Seas Is High

Ukunda-Ramisi Road, Mombasa suburbs, Kenyan coast.  Last time I was on these shores was a year ago this month: same beautiful half-stormy humidity, same high seas.  This week, our family stayed at the tourist beaches in the south.  Even though nothing beats Old Town/ downtown, I was glad not to walk the same roads and alleyways as before, glad not to revisit old loves and losses. 

Mombasa City in July twenty-twelve is restless, roving, people suspicious of everyone else around.  Hard to explain, but the people is palpably more riled-up than last summer -- I could feel it in every conversation and in the airwaves, against my skin.  The air is charged right now, electric and large. 

When I was a kid, the beaches were swarming with tourists from the wild west -- Italy, Germany, England, Canada. Resorts and lodges were maxed out, restaurants always at capacity.  Siku hizi, the white sands of Diani are mostly empty.  We passed one old resort on the beach that was completely shut down and crumbling and hollowed out by sea-winds – a three-hotel operation called Alliance that we stayed at once when I was like ten.  Now it’s a Colobus Kingdom: monkeys climbing water-worn stone pillars and bannisters, unafraid of humans. Vines and moss swallowing the pool-tables and staircases.  A wooden zebra statue in the bottom of the pool. Every pane of glass is still intact and the hotel’s old tide-tables are still framed on the wall.  It’s a weird, desolate ghost-site: smelling of salt, full of wind.  

All of Diani feels like a slim shadow of its older days, so much quieter and humming with poltergeist sea sounds.  Dad has this hypothesis that the government overtaxed beachside business-owners until they couldn’t keep going – killed a major revenue-source by demanding too big a cut of the profits.  Less spectulatively, tourism took a nosedive after the 08 elections and hasn’t recovered yet.  Plus, there's been major and protracted fallout from the bombings earlier this summer in Garissa and parts of Mombasa. The US embassy is still issuing travel warnings, and Harvard just sent me an email saying Kenya is on their “red-flag country list."

Speaking of Kenyan elections and our luminary leaders, here's a rhymed update on the latest Raila/Miguna gossip (incited by Miguna's Peeling Back the Mask):

presidents and PMs be grievin society

Mista Odinga be achievin notoriety

he's tellin Miguna to just leave quietly

expire in July like a bag a Chex-Mix

don't mind how you exit

long as you expedite, Fed-Ex it

cause his voting body's shrinkin like it's anorexic

the only way to get more power is to flex it

deflectin these rumors like a Plexiglas shield

Kazi Kwa Vijana, he feelin it

Triton gasoline, he dealin with it

corn a the country, ain't stealin it

Raila is affirmin the "freedom of expression"

cause his next big scandal is the General Elections

Passion Pit's "Gossamer" & Illogical Love

Up for reflektion: Passion Pit's Gossamer.

Until I read Pitchfork's coverage of the album, I didn't realize that Passion Pit was basically just one dude, Michael Angelakos.  Back when Manners came out, I thought it was beautiful too -- both albums seem somehow insane, or familiar with insanity.  But in Angelakos' music, insanity isn't this alienating or alien quality; it feels familiar.  When he's singing in his crazy strung-out, on-the-edge voice, you begin to recognize that tenor, and recognize that state of being.  And I'm starting to think that maybe the experience of insanity (or of brinking on insanity) is a universal experience -- when I listen to his songs, coming from some place so chaotic and wild and illogical, I'm like, "Yeah, I know that place."  Maybe insanity, the un-plumbable dark, is familiar to a lot of people.  I mean, so many beautiful things resemble insanity: love, creativity, revolution.  Even if you don't struggle with a mental illness or know someone who does, there's a high chance you've seen elements of the insane in the everyday undark parts of life.

Angelakos has actually dealt a lot with mental health issues -- he's been bipolar and suicidal, and can't tour very much due to unpredictable breakdowns.  He seems like a brilliant and genuine person in the article, but the person who struck me as the star of the story (although she only got a few mentions) was his girlfriend of three years, who stayed with him through his bouts with insanity.  It must be so devastating to be worn and torn by someone you love intensely, someone who is dealing with demons and darknesses and mental abysses that you recognize but can't remedy.  To love someone through their many variations of themselves -- variations that, at times, might make them a stranger to you. 

Insanity is kind of this contagious thing, I think.  You can't love someone on the edge without going to the edge yourself, without looking down into the dark and seeing what they're seeing, without knowing the terror of that spiraling, bottomless wilderness.  Without becoming kind of insane yourself.

In the interview with Angelakos, he says he doesn't know how to make sense of love, which is why he writes a lot about it: "On a literal level, love does not make sense, but that's what makes it love."  I can't help thinking that love is another iteration of insanity -- I believe that now, more than I ever did.  Love, and not just romantic love, is insane because it's not logical, and it will inevitably hurt you, and it's economically not-viable (the returns rarely equal the investment), and it will take you to disturbing convoluted secret places in yourself and in the other person, places that never saw the daylight before and might never again.

That's the main reason I love Gossamer -- the way it handles insanity, or love, or both.

Hewa, Hewa

4:00 am, Modern Coast bus, somewhere on the Taveta-Voi road.  From my seat in the fourth row, I can see out the windshield into the deep night, can see the thin grey tarmac stretching out in front of us into the dark.  Every few minutes, two high-beams come swiftly toward us from the other direction, lookin like a near-on collision, movin left at the last minute lest we hit it and trundling on toward its own destination, westward.  We’re driving east through the night to get to the Indian Ocean we love so well. This sub-genre of bus is called Oxygen, cause it has an air-conditioning system installed above the seats.  An “air-conditioning” system.  Five hours into our drive, we find we can’t breathe, can’t open the windows, are delirious on CO2.  At a gas station in Voi, we groan and grime our way to the toilets and back.  Caleb points out the word OXYGEN in massive neon across the bus: “It’s like the cry of the passengers,” he says.  “Oxygen! Oxygen!”  The driver grumbles at lethargic passengers to get back on the bus: arrival time’s gotta be 7:30 am, Mombasa.  I think that the city will be beautiful in the dawn.  We hit the road again, swerving across lanes to avoid rutted spots, the road a slim grey ribbon cutting across kilometers of close-grown sisal plants, mysterious and severe at night.  Headphones in, drifting between dreams and erratic headlights, hurtling forward through the dark.

Mwenda Bure

The other day on a dirt back highway I saw a motorcycle rider, a piki piki jamaa going the other direction.  His shaky metal dirt bike sported two flags on the handlebars: an Arsenal pennant, and the Kenyan national flag. Two deep loyalties, head high lyk royalty.  He was playing some KE pop from a roped-on radio, which is: electric-piano riffs played in descending three-note chords, creating a mobile sound-surround that followed him as he drove. On the back, a mama who carried her groceries in a plastic bag, which was squeezed between her bosom and the driver's back.  It was this joyful, itinerant atmosphere -- I wanted to stay in it, or keep it with me, but its movement was essential and non-negotiable.  The music, the man, the bike were forward-rollin/ not-slowin/ waving from a road I wanted to be on.

Many more streets and seas and back alleys (and highways, airwaves) coming up soon, I hope.  I close with a Kiswahili proverb, an axiom I will cling to in the coming months: mwenda bure si mkaa bure, huenda akaokota. An aimless traveler is not like an aimless sitter... a traveler might pick up something.

Mwenye-nchi

Downtown Nairobi, Friday noon, a massive billboard looms over the traffic near Ngong.  Its message is politically sponsored: on it, Kibaki is holding page-one of the new Constitution.  A red arrow points to the paper in his hand, followed by the words, "katiba yangu" -- my Constitution.  Strangely, not "katiba yetu," our Constitution.  A stab at individualizing the fragmented-nationalistic?  Then, in huge letters below the photo: MWENYE-NCHI SIO MWANA-NCHI.  "Being in the country doesn't make you a citizen."  Lately, I've been seeing manifestations of that two-sided phenomenon of national pride/ xenophobia everywhere I look.  It strikes me mostly as a top-down initiative -- an attempt by the bwana wakubwa (big men) to coalesce this fractured country, just in time for the next elections, by fostering more hostility toward tourists/ immigrants/ wageni.

Earlier this month, flying Switzerland-Nairobi, I was asked to produce my return ticket before boarding the plane headed for Kenya, request of the Kenyan government.  Apparently, too many wazungu were coming into the country, falling in love with it, and never leaving.  I had only bought a one-way ticket (confirming those suspicions!) so I was sent to an interrogation room.  Got out of it by assuring them that I planned to put down my roots in Tanzania -- as for Kenya, I'm just passin' through.

It's weird, as an American, to be on the other side of the fence (America as fabled Promised Land, keeping everybody out southside.  Now my "Zion" is the other side of several borders: legal, cultural, relational).  While recognizing that I still have it easier than almost anyone else in terms of global mobility/ border permeability, I often feel unwelcome in the places I want to be my home.  That billboard in downtown Nairobi put my greatest unvoiced sorrows into clever Kiswahili.  But hamna shida -- I don't think think that billboard, or the anti-foreigner rhetoric I've been hearing in the airwaves, is really representative of nationwide sentiments and attitudes.  As I saw in Mombasa last summer, generosity and inclusivity abound, at least in the people and communities I was lucky enough to intrude upon.