Tell More about this Place: A Review of Binyavanga Wainaina's "One Day I Will Write about this Place"

I was drawn to Binyavanga Wainaina's "One Day I Will Write about this Place" by the title. There was a familiar note in it, about a thought I have also had throughout my life, from when I started to write at thirteen and my friends began to expect me to always give the writer's perspective one events happening around us. Sometimes being a writer gets in the way of just enjoying what others are enjoying, in the moment it's happening. There is a certain temporality in nearly everything you do; the deed is not complete until you write about it one day. Anything that you do, all places you visit, all your interactions, and everything in between, carry the potential to be written about--you therefore remind yourself (through some thought or whisper) that one day you will write about the event, about this place. Binyavanga has had moments when he would be participating in an event, or observing it, and thinking how one day such an event would turn into great material to write about. I felt those moments; they made me remember my moments of promise, of goal-making, registered somewhere in the writerly subconscious. The writing thus becomes self-reflective, pulling its weight and worth from those promises made so long ago. This is writing that has performed itself, with a widespread tone of self-fulfilment, yet it also communicates with commitments of the same nature, that readers, who may one day become writers, think about.

Now, Binyavanga is not writing about one place (I remember reading similar assessments in someone's review, perhaps Alexandra Fuller or Helon Habila, something I had observed too; something I agree with, something they expressed slightly differently from how I am going to break it down here). On the surface of the narrative, Wainaina writes about the different places he has lived, starting with Kenya, on to South Africa (a lot of South Africa), then to West African countries like Ghana, Nigeria, Ivory Coast. There is a bit of America and Europe too--these are the places I wanted to hear more about. That train ride in New York, in which Binyavanga observes a sobbing woman, remains vivid. While place means the different places he writes about, the author elevated the meaning of place to an experience in a moment of  observation, to be remembered and written about later.  Yes, place is an experience, a condition of being in a specific setting at a given time, a place which will contribute in the accumulation of place/s as one grows.

The book has already been termed a bildungsroman--by Fuller and Habila, by far the most important reviewers of the book--and to some extent it is. But the potential problem is that it is not quite a bildungsroman; it is a promise of one; hence my title: "Tell Me More about this Place". Here is a book that anticipates many more like it, some kind of memoir series, still looking for its voice; it has a voice, but this current voice installation promises another, perhaps one fully realized, one that will "one day" write about this place. There are these places--fragmentary experiences--that the writer has written about so far, but there is more the reader can expect, more unified, stand-alone phases of experience. This book is still a promise, if not for Binyavanga himself, for others in his place who have felt that one day they will their place, real or imagined.

Let us then enter the current installment: The book begins with the seven-year-old Binyavanga playing soccer with his siblings, a relatable scene to children growing up anywhere on earth; we all (and I generalize) have played some kind of game, nothing foreign in this. The sister is Ciru, the brother is James; they seem to know what they are doing in this game, they seem purposeful, aiming at goals. Amazingly, that trait will define how well they will do in life, per societal expectations. Watch children play; you could almost tell who is going to lead an organized life sooner, who is going to need more help structuring his or her life, et cetra. Well, teachers tend to be more attuned to the meaning of games than parents (now I am thinking of that stinging slap from my Sub-A teacher, who wanted me to play with others instead of reading; what were more stinging were her words: "Don't read!"). There are things we don't forget, for whatever reason. That's what Binyavanga as narrator succeeds in, bringing the reader's attention to moments that might easily be overlooked, yet such moments are full of significance. Who would have known that a simple soccer game in the dirt would be so revealing about a kid's future?

This afternoon of soccer, which introduces the book also introduces Binyavanga Wainaina as a goalie of words, more than he is one for the soccer ball. When his siblings are exhausted they also realize they are thirsty, so they get a drink of water. Narrator Binyavanga analyzes--and italicizes-- the word thirsty.  Then, while Ciru and Jimmy's thirst has already been quenched by rapid gulps of water, our narrator realizes that he too wants to be thirsty, and thirsty he becomes; so he gets a glass of water too, drinks, burps, and rubs his stomach, "which growls". By now the reader should already be enjoying the element of play in the prose, which introduces Binyavanga the reader, anticipates Binyavanga the writer, guarantees Binyavanga the narrator. By the time of italicized thirst, I have already found the narrator interesting, and I have finally decided to focus on just reading this one book for now (I also should be reading "The Fear" by the Zimbabwean-also-in-New-York Peter Godwin, or "Oil on Water" by Helon Habila, or "Small Memories" by Jose Saramago).

We read memoirs to find out how life has been for the writer, or find whatever we can that reminds us how our own lives have been. Sometimes, there are those who claim to read a memoir or any book for that matter, to find out how life is lived in other places. There are many ways in which Binyavanga's experiences don't relate to mine, and I sense this is a good thing in proving that not all African experiences are the same. He grew up in a middle class city family, attending decent schools, watching lots of television, reading children books that children in America were reading, and so on. I grew up in rural Zimbabwe, going kumunda at four, five, six in the morning to do farming things before proceeding to school. I didn't read children's books like the Hardy Boys--one of my early books is "Burr" by Gore Vidal, which I read without comprehension, but I enjoyed the occasional wonderful prosaic expressions, which I imitated later in composition of days we would never forget. I could go on about how my African experiences were very different from those of the Binyavanga narrator, but what's important to note now is how these differences enhanced my enjoyment of the story, and a few pages into the narrative, the differences didn't matter any more. The narrator, in his critique of the very concept of experience itself became interesting, reminding me that holding and directing that plough in the farm, I probably was thinking about how one day I would write about this place.

Your transitory experiences, your meditations, your thoughts, day dreams, and your neglects, allowed to accumulate, can catch up with you, and in totality can be a key element of your identity. When Binyavanga, in South Africa, neglets his studies at the Transkei university, eventually dropping out, that affects his livelihood there. The wish to write about some of his observations and experiences one day does not erase the fact that he has  delayed his graduation and sabotaged himself on  his plans to acquire a degree in commerce. Yet, for the writer in him, the mess he is in will one day become the material for creative writing. As a person, there are moments he regrets the time he has wasted reading novels, when he appreciates that he has a sister who has got it together. Moments like these, when we are at the height of pessimism or optimism, when we feel terrible about ourselves, and melancholy or false courage seeps in,  a voice in us may solace us with the promise that one day we will write about this place. That promise becomes a survival mechanism, that if all else fails, as it already is, there is a chance that we will tell our story, and stories are good, people love to read about our weakest moments, and about how we survived to write about those moments. In other words, if you still can promise --or threaten--to write about your experiences and observations one day, you are still hopeful that you will still be in position to write, to publish, to be read. No wonder you actually get it together, shape up, and work not to disappoint your writerly self.

So then you write--Binyavanga did: then you start publishing, you meet friends in the writing field, you write together, you experience rejection, you continue writing, you publish something, you get paid for it, you write again, and now you are serious about writing, you win a Caine Award for African Writing for your short story "Discovering Home", you are really happy beccause not every African writer wins this, you are distinguished, now you have agents waiting for you to finish the damn book--the promise you made to write about this place, and you do. But the book is still a promise--to really write about this place.

Some reviewers will waste our time talking about how this book is so revealing about a culture that's different from ours. Such reviewerss have their place in the publishing world; they give readers a reseason to go buy this book by an African writer. And while you are at it, buy a ticket for the Broadway production of Fela.  But it's importat to tead Binyavanga's book like you would read any book you didn't write. Read it as a memoir, and if we seek different cultures in books, any memoir ever written is a unique island of the cultural. In a memoir we often go me-me, just as our readers expect to see a you-you. Even where, like in Peter Godwin's' "The Fear", we write about other people, dictactors, whole countries, victims of torture, somehow, we are writing about ourselves, much less about a culture. So read us as such, as individuals individuating. But, of course, we are not here to debate.

The language in "One Day I Will Write about this Place" brings attention to itself. If you want, you can just read the book to enjoy how the sentences unfurl or coil themselves. If you are looking for culture, look elsewhere, because you will be confused, and may embarrass yourself by proclaiming how well you know Kenyan culture based on this book by Binya-something. When writers play with language and we get confused, some of us begin to really appreciate them; because that's art. Let me tell you a secret. Sometimes writers can hide in the veil of language, when what they are saying cannot be said in a more straightforward, often-revealing way. So then linguistic gymastics set in, or sometimes, as in the case of  some Marechera moments, linguistic crisis. Language is really a veil, often a thin one; it often fails us, cannot capture exactly what we feel, pretends to capture the lived experience, or sometimes hums beautifully without serving us well. Okay, suppose we say: " It's only language, a tool we use to express ourselves, a tool we twist and control," we still  fail ourselves and miss the point of writing. Language use sometimes reflects how dismally the medium fails us, so we resort to crafting it to approximate our experiences, our places. In short, surface prose acrobatics are a reflection of how much we can't capture; it's another transitory moment, a promise of a time when we will write about this place.

Let's quote some interesting moments in the book. That afternoon of the soccer game, the narrator says: "My laugh is far away inside, like the morning car not starting when the key turns." The prose grabs you and twists your insides like the laughter he is talking about. Laughter is very important throughout the book, consistent with Binyavanga's well-known assertion, "we laugh, we fuck." Laughter is good-- "I laugh when Ciru laughs and I find myself inside her laugh...I can feel her laughter swelling, even before it comes out, and it swells in me too" --especially when you are laughing with your sister. With these first few moments of laughter, and then the narrator's goalie disaster--laughter and disaster--the mood of the memoir is set, so is the level of the emotional temperature; there is to be a certain crude sensitivity [only because it feels closer to insensivity sometimes, some kind of helpless cynism]  throughout.

Binyavanga Wainaina rendered the language politics in Kenya very well; all the linguistic hierarchies, the strata of first, second, third languages, the squirming lingua francas, and so on.
He criques language use by the different groups of Kenyans, and the position of Swahili and English. He problematizes the issue of language; it's one of the reasons he will write about this place one day. His memoir remembers in English, of course; it remembers, "I am always standing and watching people acting boldly to the call of words...They don't seem to trip and fall through holes their conviction does not see.So their certainty must be the right world." In short, their word is their world. And based on what we know of language/s,  our words alone--as hurtful as they may seem--cannot, alone, ascertain our world. There is always more; there is a lot more, for instance, beneath the crafted words of the memoir we are reading. And it is fair to expect readers, to authorize readers, to also grasp what the words are not saying, but most us readers are impressionable in the face of words (echoing Adichie) that we will end here and declare the certainty of the world based on the word on the page.

I liked how the memoir shows awareness of some of the enduring issues of African literature, the Western-sponsored competitions, donor-funded themes, the audience of African writers. Having been at the center of contemporary African literary and critical debates, issues of representation and authenticity, Binyavanga Wainaina is aware of these issues, and he show it:
"I spent the past few weeks polishing a short story for the Caine Prize for African Writing. It is about a young girl (Girl Child, Gender!) who is questioning the world, and her mother's values (Empowerment). I mine every sexy African theme I can think of. The Caine Prize, based in England, is worth fifteen thousand dollars, and you get an agent and fame and lots of commissioned work."

This was a lovely revelation in the book, for me an inside joke of sorts, because much of a big deal has been made in somewhat small sections of African criticism, about African writers as sell outs who just serve Western readers in order to make money. After reading about Binyavanga's experiences, a reader wouldn't be averse to the idea of the writer finding ways to make some money. And a writer who understands his market is a good writer. But seriously, some of these debates are a waste of time. Let writers just write; they get rejected a lot, so the occasional recognition, by the West, or by the Rest of us hurts neither the writer nor the continent: if in my first installment, a mere short story, I write about malaria in Southern Zimbabwe, who is to say  I will not write a novel about rafting down the American River while daydreaming about the Crocodiles of the Limpopo, which I have never seen? 

As if the little joke about the Caine Prize was not enough, a couple of pages further down, Binyavanga joked again. After letting down the European Union by not writing what they wanted him to write and rejecting their monetary offer (what an ingrate!), the narrator says: "I start to understand why so little good literature is produced in Kenya. The talent is wasted writing donor-funded edutainment and awareness-raising brochures for seven thousand dollars a job. Do not complicate things, and you will be paid well." Moments like this, for me, makes reading the memoir a real reward; they make those grocery store or DMV lines seems unfairly short; in such moments, the memoir becomes my memoir too. Does this contradict the need for good marketing I mentioned above? Almost, but the ability to refuse some assignments because they make me feel used is always welcome, and rejecting the rejector is always empowering. Most writers, especially in African countries, are likely to take any assignment that offer money, at least initially, but writers, with their threat to write about these things one day, are writers, and what drives your art will win over mere, mindless profit.

"One Day I will write about this Place" has a very good ending. Binyavanga Wainaina was certain to make the beginning and ending very interesting, which is consistent with good organization...craft. I especially love the last sentence, which makes reference to Kenyans, but it could apply to Zimbabweans as well: "We fail to trust that we knew ourselves to be possible from the beginning." In the paragraph, the narrator has just said, "Kenyans had already found a coherent platform to carry our diversity and complexity sound [the guitar sounds of all of Kenya speaking Kenya's languages]." We started with Binyavanga the growing--individuating-- boy and ended with a Kenya full of potential. In "One Day I Will Write about this Place", we moved from person to country, but we arrived there after a fragmentary journey through other places; we collected hints, built an experience, and now, at the end of the book, we realize there is more that still needs to be told, and thanks to nature of this genre, the writer can always make more memoirs.