The Fire in Ten
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
(in which elements necessary to make a hearth, and sustain its heart and heat are proposed)
I
Hearth of home, home the hearth. Hearth, where heart and earth and fire merge to summon souls into a stillness that is a window into tales that refract human beingness. Have you, as I have, been mesmerised by the dance of fire in a hearth that can dissipate the night in a million light sprinkles fanning out into forever?
II
Crossing life’s thresholds. The passing of time marked by less emphatic birthday celebrations, not because of any desire to cling to an illusion of eternal youth, as much as it is to avoid the inexorable march to a literal and figurative decrepitude. “What endures?” A character in a story I know asks. What endures, so that one can say with certainty, this alone (endures), this is meaning. And meaning is what I come home to, I imagine. Meaning is the hearth, a hearth is a threshold.
III
Azure, cobalt, sapphire, cerulean, navy, saxe, ultramarine, lapis lazuli, indigo, aquamarine, turquoise, teal, cyan; dominant shades of the blue of our exquisite earth from outer and inner spaces. Hues of earth from the view of intergalactic birds. No one needs to remind me that ‘this is beautiful’. It just is, as if perfect beauty is a preternatural memory intrinsic to the blood and knowing. The Made-in-China globe on my dark brown, fire stained table – candle burns–is also mostly blue, but the shapes of the continents are deformed to make Africa – zoom in – seem smaller, makes it small and not threatening and not so immense that it might consume every other by its age. Hue of home is blue blue, blue like the earth’s day.
IV
There is a literature of dark nights. Of the soul, of illusions, of how bodies can curl into themselves seeking for the warmth of fire. Dissolution of certainties. There are nights when no fires are lit, no fires are to be found, a literature of cold hearths and a poetry of the memory of shadows that some fires cast upon room walls.
V
Three years ago I heard the story of certain earth birds. It was murmured to me by a lean, lined elder draped in a red shuka. His over two hundred cows seeking pasture in a dry Kenya spring season browsed close to him. It was an October that was as this October when the short rains have failed and the land is golden and red stained with dust, an elegiac beauty. Passing by, as passer-bys can still do in a land such as ours, we paused to greet each other. And then we stood in silence, the wind in our soul. A Ngong Hills’ sunset is the substance for poets and a site of contemplation for mystics.
The birds.
A moving cloud weaving this way and that, a greyish sky accordion, like a song set free. On any other day this would have been a reason to rhapsodise.
Except the elder’s gaze is bleak.
They are beautiful, I say, trying for shared delight.
He answers. They are lost. He indicates westward. Someone has cut their trees. For a road. He gestures. That was a forest…over there.
I squint. I do not see.
When?
January.
The birds have been lost ever since?
He looks at me. He glances away. They come from far. This is the season of visitors. Now there is no hospitality left to offer. Someone has cut their trees. He uses his chin to point at the birds. Been like that since yesterday. What a struggle. To what home do they now go?
Stillness. Except for the churning, restless wind in our souls, the orange fire of the evening shining our faces, and on the wingtips of so many tired home-seeking birds.
VI
As a people and a nation we might have saved a thicket of shrubs for fellow-travellers. The Kenya Ministry of Planning and any one of our Chief Roads Engineers could have deigned to ask to whom the trees belonged. I am told these birds are a species of swallow, and every year at about the same time, for eons, they have shown up after battling distances across seas and storms. They start their journeys in Northern Europe. They leave fledglings behind. In an act of splendid mystery, these little ones, weeks later follow some hidden song trails written in secret skies to find parents who, earlier, had come to Kenya for warmth and to build summer nests. But here, their homes have been turned into a winding, tarmac road. If only we had not been deafened by our delusions, the cacophony of so-called progress. We might have asked, as citizens: to whom else do these trees belong? Any one of the herdsmen who traverse these lands often would have told anyone who had bothered to ask about the meaning of these trees. Anyway, would it have cost anything to let just one tree remain standing? It would have sufficed as a resting place for little weary, wandering feet of fifty thousand songbirds.
VII
Over five months ago, I encountered a priest who was wrestling with his soul, his thoughts, his knowledge, his vocation, his reality and his humanity. He had heard rumours of a fire being lit. He rushed to the site, travelling a long distance, sneaking past military roadblocks. The fire had passed over. He stumbled upon a blood-soaked immense field turned into a nightmare for abnormal human sorrow. The outrage was barely noticed by a whole world mesmerised into Keeping up with the Kardashians. The priest had waded into this man-caused terror created by men with respectable names and histories. Men who had walked away, mission accomplished, as they have done in other worlds. He touched the debris from human hypocrisies, fallout from perception management lies put out by a humanity wilfully co-operating with demons. He counted the human holocausts offered on the altar of the earth in exchange for Colton, sapphire, hardwood, titanium and silence. He counted the dead until he stopped counting.
The priest fled his mission station.
He raced across boundaries and crossed countries. He travelled until he stopped in a small Nairobi sanctuary.
I run into him there, a big and broad beautiful black man, prostrate with wretchedness. His tears were a puddle around his head. Blood-straining lines were written out on his face as were the sorrows that had been buried by the human race. When he rose to his feet, his arms were limp, and his body bent over. He would tell me later that he had tried to curse God and die but had felt his heart’s light go off as if it were a candle wick. Later, he would speak words in French-accented brokenness and his eyes were swollen shut: “Are we doomed to be ghosts, we the peoples of Africa? Are we to be ghosts written with contempt into a world that does not see us? To be burnt away from our soil enriched by our ancestors’ bodies, soils leached off our dreams? Are we ghosts that the tales of the persistent and unrequited death of our children must go unheard?”
Silences.
His hands shook as he tried to light a cigarette. Flare of match. We watched it burn down and die. He whispered. “Even the sparks we use to relight our lives are not drawn from the forge of our hearths. We are ghosts after all.”
I understand that some answers for some questions can only be spelled out in tears.
VIII
Dear Fr. Aurelien,
I have not yet heard that ghosts weep tangible tears. Now I am a reluctant witness to the unhappy grace you have received. Yours is the fate of brutal witness of what is most abysmal about humanity, and its investment in lies to erase the evidence of human suffering that it has designed such terrible machinery for. The only epitaph for (y)our beloved, already-forgotten murdered is the shelter and hearth that your memory now offers. The flame in your gaze is the repository of the evidence of human senselessness. It is not given to many to stumble through a field strewn with a hundred thousand murdered men, women and children, and wail a prayer as the only acceptable language, until even that prayer dries up. It is not given to many to glimpse a horrifying sequel; a casual parade of the world’s representatives, its global businessmen, its sheep-clothed lupine humanitarians driving past innocent corpses, lorries laden with the bounty of the land, this, the great vestige of Eden, still desired, still coveted, its treasures craved, but its people loathed and in-the-way. Ever since I saw and heard you, I have been unable to speak (we have not yet constructed a lexicon for this type of fire, have we?). But I have sought to listen to whispers travelling through fireless nights. Last evening, to my initial horror, I heard arcane susurrations that are the voice of the blood of Abel crying out to Eternity, and demanding It to ask of Cain: “Where is your brother?” (Did Cain, that cursed wandering ancestor of humanity ever find a hearth before which to stop and warm his fratricidal heart?) For our hundred thousand slaughtered siblings who are nameless (for now) is there a Supreme Judge to whom their blood may appeal? I have sat in stillness with that question. I imagine that their blood is howling out Abel’s question: Ask Cain and his descendants, where is your brother, where is your sister? I am certain we shall each have to respond to this question in one way or another, if not now, then later when we cross that darkest of thresholds.
I see in you a most dreadful gift; that of seeing the world as it is and being asked to love it, starting with its putrefying wounds. What a weight; that of forgiving our continent for not protecting our people better, and the world for its pathological lust for turning our most vulnerable into blood sacrifices for their child-eating, fire-breathing, ghastly gods of war.
(You are going to have to teach me how to forgive God for not intervening in the drama of horror imposed on people’s lives more emphatically.) Anyway, dear Fr. Aurelien, with this note I enclose a pack of matches. They are made in Kenya. I checked. The hint of phosphorus on their tips is also African. I asked.
PS: It is confirmed. Ghosts don’t weep tears that quell flames.
In gratitude for your ‘immolation’, for your gaze and the tears of your heart,
Sincerely,
IX
Ingredients for a certain kind of hearth (made in Kenya)
Earth, the sanctuary, earth, the dust of stars and souls, earth in Kenya can be red, brown, black, grey and beige. Earth can be white in Kenya. And there is a place, I hear, near Tana River where it is rather blue. The soil from home where antecedents have rested is always the most beautiful because there is something of the fragment of their soul lingering to offer colour and new life to future fire.
Stone: The idea is some sort of heat resistance without repelling fire. Nairobi blue stone, Black Granite, mazerasnatural stone, limestone from Kitui, Soapstone from Kisii, and Athi River Marble, whatever, or make your own with baked clay from Kisumu like my late grandmother Aduda used to. Clay, is especially good at storing human memories.
An enclosure. Best if a shelter encircles the hearth, a shelter with walls so that the secret messages in and of fire can be cast as dancing shadows.
Fuel. Wood. But not in this age. The tears of homeless travelling birds now soak into rare wood and cause fire to spit in offence. Wood, only if it has fallen of its own accord, and sought its new fate as fire
People (and other creatures) To imagine, to create, to gather, to draw in, to sit still and watch and wonder. To blend and ignite the wood so that there will be fire, and inside the fire there will be the presence of many, the ones who have gone before, the ones to come, the unseen; the watchers. When people talk and cook and dream near fire, they may laugh, they may cry and they may also fall into silence. Some of their unanswered questions will be soothed, and maybe on the night of the fire, they may sleep easier, because fire is a way of prayer. Not all fire is the same. The fire in Kenya is not the same as the fire in Mumbai. Every fire has its own perfume, and look, and feel and language. The fire in Kano Kolwa is not the same as the fire in Brisbane.
Every hearth has a mother. A mother is not ‘people’. A mother upon whose face fire shines is a picture of the shade of God.
Wait for pristine darkness before setting a night alight One matchstick, one matchbox. Strike, light
Murmurs; ghosts, souls and other night beings (mostly shy), or silence, for fire sings, fire plays, fire has music.
IX
Her breasts now skim the top of her belly, gently pulled down by the years of suckling by her eight separate children, the ones she summoned, she sought, and willed into life. Her eyes are tinged with the cataract grey of inexorable age. She is really not as tall as we once believed and the omnipotence of the past is mostly strewn with the truth of vulnerabilities that time has admitted us to see had always been there. And four years ago, when her husband—daddy— died we saw her crumble and fall and splinter into solid pieces. Later, unlike Humpty Dumpty, she put herself together again and the King’s horses did not help either. Her skin is still honey-sun warm-soft-brown and her voice rings clear across grasslands and causes six dogs to race towards her tongues lolling, eyes grinning. There is a place beneath her heart, surrounded by her ribcage. A hearth. Here is the site of home, a map of belonging in the life story lines etched into skin. Here is the centre of this woman’s well-worn body, above caesarean war wounds and mounds and marks and a womb that opened as a pain portal to urge renewed life onward. Beat, beat, beat, still it beats, my mother’s heart beats and in the place where it beats is a fire. I am warmed by her name –Mary– and loving her is also who I am. Loving her is a glow in my heart.
Ò
“Mummy what is your sense of hearths?” I pretend to tilt a microphone towards her face. She gives me her sideways look. Part impatience. But she is a retired teacher and a mother of eight. She has learned to accommodate every type of strangeness. She purses her lips. She thinks aloud, “Mhhh…” Then she says, “All hearths are installed outside of time.”
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor is a Kenyan author born in Nairobi. She studied English and History at Kenyatta University, earning a Master’s from the University of Reading and an MPhil in Creative Writing from the University of Queensland. Owuor served as executive director of the Zanzibar International Film Festival from 2003 to 2005, where she launched the festival’s first literary forum. Her novella, “The Weight of Whispers,” published in the literary magazine Kwani?, won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2003. Owuor’s acclaimed debut novel, Dust (2014), explores Kenya’s complex history through the lens of a multicultural family and was shortlisted for several prizes. Her novel, The Dragonfly Sea(2019), explores the more personal and intimate character of both Africa’s historical and developing closeness with China. Owuor is also involved in nature-related story-creating and working with producers to build their writers’ rooms. A co-founder of the Macondo Literature Festival, Owuor is also working on a new novel titled Nocturne.
‘The Fire in Ten’ appeared initially in Hearth: A Global Conversation on Community, Identity, and Place, and is republished by permission of Milkweed Editions.
*Image by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash
