The Clumsy Binyavanga Wainaina in Johannesburg
An essay on Binyavanga Wainaina’s move to Johannesburg and the how his clumsiness is central to understanding his work and life by Hugo kaCanham
I am afraid of Binyavanga. When the invitation to meet him arrives, I accept without thinking. It is Binyavanga Wainaina after all. And then the anxiety comes. The dinner is tomorrow. When I get home I reach out for his book — One day I will write about this place. The cover has a curry stain. After reading it, I had passed it on to my brother. He had passed it along to my sister. It came back to me with other stains. I decide that I will ask for his autograph. I want to read the book again so I can ask Binyavanga important questions. But I don’t. I am from Lusikisiki and I know the Mthatha of which he writes about his student days. The texture of the book is as familiar as the caress of my favourite jacket. He weaves yarns to describe worlds that I know. I come to see them in new ways. I want to visit the worlds that I do not know.
I didn’t know that Binyavanga is in South Africa. My friend Grieve invited me to join them for dinner. I would also get to meet Grieve’s wife Mnwasa. Grieve calls him Binya. I follow his cue. Binya does not fill my mouth the way that Binyavanga does. When Binya arrives, he is tall. He has a striking face that I recognise from online images. A strong and steady stare. His mouth is not prone to smiling. There is a fine green line dyed into his hair and running across to the back of his head. His colourful jacket does not hide a gentle protrusion of his stomach. I immediately think of his father’s stomach in the essay — I am homosexual, mom. He greets Mnwasa by taking her hands in his. “You are beautiful,” he says. Mnwasa glows. I hear the slur in his voice and recall that he was very ill a while back. His voice is a bit too loud and the people at neighbouring tables hear him. I see their looks. But they stop hearing him after a while. Later, he explains that he had a stroke and that it will take a few more months to recover his speech. I had read his essay about how a major stroke killed his father. I hope he recovers soon. He looks vulnerable but he is upbeat.
I am ashamed of South Africa, but Binya believes it is the place to be. He has elected to stay in Johannesburg for about five years. It is a feeling he has about the city. He places high value in his sense of place. He is spiritual and talks a lot about the traditional healers that he knows. Johannesburg has many. He laments how traditional healers have been wiped out of Kenya’s public life. He could be a sangoma. Illness forces many to confront the realm of the ancestors. Johannesburg feels right to him. “I danced all night when I got here a few months ago. I love my large apartment in Yeoville. I wish it had wifi though. Johannesburg is Africa without some of the prejudice of other parts of the continent. Nigerian men date other men here.” He gestures to a black male couple at the neighbouring table. One of the men meets his eyes. “I don’t hang out with middle class homosexual men. I love hustling gay people. They don’t have all of these pretences of trying to be something. They just are.” He likes the word homosexual. He chose it above the more familiar gay in the title of the ‘lost’ chapter of his memoir — I am homosexual, mom. He is working on three projects. The two book projects already have publishers but he loves one project more than the other. He is writing furiously. He has been doing so since he arrived in South Africa. Johannesburg is good for his creativity. He describes one of the essays that he is working on with truckloads of enthusiasm. His eyes are happy.
The third project is about dancing. He has a European colleague that has agreed to record him dancing. Perhaps it will be an artistic installation. Silently, I balk at this. He does not look like a dancer. He does not strike me as athletic. He is tall and big and I fear he might fall. It is not so much his body that I fear because I know many people with his bearing with better rhythm than trained dancers. He puts a word to my sense of him. “I am clumsy”. He is clumsy. But it could be the effects of the stroke too. It is in the way he drinks, eats and moves. His writing captures detail like a painter, but in the tactile material world, he has no regard for the small things. I ask him how he moves about the world without paying attention to the things that trip up most people. Things like: Renewing a visa in a country that he visits and decides to live in. Going to the doctor when he feels sick. Eating healthily. Submitting assignments and pitching for exams when he is a student. Picking up the phone to call his family in Kenya. Walking in the streets without fear of being mugged. Wearing his sexuality on his sleeve like it was an accomplishment. These things elude him. I see it now. He orders drinks without looking at the cost. “I am clumsy,” he says. “If you are consistent in doing things clumsily, people stop expecting things from you.” I think about this and wish that I was clumsy. “If you are consistent in not paying attention, people expect you not to know. Or to forget. If you forget to turn up for an examination, people stop expecting you to pass. I don’t care about anything really. Except writing. It’s the one thing I do well. The only thing I want to do really.” I want ask — “And dancing?” But I don’t. His sexuality matters a lot to him. When one looks at his social media presence, it is apparent that he is a lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgender, intersex activist. But he is mostly a gay activist. He abhors homophobia. I suspect that his attraction to South Africa is somehow related to the relative freedom to live as a clumsy gay man that does not have to worry about old school homophobia. When I read One day I will write about this place few years ago, I had tried to befriend him on facebook. I felt like I knew him in the way that great writing might deceive readers into an intimacy that does not exist. But like many real public figures that people clamour to associate with, he had reached his maximum ‘friend’ status. Sitting across from him though, I could sense the loneliness radiating from his frame.
Bashfully, I explain that I had tried to befriend him on social media. He responds generously and sends me a friendship request. I accept and then I am privy to his activism. His essay — How to write about Africa was a masterful demonstration of his love for the continent. But his everyday activism is about a truth he has known since he was five years old. Although I had picked up hints of his sexual orientation in the textual brilliance of One day I will write about this place, I am amazed at his authorial restraint in not naming it. I suspect that he thinks this was a weakness of the book. I differ on this score. The book is all the more beautiful for its shadows. Its hints. The silent recognitions are more satisfying because the reader works alongside Binya to sit with undeclared knowledge. The word may be called edging. But when the essay appears in 2014 under the declaratory title of I am homosexual, mom, it is not a simple confirmation or the fruit of delayed gratification. It is not only a lost chapter that should have been in the book. It is poetry. A long lick at a devastatingly decadent ice-cream at the height of a Kenyan summer. It is not a declaration either. It is a scream ricocheting off the walls of a crematorium or a lonely grave yard. His father is not there to hear him. He has died. And what about the rest of us who hear him? It does not matter. He does not care about our judgement. In the “wrong version” of events, he has whispered it to his dying mother.
Nobody, nobody, ever in my life has heard this. Never, mum. I did not trust you, mum. And. I. Pulled air hard and balled it down into my navel, and let it out slow and firm, clean and without bumps out of my mouth, loud and clear over a shoulder, into her ear.
“I am a homosexual, mum.”
Ethereal. Beautiful. Painful. Gut-wrenching. I will stop. But first, let me urge the reader to read Binya’s words again. To feel the air balled into his navel. And to exhale with him. In the correct version of events, his mother is not alive to hear his whisper. Diabetes claims her before he can leave South Africa and reach Nairobi. His clumsiness has taken care of that. His visa has long expired. Yes, the stupidity of our governments means that African’s cannot move freely in Africa. But all of Africa hears his wail. He is tenacious on social media. Now that we are social media friends on twitter and facebook, I see how he fights homophobia.
Binya wants to move about freely in the world. I know that after Johannesburg, he would love to live in Lagos. But Lagos will not let him be his clumsy self. And so, Nigerian homophobes bear the brunt of his acerbic tongue. He threatens to pull his work off literary websites when he sees homophobic slurs. I applaud him. We should be clumsy enough to be ourselves wherever we are. In Kenya’s Nakuru Golf Club, Lagos, Benin, Timbuctoo, Mississippi, Berlin, Delhi, a University of Umtata campus, or Johannesburg.
Binya wants his parting coffee to have four shots of expresso. We leave the Lucky Bean restaurant. Binya announces that he wants to go dancing at Liquid Blue. We walk with him and leave him in the hands of the tall Nigerian bouncer at the gay club. Binya wants to dance. We worry about his clumsiness. There is diabetes and stroke in his family. South Africa is not kind to people without medical insurance. We have a literary genius and activist in our midst and Grieve and I wish our local universities will employ him soon. Before his clumsiness puts his visa at risk again. For now, though, Binya just wants to dance and write in Johannesburg.
Hugo kaCanham lives in Johannesburg, South Africa but mostly longs for the village of Lusikisiki where he was raised on stories. He teaches Psychology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He reads and writes for work and for pleasure. He has published essays in Brittle Paper, Transition, City Press. You can see more of his work on his blog: hugokacanham. And follow him on Twitter @hugokacanham.
