A short life in literature…

I did not go to school with anyone famous. I learnt English, with quite a bit of Mathematics. Equations are about reduction. So is literature.

I remember a Maguerite Duras heroine saying, ‘Mon visage etait detruit quand j’avais quinze ans’. Never mind the obvious difficulty of a native French speaker extruding such a mangled phrase, I longed for a similar sense of mystery and self-knowledge, and have carried this phrase with me ever since. To my horror, I find that my teenage memories are very unreliable - when I re-found the book recently - l’Amant – the opening sentence was different. The only first line I’ve ever been able to remember, and it turns out it’s been wrong after all. But only wrong in the specifics, the emotional tone remained bang on target.

I only did one Shakespeare play at school – Macbeth – and my strongest memory is of the witches stirring bubble and trouble. I have had limited success in reading other Shakespearean plays thereafter, though the intention to do so still remains.

I loved literature in French, including books by Sembene Ousmane and Mariama Ba, Senegalese authors from next door. Despite this, I wasted a lot of my teenage years reading Mills and Boons. Even during this unfortunate nadir in my reading life, the best place to read at home in was the loo, where I could avoid household chores undisturbed, for hours on end, emerging to eat or converse when required.

Later, when I figured out how to turn my nose at romance, I developed a strong belief that life isn’t all happy endings. I doused myself in other kinds of books, books I can still remember, those that sit on my shelf and stuff my chest with fondness, like:

Ake, Wole Soyinka
Ghostwritten, David Mitchell
Maps for Lost Lovers, Nadeem Aslam
Short stories, Guy de Maupassant
Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangaremba
Possession, A S Byatt

These are the books that left me dreamy, when at the end, I did not want to leave the world I’d been immersed in.

After leaving home, and then university, I scooted off to Kenya, where I have lived ever since, bar a two year stint in the US. I started to write because I needed to think, and the only way I knew was to put words down one after another. And here I am.