Fiction
Poetry
A Tale of Exile
Literary Monuments
Thotlines
Audience Response
A Lesson from the Book of Ma and Pa
A lesson in Bricklaying
"What is Christmas like in Africa?" A student of mine recently asked me.
I think for a moment. "In my country, everyone vacates the cities and travels upcountry to their ancestral homes to be with family. The cities are left lifeless, odorless, hollow, as if a neutron bomb had been dropped there. Chickens, goats, pots and pans are packed together with an exodus of humanity into public vans, buses and private cars bound for home."
"Home?" My student was a tad puzzled.
"Yes. The cities are not considered homes. They are places with houses. Ancestral lands are places with homes."
"What's the difference?"
"You occupy a house; you live in a home." I said, hoping I could squirm out of this one. I wasn't up to lengthy philosophical exposes on the cultural definition of a home. I needed to get home and get my pot of greens going. My student burst out laughing.
"Nice one. Luther Vandross, huh? A house is not a home..."
I wasn't trying to quote lyrics from Mr. Vandross. O well, another lesson lost in cross-cultural translation.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - -
I'm on the train, and my student's question stays stuck in my mind. A Christmas childhood memory comes knocking. It is one of those eternally framed in my mind. I couldn't be any older than six. I'm at home, up on the hills where the echoes of my being forever bounce against the ridge between my shoulder blades, maintaining an invisible leash on me no matter how far in the world I travel.
My small frame is propped up on a box in my parents' bedroom, against a window that overlooks the thatched hut we call the "warm house" because it had the three-stone fireplace that was kept lit all day, primarily used as the kitchen and a place for gathering and telling tall tales into the wee hours of the night. The hills have licked up the last rays of the sun, leaving but a dusky hue of its dying presence. The night is coming to life. I can hear voices coming from the warm house, building up occasionally into boisterous laughter. With it, the aroma of good food, the occasional "hodi!" of visitors dropping in to say hello, and all around it, a certain aura of goodness that sticks to the creeping night like a child to its mother. I feel a tinge of excitement. Tomorrow is Christmas.
Memory shift. I'm a bit older, and the Christmas ritual is the same unchanging, sacred pilgrimage of extended family converging at the homestead. We're in the warm house, cousins, uncles and aunts from far and wide. 
There's dinner, conversation and bottoms going numb for sitting too long on wooden stools. Someone with a funny bone sends others into peals of laughter. Babes are slowly fading into dreamland in their mothers' bosoms, and suddenly, someone belches out a song and others join in as smoothly as a car going round a bend. Everyone finds their harmony, unguided, blending in perfectly. A sweet and fluid sensation surges up to embrace soot strands shivering ever so slightly with the magic of the moment.
Melody: Tino famba yostima envura (x2)
Warume wakapambana na mvura
Soprano: Chenjera!
Tenor: Chenjera!
Alto: Chenjera!
Tenor: Chenjera!
Harmony: Rua njera yauya
Chenjera, ewe mlele,
Ewe kaya, tichauya!
Only I have never known what that song was about. Don't know that language and I'm quite sure I have given a pretty bungled-up version of the lyrics, coming from a childhood memory. However, my research of some of the words tells me it could be from a people in Zimbabwe. Perhaps someone will read this, recognize it and properly chastise me with a correct version.
With every new Christmas, the family grew larger. More cousins are born and maturing adults acquire spouses. What does not grow is the homestead.
It is a homestead with a past fit for the history books, another story for another day. The homestead consists of three structures, each positioned to form the corners of a triangle. Besides the warm house, there's a four-roomed L-shaped house we call the "cool house" because no fire is lit in there. The third is a five-roomed box structure that we call the "going up" house because it is situated on a higher level of the compound; you have to go up a short path to get to it.
My grandfather built the "cool house" with as much modern material as he could afford, managing to have the wood and mud frame smoothed over with cement and painted white with chalk. It boasted a corrugated iron roof. It was a palace in its time.
Brick came in to the homestead when dad built the "going up" house in 1968 for his wife and children-to-come. It was designed with exactitude, two bedrooms on each side of a perfectly squared living room. A porch juts out the front of the house. You could slice the "going up" house into two identical halves.
Everything about it is solid. Wood so rock hard you must be careful knocking on the door or your knuckles will crack up like egg shells. The brick walls stand thick as a Roman citadel. Dad's box house is sturdy, small, and over the years, it has been a Christmas home to an ever growing extended family.
In truth, it has been a welcome center for any passer-by as far back as my childhood memory can go. Mama could make a plate of food multiply as miraculously as five fishes and two loaves of bread. I shall confess I often grew tired of serving endless passers-by during events that stretched on for days. I had a mind to find a bouncer and have every eating mouth pay up. Then maybe Mama would not have to count coins all the time.
Memory shifts. I'm an adult, and I'm standing at the porch looking out at dad's banana plantation, lush and green. The homestead is quiet. It is only May, and come December, the place will fill up again. But not as it used to. Though the extended family still gathers together for meals, my uncles have long built their own homes away from the homestead so their grown children and grandchildren can have adequate accommodation. I stand there and feel a twinge of regret that I will not be at this home when Christmas comes. I have my own home now in which I plant my own Christmas memories. I too have continued an open-door policy, thanks too to a life partner who equally enjoys keeping the door open and sharing his food. No bouncer.
The train steadily cuts across the snowy stretch towards Baltimore. I'm thrown back swiftly to an earlier memory.
"They are almost here!" Mama says.
"I can't hear them," I strain my ears for the sound of music. On Christmas eve, the Christmas chorus from the church comes around to each homestead caroling happily and disappearing into the night. They suddenly appear from the thick darkness as if the stars spit them out. Mama feels her way slowly to the porch and stands by the entrance. I can feel her quiet excitement, a certain kind of unspoken joy so pure and simple.
There's a song in her that comes alive with every live chorus. There's a song in her that's been alive for a long time, before I was ever born, before any of her children were known to the world. There's a song in her that surges through the weight of midnight's black mist. There's a song in her fingers that lies unplayed upon the strings of unacquired guitars.
"I wish to learn to play the guitar someday," she once answered when asked what else she would like to learn to do. It was at a place called Machakos Blind Trade School. Her answer took me by surprise I'll tell you that. I shouldn't have been surprised; Mama was a musical person. At her porch, she waits for her song.
That song finally arrives and stands outside, shoulders tightly squeezed together more from the excitement of the season that from the slight cooling breeze. Mama welcomes it, hands eagerly folded as one standing on a chorus line.
Walisha wikilindia nakio maranu
Malaika ukasea kufuma kwa mlungu...
When they finish their rendition of "While Shepherds Watched Their Flock by Night", Mama pulls out the token tied in the corner of her kanga and gives it to their leader who joyfully shouts out to the chorus:
"Ghorenyi chawucha! (Say thank you!)"
And the chorus shouts back excitedly, "Chawucha! (Thank you!)"
It was Christmas eve, and Mama was happy. That's all that mattered in the world.
The train rolls by still. I want to call my student and tell her that memories make a home a Home. But sometimes, there isn't enough room to store up new memories.
The "going up" house had started to burst at the seams. Dad dreamt of a big house that could accommodate all his growing children. Over the years, he put his dreams to paper, extending the architecture of the house by several rooms, sometimes a grand plan that carried his hopes for the improbable; sometimes a more realistic plan that would still take several leaps of faith to bring it to the substance of a thing unseen, but possible.
The design of a thing is not always commensurate to the value of its content. The "going up" house had architectural simplicity that reminded me of my introductory lesson to mapwork, a subject that preceded geography, in third grade I think it was. The teacher guided us to place a cup upside down on a plain piece of paper, then trace its outline with a pencil, and when you lifted it up and saw the circular shape traced out, the teacher came by your side, stuck out her fat finger towards your handiwork, and bellowed, "that is a map!" And all day, you looked at the map of the cup that you created with awe. When geography finally came around in higher classes, it was easy to grasp topography; that is when you had to fill in the map's outline with details of its content.
If one could fill up the map of the "going up" house with topographical detail, you would see therein the profiles of babies' cries and laughter, the lines mapped closely together for the quick succession of our entry into this world, each of my siblings barely a year apart, except for the last.
You would see the depression of adult footsteps criss-crossing the ground, some deeper for the moments when they carry the weight of parenting with private tears and muffled prayers, some shallower for the moments when they sat down with thankful hearts for general wellness, for doing well in society, for moments of relief when a child's fever broke.
You would see a myriad topographical lines of laughter peaking high when the children brought home near-genius grades, when a daughter performed superbly at a poetry competition, when a son got admission to a national college, when a grandchild was born.
Momentarily, your eyes will be trying to avoid the darker lines that mark out steep gorges descending into dangerous depths of human foible, gorges sunk by moments of struggle when the soul gave up drinking from the milk of human kindness, valleys sunk by acts of the Unknown, unfathomable, causing a family to search the unseen presence for reasons far beyond human understanding.
It is the knowledge of these dark valleys in the topography of a home that cause a family to know the value of light, to want to create it for others where they see suffering, and to remain thankful always for every door and window that opens in life to let in light.
In the hearts of the architects of the "going up" house, two parents sketched out a topography of hope with soft strokes of incredible love weaving through a family like the unfailing creepers of a forest propping up impossible trunks.
In spite of dad's efforts to defy his odds and remodel the house, it stood there, quietly facing the valley below, its breath-taking view of the lowlands and the wilderness that extended to the brink of eternity begging dad to leave it be. Besides, his resources were as thin as a school teacher's shoestring.
The train stops at Halethorpe and lets out its content into the winter chill. My mind races back to a more recent past when we decided to take up the house project. We are all gown. We knew that the old folks had given all they had and the time had come for them to kick back and drink from golden chalices. The "going up" house had become an inconvenience because of poor infrastructure and lack of amenities necessary for comfortable living.
Aging parents sometimes require specialized facilities and easy access to healthcare centers. Thousands of parents across the country who live in rural areas go through a similar struggle. The solution is either to wait for government to build infrastructure in forgotten places or for children to move their aging parents closer to roads, water, power, and hospitals. We chose the latter. Dad had a fitting location at the foot of the hills for the new home.
"I would like to get all your certificates framed and put up in the house when it is finished." Dad said to me. "I want everyone who walks into that house to know that my children built it."
In truth, Dad and Mama built that house. God gave them six bricks into which She breathed life. Four girls and two boys. They invested everything they had into these living bricks, breaking their backs in a thousand places to ensure they were fired up and hardened just right with good education.
While others laughed at Dad, pointing fingers at the man who retired with no material wealth to show for all his work, his six bricks came to maturity. They were all of different temperaments, having acquired different levels of wealth and experience. And for those who didn't have the wealth to give at the onset, still knew they were indispensable bricks for the future of this home. With these six bricks, Dad and Mama started building their dream house, counting down the days they would rest up their weary feet under its roof.
"Is she on her way?" Dad asked Mama on the phone. He wanted to make sure that I was going to see the house before nightfall. It was almost complete. The last time I had been there, it had been an empty field.
Soon, Mama and I are there.
"I planted forty apple-mango trees. When they mature, they will bear great fruit." Dad explains. The compound is full of sprouting crop, cassava ready for harvest, newly planted trees better protected than Kim Jong-Il's nuclear weapons. "Neighborhood goats were getting to them. I had to do something."
"That's where the green house will stand. This right here is the well. Big enough to harvest lots of water."
At the arrival of dreams long awaited, new ones begin. It is the cycle of life. I'm awed by the progress. I take my camera and start to inspect the house alone. A while later, I spot dad giving Mama a tour.
"Here, that's what they installed... no, move a little to the left... yes, that one."
"It's very solid." Mama says, touching the lip of the toilet bowl.
"This way." Mama holds dad's arm and follows. She lets her fingers feel his guiding elbow as she had when she made her vows to him forty-two years ago. But this time, it's filled with ancient wisdom about life, love, endurance, and rest.
"That was the corridor." Dad continues.
"The whole length I just walked?"
"Yes, the whole length. The children's rooms are to the left of you. Out this way, let me show you the outer kitchen door they put in the other day." Mama 
touches the door, her hand going over the wood, taking in its feel, picturing it, and the many people who will soon be walking in and out of it.
The door reminds her of the color of sight; she sees it in her mind, a solid brown, like the security of trusted friends, the rootedness of family, the embrace of children.
"Give me your hand. Here, feel this. This is the outer kitchen sink, all brick. People can sit out here and eat, talk, even cook."
"Yes, yes. Good."
"And these are the kitchen stairs... no, here, up another two steps and you'll get to the door."
"Oh, they are a little too high."
"Ok, I'll have them reconstructed."
I watch dad guide Mama down the stairs. I feel the breeze begin to pile up specs of new memories. I touch the tail-end of the home-bound sun and take the last picture.
I see things as I had never seen them before, uneclipsed. In a month, Mama and dad will be spending their first Christmas in their new home with their children and grandchildren. It is a beautiful home.
"Your children are well. They give thanks." The arriving sun says to God.
Merry Christmas to a pair of outstanding parents.
Mkawasi Mcharo Hall
