Last Saturday morning there was a
trail of blood beginning at one of the ditches near the museum, this trail of blood
ran through town until Kencom where it stopped again to restart on the long,
cold road I had to walk home. I know this because it was my blood.
I didn’t know how bad it was
because you never really know. Shock being the first anaesthesia that you get
when you hurt really bad. Saturday morning I finally got a look at my face,
half of it was covered in blood. It’s rare to see so much of your own blood, it
usually only happens when its being donated to save another life, at those
moments it darkens as it collects into the heart sac (for lack of a better
word) with each of your heartbeats a surge goes in but in the sun and maybe
because of proximity its dark red. What I saw on my face was bright red. It
looked alive. It was the colour of blood right after you cut yourself while
cooking, the colour that drives you to put your finger in your mouth. The
colour that screams life more than anything else, filled with oxygen and
platelets and red blood cells, it was the colour of life and I could see it
fill half of my face, drip down onto my clothes, onto my shoes, onto the floor.
Drip down and disappear.
Why is it when someone undergoes
trauma we make them relieve it so much? Does talking about it actually help?
Does talking a lot about it help a lot? There is a part of us that’s curious but
there’s a better part of us, one that’s concerned and this is the one that wins
out. You show concern by giving a fuck, by trying to find out what happened and
where and how many and what time and details, details, details. The thing about
it though is the person who’s gone
through the trauma lives with the details. They pervade every single moment.
Before they get to sleep, while they listen to music, as soon as they wake up,
when they get treated for it. Details, details, details. I can’t drink anymore.
It’s not a decision I have made I just can’t. I was drunk when it happened and
there was smell of alcohol on me, it stayed with me all through it and now I
can’t stand how alcohol smells. If I had just had sex with the most beautiful
woman in the world and she had left her smell all over me as tends to happen (incidentally
is this how all those cheating husbands are caught?) I wouldn’t have been able
to hug her for weeks because as soon as I smelled her I would remember. The
details would come flashing back and I would be back there. So I know you are
concerned but don’t ask, don’t make me talk about it more than I will right
now.
The thing that happened (sort of)
Early Saturday morning, the kind
of early where it’s still late Friday night and I wake up. My clothes are
soaked through. My head aches. My wrist aches, my knees are sore, my neck in
pain and I feel violated. Am not sure what happened but I know it was bad.
There is an unholy mix of amnesiac that comes from both drinking and receiving
head blows. My sweater is wet, my t-shirt is wet, my bag is wet even my boxer
is wet. I get my bearings and I know where I am and a fresh pang of fear shoots
through me. I hate being in this place, bad things happen here, bad things
happen here all the time. But am freezing and though am not sure exactly what it’s
obvious bad things have happened to me. I reach in my pocket and I find some
money. No phone of course and the first tremor runs through me. It’s cold, and
worse its smelly. I know where I woke up, and I know it was in a sewer but that
doesn’t matter. Right then I have to get home somehow and I have to walk into
town. But then I don’t want to because bad things happen on this road but a bad
thing happened to me already and lightning doesn’t strike twice so I begin to
walk to town. No incident on the way there. I get in a matatu and hand the guy
my money, he gives me change. In retrospect am sure my fellow passengers held
their noses and looked at me in shock, looked at the blood and the wet and
tried to move away, but I don’t remember any queries as to my allrightyness
when I very clearly wasn’t. I got off the matatu and made the long trek home.
Got home and found the door locked and couldn’t get anyone to wake up. So I
curled up in a ball in my filth and my blood and closed my eyes (head wounds as
you can imagine don’t lead to the most logical of decisions.)
When next I woke the sun was
shining. But it was cold. Colder than I had ever been and it smelled. I
shivered my way up the stairs luckily someone saw me and helped me on my way. I
went to the bathroom and took off the smell. The smell of sewers and shit and
urine that would be a part of me for a long, long time. I stripped it off and
dropped it. I got into my biggest woollen socks and my driest available clothes
and my closest warmest duvet and shook like a junkie. I shook and shook like a
dog trying to get water off its skin. I shook and shook until my family came to
get me and put me in a car and drove me off to my aunt’s clinic because I
needed to be treated. My temperature? 34.2 degrees.
When blood dries in hair like
mine it forms little cotton balls of dark red, nearly black alloys. If I
scratch hard enough the cotton balls fall off but they hurt. The blood clots
and congeals and mixes up my already
hard hair into minidreadlocks that make me look like I walked out of a comic
book battle. When you have a head wound they have to shave your hair off. This
hurt. It seems a small thing to hurt considering what I went through but it
did. The painkillers hadn’t set in; the shock had begun to wear off and it hurt. Then it was done and I asked to see the
results. Someone snapped a photo with their phone and showed it to me.
Two ravines as deep as any wound
I had ever seen crisscrossed each other on my head, they yawned deep and red
and raw. And some of it came back, just a bit, just a peak. And even now am not
sure if its real or imagined because I can see someone with a panga bearing
down on me and lodging it deep in my head. I can see him doing it again as am
beaten from all sides. And my neck hurts, it has all week and all I hope is
that the panga didn’t cut in so deep that he had to push with his foot to get
it out. I can see the panga but I shouldn’t. I can’t even see the wounds
without the benefit of a snap shot. But I can see the panga. It’s not new. This
is not the first time it has pulsed blood. This is not the first time it has
bit into skin and maybe this is what saved me. A fresh one wielded with that
much hate and malice would have left me cold. But they must have imagined they
left me cold mustn’t they? I mean why take the trouble of rolling someone onto
a sewer? That’s how you leave someone for dead here isn’t it. You leave a body
bloated with urine and shit and water to be found the next day by someone
crossing the road and the Chiromo Mortuary is right there so maybe they were
conscientious too.
It wasn’t until right then when I
saw how deep the wounds were, when it hit me that they had hit me with pangas
that I realised that someone had tried to kill me. My aunt wielded her needle
and thread deftly. She (after painkillers) took the flaps of skin that were
struck apart and passed a needle through them. Head skin is hard. I could see
her struggle to make a puncture; I could see her grimace with effort as she
tried with a point to make a hole in my skin. And succeed and make a hole in
the other flap. And I could imagine how hard he must have swung that machete
not once but twice to do what he did. To someone he didn’t know for what
amounted to a bounty of less than 3,000 shillings.
I always believed that there are
no bad people only people who do bad things. But that was before anyone had
ever tried to kill me. Now I couldn’t… it was hard to reconcile these two
beliefs like poking a hole in head skin to make 2 flaps one. They didn’t hate
me, they couldn’t have. And am still sure that they love their mothers and take
care of their siblings and that if one of them was as hurt as I was the rest
would surround him with messages of love. But still at that point they hated
something. There’s a myth that Kenya is getting better. It’s not really a
religion because it’s not believed by the vast majority of Kenyans. There is a
growing middle class but then this just allows that middle class to encapsulate
themselves in follies and hopes of a bright future. You almost never have to
come in touch with a really desperate Kenyan when you are there. You almost
don’t see them. You don’t see the parts of Nairobi that are so poor they
produce people willing to wait out all night for their chance to rob a car or a
passer-by. You don’t see the frustration that builds when such a small
percentage of the city is getting on and walling up while the rest remains
where it’s been, where it’s always been, forgotten, in the shadows. And when
they hit me it wasn’t me they were hitting so much as everything else. A system
that doesn’t give voice to their concerns and subsequently forgets them
rendering them invisible and unseen. An undercurrent in the city that is never
heard until it rocks the foundations. Frustration and pent up anger blowing a
fuse as its all taken out on the symbol of what they have come to hate. It’s
not me that they hated, its all of us. Us who forget and don’t give a thought
until something like this happens. I lay in that sewer and shit entered my
head. And piss rolled around in my blood. I felt hated and victimised and the
truth is that the people who did this to me feel that way all the time.
Everything shits on them. The city, the people, us who avert our eyes and think
everything is ok just because we are.
A friend of mine says I have communist
sensibilities and I gave that paragraph over to them. Because that is what Graig
would have wanted back then. It feels almost like a eulogy to who I used to be.
Am pissed, of course am pissed. I want things done to these men and I want bad
things done to them. I want the full force of the law brought down on them
because this was MY LIFE and no matter what we say when we try to be charitable
my life matters more. I don’t want to die and very nearly did. And it was
thanks to some people who got 3,000 shillings out of the deal. Is that how much
they value my life? So why should I value theirs anymore. Why shouldn’t I root
for trial without jury, why shouldn’t I hope that they get caught and they get
shot and they get thrown in sewers? I never did anything remotely deserving of
this.
….and yet no one even suggests I
go to the police. This is how much faith we have in the legal system in our
country. This happens and no one thinks it’s worth reporting. What will they do
anyway? Arrest them? Find them? Bring them to justice? Who actually believes
any of this? No one who saw me obviously, no one in my family definitely. We
accept the bad as it happens here way too much and no one thinks anything will
change or that a beating nearly to death is a reportable crime. And you know
what I don’t either. This is my report, my loss of faith in so many things. A
lot of me died that day. It may grow back but right now it’s gone maybe best
forgotten. My faith that things are getting better, some of my faith in humanity
(though them leaving me enough fare to get home helps with this.)
And worst of all my happiness. If
I leave myself for too long with thoughts of what happened, if I try to
remember past what I already do I break into sobs as I think that they tried to
kill me. I feel like they infected me with something, some of their hate, some
of their anger. A sad truth about near death experiences is a small, a tiny,
tiny part of you wishes you had died so that you didn’t have to go through it.
And a bigger part can see what would have happened if you had. The bloated
corpse and the frantic calls and the morgue visits and its all sad, its
exhaustingly sad, what happened what could have happened. All this week I
slept. I looked forward to sleeping; I took my drugs so that I could sleep
because… fuck this world that’s why. Fuck a place where this could happen, fuck
it all. Let me close my eyes and sleep it off and when I wake let me take drugs
again so I can sleep. Being awake means I think about it and I don’t want to.
And I took really strong painkillers the other day and I felt happy for the
first time since it happened. I had forgotten this feeling, happiness. Now all
I’ve had is emptiness and anger and distractions and in the midst of all that
fuck this world and most especially fuck this country, fuck Nairobi and all you
mean because right now I hate you and I would live anywhere else for any other
reason.
But then I’ll remember what it
feels to be happy and it will be ok. So that’s how am doing. That’s everything
of how am doing and how am feeling. The only other answer to that I will give
is am healing, because even if that isn’t true I desperately need to believe
it.
