The hedges blushing lightly against a slowly greying sheen of darkness were always a sign. You would remember the sudden hustle of their leaves, the almost audible terror on my brows at quickening footsteps, the defiant hedges paving the way and then closing in almost interchangeably, that we’d shift in our hiding spots.
Before I am twenty-three, and before I listen for the muddled snoring of a body whose ears have no use for the jeopardy this brings to the stillness, I am sixteen, and twelve, and ten. I am also nine and five, and I am listening for its silence. On our living room wall is a painting of Florence Nightingale on a dark hallway hoisting a lantern. She seems to know what to do with the dark. The lantern too.
I was with you when Baaba told us that there are words in everything, even the meaninglessness. Do you not remember? A sunbird nesting on the window rafters, lusting after the weakly blooming lilacs beneath and the lilac’s mother was speaking care through her knuckles to keep alive? Baaba worrying about the drying sorghum grains on a mat in the sun? And that we were speaking with our eyes only? I wanted to tell you that the sunbird sings. The sunbirds of East Africa sing the same song over and over again. To feed you the openness of familiarity. But it is the colour of the wings you wanted to have the words for. I saw this; the outstretching of your left hand to clutch the ankle of your right. The gleeful pleading knotting between your teeth. Your eyes folding as if begging Baaba not to let it fly away. He built a cage out of reeds. It took days, I know. But you sure remember Mother mourning that we would poke holes in her market basket as a makeshift shelter.
I was with you when Baaba told us that there were words for everything, even the uncertainty. I heard the words, you read his eyes. Do you not remember? It was the night of your Irũa, and your eyes occasionally shifted sideways in apprehension. Your hands would tremble and then stop to hold yourself together. I could see the tiny hairs beginning to sprout above your upper lip rise. Your skin must have been taut. Alert. Waiting for a sign of the atmosphere changing. Ready to distinguish the heat of the fire frothing before us from that of the lanterns; because inspecting the homesteads with the light of lanterns in the night was how male children were chosen for initiation. Baaba could see this. I could not explain why he smiled at this. You could not either, I know. I wanted to see the men lift their lanterns in the dark. To catch their pleasure in locating you. I wanted to read the eagerness on Baaba’s face. To read the hesitancy in yours. To read the duty in theirs. To give you a name for all the confusion. Because nothing tangible to the eye is made out in the dark.
A lantern has always been used to make sense of our journeys. Amidst a civil war, Harriet Tubman would lead slaves to their freedom through an underground railroad. A lantern would serve as a powerful symbol in this perilous journey—to make sense of the dark. The blankness. Raymond Luczak says that a deaf man is always in a foreign country. That he remains forever a language to learn. I learnt to touch things intently with my naked hands by touching you. I found language louder than just an obvious dialect coloured in the knuckles of your palms. I learnt to sit in silence because I sat with you. I learnt to need things, want things, demand things, and ask for things, differently, with my hands, and my eyes, from watching you. I learnt to listen to things without needing to hear a sound. When Ocean Vuong said, “And you were there, you were the window,” I think of your body welcoming mine, your hand outstretching, you pointing your hand back to your torso, your mouth parting only slightly (your mouth parting only slightly was a metaphor for joy), your head tilting to offer me the full breadth of your shoulder. You would remain a foreign country I would have to consistently learn to dwell in, but you remained open. You were there. And you were the window.
My first journal entry for April is a quote by Carl Phillips from their poem If I Fall. “Light enters a cathedral the way persuasion fills a body.” A line goes. He talks of trying to conduct his body with a cathedral’s steadiness. The word “conduct” in its doing form can be interpreted as the act of leading or guiding (someone / a thing) to or around a particular place. Persuasion can be read as coaxing. Inducing. Guiding. A cathedral could also mean a dwelling place. I found the hand of God moving through your chores. You knowing exactly when the kettle pot has come to a boil without needing to make out the whistling. You knowing when exactly the disk snaps to sever itself from the power. It seems too that God had found a way to inhabit your body the same way light enters a cathedral, and how exactly to command your steadiness. By the time a child’s sensory organs begin to fully develop, you could tell the heat of the fire apart from the heat of the lanterns. That either could burn if mishandled, but either could also warm.
On the night of your baptism, the priest narrated all over again to Baaba and I how of all the baptisms, yours had felt to him like the chatter of two divinities left to the intricacies of their spirits. I wanted you to know that God speaks, that Baaba said God speaks, that you could look at his eyes and be assured of its truth because his eyes always looked at you with answers more than they did with just the need to ascertain that you were still there. Akpa Arinzechukwu in their poem Salat 01 paints us a portrait of a son needing to look a father in the eyes to understand God. “It’d be gentle, intimate.” A line goes. The poet further goes on to add how we want from our fathers the same thing we want from God, “to be present — attending to our desires with such tenderness a dew greets a leaf in the cold days.” A line goes. And although I had never heard God speak to me, I wanted you to know that God speaks and to ask if maybe you had heard Him?
It is true what is said of life. Its tendency to go on. Lanterns to you were a language for safety. A sign that someone, or something, was eventually going to save us. A sign that amid the darkness, the light will pave the way for them. That whilst we bid farewell to one thing, something else would welcome us. That you could touch things without needing to wonder about the exact measure of the danger in their tangibility. I know you prefer to sleep with the light of the lantern on but slightly dimmed. I know too, that the haphazard shadow of objects the weak light poses on the walls is your idea of the flame’s permanence. And I know that you love a girl who for the first time ever, knows when to turn your hearing aids off, and when to leave them on. She readies you for bed. Her lullaby rises like offering frankincense through her throat. It transcends her mouth, widens her eyelids, and lodges itself on her hands. Sometimes, there is no need for prayer. God could require instead, just a reading of human hands.
But the hand holding an axe knows not only exactly what not to break, but also, what exactly to break and where to break. You were never gifted with courage. Forgive me now, that these are the consequences of your overdependence on light. Of me not knowing what to say and not needing to know what to say and you not requiring me to say it to hear it, because the light could interpret things for us. Forgive me of this too, that the city lights up however it will. The headlights topple over only what they do not wish to destroy. The streetlights hover over whatever they wish not to diminish. The lights here do not seem to have the urgency to squeeze into every opening the darkness squeezes into. In 1807, the first street lamp was lit in Pall Mall, London. Because it ran on gas, it could only illuminate a few feet around the post, leaving the rest of the streets fairly dark.
We have a tradition of holding hands here when danger looms and it is the tangibility of another body we seek to diffuse the fear in our own. But when the lanterns waned and the wicks choked on the last straw of paraffin, we held hands. When we hid and you felt the heat of Baaba’s lantern intensifying, coming to find us, we held hands. I am writing this to you because I am holding your hand. I have been holding your hand. And because Sontag makes us aware of the sanctity of hands reaching for other hands. “The person has allowed me proof that I have a body.” Reads a line from Sontag’s As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh. And because, again, we have not always needed these excuses to hold hands.
I am writing this to you because I am holding your hand. And because Baaba called again this morning to ask if I could see you. The truth is, the ones with eyes don’t always see the need for them until they have to use them as a substitute for language. The truth is this, also, it is you who see me. It is you through whom I see Baaba hoisting a lantern. To sift the darkness. To empty the fear. To find us.
I was with you when Baaba told us that while there may be words for everything, there are not answers for everything.
Forgive me of this too, might I add; that the streetlights help us find a way for only the distance they will. I recognize this; your brows twitching (fear), your nipples freezing behind your tee (fear), your belly leaning into mine (fear), your hands clinging onto mine only too fiercely (fear). Why does the body know what it needs by showing it more than it knows where to reach for it?
There are many uses for a lantern. It is documented. We know of one, its tendency to always find us. What happens to our journeys should the lanterns wane? We have hands. Baaba has always insisted that we have hands, and in case we do not know this, he has hands. What if, then, we have to wander alone in the dark? The hands will guide us. His hands will hold us.
*Baaba has been used to mean ‘father’.
*Irũa is the Agikuyu initiation ceremony.
About The Author
Naomi Waweru (she/her), a Kenyan, is inspired by love, vulnerability, the yearning of bodies to be free in their connection, and she has an eye for tradition and culture. Her writings present an adoration for the body. She portrays it as your first sanctuary. She has been published and is forthcoming in Lolwe, Ta Adesa, Clerestory, Delicate Friend, Neurological , Overheard, Kalahari Review, Poems for the Start of the World Anthology, Ampleremains, Peppercoast, Afroliterary, Overheardlit and elsewhere. Reach her on Twitter @ndutapoems and Instagram @_ndutapoems.