One Day I will write about this place

Author: Binyavanga Wainaina

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 272pp (2011)

The cover of Binyavanga Wainaina’s memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place, looks, at first sight, like the image the Ministry of Health likes to use on its posters to warn against the effects of smoking.

The human being in the image has all been eaten up only some sort of humanly shape remains.

The image is intended to portray how smoking has the effect of damaging nearly every part of a human body beyond recognition.

Even after close scrutiny, Binyavanga’s cover retains a number of similarities with the anti-smoking image.

It’s been said many times over a book can’t, and shouldn’t, be judged by its cover. There’s a precautionary cliché to that effect. Yet what’s indisputable is a book’s cover is supposed to, and often does, tell something about its content. So, if there’s one thing the cover of Binyavanga’s memoirs suggests, it’s his penchant for going against the grain; for jabbing.

My friend who brought me a copy didn’t judge it by its cover but a few pages she had skimmed through. In a dismissive tone, she concluded, rather wryly, how she, too, could write such a book. The subtext of her remark questioned why anybody with an intact sanity could waste their time to produce such kind of work.

I had no response. I hadn’t read the book. I didn’t need to have one. I was neither the author nor did I have any vested interests in it. Yet, somehow, I felt the need to say something, after all hadn’t I shown urgency in her bringing it? So, I fumbled something about style and preferences of an author and how each has absolute rights to determine that for him or herself. She didn’t buy even if she didn’t say anything in response.

The import of this exchange in many ways reveals what a polarising force Binyavanga can be, whether he’s aware of it or not (I personally think he does), and how this inescapably permeates his works.

A man of his views, Binyavanga, says those who have engaged him, will slap them down without warning or care. Damages can be fixed later, if necessary. His swipes at Ugandan writers offer a much closer illustration. As he sees it, they’ve sucked up to a culture of politeness and sacrificed their expression to those who might likely publish them or bankroll their publications. They lack spine to rock the boat as it were.

I could empathise with my friend. Who writes memoirs in present tense but a Binyavanga? Who is confident, or perhaps adamant, enough to write incoherent, many times abstract, thoughts and insist (he must have insisted) on them being published as they are?

Let there be no one to deceive that nearly the first half of the book is not difficult to get through. Binyavanga hops from one issue to another. Sometimes he retraces his steps and repeats some things, albeit without really clarifying them. Others, he simply keeps going further into abstractions; into trying to marry many strands of experiences; into trying to create some universal concepts.

Who writes memoirs that hasn’t fully lived life and done phenomenal things along the way that go down as great lessons of life? It’s the U.S.’s historical president Barack Obama who writes in his memoirs, Dreams from my Father, how “an autobiography promises feats worthy of record, conversations with famous people, [and] a central role in important events.”

If you haven’t trampled apartheid, for instance, spoken truth to deadly power, raised up against terrible odds, and any one such thing like that, what’s your story to the world?

Obama adds how, at the very least, an autobiography implies a summing up, a certain closure, which hardly suits a young person still charting his way through the world. Obama was 33 years old in 1994 when he published his critically acclaimed memoirs.

Binyavanga is 40. Besides winning the Caine Prize for African Writing, starting a literary journal, writing a widely and wildly circulated essay, How To Write About Africa, lampooning western portrayals of the continent, and lately teaching, what really are his feats that are worth summing up for posterity?

Approached this way, Binyavanga’s memoirs are less about him as an individual and more about the times he grew up in. Born at a time the postcolonial project is beginning to falter, he comes of age when it has completely broken. Issues of identity, one’s place in the world, building societies, development and progress, both at personal and collective level, are some of what frame the questions of the day.

A keen observer, highly descriptive in his writing, and quite skilful at interpretation, Binyavanga’s personal experiences, in broad strokes, are only but pegs that hold an account of an age. His abstractions and incoherence tell his own struggles growing up (and how candid he is about them!); the struggles of his peers trying to live the lives they want for themselves and those that their parents desire for them; and the struggles of communities they live in.

Sometimes, it is that you’ll read a comment in praise of the book and it’s clear its author is only being gracious. After all, he is given an advance copy, or perhaps a manuscript, to say something catchy about the book. The comment by Ngugi wa Thiong’o couldn’t be a more accurate summary of Binyavanga’s efforts.

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