home

In Limbo.

Posted on by kidoshowaafrika

Smell the camel milk off my skin
Nails permanently dirty from desert sands, toothpick cannot dig deep enough.
Measure the loose curls and straight patches of my combined texture.
Cannot comprehend my belonging.
Kenyan home.
South African home.
In limbo.
Too many bedrooms to decorate.

Muembe no good doer (Laughter)
Kikuyu money lover (Laughter Laughter)
Al-shababe (Laughter Laughter Laughter)
In limbo.
Too many people to be.

Parents parenting cannot understand my desire to nomad,
Come home.
Mothers’ home. (Not his house)
Fathers’ home. (Not her house)
Your home.
In limbo.

Nomad.

Posted on by kidoshowaafrika

Dedication to the nomads, wanderers and those in search of home.
For home is not a place but a feeling.

Nomad.

We do not stay in a single place for long. We live in ungoverned land that belongs to no he or she. Lawless, marauding in it’s own cyclical balance.

Expansive land lies before me, the land of my forefathers, their footsteps frozen in the sand and the dust rising from the Earth to come quench my thirst for belonging in my mouth. Dry it is, but so full of life I can taste all the stories of the past.

I have never been able to live in a place for longer than 5 years. A long time for a nomad, disappointing. The world has made me make a home out of apartments and houses and people. But I am a nomad you see and we do not find homes in things that are still, things that do not move with us.

Home.

With such ease I can pick up my belongings and leave.  I can memorise your jaw-line, the strong symmetry o f the creases next to your eyes when you smile. Your scars from when you were eight, to the deep crescendo of your laughter from the furthest corners of your soul. With such ease I can forget what I ever loved.

But in the end we are not people, we are places trying to find home in one another.

I fear the moment I will realize that I have found a home. Found a home that will make me stay. One that will not come taste the stories told by the dry desert sand in their mouth, will not feel the pulsating beat of the earth underneath their bare feet, will not have their heart yearn out to the past, one that  will not find a home in me.

It is the nomad in me, to talk so highly of belonging to no man’s land and fighting to call it a home. It is the nomad in me to declare the tall, thorny acacia trees that tower so gloriously above me as my protection, the nomad in me to say that the dry, barren soil beneath my feet that bares my ancestors story will feed me. But how now child, can you make a home out of nothing?

How easily my mother was able to find the strength to sit in this comfortable life of finding a home, a permanent one. We talk of going home, distant lands and great places we have not walked, of corners of our land we have not seen, for a brief moment there is fire in her eyes, the life of a nomad replenished, but just as soon as it appears, it is repressed. A back and forth in my mother’s head. We have a home now, we do not need to go. Her mouth saying one thing and her eyes betraying her, saying another. You see for she has found a home in my father. But when home is on fire, where shall we go?

When the voices of my ancestors stop calling my name and the dust in my mouth has told me all the stories, when I have gone through all the crannies of my land and climbed every acacia tree. When I have witnessed the death of a day and the rebirth of a new one all in one doing and felt the strong warm desert wind carrying all its secrets whisper in my ear, only then will I know that finally the nomad in me has found a home, a home within myself.

Reminder.

Posted on by kidoshowaafrika

You are not one of us.
You’re from there, where. There, there. You know where, up there somewhere.
You seem lost, but we cannot help you find your way.
You are not one of us, we cannot guide you home.

Go back.
Go back to the place where the birds sing constantly drunk in a sunny haze,
To the place where each step you take produces a beat
A cacophony,
Where your feet play rhythm.

You do not belong here.
Strangers with warm hearts are unwelcome, we are not open to unfamiliar things.
So go,
Go with your open arms, your loving smile, your desperate eyes. Take them back to where they came from.

You can pretend.
That tall buildings are trees, the lights are sunshine, the streets are home and the loud silence is not too deafening.
But we cannot pretend for you.

So come as you are,
Heart in the palm of your hands,
Begging and crying,
But we cannot accept you,
And you cannot call this home.

4.32AM.