In Kwani Vol. 7: The Majuu Edition, Tee Ngugi recounts moments of his
sojourn in Namibia with memories of ‘lost love, hard times and the search for
self’. Indeed, the essay When You Arrive
At the Far End of a Continent echoes his conflicted view of a wide range of
themes that characterise his short story collection, Seasons of Love and Despair.
The
collection is made up of seven stories. Love
and Damnation is the first story, a narrative similar to the vain nostalgia
and self-destruction that consumed Jay Gatsby in the American classic, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The story traces the
life of Jula, now a rich man, with a huge farm full of ‘cows, horses and sheep
grazed in the meadows’.
However, Jula, like Gatsby, is unable to
recover from a past love that connected him to Isha, a prostitute, twenty five
years ago. Jula grieves over lost love until he meets Isha again when she comes
to his home asking for work. Before that, he had to seek refuge in innumerable
occupations only to ‘kill the yearning and memories through physical
exhaustion’.
Isha
finds him a saved man, married to Ruth, a devout Christian, whom he married in
a holy matrimony in the presence of Reverend Simon Mata, a man who will betray
him later. His obsession with Isha leads him to her servant quarters where he
finds her making love to Reverend Mata leading to the murder of the latter.
Tee
examines the hypocrisy of religion, lost love; women constantly heart-breaking
men leading to their downfall as evident in other stories: Mystery of the Missing Girl, The
Red Flower, and The House in the
Savannah.
For
solace, people resort to the bar where you find peasants talking loudly and
dancing perilously to the music from the juke-box trying to forget their
poverty. Life breaks everyone – schoolteachers, priests, peasants, prostitutes,
mechanics, politicians, and even university graduates. In Broken Lives, none is spared and the downfall of Melissa, formerly
a bright girl in school, reveals despair and haplessness at its peak.
The
writer employs the first and third person narrator perspective to walk the
reader into the crooked lives of characters such as Stephen Mwangi Thogoru in The Devil’s Dance. He is a jolly chap
who buys people drinks at Meko People’s Bar during the day, but murders them at
night. Thogoru is in fact a symbol of a
rotten society that will maim and kill at will thus forcing the poor to resign
themselves to the vagaries of fate. It is what compels the narrator to pose:
‘I was transfixed! Was this how we died?
Quickly and agonizingly, and at the hands of a presumed friend?’
A
ruthless realist, Tee is not afraid to sketch a wasteland littered with
sadness, betrayal, endless disillusion, hopelessness – in fact, except for the
last story, Love in the Age of Innocence,
all end tragically. Some of his characters constantly peer into the lives of their
counterparts through spaces left by the curtains signalling a world of eroded
privacy and the determination to conceal crimes.
The
book is available at the Prestige Bookshop.
