MEET THE AUTHOR : Abrahams must have been a woman novelist

It is not fair to compare authors – or people for that matter. We all have our own unique ‘signature’ styles with which we express ourselves in speech and in writing.

Yet I am tempted to compare. And to venture further and conclude — unscientifically, of course — that female authors, the few I’ve read at least, write with soul, and the male authors...well, they simply write.

I wasn’t aware of my own biases until a dear friend expressed her preference for female authors. I quickly did a mental tally of my all-time favourite reads. The ones I have to read at least once every year because they took me on an unforgettable journey. The sort of ride I want to do again and again... What do you know? All female.

In a book club I was once in, I found some male-authored books we chose quite dirty. I don’t mean sexually explicit necessarily... I mean dirty filthy and gory — overflowing toilets, stench, flies on corpses, oozing blood-type of dirty. For example Meja Mwangi’s Going Down River Road... *Ducks for safety at the uproar this example has elicited*.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all male-authored books that are like this, but it’s many of the ones I’ve read. I am not saying we pretend these smells and filth don’t exist, no. I’m only saying, could we not dwell there? The guys in our book club enjoyed these kinds of descriptions, some of the girls too.

I preferred human stories – stories of human connection; stories with wonderful conversations and deep emotion. I loved reading a book and being overcome with the feeling of pulling up a chair with my best friend, baring our souls and only coming up for air and for potty breaks. I felt like I had to apologise for not liking toilet scenes and their overpowering stench of human excrement.

I felt tempted to pretend that they did something for me — those phlegm-filled, mucus-ridden, urine-choked scenes. While I appreciate they symbolize the level of rot in society, I felt nothing but a bored revulsion. And for a long time, I couldn’t admit that I really do enjoy a good love story.

Not the trashy predictable shallow romance that can reduce one’s IQ. Not those ones. I mean a sincere, authentic, heartfelt and memorable love story – the kind that can happen to us. I was afraid by admitting this; I’d be cast as the typical ‘girl who likes romance novels’. A label I was keen to never acquire; never mind that I am, indeed, a girl.

Blossoming love

I’ll never forget how I raved on about how good Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was. My male friend purchased it based on my glowing reviews. He later confessed that he was struggling to finish it. How was that even possible? I didn’t sleep at all the night I laid hands on one of the very first giant hardcover copies that trickled into the country. Every sentence went straight to my soul. Reading was pure joy! How could this be a struggle?

“It’s an okay book,” said my friend. “The writing was excellent. It just felt like I was eavesdropping on two women having a conversation.”

Eavesdropping? Isn’t that exactly the thing one would want from a story? To eavesdrop on conversations we wouldn’t ordinarily be privy to in real life? Like a fly on the wall, I want to watch unnoticed as my characters do life – unpretentiously. Why my friend found this burdensome is beyond me. Did it seem too gossipy? Not to me. It didn’t. To me, this was an enormous privilege.

So my biases persisted as I remembered the charm of Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter and the lump in the throat that refused to go away after reading Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood. Who can forget the powerful sense of patriotism and a desire to live a life with purpose after reading Wangari Maathai’s unforgettable Unbowed, or prose so expertly woven as in Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus?

And so I pressed on with life, my biases tightly and stubbornly clutched to my chest. Refusing to consider another point of view, until I stumbled upon Peter Abrahams’ A Wreath for Udomo. I concluded, after a few pages, that Abrahams must have been a woman because he wrote with soul.

We probably remember Peter Abrahams for Mine Boy, which a generation of Kenyans might have been forced to read to pass their Form Four English/ Literature exam. But nothing tugged at my soul quite so like A Wreath for Udomo. Sure, it’s not the catchiest title. For years I watched the 1956 published book gather dust on my parents’ shelves. I didn’t care to read about wreaths; and who or what was Udomo anyway? And so the years rolled past as this little gem sat, unread.

Until one day, out of sheer boredom really, I opened it. The first line caught my attention... ‘Lois would not have noticed him if it had not been for his eyes...’ What was it about his eyes? (Hopefully not that he had been beaten to a pulp and now wore a blood-oozing black eye!)

The sentences turned into paragraphs and into pages. My emotions logged in and clung. I longed for liberation, like the main character Michael Udomo. Born in Panafric, a fictional African country, this young, relentless, missionary-educated man was now in the United Kingdom. Although a student; his heart was at home, consumed with his motherland’s liberation. Then Lois Barlow, a white woman in her late 30s, happened. She was no raving beauty, but there was an irresistible quality about her. Abrahams treated us to a front row view of this blossoming love. From their awkwardness at first — he was a broke but determined black man; she, a wealthy but lonely white woman. Gradually, their awkwardness gave way to a mutual vulnerability and then bloomed into love.

To agitate for freedom for their motherland, whose inhabitants were mostly illiterate and highly superstitious. Whose structures and systems were not defined, who faced a dire shortage of educated skilled workers. The colonial masters were quick to remind them that they were not the first to be colonised. Indeed history records conquest after conquest...wasn’t Britain, after all, once a Roman colony?

This story is possibly, loosely based on the lives of Kenya’s Mzee Jomo Kenyatta and Ghana’s first Prime Minister Kwame Nkruma and other revolutionaries, who had opportunities to study abroad and who used this exposure to speak for their homeland.