|
tall tales and all
Fiction
Poetry
A Tale of Exile
Literary Monuments
Thotlines
Audience Response
|
And so has Lenana Olesakaja wrestled with God, sprained many an hamstring, lost many a match, and still he wrestles for his blessings.
He has begged for, waited for, and demanded an explanation to God's silence over the myriad mind-boggling injustices within and around him. He has demanded to have his share of the blessings, not curses. He has demanded to be whole, not diseased. He has demanded to be a leader, not a slave. He has demanded to be a giver and not a beggar. He has demanded respect, not abuse. He has demanded wit, not docility.
And still he wrestles.
"When shall the valley of the shadow of death cease to be my abode?" God sits silently watching him from a keyhole.
And still Lenana wrestles.
For many decades now, a biblical heritage has trickled down to Lenana. He regrets that he has such little knowledge of his people's oral scripture, most of it lost in the floods of colonization. But he calls himself a man of historical relevance. So he reaches out for a vestige of that heritage which presently lies on his table in the form of a King James Version bible. It has lately become a constant companion. He searches through the grain and the chaff in this holy writ, finally landing on the fascinating account of good old Jacob, that co-founder of a nation called Israel, that chief snatcher of birthrights, that run-away self-exile. After some reading, he sighs deeply, puts away this book that has caused genocides and revivals through human history, and looks out at the snow that now begins to fall softly across Minneapolis.
"Ah, how well I understands this patriarch!" he says to himself, "He that knows that a time comes when the clay must wrestle with the potter, when the powerless must wrestle with the powerful, when the last-born must wrestle with the first-born. That time is always now, and there's no giving in until the blessings are mine!" Lenana was satisfied with this little surmon to himself. The snow brought down its applause in thicker flurries.
A weak smile lingers for a while on Lenana's tired features. He turns to look at the framed picture of the little girl with a big, radiant smile displaying a pair of rabbit teeth on his bedside table. He reaches out and tenderly touches the glass.
"Yes, I do understand him, sweetheart", he says to the girl in the picture. He seems to be listening to her.
"No, little one, Jacob was not a bad man... no, not better than daddy, but he was a clever man.
You see, one day, in his wily ways, for as cheap as a bowl of porridge, Jacob bought himself a birthright from his hungry brother, Esau. Esau had no use for anything that came with the burden of leadership and responsibility. He was a man of the wild, a man of the moment. Vision does not come easy for a man of the moment. A man of the moment is often ruled by the passionate hungers of his flesh. He needed porridge, now! Jacob, the deprived second-born, saw his chance. Power, honour, opportunity, recognition - a birthright for a bowl of porridge! You do not get that kind of a bargain even in a garrage sale.
"Then... this is where your daddy's heart weeps," Lenana looks closely into the face of the little girl. "After successfully carrying out a bloodless coup d'etat in his own home, after outwitting his father, the incumbent 'President' Isaac, after taking the seat of power from Esau, that designated short-sighted successor, after the crown was irreversibly stamped with his name..." Lenana pauses, a wave of sadness washing over him in the silence of his room, "after all that effort, fear gripped him, and he ran away and slaved for someone else for many years... You will understand someday, sweetheart."
Lenana's gaze shifts again to the falling snow outside. He goes to the window and looks out at the distant world he has lived in for so long. Still at the window, he continues to talk to the little girl in the picture.
"Yes, little one. Fear ruled the man of vision, the man of strategy, the man of results, and made him a slave. For fourteen years, he slaved to earn Rachel in a foreign land. And one day, his eyes were opened, and he made his way out of the long tunnel of travails, toil, and turmoil," he turns to look at the picture and swallows hard,
"As I surely will, honey. As I surely will... someday soon"
In the fifteenth year of his self-exile in the US, Lenana Olesakaja's eyes have been opened, and it dawns on him that he has become a slave in a foreign land. He is 39, going on to his deathbed.
Lenana has known the emptiness of slaving for 'Rachel'. She was that elusive dollar that constantly twinkled like love hearts in his eyes, and whose desire boiled in his blood sending him into a frenzy of harsh labour day and night. 'Rachel' had been Lenana's bowl of porridge that purged his pangs of short-term hungers. 'Rachel' had made Lenana feel important and successful when the stories eventually made their way to Kajiado. 'Rachel' had helped Lenana hide his deep sense of loneliness in a foreign land. 'Rachel' had helped boost Lenana's pathetic ego crushed under many insults as a black man from savage Africa. He had known poverty and the shame of it. He had thought then that 'Rachel' would help him purge this shame. And so he slaved and slaved in a foreign land to earn her. All along he had failed to realize that like Jacob's Rachel, she was barren. She could not bear him the joy he sought. Now memories of his chase begin to flash across his mind. It was ten years ago when he first met Shaniqua...
-------------------------------------
"I love you too", Lenana said, trying his best to gaze into the eyes of his newfound bride.
"What have I just done?" he silently asks himself, "the end will justify the means. I need this green card thing," he chastised his conscience.
Shaniqua Williams, just turned Shaniqua Williams-Olesakaja, was beside herself with matrimonial bliss. She could not believe her luck. At 34, she had given up all hope of ever getting married. Then from out of the blues, this 29 year-old irresistible "Mandingo" turns up. Her very own Shaka Zulu, her warrior in shinning spear, to love and to hold. He had told her how in his tradition, a man must kill a lion with his bear hands in order to be initiated into manhood.
"You really have killed a lion with your bear hands??" she had asked, awestruck by this masculine magnificence from wild Africa.
"Yes, I have", answered Lenana, as humbly as he could, and showed her the deep scratch marks on his arms to prove it. They were injuries sustained from a part-time job he did two summers ago reinforcing barbed wire around some ranch in Texas. Well, at least it had helped pay his rent after graduating from the University of Texas. He had decided not to go back home after earning his degree. His J1 visa status was limited; it required him to go back home immediately after completion of his studies. But he decided to gamble with life in the land of dream-chasers. Having acquired an illegal alien status, he hopped from one off-the-book job to another, getting frustrated as time went by. He needed a green card. Well, he could afford to tell a lie or two to a beauty like Shaniqua, for his ego's sake. "Besides," he reasoned with himself, "I'm accomplishing a braver feat than killing a lion. Keeping myself alive here and still managing to send some money to my folks in Kajiado is no mean task." With that, his conscience was cleared.
"Ooo..." Shaniqua had cooed, as she rubbed the 'Moran' injuries soothingly.
"Maybe I'll grow to love her", he thought, trying to ward off any sense of guilt. Right now, he must play his Mandingo role right and keep his eyes on the prize - the almighty green card. For three years, he had played the green card lotto without success. Until Shaniqua, a beautiful African American woman whose aggressiveness he could not understand, fell in love with him and proposed. He didn't know what hit him; he just said yes. Oh amazing grace!
"How many kids should we have, hon?" asked Shaniqua excitedly. Lenana was jolted back to the present.
"Oh, maybe five, seven... My mother had seven. Together with the children of her three co-wives we are all seventeen" Lenana was sharing information he hadn't had time to share in their very brief courtship, if it could be so called.
"Seventeen!" a mixture of horror and excitement sent Shaniqua into peals of laughter. "We shall have Shaka, and Kenyatta, and Neffertiti, and Sheba... "
"And Laibon Lenana for our last born" said Lenana. Her excitement was infectious. He did not understand her constant craze for African heroism, but it had a nice ring to it. He thought it was just a spin-off fad from the Harlem Renaissance and the Negritude movements. After all, she was a graduate in Literature and a creative writer of sorts. He was so far removed from Shaniqua's deep hunger to belong, to be identified with roots of strength, respectability, and dignity. A hunger carried through generations of physical enslavement, economic strife, and psychological subjugation. One kind succeeding the other since the Mayflower docked with its first documented slaves, to the present.
Lenana was completely lost on Shaniqua's hunger for the birthright of the first-born. Her people were the constant recipients of bowls of porridge that came in different shapes: welfare, drugs in the streets, liquor store licenses in their neighbourhoods, token leadership positions... So many bowls of porridge down the years in exchange for their birthright, their blessings. Anger and aggressiveness had become their traits of survival. What Lenana saw as a romanticist clinging to African heroism was part of their effort to get back the dignity that came with their birthright.
"Laibon Lenana?" asked Shaniqua, "never heard of that one."
"He was a great spiritual leader of the Maasai people. Laibon is the title for the chief medicine man, a hereditary office. The British also gave him a political office as a paramount chief for their own manipulation. Through him, they signed a treaty that allowed them to split us into reserves, steal most of our land, and later imposed poll tax in form of cattle to reduce our wealth."
"Why couldn't the Laibon see through the tactics of the British?" Shaniqua was puzzled.
"Beats me. Maybe he needed to purge a personal curiosity. Get a taste of foreign power."
"Would someone give away his people's heritage, their own land, out of curiosity?"
"You'd be surprised what a bowl of porridge can do!"
"Maybe he was just a weak Laibon." Shaniqua's romanticism was getting thoroughly dented.
"Oh no. He was very powerful and visionary. The story goes that when his father, Laibon Mbatiany died around 1890, two of his sons fought for succession. Sendeyo and Lenana. He favoured Sendeyo who was the son of his favourite wife. But Lenana, the son of his first wife, was the rightful heir. On Laibon Mbatiany's deathbed, Lenana outwitted his father and brother by posing as Sendeyo so he could receive the old man's blessings as the next leader. Being too old and nearly blind, the Laibon blessed Lenana. Civil war broke out when Sendeyo discovered his brother's deception. But being the powerful and visionary leader he was, Lenana the crown snatcher managed to re-unite the Maasai by 1902. But alas, the deceiver soon got deceived by the British. They made him paramount chief and snatched Maasai land right under his nose!"
Shaniqua looked at him suspiciously.
"You think I just made that up?"
"Well, if I was not familiar with the biblical Jacob and Esau story, I'd have believed you. After Jacob deceived his father and brother, he fled and later on got deceived by his master, Laban."
"Actually the story I just told you is older than the introduction of the bible in Maasailand. Strange, huh?"
"Hmm, very strange..." Shaniqua made a mental note to do her own research, which included traveling to Laibon Lenana's kingdom.
"So is my love descended from the great Laibon?" She cupped his dark handsome face in her manicured hands and drunk in the beauty of her catch.
"I believe I am." He hoped he looked convincing. He knew he had no Laibon lineage. But why not score more points For himself.
"We have to visit your great-grandfather's kingdom for our honeymoon, or whatever has remained of it!"
"No! I mean... let's visit places I haven't seen. I was practically brought up there!"
"But I've never seen Maasailand."
"Let's leave that for our second honeymoon, when we eventually have our own little Laibon." He hoped he could by then have bought enough time to persuade Shaniqua off visiting Kajiado. Not that he was ashamed of his people. He just didn't know where to begin telling the complex story of his life to one so culturally different. Lies were easier to tell. Right now Shaniqua believed Mzee Sakaja was a rich polygamist with thousands of cattle and an African mansion called a Manyatta. Lenana had no way of explaining his family's poverty. Most important, he had no way of explaining his uncle's real million-shilling brick mansion with several cars and a guard dog, just half a mile from his father's miserly looking homestead. According to a document called a title deed which Mzee Sakaja had no respect for, he was his own younger brother's squatter. Lenana had no way of explaining how his rich uncle acquired him a government scholarship to spite his father who had refused British education. Lenana had no way of explaining that he believed his poor illiterate father was a wiser and more dignified man than his educated sell-out corrupt uncle. There was too much to come to terms with, too much to explain. Shaniqua did not have what it takes to absorb the reality of contemporary African life. She needed time to be weaned slowly into the real Lenana. Right now, she needed to believe in invincible warriors and kingdoms.
And so to Spain they went for their honeymoon. And after the honeymoon, began the toil and the turmoil. Little Laibon Lenana did not materialize. Neither did Kenyatta, or Shaka, or Neffertiti, or Sheba. It did not seem like they ever would. Then one day, two barren years after his marriage to Shaniqua, Lenana spotted Mumbi. He spotted her in cyberspace on a forum he met frequently with other Kenyans to discuss the whys and wherefores of their beleaguered nation. It was also a forum where Lenana could afford to be himself. He had began to exist in the virtual world more often than in the physical world. Shaniqua noticed, raved and ranted. Lenana only became more virtual. Mumbi's essence came crushing through his computer screen and possessed him like a virus.
Ah, Mumbi!
The tale continues... By the Rivers of Babylon
Note: Except for the legend of Laibon Mbatiany and his sons, and all other characters and situations are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
|
|
