing
An interview by Akal Mohan in Kisumu and Naomi Nduta Waweru in Nairobi.
Akal: Hello, Naomi. Thank you for agreeing to this conversation. Where do I even start––so, I am supposed to be talking to a friend later about the Palestinian-Israeli war. I know it’s an old story, but to me––us, it still has agency. Urgency. Whatever reality that involves violence and oppression and apathy and death will always be urgent to me. And as I am preparing for the talk with my friend, this word ‘blistering’ keeps ringing in my mind. Perhaps it is because of the blistering truths in the nuances of the situation there. Perhaps it’s about the blistering complexities of war. Perhaps blistering is the word to sum up the nightmare there. What word(s) are you obsessing over today? this month? this season?
Naomi: Hi there, Akal. I am happy to be in conversation with you. The word blistering has reminded me of the current political climate in the country. Lord! Anyway, I believe in having certain words that move me through a season or a day. Depends. And lately, I’ve been so obsessed with the word chrysanthemum. I’ve seen it used so much in some of my favourite poems and fiction, and of late, reading an interview of Kiprop Kimutai with the word in it reminded me so much of how I loved it when I first encountered it in Akpa Arinzechukwu’s poem.
I won’t lie, I read Odour of Chrysanthemums by David Herbert Lawrence because of the word. It occurs to me as a transcendent word. This leads me to another word I’m obsessing over - transcendent. Frank Njugi did a profile on me and titled it “The transcendental poetry of Naomi Waweru.” And I was like, thanks to him, I will be obsessing over the word for a considerable future. These are the words I am thinking about so much, and they embody some sort of boundlessness for me.
Akal: You say, “The word blistering has reminded me of the current political climate in the country. Lord!” and Naomi, the exclamation mark pulls me back to how dire the situation in Kenya is getting. When the protest started, I intentionally curated my reading list to only Kenyan literature. I was running back to Kenyan history to try to make sense of the collective distress we were experiencing as a generation- especially since it was mostly led by Generation Z. It is during this period that I came across one of your poems titled, I have a tribute that stretches my navel, and these lines stuck: I carry the grief of an entire generation/in a body of two decades. The immediate question ,to me, was how were you able to predict this future? A time when a generation, mostly in their twenties, would carry the plight of the entire nation? I guess this vindicates Frank Njugi, The transcendental poetry of Naomi Waweru.
Fact, I also first encountered chrysanthemum in Akpa Arinzechukwu’s poem, After Suicide. I did not obsess over it, though. Why is it important for you to have a word taking you through a season?
I brought up this question because I remember our editor-in-chief, Mubanga Kalimamukwento, asking it during one of the Ubwali Masterclass sessions. Were the sessions helpful?
Naomi: The Ubwali Masterclass, hands-down, is one of the best writing classes I’ve taken. Mubanga’s class on emotional range helped me approach my writing with intentionality. When she said how important it is to ensure an emotion is robust on a line level before moving on to the paragraph and ultimately to the whole page, or chapter, I was blown away by the brilliance of it. Kiprop Kimutai’s lesson on protecting your inner life as a writer could not have come at a more timely moment in my writing life. His lesson on Building from Memory was very personal to me. Perhaps because most of my writings are an exercise in looking back. I have been fangirling on Frances for the longest time. Sitting in a class with her will have to feature somewhere in my autobiography. Forgive me, I could go on and on but I trust you get a picture of how impactful the Ubwali Masterclass 2024 was to me. Even the connections I continue to enjoy with my classmates.
I’m so glad you linked one of my favourite poems by Akpa here. I’m jealous of everyone who will get to read it for the first time. A word like chrysanthemum blowing me away by its beauty will make me interrogate its origin, its usability, the first person to ever use it and how they used it, and the other people who have used it in the very many available contexts. And so I get to read the whole poem, the whole thesis, and perhaps the whole think piece. What is a way of me trying to make sense of the word also ends up being a way of picking up so much more information and gathering exceptional and favourite pieces as I go along. That is how, basically, a word moves me through a season. For instance, I read After Suicide, lusted after the word chrysanthemum, but ended up coming from that poem with a new profoundness for the themes addressed and, perhaps, one more way to look at the world.
I wrote I have a tribute that stretches from my navel, thinking more about myself than I was thinking about the next person, or the next great event it would ‘predict’. It was also a time when I was very naïve in my writing, I didn’t even know someone could get published and paid for it. It was going to end up in a WordPress blog site that my brother created for me. I wrote that poem in one sitting, no revision, no edits, no ‘performative/functional poetry writing knowledge’ whatsoever. Trust me - in that my campus room with one defective window and unwashed plates from the previous night’s take-out, my roommate snoring from a long day of university-ing - I did not have a single intention to predict anything. But they say art is a mirror. For any situation, look around, and you will find a poem for it, a quote for it, a story for it. Artists have been called ‘seers’ of some sort for a long time, and I think that is why everyone looks at us with a side-eye, lol. Those lines were very much personal, how we find ourselves housing so many emotions in us, and it feels like we are carrying the emotional weight of every person who has lived. My mum will cry for a neighbour passing on, and I will liken how intense her grief is to be as though she is grieving on behalf of everyone in that ceremony. The lines’ relevance to the current youth protests is a matter of a piece of art being alive and transcendent enough to be timely and relatable as well. And thanks to you mentioning the relevance of these lines to a historic moment, I will consider sending an application to be a prophetess. I hope I am accepted.
Akal: Haha, I promise to be there for your ordination as a prophetess. You know, I had never thought of fiction preceding reality until I heard Peter Kimani talk about it during the inaugural Macondo LitFest, with allusion to his book, Dance of the Jacaranda. See how lines that were for you, become relevant lines to a historic moment. Have you ever wondered how writers are sacred? Seers were, no? Naomi, me, I miss those naive days when I had not learnt the traditions and rules of writing. Days when I would sit, write a draft and send it to friends who would never say a bad thing about my writing. Do you miss such days? I mean, we got this brilliant poem from those days.
When I first read your nonfiction piece, The beacons. The bearers of our light, a couple of words came to mind. Light was the first word. I remember looking at my aging coping of All The Light We Cannot See, and thinking of the power of human resilience. Womanhood and Femicide came to mind, too. I wanted to inbox you and ask how you manage to negotiate existence as a woman, given the terrifying narration in your essay. In this sentence: “We can now die.” We said, with or without meaning it. We had raised a revolutionary sisterhood. We saw it when one of our daughters died and they held vigils., I paused. In the pause, I thought of Woman Poem by Nikki Giovanni and how in her opening she says that her whole life is tied to unhappiness. This, sadly, is the reality of most women. Have you ever had a season when you obsessed over Womanhood or Femicide? What was the knowledge you acquired in this season?
Naomi : When you ask whether I have wondered how writers are sacred, I think of how writers should just accept they are sacred without arguing. Because it’s true. Without, of course disputing what Tom Stoppard says about the words being sacred and not necessarily the writers.
And certainly, I will give anything to go back to that time I would write on the back of my Calculus II exercise book without caring for the ‘rules’. They say ignorance is bliss. I think ‘knowledge is torture’ or ‘knowledge is problems/chest pains’ should be published as the true opposite. If anyone wants evidence they should come and see how I am being tortured by all this writing knowledge I am acquiring. On a lighter note of course.
Knowledge can do two jobs: liberate you but also cause you not to sleep at night. With time, obsessing over womanhood has stopped being just another momentary activity I engage in and abandon. It can no longer be seasonal. I am responding to this minutes after reading about yet another femicide case in today’s paper. The realization that this may never end is enough to make me think of womanhood and its many facets as my full-time job.
When I sat down to write this essay, it was a result of this cumulative obsession. And my writing of it was also me immersing myself in a pool of knowledge; it was a learning process. I wrote it standing on the shoulders of a whole battalion of other women who were writing to bring to light these multiple facets. From reading Chioniso Tsikisayi and the girl in her essay, “Of post offices that turn into butcheries”, I am learning to think about the many cases of femicide that do not make it to the headlines. Statistics are wonderful to master and easy to belt out before a press conference. I am learning that these numbers will terrify anyone, or not. But they make me think, what about the cases we have not heard? What is not accounted for? I have learned that for every figure, I will have to extrapolate. For every case that makes it to the news, I will have to think of a whole lot of others that the world may never hear of. I am learning that there are names that do not end up on a protest placard, printed on a t-shirt, or a water bottle.
By the time I was done with the essay, I had learned that all these efforts by the women in my essay are an attempt to light a fire that will warm us in a world that continuously tops up the ice in loads and puts out the fire. I am learning that our resilience does not mean that we are not afraid - I mean, the last thing I am doing walking in the streets of CBD is being unafraid - but it is a statement that we are united in our fear, the end product of which is manifesting as a sisterhood, a revolution, a holding hands through it all, a leaning in to support that one more worn-out head. I am learning from the women in my essay that the sum of what we are carrying is not light, but it is necessary that we carry it together if we are to leap out of it. Mofiyinoluwa Okupe puts it so beautifully in her essay Abundant - “On the days you can not lift yourself, your sisters can lift you.”
I am learning that embracing our womanhood and its many facets as a collective does not mean that the rage is not there. And it is not always that the rage will be transformed into something beautiful. It will push us to do some of the things the women in my essay are arrested and arraigned in court for. I mean, tell me why my first lesson in self-defense was to carry pepper spray in my purse. I am learning that this collective rage is necessary.
When you mention resilience, I am taken back to this quote I saw on Twitter by Zandashé L'orelia Brown. “I dream of never being called resilient again in my life. I’m exhausted by strength. I want support. I want softness. I want ease. I want to be amongst kin. Not patted on the back for how well I take a hit. Or for how many.” The women in my essay are every single woman out there. I am learning that after all is said and done, we do not want to be defined by all the hits we can take. Neither do we want to be defined by how big of a shield we can build to defend ourselves from the next big hit.
Akal: I ask the question on womanhood and femicide while male. I ask it while sheltered under the privilege of patriarchy and masculinity. I ask it because I wanted to limit our conversation to words you obsess over and how some are yours eternally. This is my disclaimer in case any of my questions is a trigger. I have read the femicide stories, and immediately sent a-be-safe text to the women in my life. Pray for mercy. Here, the desert will eat your child( Gbenga Adesina). Kenya is turning into a desert, the mouth of a shark, our villain- she is eating us.
The tweet by Zandashé L'orelia reminds me of a line by Romeo Oriogun and how he describes it as the pain of strength. Naomi, resilience is costly. It’s draining and takes so much of my effort. I keep wanting to get to a point of zen. A point where I resign and convince myself that what will be will be. It must be Romeo Oriogun who says that if trouble is what he has come to inherit on earth, then the dust of his life will testify to the beauty he created out of it. I applaud you for your unafraid-ness. Is it too early to ask what testimony your dust will share? Womanhood must be a gift to humanity that we take for granted.
Have you ever examined the fragility of words? I am just done talking to Chris Baah (I Echo) and he has pointed me to this short story by Stephen Embeleton which has ‘ words are hard/ words break’ as an epitaph. I do understand the wonder and dangers of words, I just have never thought of their fragility. I do want to see what chrysanthemum becomes after it breaks.
Finally, Naomi, when we started this interview a couple of days ago, I was obsessing on the word blistering. My season with it is over. Not because reality has become any less blistering, but because I want to lie to myself. I want to dissolve into a fallacy of a mundane word. A word like Salt. Look at it again and see how simple it is. One vowel seated between three consonants, the l almost swallowed by the t. My tongue can easily host this word, imagine. What if our existence was this forward? What if all we bore was this light?
As we part, I dedicate Earth’s Salt by Malika Booker to you. Whenever you get it, think of what is said in Matthew 5:13, but you are the salt of the world. What happens when salt loses its season?(flavor). Promise to pay attention to this line: One fine morning when my life is over, I will fly away home. Bye!
Naomi : For your first question, I will have to refer to the women in my essay. And how they are in a constant state of offering - their laps to host the heads of their daughters, their hands to braid and unbraid their daughters’ hair, their arms to hold their daughters’ babies when the daughters are imprisoned and introducing them to the warmth of their bodies, their eyes to behold what their daughters have turned their trouble to (the documentaries they have made to sensitize, the myths they have turned to modern medicine to demystify, the wayward cultures they have overhauled to make their existence one less taboo, replacing the biting words with those that can go down their throats, or words they can hold in their tongues without fearing for the sting). At the end of a long day of woman-ing, I want to come home to this offering and this only. The realisation that I will be nurtured, loved and my place in the world will be validated, the resulting troubles nursed, and the exposure dressed by hands that know just where to reach and stitch. Romeo Oriogun wants the beauty he has come to, to be the testimony of the dust of his life. I want for the dust of my life to testify to the collective care and nurturing that emerged from all the trouble. That we have something, even little, to offer to one another. This is how we lived. But we had each other. We made room for each other, despite. I hope that my dust will testify to just what Lucille Clifton says along the lines of, “won’t you celebrate with me what I have shaped into a kind of life?... that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.”
I do not think I have sat down to examine the fragility of words. This gives me something new to think about, I guess. And as I read through the story, I was fascinated by how the writer says that he cannot just write anything. He has to write Soyinka because if he writes anything else, what would be the point? The significance? And here I am reminded how words matter differently to different people - that this way, then, must be how their fragility plays out. How one person will hold one word will differ from how the next person holds it, and they will have reasons for doing so that we may or may not understand. And sometimes it will not be in our place to understand. It brings me to the idea of the authorial voice and how a reader may identify with one author's voice more than they do the voice of another. When Stephen asks, “Would they even know, right here, that ‘fell’ means terrible, cruel, savage?” Within the context that he has used “fell” in the preceding line, I am reminded how as a writer, I am only a temporal carrier of my words. When I transfer them, they cease to be mine. The readers will hold them or carry them how they know best.
Yesterday, I read “Song” by Animashaun Ameen and he says in one line, "To be a good son is to be as careful as a sentence”, and these words are all I can think of even now. And how for a sentence to be careful, we have to begin the care from what came first - the one word that began it all, and then the word that came after, and so on. Fragility translates to vulnerability which translates to nakednessness. When I examine the fragility of words, I can almost arrive at these two forms. And after reading Stephen’s epitaph and Ameen, I thought of a porcelain article of crockery at the edge of a kitchen counter, and how any minute, something is bound to knock it over. We do not know what, but we know that upon falling, it will break, and we will have to gather and discard the pieces. If we are lucky, before someone steps on them. We have the option of placing it somewhere else as well, where it can not be knocked over. But our caution does not rule out the possibility of breakage in its other contexts and utilities. And I think of a word, at the edge of any sentence, a paragraph, the tip of the tongue, we may never know what will happen when we speak it, place it on the page, or transfer its use to someone else.
And now unto your last offering to this conversation which takes me back to when I was little. My mum brought home a calendar with an invitation to a wedding of some political figure. When I looked at the calendar, all I could see was the word venue. I was fascinated. It looked beautiful and simple. But also, I could not get the pronunciation right at first. And when I finally got it right, I was like, why does the e at the end disappear? And why do I have to introduce some new letter somewhere? Looking back, I think I can say this was my first lesson on how life, or rather existence, will not always be straightforward. I think also, that was when many of my problems started, lol.
When someone recommends something, I take it as a sign that they want me to see something I can perhaps use as a map without which, I may lose the rest of my very poor eyesight. I guess this is how I say, I will delve into Earth’s Salt. It has been a good run.
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AKAL is a Kenyan short story writer, essayist and poet. He has previously been shortlisted for the Africa Writers’ Award in poetry. Akal is also a 2023 Idembeka Creative Writing fellow and Ibua Novel Manuscript workshop attendee. In 2022, he was a recipient of two digital residencies organised by the University of East Anglia, one of which resulted in a short story collection that he contributed to. Akal reads in trust and writes in faith.
NAOMI is a Kenyan short story writer, essayist, and poet. Her short story, Sanctum was chosen for publication by Lolwe and reprinted in the 2023 Best Spiritual Literature Anthology of Orison Books. Her two flash fictions made the 2023 Kikwetu Flash Fiction Contest longlist. Her poems and non-fiction have appeared in Ubwali, The How to Fall in Love Again Anthology by Inkspired, Clerestory, The Tribe, Delicate Friend, Afroliterary, Poems for the Start of the World Anthology by Paza Sauti, Drr, Ta Adesa, Overheard, Ample Remains, Kalahari and elsewhere. She is an alumni of the Nairobi Writing Academy as well as The Ubwali Masterclass of 2024. Reach her on Twitter and Instagram @_ndutawaweru.
