we call our mother’s mother nyanya
and our father’s mother kukhu.
both are luhya dialect for the same thing
but one holds weight over the other –
a stream against an ocean.
we know we loved nyanya.
the language she spoke was riddled with memories
from the root of cherishment itself.
sometimes, when we were just lonely kids,
we dreamt of her embracing us whole,
tearing all the reservations we held.
one time, nyanya’s soul transcended the world of the living, her
funeral was a beautiful mosaic of singing and dancing isikuti the
wailing of our mothers and aunties a perfect background ensemble
and we, the children, ate soup-filled githeri to our fill
unaware of where bodies go when they tire of the earth.
they do not make them like that anymore; the funerals.
****
kukhu’s way is different.
we do not understand the way she holds us.
when she says she loves us, smiling with her bare mouth,
we build a resistance to her show,
thinking it all a play.
and perhaps we are wrong to think this.
she is old and disappearing. she has no strength
to fake it till she makes it but everytime she receives us in a warm embrace,
telling the cousins to slaughter a chicken for us, ululating and praying to a
god some of us do not believe in, we think of our father
his new family perfect and full of a bond with kukhu.
we crave this connection to a culture we did not grow up with –
the stories kukhu tells them in the dead of night,
the secret language they exchange between loud laughs,
the udaku in a village that fails to claim us as its children.
we are lost in the middle ground of trying to connect our past
and our present and the modern future is no help.
we cling to our screens. we speak through memes and instagram reels.
we laugh only when a bad joke is cracked and above all,
we dream of nyanya’s arms around us, soothing us to sleep.
if she were still alive and breathing, would we have a sense of belonging?
Amanda Nechesa is a writer and poet from Nairobi, Kenya. She has work published or
forthcoming in Brittle Paper, Isele Magazine, The Elephant, Kalahari Review, Fiery Scribe
Review, Efiko Magazine, Qwani 1 & 2 and elsewhere. On stormy days, Amanda spends time
dreaming of the sun.