The blog will not have its usual laser focus today. Monday is an official holiday, so nobody I try to call is in. Hence another caffeine-heavy day of reviewing old articles in single room that comprises the modest library of The People's Daily. The butterball librarian and I have made peace, leaving me nothing to but isolated scraps to write about.
Scrap one: This place is freaking filthy. When there's sunlight on the floor, you can see little clouds of dirt go puff puff puff where ever you walk. Fairly early on yesterday, my hunter-gatherer instinct brain sensed the filth on the keyboard I was using and announced "We must not eat anything with our hands until we wash our hands. At home."
Scrap two: Intrigue! Young guy walks into the library, strikes up a conversation with la grandita. They're both laughing until Sara, the library filing girl who has a pretty smile and thirty pounds of junk packed into a twenty pound trunk draws attention to herself. "Ay!" she says in that cagey I'm-so-not-focused-on-you-right-now way. Young fellow freezes. “Have you lost my phone number? Why can’t you call me?” she says with a laugh. She goes back to filing, smiling. He just stands there like a deer in headlights. He walks over to her but just stands there. Says nothing. No doubt letting the memory of this moment of paralyzed jackassery burn into his brain. She doesn't look up. He aborts whatever he was going to do, mumbles something to the librarian, leaves. Does this bore you, dear reader? Don't care. This was my TV yesterday.
Scrap three: Politics! Before I came out here, | read two books by this guy Koigi Wa Wamwere. He writes about how his uncle suffered fighting the British, and how he was imprisoned and tortured by President Moi until he escaped Kenya to Norway. I wanted to do a story about Koigi's literature being a part of a new, original political voice the new Kenya. The return of the lefty.
That would have been bad. An article in today's paper reported how Koigi got booed the other day in his home district, and the reporters in the library all thought it was hilarious. Basically, they see him as: a guy better at writing about stolidity than practicing it, a self-important schmuck, and an unthawed Marxist. He's not cool or influential, he's just published. I'd talked to his publishers in NYC, and they seemed to think he was an influential voice. Not that I expected them to tell a Newsweek reporter, "Yeah, we've published two of his books, but we think he's crap."
But that's what the young reporters here thought of Koigi's anti-imperialist rhetoric. And these are people at the freaking People's Daily. The place is as anti-conservative as the name suggests. When there are still people alive who can remember colonization but the youth reject it as a cause of their problems, that’s interesting. "Interesting" is as about as specific I can get right now, as my brain is fried.
Scrap four: Took a cab home around 5:30, as the sun was just starting to be horizontal enough to show rays. Filed one image away: the bright white pre-sunset light in the big Kenyan sky towering over an uneven clapboard fence. Seemed very Africa: Yes, it’s beautiful. No, that fence wasn’t built by a professional, and no, no one’s been around for maintenance in six years.
Came home and watched the first half of Pi, which is either the best movie in the world or the worst to watch when you’ve been in a library all day studying old clips.
Waddaya want, a well-rounded narrative? Talk to someone who did something today. I just sat there.
