The Burdens We Carry
Gladwell Pamba
Gladwell Pamba
We are Shicu, Chelagat, Kadzo, Namalwa and Adhiambo. We are girls fascinated by butterflies; we are teenagers, breaking free from our mother’s prying eyes; we are young ladies, wild and in love; we are women with daughters and sons eating our salaries because of school fees and nonexistent trips; we are old ladies and our bones are rusty hinges on ungreased doors. Our skin is the colour of mature coconut, of coffee berries, of cotton soil; our faces are clear fields, are ravaged by acne, are in-between. We laugh with our eyes closed and throw our heads back luxuriously and we also laugh in silence. We snort sometimes. We pick our noses when the world is not watching and lick the brown lump and it doesn’t taste that bad. We run in the rain because we want to replay scenes of The Notebook. We roll our eyes when we talk because adults suck. We love lounging in our backyard, taking in the cool Saturday breeze as we down a thermos of tea. We were whole humans, before that day when it was with our pastors and husbands and teachers and taxi drivers and neighbours and cousins and uncles and fathers and fathers' friends and our brothers' friends and our boyfriends and strangers.
It happened to us on a windless day within the estate when all adults were in the houses because you know adults? Always taking in hushed tones and tackling cryptic topics and sending us away with their eyes. We were playing hide-and-seek, and the sun was so low as though it wanted to play with us. When it was our turn to hide, we plunged into his house, a place our friends could never guess. It was out of their imagination. He was our uncle; not uncle uncle but uncle because he was older than us and in secondary school. He never shouted at us to be quiet unlike other adults who thought they were important, and we loved him. His sweet smile assured us he wouldn’t let our friends find us in his bedroom. He slipped his hand in our skirt and we jerked.
Don’t be afraid, Kamum, he said, a smile sprinting across his face. We pressed our legs together. Here, have this, our uncle said, handing us a crispy note.
All this is mine? we asked, our eyes widening.
Yes, and I will give you more, if you don’t tell anyone about the secret game I’m going to teach you. Just for us two, he whispered, rubbing our head.
The word “us” was a gentle feather on our face. We giggled conspiratorially, even though we wondered why we shouldn’t tell our friends about the money. We could buy flambo, jaggery, white mint, toffees. Because of this money, we were going to be president of our group, which meant we’d choose our team first in the game of kati. Now, sitting on his bed, we were excited about the new game.
Just let me touch small Kamum, our uncle said, his hands walking all over us, reaching our panties. You touch me, I touch you, he said.
It happened to us in the year nineteen ninety-two, when the drought drank all the water and ate our livestock, and the land was an endless cracked cake. At that time, we’d leave for the neighbouring water point when the morning was still heavy with darkness and return when darkness was splashing in. That evening, we were on our way back, the heavy jerrican pressing our necks that retreated to our shoulders. Our bodies were bags of bones, weary and drying from the long trek. He sprang from Ol Payut Gorge, where the seasonal river had since dried up. The jerrican fell from our head and rolled away, coughing out all the water. His constriction on our necks contained our scream. We were suffocating in the dust that attacked our eyes, ears, nose and mouth. It happened as fast as the thirsty soil gulping our water. It was a moment of pain and loss. Three months later, he was at our father’s homestead, discussing our bride price. Pack your things, our mother said, we are lucky someone has agreed to marry you, despite your condition. We were ashamed of falling pregnant before marriage and we went way with him, carrying his child.
It happened to us in school, under the full light of day when everyone was there and yet, not there. The teachers laughed away in the staffroom downing the evening tea; the students screamed their lungs out in the playground. The boys blocked our path on our way to the toilet and dragged us into the unfinished ablution block. You wrote our names in the list of noise makers, blalfukin, blalbastad, they said, their faces exploding with rage. You think you are cleverer than us, biatch? I am not afraid! we said, even though we were already pissing on ourselves. One of them watched out for any looming danger and they rest unbuckled their belts. Seven, sixteen-year old’s, with a persistent sweaty stench and awkwardly tall. They were vultures; we were their carrion. They tossed us, scrambled for our body parts, chewed us beyond existence. They jeered as we tried to break free, telling us to give up already, because nobody was going to save our asses. They gnashed their teeth when we bit into their arms and punched us in the face. They pressed us down and when they finished, they watched us cry until there were no more tears. They laughed and asked who was cleverer now as they fist-bumped with each other, gazing at the trail of damage, that was me, curled on the floor.
It happened to us after dundaing in Tribeka Club, where we’d gone for a friend’s birthday party. The DJ’s selection was on point, as always, especially at the precise moment when you let your intentions of leaving be known and he plays Burna Boy, then Naiboy, then Destruction Boys, dammit! We had to drag ourselves out because hallo, we were employed and that was adulting. It was few minutes after midnight and the party was almost blowing off the roof. Our friends begged us to stay longer, but we couldn’t and promised to call them once we got home. The rain pelted hard and the taxi driver arrived after about five minutes. We hopped into the vitz and asked him to drop us at Nyayo Estate, Gate B. At the University Way Roundabout, instead of taking the left, he turned and drove into Mamlaka Road. We slammed him for taking the wrong way and that was when we met his eyes, cold and murderous and he told us to shut the hell up.
We are used to whores like you, he said.
I am not a whore! we said. Take me to Nyayo or I’ll expose you on twitter!
His laughter scooped out our intestines and our hearts cringed with terror. We begged him to take our money, our phone, but not your body.
I will have them all, he said with a finality and we couldn’t overpower him, as he drove into a dark spot.
It happened to us right under our own roofs, with our own husbands. It was not once, or twice or thrice. It happened on Mondays, during Easters, in Decembers, when he was burning with sexual urge but our bodies were blocks of ice. He declared, with an irritated tone, that it was his right as he spread our legs and wriggled in. We didn’t want because we had the husband’s stitch or we were mourning our dead mothers or we were weary from the day’s rigors or we were nursing our bosses’ frustrations. I don’t want stories; I want sex, he said. We listened to him groaning on top of us, our dry vaginas pounding with pain. We listened to his increasing heartbeat, to how his back muscles contracted and relaxed, how he swelled inside us and shrunk, gasping for air. We no longer cried. We lay numb. We let them have the bodies which we carried but were no longer ours.
This is not soap that will get finished, our lecturer said in the untidy office that smelt of old books. He was young and in touch with fashion and was even on twitter and Instagram. His posts were sensible. Always talking about education and politics. He rose from those Victoria Palace swivel chairs, and in slow motion, drew closer. We perched on the seat; our legs frozen. You are a big girl, he said. We looked away. He tilted our chins and we saw the burning beast in his eyes. We felt goosebumps sprouting on our skin, the kind that came when you walked near a bush and thought you heard movement. We watched him open his fly. We threw a look at the door. He looked at it too and said no one was going to come as it was past office hours. We shot from the seat when little courage freed our legs but he pinned us back down. We said, no, let me fail that fucking exam, I don’t care! Our stance was met with a malicious smile racing through his face. You don’t have a choice now, do you? he said. We were now shaking. This was happening! Like what happened to Natasha and Lisa and Sharon. We were seeing headlines of a campus student found dead miles from the university. We were seeing our parents’ and siblings’ broken faces when they received the news of our death. We were seeing our images spewed all over social media. We were seeing women protesting in the streets, carrying placards with our names and faces on them. We were crying now, telling him we don’t want this. We don’t want HIV. We don’t want to die this way. His embittered laughter ripped our exploding hearts apart. Relax, young girl, it is a simple bj. I know you girls are pros. And don’t even think about biting me because I’ll finish you.
And you ask us, how did we react after the rape?
Every time our father left our rooms, we trembled in our blankets and wanted to forget everything. We felt cheated and robbed because he was supposed to be our protector. We cried every damn time and felt trapped in a bad dream without an escape. We wanted to tell our mothers but courage had long abandoned us and its place sat an overpowering sense of blame for being born a girl. We bottled our shame and fear. We pitied our mother, even though we were the ones hurting.
We cried in our rooms, still feeling their filthy hands, their giggles, their hot eyes on our bodies. We listened to the day break, without having slept a wink and rose to go to school again and again. We wanted to die with shame because we saw how they looked at us, monitored us and laughed at us on our faces. We were angry at ourselves for provoking the boys, for writing their names in the list of noisemakers. They won; they were cleverer, we said to ourselves and cocooned into balls of self-blame. We wanted to forget that scene, but we walked with it all our life. We sat in church and listened about forgiveness and letting go, but we could not shake off whatever had happened to us. We became adults but we still carry that day in our hearts and every day it is fresher than ever before. Some of those boys are now married with kids, some emigrated to States, some live flashy lives on social media and we wonder if the women they parade also went through our ordeal.
We were blank knowing something bad had happened to us even if we didn’t know what. We were too young to comprehend its magnitude. We kept quiet even though we carried this image of him with us all our lives. We threw away the money because something told us to and we also didn’t tell any other person what uncle had done. And yet, after that, we still went to his house and he did that over and over and over. And we kept quiet and quiet and quiet, and nobody seemed to notice. We were getting into a black hole. And it felt as though it was not wrong, just as he had told us.
It is just a game, Kamum; our secret game for just you and me.
It happened until our parents moved estates when our father got a promotion. And till now, we see him in our sleep. And we know he stole our life and our innocence.
In the weeks that followed the Tribeka thing, we admonished ourselves for going to the club at night in the name of fun. Rage and disappointment consumed us beyond recognition. We deserved it, we told ourselves because if we’d chosen to remain indoors that night, it wouldn’t have happened. We were ashamed for shouting at the driver and provoking him, yet again, we were enraged at him for holding the knife in our throat and taking over our bodies as if they were mere commodities in Gikomba Market. We hated our bodies and wanted to discard them in the dumpsites because that was where they belonged. Useless. Tattered.
We knew it was punishment from the gods, but we didn’t know what we had done wrong. We asked the gods for forgiveness, to set us free from the eternal pain since the incident, but they turned their faces away and let us rot in anguish. We wanted to abort the thing growing in our belly because it was a constant reminder of the forceful stealing, but a bigger reminder was the man we were married to, our own abuser, that we slept next to every night. We prayed for strength because many nights, we stared at him fast asleep and wanted to drive a machete into his throat. We grew old and watched our child grow old and we wanted to tell him the despicable father he had, but we just could not. Sometimes life requires silence.
We reprimanded ourselves for being too busy, for being too sensitive to things, that we didn't give our husband their needs. We wanted to come first, but in our marriage, that did not matter, because we didn’t have a voice. We felt hollow; we detached feelings from our bodies. We did not care anymore whether he had our bodies during our period or on good days, whether he had them in the living room or in the farm or bathroom or in our mother-in-law’s house. Our bodies became things. To be consumed whenever, whichever, how-ever.
We carried our burdens without any help because that is what happens with dead things in the inside. We felt as though our bodies were rotten banana stalks, eroding away. We wished we could scoop out the infected parts or things in our bodies. We wanted to discard our bodies in the river, plunge them into concrete, slice them and set them ablaze. We wished to come out of this anguish and started fresh, but we got stuck in this grief and rage and emptiness.
You ask how did the world react?
After that, the world carried on: the blazing sun that kept time, the days and nights devoid of promise, still came anyway. Even the damn sunbirds and weaver birds mocked our anguish with their songs in the mornings, as if nothing major had happened to us and as if we were still whole humans like the rest of the populace. Our mothers carried on with their forlorn faces, and hunched backs and refused to look us in the eye. Our husbands went to work and came back every day; sometimes with gifts for us and for our children. Our teachers carried on with classes, their voices powerful and compelling as they taught science of the human body and ignored our silent protest that our bodies carried. Our friends carried on with games, brikicho and rounda, and screamed even louder around the estate, which we looked behind the curtains of our confused little hearts and wished we went back to being that happy. The world simply turned a blind eye on us.
When we got strength after hours, days, weeks, years and opened our mouths, we got the responses that had prevented us from talking in the first place. They told us: don't play with boys, they are that way. Respect and submit in totality to your husband; it is his body not yours. Dress decently not to tempt men, c’mon girl, you know men are visual? Forgive him, it is how you will move past this. Why are you crying--you weren’t even a virgin? The senate will investigate and get to the bottom of this, but be advised that the reputation of this university is key. Did you scream loud enough or your voice wasn’t strong enough? Are you saying you didn't enjoy even just a bit? I know it was awful, but this is family and family comes first. Please, protect your father’s image. It is just sex and you didn’t die. There is nothing we can do; you have no evidence.
They are here with us. We see them; we eat with them in family gatherings; we listen to them in church; we stay with them under the same roof. We see their names in our list of referees. We sit with them in office and in matatus. We see them at market centers, malls, in the lecture halls, in the classes and in our estates.
It happened to us on a windless day within the estate when all adults were in the houses because you know adults? Always taking in hushed tones and tackling cryptic topics and sending us away with their eyes. We were playing hide-and-seek, and the sun was so low as though it wanted to play with us. When it was our turn to hide, we plunged into his house, a place our friends could never guess. It was out of their imagination. He was our uncle; not uncle uncle but uncle because he was older than us and in secondary school. He never shouted at us to be quiet unlike other adults who thought they were important, and we loved him. His sweet smile assured us he wouldn’t let our friends find us in his bedroom. He slipped his hand in our skirt and we jerked.
Don’t be afraid, Kamum, he said, a smile sprinting across his face. We pressed our legs together. Here, have this, our uncle said, handing us a crispy note.
All this is mine? we asked, our eyes widening.
Yes, and I will give you more, if you don’t tell anyone about the secret game I’m going to teach you. Just for us two, he whispered, rubbing our head.
The word “us” was a gentle feather on our face. We giggled conspiratorially, even though we wondered why we shouldn’t tell our friends about the money. We could buy flambo, jaggery, white mint, toffees. Because of this money, we were going to be president of our group, which meant we’d choose our team first in the game of kati. Now, sitting on his bed, we were excited about the new game.
Just let me touch small Kamum, our uncle said, his hands walking all over us, reaching our panties. You touch me, I touch you, he said.
It happened to us in the year nineteen ninety-two, when the drought drank all the water and ate our livestock, and the land was an endless cracked cake. At that time, we’d leave for the neighbouring water point when the morning was still heavy with darkness and return when darkness was splashing in. That evening, we were on our way back, the heavy jerrican pressing our necks that retreated to our shoulders. Our bodies were bags of bones, weary and drying from the long trek. He sprang from Ol Payut Gorge, where the seasonal river had since dried up. The jerrican fell from our head and rolled away, coughing out all the water. His constriction on our necks contained our scream. We were suffocating in the dust that attacked our eyes, ears, nose and mouth. It happened as fast as the thirsty soil gulping our water. It was a moment of pain and loss. Three months later, he was at our father’s homestead, discussing our bride price. Pack your things, our mother said, we are lucky someone has agreed to marry you, despite your condition. We were ashamed of falling pregnant before marriage and we went way with him, carrying his child.
It happened to us in school, under the full light of day when everyone was there and yet, not there. The teachers laughed away in the staffroom downing the evening tea; the students screamed their lungs out in the playground. The boys blocked our path on our way to the toilet and dragged us into the unfinished ablution block. You wrote our names in the list of noise makers, blalfukin, blalbastad, they said, their faces exploding with rage. You think you are cleverer than us, biatch? I am not afraid! we said, even though we were already pissing on ourselves. One of them watched out for any looming danger and they rest unbuckled their belts. Seven, sixteen-year old’s, with a persistent sweaty stench and awkwardly tall. They were vultures; we were their carrion. They tossed us, scrambled for our body parts, chewed us beyond existence. They jeered as we tried to break free, telling us to give up already, because nobody was going to save our asses. They gnashed their teeth when we bit into their arms and punched us in the face. They pressed us down and when they finished, they watched us cry until there were no more tears. They laughed and asked who was cleverer now as they fist-bumped with each other, gazing at the trail of damage, that was me, curled on the floor.
It happened to us after dundaing in Tribeka Club, where we’d gone for a friend’s birthday party. The DJ’s selection was on point, as always, especially at the precise moment when you let your intentions of leaving be known and he plays Burna Boy, then Naiboy, then Destruction Boys, dammit! We had to drag ourselves out because hallo, we were employed and that was adulting. It was few minutes after midnight and the party was almost blowing off the roof. Our friends begged us to stay longer, but we couldn’t and promised to call them once we got home. The rain pelted hard and the taxi driver arrived after about five minutes. We hopped into the vitz and asked him to drop us at Nyayo Estate, Gate B. At the University Way Roundabout, instead of taking the left, he turned and drove into Mamlaka Road. We slammed him for taking the wrong way and that was when we met his eyes, cold and murderous and he told us to shut the hell up.
We are used to whores like you, he said.
I am not a whore! we said. Take me to Nyayo or I’ll expose you on twitter!
His laughter scooped out our intestines and our hearts cringed with terror. We begged him to take our money, our phone, but not your body.
I will have them all, he said with a finality and we couldn’t overpower him, as he drove into a dark spot.
It happened to us right under our own roofs, with our own husbands. It was not once, or twice or thrice. It happened on Mondays, during Easters, in Decembers, when he was burning with sexual urge but our bodies were blocks of ice. He declared, with an irritated tone, that it was his right as he spread our legs and wriggled in. We didn’t want because we had the husband’s stitch or we were mourning our dead mothers or we were weary from the day’s rigors or we were nursing our bosses’ frustrations. I don’t want stories; I want sex, he said. We listened to him groaning on top of us, our dry vaginas pounding with pain. We listened to his increasing heartbeat, to how his back muscles contracted and relaxed, how he swelled inside us and shrunk, gasping for air. We no longer cried. We lay numb. We let them have the bodies which we carried but were no longer ours.
This is not soap that will get finished, our lecturer said in the untidy office that smelt of old books. He was young and in touch with fashion and was even on twitter and Instagram. His posts were sensible. Always talking about education and politics. He rose from those Victoria Palace swivel chairs, and in slow motion, drew closer. We perched on the seat; our legs frozen. You are a big girl, he said. We looked away. He tilted our chins and we saw the burning beast in his eyes. We felt goosebumps sprouting on our skin, the kind that came when you walked near a bush and thought you heard movement. We watched him open his fly. We threw a look at the door. He looked at it too and said no one was going to come as it was past office hours. We shot from the seat when little courage freed our legs but he pinned us back down. We said, no, let me fail that fucking exam, I don’t care! Our stance was met with a malicious smile racing through his face. You don’t have a choice now, do you? he said. We were now shaking. This was happening! Like what happened to Natasha and Lisa and Sharon. We were seeing headlines of a campus student found dead miles from the university. We were seeing our parents’ and siblings’ broken faces when they received the news of our death. We were seeing our images spewed all over social media. We were seeing women protesting in the streets, carrying placards with our names and faces on them. We were crying now, telling him we don’t want this. We don’t want HIV. We don’t want to die this way. His embittered laughter ripped our exploding hearts apart. Relax, young girl, it is a simple bj. I know you girls are pros. And don’t even think about biting me because I’ll finish you.
And you ask us, how did we react after the rape?
Every time our father left our rooms, we trembled in our blankets and wanted to forget everything. We felt cheated and robbed because he was supposed to be our protector. We cried every damn time and felt trapped in a bad dream without an escape. We wanted to tell our mothers but courage had long abandoned us and its place sat an overpowering sense of blame for being born a girl. We bottled our shame and fear. We pitied our mother, even though we were the ones hurting.
We cried in our rooms, still feeling their filthy hands, their giggles, their hot eyes on our bodies. We listened to the day break, without having slept a wink and rose to go to school again and again. We wanted to die with shame because we saw how they looked at us, monitored us and laughed at us on our faces. We were angry at ourselves for provoking the boys, for writing their names in the list of noisemakers. They won; they were cleverer, we said to ourselves and cocooned into balls of self-blame. We wanted to forget that scene, but we walked with it all our life. We sat in church and listened about forgiveness and letting go, but we could not shake off whatever had happened to us. We became adults but we still carry that day in our hearts and every day it is fresher than ever before. Some of those boys are now married with kids, some emigrated to States, some live flashy lives on social media and we wonder if the women they parade also went through our ordeal.
We were blank knowing something bad had happened to us even if we didn’t know what. We were too young to comprehend its magnitude. We kept quiet even though we carried this image of him with us all our lives. We threw away the money because something told us to and we also didn’t tell any other person what uncle had done. And yet, after that, we still went to his house and he did that over and over and over. And we kept quiet and quiet and quiet, and nobody seemed to notice. We were getting into a black hole. And it felt as though it was not wrong, just as he had told us.
It is just a game, Kamum; our secret game for just you and me.
It happened until our parents moved estates when our father got a promotion. And till now, we see him in our sleep. And we know he stole our life and our innocence.
In the weeks that followed the Tribeka thing, we admonished ourselves for going to the club at night in the name of fun. Rage and disappointment consumed us beyond recognition. We deserved it, we told ourselves because if we’d chosen to remain indoors that night, it wouldn’t have happened. We were ashamed for shouting at the driver and provoking him, yet again, we were enraged at him for holding the knife in our throat and taking over our bodies as if they were mere commodities in Gikomba Market. We hated our bodies and wanted to discard them in the dumpsites because that was where they belonged. Useless. Tattered.
We knew it was punishment from the gods, but we didn’t know what we had done wrong. We asked the gods for forgiveness, to set us free from the eternal pain since the incident, but they turned their faces away and let us rot in anguish. We wanted to abort the thing growing in our belly because it was a constant reminder of the forceful stealing, but a bigger reminder was the man we were married to, our own abuser, that we slept next to every night. We prayed for strength because many nights, we stared at him fast asleep and wanted to drive a machete into his throat. We grew old and watched our child grow old and we wanted to tell him the despicable father he had, but we just could not. Sometimes life requires silence.
We reprimanded ourselves for being too busy, for being too sensitive to things, that we didn't give our husband their needs. We wanted to come first, but in our marriage, that did not matter, because we didn’t have a voice. We felt hollow; we detached feelings from our bodies. We did not care anymore whether he had our bodies during our period or on good days, whether he had them in the living room or in the farm or bathroom or in our mother-in-law’s house. Our bodies became things. To be consumed whenever, whichever, how-ever.
We carried our burdens without any help because that is what happens with dead things in the inside. We felt as though our bodies were rotten banana stalks, eroding away. We wished we could scoop out the infected parts or things in our bodies. We wanted to discard our bodies in the river, plunge them into concrete, slice them and set them ablaze. We wished to come out of this anguish and started fresh, but we got stuck in this grief and rage and emptiness.
You ask how did the world react?
After that, the world carried on: the blazing sun that kept time, the days and nights devoid of promise, still came anyway. Even the damn sunbirds and weaver birds mocked our anguish with their songs in the mornings, as if nothing major had happened to us and as if we were still whole humans like the rest of the populace. Our mothers carried on with their forlorn faces, and hunched backs and refused to look us in the eye. Our husbands went to work and came back every day; sometimes with gifts for us and for our children. Our teachers carried on with classes, their voices powerful and compelling as they taught science of the human body and ignored our silent protest that our bodies carried. Our friends carried on with games, brikicho and rounda, and screamed even louder around the estate, which we looked behind the curtains of our confused little hearts and wished we went back to being that happy. The world simply turned a blind eye on us.
When we got strength after hours, days, weeks, years and opened our mouths, we got the responses that had prevented us from talking in the first place. They told us: don't play with boys, they are that way. Respect and submit in totality to your husband; it is his body not yours. Dress decently not to tempt men, c’mon girl, you know men are visual? Forgive him, it is how you will move past this. Why are you crying--you weren’t even a virgin? The senate will investigate and get to the bottom of this, but be advised that the reputation of this university is key. Did you scream loud enough or your voice wasn’t strong enough? Are you saying you didn't enjoy even just a bit? I know it was awful, but this is family and family comes first. Please, protect your father’s image. It is just sex and you didn’t die. There is nothing we can do; you have no evidence.
They are here with us. We see them; we eat with them in family gatherings; we listen to them in church; we stay with them under the same roof. We see their names in our list of referees. We sit with them in office and in matatus. We see them at market centers, malls, in the lecture halls, in the classes and in our estates.
Gladwell Pamba is a secondary school teacher who lives and works in Nairobi, Kenya. She enjoys writing stories centered around sexuality and African traditions. She fears caterpillars, heights and teargas in that order. In 2019, she was longlisted for the Writivism Short Story Prize. She won the 2019 Afreada X Africa Writes writing contest, judged by Obiomatwitter.com/GladwellPamba Chigozie. She was nominated for Kenya’s Annual Sondeka Short Story Prize this year. A short story of hers appears in Digital Bedbugs Anthology. Gladwell blogs at chingano.com. Twitter: @GladwellPamba