how to write about africa binyavanga wainaina analysis

I have slept with three women in my life. I, Binyavanga Wainaina, quite honestly swear I have known I am a homosexual since I was five. I cannot risk illegal deportation, he says, and losing everything. I should not be travelling carelessly in that artist way of mine, without papers. He told me to not risk losing my ability to return to South Africa by coming home for the funeral. Three days ago, he told me it was too late to come to see her. I will call my Auntie Grace in that family gathering nanosecond to find a way to cry urgently inside Baba, but they say he is crying and thundering and lightning in his 505 car around Nairobi because his wife is dead and nobody can find him for hours. It will take two more days for me to leave, to fly out, when, in the morning of 11 July 2000, my uncle calls me to ask if I am sitting down. I am rushing, winding up everything to leave South Africa. Relatives will rush to see her and, organs will collapse, and machines will kick into action. But she is in Nakuru, collapsing, and they will be rushing her kidneys to Kenyatta Hospital in Nairobi, where there will be a dialysis machine and a tropical storm of experts awaiting her. I am hurricaning to move my life so I can see her. I am living in South Africa, without having seen my mother for five years, even though she is sick, because I am afraid and ashamed, and because I will be thirty years old and possibly without a visa to return here if I leave.

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. Nobody, nobody, ever in my life has heard this. But surely the jerk of my breath and heart, there next to hers, has been registered? Is she letting me in?

“I have never thrown my heart at you mum. My heart gasps sharp and now my mind screams, sharp, so so hurt so so angry. It grooves so easy, a breath, a noise out of my mouth, mixed up with her breath, and she exhales. She will listen, even if she doesn’t hear. I will whisper, louder, in my minds-breath.

She is so big – my mother, in this world, near the next world, each breath slow, but steady, as it should be. She is awake, listening, soft calm loving, with my head right inside in her breathspace. I will arrive on time, and be there when she dies. Because this time I will not be away in South Africa, fucking things up in that chaotic way of mine.

I was putting my head on her shoulder, that last afternoon before she died. A lost chapter from One Day I Will Write About This Place.

How to write about africa binyavanga wainaina analysis