I walk round the bend from the Kenya National Theatre and down Kijabe street, looking for the food kiosks I once knew that stood some place near Text Book Center, or so my frayed memory tells me. There, we would consume chapati-mayai and tea. They think up the most innovative combinations of dishes on the…
October sprinted by, leaving an easily forgotten sprinkle of tired maroons, oranges, and yellows that almost grayed out of fall fatigue. The season had been late coming and already, the trees seemed forlorn, ready to shed their leaves and bow out into hibernation. Something was chasing fall, a bad dream it seemed. Only the maple…
The eagle’s eye spots its target and begins to circle the air above. His movements are slow, meditated, precisely calculated, better than the unfailing tick-tock of a clock. He has been traversing the skies for many days, moving away from the cloudy zones that blocked his vision by day, relaxing the wings of his determined…
The dazzling silver of the Swedish Alps seemed to be mocking Mumbi’s gray countenance as she looked down thousands of feet from her seat on the KLM flight. Send me sleep, dear God, send me sleep, she begged. For two days now since she read her sister Kui’s email, she had not slept. She had…
“Sheeeit!!!…” Cursed the voice at the other end of the line. Lenana quietly hung up on the deranged lunatic without a word. Shanni watched him from her spot in the living room. She knew instinctively who it was. It was her younger brother, Crush, and she wasn’t about to ask questions. Not now. Yet it…
Mumbi contemplated the little arrow resting on “send”, sighed, and right-clicked the mouse. She sat gazing into her computer screen for what seemed like eons. She was giving him time to make a response. She was aware of the existence of the chat option that allowed one to carry on a conversation on screen. She…
I never got their names. This past weekend, I sat opposite three people who were waiting to be picked up after a conference on disability and rehabilitation. They were all blind, some with a double handicap. The small guy in a wheelchair with a blind cane towering above him had just won a major award…
Some 20 years ago, I was in the cast of Samuel Beckett’s one-acts, directed by a visiting French company, Theatre du Shaman. The thing is, we struggled to see the humor the director insisted was in Beckett. We just couldn’t see it. How on earth could the doom-and-gloom of Beckett’s absurd theatre be funny? We…
“Well, shall I say congratulations!” Dr. Clemmons chimed, still peering into the screen. Shanni shot straight up into a sitting position from the table, her belly still gooey with the gel. “Careful now. Look for yourself. This right here on the screen is the image of your twins” “Twins?!?” this time she almost fell off…
Previously – Part I: For a Bowl of Porridge It is forty-seven minutes after nine in the late dawn of Chicago. Mumbi sits by Starbucks sipping a cappuccino and sings her song of Zion. She sings the memory of her home and all that she left behind. She sings the promises she made to herself…