Praise Poem – Stephen Derwent Partington

We praise the man who,
though he held the match between
his finger and his thumb,
beheld the terror of its tiny drop of phosphorous,
its brown and globoid smoothness
like a charred and tiny skull
and so returned it to its box.

So too, we hail the youth who,
though he took his panga on the march,
perceived it odd within his fist
when there was neither scrub
nor firewood to be felled,
so laid it down.

An acclamation for the man who,
though he saw the woman running, clothing torn,
and though he lusted,
saw his mother in her youth,
restrained his colleagues
and withdrew.

We pay our homage to the man who,
though his heart was like a stone
and though he took a stone to cast,
could feel its hardness in the softness of his palm
and grasped the brittleness of bone,
so let it drop.

We laud the man who,
though he snatched to scrutinise
the passenger’s I.D.,
saw not the name – instead, the face –
and slid it back
as any friend might slide his hand to shake a friend’s.

And to the rest of us,
a blessing:
may you never have to be that man,
but if you have to,
BE!

Praise Peom was written in Kenya, January 2008. Stephen Derwent Partington is a teacher in Kenya, and a poet. He lives and works just outside Machakos and is a member of Concerned Kenyan Writers. A collection of poems, SMS & Face to Face, was published by Phoenix, Kenya. Stephen is the Exhibitions Consultant for Generation Kenya.

The Kenyan Diaspora Takes Action

GRACE, ‘BABY BRIAN’ AND THE HUMANISATION OF THE INHUMANE

It is a great pity we don’t know/ When the dead are going to die/So that, over a last companionable/ Drink, we could tell them/ How much we liked them –
Bernard O’Donoghue, ‘Going Without Saying’

There are certain types of violence and suffering that can not be hidden: whole villages burnt to the ground, teargas canisters falling like obscene snowballs, people of ‘a certain community’ trudging in their tens of thousands to IDP camps. All very visible, very public, and we can tut-tut from the safe-side of our TV screens.

And yet, there is sometimes a violence that is so real and vile, so intense, that even the image-loving media will suppress evidence of it, for fear that such photographs will ‘inflame’ yet more wrongheaded passion, more violence. Such photographs circulate in small but dynamic whirlpools, from private email inbox to inbox, and on the obscure blogsites of the concerned. Like doppelgangers, you get to see them only if you are very lucky. Or unlucky.

But if there is tragedy of the type that I will come to mention, there is also, sometimes, extraordinary kindness and humanity. Occasionally and impressively, this is from strangers, and is of a sort that can not of course compensate for death, for loss, but which can at least remind us that we are all capable of goodness, that we can all exhibit virtue and care.

***

At the height of the post-election violence in Kenya, a disturbing photograph was snapped by a Reuters photographer. Certain international media houses ran it, but here in Kenya it was only visible to those with the correct internet associates. Let me, in an attempt to dissociate myself from the shock that I first felt on seeing this picture, try to unemotionally describe the scene. Perhaps bullet points are miserably appropriate:

• the flimsy door of a one-or-two roomed house is ajar, and through the doorway we see …
• battered old chairs, covered with net-curtain material
• a fourteen-month old baby sitting on one of those chairs, crying
• a teenage mother, the baby’s mother, sprawled face-up on the floor, dead, a large stain of irremovable red blood seeping across the bare concrete from her head

And that, visually, is that. Of course, the scene had a cause: a policeman’s bullet. Whether that bullet was fired in error or intent, we should let an investigation decide, perhaps. Presumably, though, the child, ‘Baby Brian’, is not aware of the niceties of the Kenyan legal system. What he seems aware of at the time of the photo is only the taste of tears and the indeterminate absence of something vital.

That might have been the end of it: once more, we might have just looked at this photograph, tut-tutted or shed a weakly cathartic tear, and moved on to the next image, forgetting Brian or his innocent mother, Grace. Probably, that’s what I was going to do in those post-election days of image overload.

No, such a story can not have a truly happy ending, not yet, but it can and does have a continuation that is something of a palliative. For all the right reasons, a Kenyan named Joseph Karoki featured the disturbing Reuters photograph on his Blogsite, josephkaroki.wordpress.com. Joseph didn’t want us to just ogle at this picture, to ooh-and-ahh or enrage – rather, he wanted to help Baby Brian and his family, and give others the opportunity to help. Along with other friends in Kenya, he traced Baby Brian and his remaining family to a village near Naivasha. Then, working with the family, he began to raise money for, initially, Grace’s funeral and (an ongoing project) an educational fund for Brian’s future. The details of how to donate toward this secure fund appear both on Joseph’s Blogsite and on the website of VUMA KENYA, a non-profit initiative based in the US.

Grace Mungai has since been buried, with the dignity that a stray bullet denied her. Deprived of life in what should have been her joyful teenage years and the early years of motherhood, Grace at least now has the cold comfort of lying somewhere more tender than a concrete floor. For that, she has her family to thank, but also the kindness of strangers who took all the indecency of that image and converted a little of it into kindness, into grace.

So, is there a hero who has emerged from this appalling situation? Sometimes it’s impossible to identify one figure when all the players exhibit something of either integrity or innocence. Perhaps, in macabre fashion, we can perform a version of an Agatha Christie denouement:

• Jeremiah, the father of Brian and the husband of Grace, certainly. He is the silent player, who does not feature in either the photograph or in my inadequate prose
• Baby Brian, yes. Not because suffering is noble, but because like all children he has the potential to grow into a forgiving young man. He can not grow by himself, no, for who can now wish isolation upon him? Rather, he can do it with the support of family and his new-found well-wishers who can prove right the old proverb that in Africa ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. Sometimes, a global, web village
• Grace? Like so many others, she is an accidental martyr, missed by all who knew her well and loved her dearly, but also, no doubt, by those strangers who she herself must have at times shown kindness to.
• Us? Potentially, if we either act on this case, or if we ourselves do the right thing in difficult times
• Joseph Karoki and the VUMA KENYA diasporans? Yes, and obviously Yes, for they took what might have been a hidden shock and sympathy, and they acted upon it, realising that tears alone are inadequate. They combined pity with practicality, and so got something done. Something that reminds us that in those days when we rightly worried because neighbour turned upon neighbour, there were also strangers who turned positively to strangers, and who lent a hand, even across the reach of the Atlantic Ocean

Most importantly, to my mind, we are reminded that we do not ever have to suffer in silence when we are ourselves wronged, or accept that someone else’s suffering is ‘their own problem’, safely distant from us. Rather, we are humbled into the realisation, the healing realisation, that we all suffer when the innocent suffer, and that we can all, all of us, no matter how ‘little’ we are made to feel in comparison to the so-called ‘Big Men’, be better, be good, be human.

Stephen Derwent Partington is a teacher in Kenya, and a poet. He lives and works just outside Machakos and is a member of Concerned Kenyan Writers. A collection of poems, SMS & Face to Face, was published by Phoenix, Kenya Email: stepartington @ yahoo.co.uk.