Being Human

The other day, the power had gone off and we were left in darkness with only one candle.
My son and I were in a fight over some insensitivity but we were like, on the road to recovery. We don't like to be in a fight for too long. Advantages/disadvantages of being a two-person family.

Well anyway, we were in the same room because we were sharing the candle otherwise I guess we'd still have retreated to our respective corners. He was reading a book and I was reading fanfiction on my dying phone. The J in my story had an alter ego; a cold sumbitch, clinical, ruthless. He was trying to shut it down and tuck it away into a forgotten corner of his mind.

And it got me thinking about our fight and coldness and how everyone has that part of them that is clinical, and emotionless. 

It's a hard part.

Cruel even.

Like the Soulless Sam from season six of supernatural and how he behaved like a droid.

The crazy thing is, when my son taps into that part of him that is cold, I always think he got it from his father. Even though, if you ask me, I will tell you that I have ice in my veins. Something happened that really brought that home to me that night.

I almost burned the house down.

See I was looking for some other candles and I found one tiny stub that was almost done. So I lit it and put it on top of a tray which was sitting on top of the fridge. Long story short, the candle burned down to its root and then set the tray on fire. 

I was in the loo at the time and my son was in the sitting room. I don't know how he noticed that the kitchen was halfway to being on fire, but he shouted my name and said something's burning and I just ran. 

But I didn't run in a panic or in fear. No, I just hurried.

Threw everything outside that was still burning and swept up the debris even as my kid stood frozen. He was clearly terrified. So I made a point to ask him if he was injured. He said no and continued to stand outside in the dark. I knew then that he was shocked and scared and whatever we'd been fighting about just ceased to matter.

Long story short, the house could have burned down but I stopped it. My kid did help me by pouring water on the flames. My heartbeat didn't accelerate, my breath didn't come short, my hands didn't shake, I wasn't moved. It was just a thing that happened.

I wouldn't even have noticed my lack of being shaken if my son wasn't. I was surprised that he was because he's not usually the kind of person who is emotional about things. 

Naturally, all this navel-gazing about the cold parts of us had me thinking about recent events and the question I keep asking myself - why did it take George Floyd for people to start caring about police brutality.

And what it comes down to, I think, is what you nurture. You see, unlike J, I strongly feel that this ice-cold part of us has a part to play in our lives. It enabled me to walk into that kitchen and handle things before they went too far out of control - also thank fuck we don't live in a wooden house.

And of course, that took me back to this whole thing we're living through and what makes some people less "human" than others. And I think it comes down to which part you nurture, and which parts you don't. If your life is one of hate and fear, you're living in survival mode, that cold part is supreme. It's in the ascendancy. So you have less humanity, less empathy, you're living on the edge.

And that was an interesting explanation to me of why racism. Instead of being a balanced person with all the various parts, you have this being who lives in fear and so all they do is react. Isn't that interesting? What do you think?

Africasplaining Is A Thing That Happens

The other day, I made some chapati, pilau and stew for dinner and posted it on my Instagram because I don't usually cook that lavishly on a daily basis with no reason. While composing the caption, I got the idea for this blog post because really it was this or have a really long caption on Instagram.

Nobody wants to read a blog post on Instagram, they're there for the pictures, right? So here we are.

Anyway, when I was writing Cinderella By Any Other Name, I had a beta reader tell me that I had gotten the food wrong.

That the protagonist's wedding was full of Indian food. That's because the guests were eating chapati, samosas, mahamri, among other things. Now when I saw that, my first instinct was to burst out laughing because what? You're literally telling me what people in my own country eat?

But then I asked myself, "Hey Annemarie, did you tell her that you were a Kenyan?"

And the answer to that was "No." 

I just assumed she knew since I found her on Instagram.

I guess we all know what they say about assumptions.

Food connects us. Indians and Arabs have been trading with the East African coast since medieval times. So a lot of what is known as Swahili Dishes by us here may be known as Indian food elsewhere. It's like the mystery of Mexican Beans and Rice which is very similar to African Beans and Rice. Where's the connection? My guess would be slavery.

This food thing, had me thinking about other instances where I was told by people from 'away' what was 'normal' for my region in my story. For example, another beta reader, for In Search of Paradise, told me that it was unrealistic for one of my heroes, Ben, to be a rugby player and also intellectually advantaged. Because he was a "jock" he couldn't also be a "nerd".

I don't think I need to tell you where that beta reader was from.

And so I had to explain that, "No, where I come from, the people who excel in sports - especially rugby - are also the brightest students. I know one actual rugby player who is also an actuary. And then I was thinking about why that is. Why are the brightest students also the sportsmen here, while in America, you cannot be both?

And what it comes down to is opportunity. 

In Kenya, the best sports-equipped schools with the best coaches and whatnot, are also the same schools which do well academically. However good you are at sports, you cannot rely on it to make a living. The backup is always a good education - so both things are valued. In the States, as long as you're good at sports, you're given a pass academically. Also for many of the economically disadvantaged, playing a sport is perceived as the only way out of poverty. So those people might not have the best schools in their districts but they can play football, or basketball or baseball use that as a ticket to a better school/university/life.

And so the myth grows that you can be either/or but you certainly can't be both.

The other major incident I remember of being corrected about my own fucking culture was when I saw one of the writers I was following was writing a book and they posted a snippet on Twitter. One of the creatures was named after a Kiswahili word but the way that he'd used it was wrong within that context. So I told him the correct way to do it.

He asked me for my sources.

So I say, "Me. I'm the source since I speak that language."

But, he says, "according to my research, this is how to write it. Do you have any conflicting resources?" So I sent him all the links still quite shocked that I don't qualify as a credible source for a language that I speak.

I tried not to take it personally but it still shocks me. I don't have to tell you what race or what country he was from, do I?

What all this comes down to is that there is one more type of 'splaining that is severely underestimated. That is telling Africans what actually happens in their own continent. The saddest part is that other Africans will also tend to accept that foreigners are better sources of information about themselves than they are. The other day, when Obama's brother sent that quickly debunked tweet about Obama's birth certificate, I replied that the man trying to retweet it as proof of something (I'm not sure what) should have just first read the replies to save himself some embarrassment.

So some other #MAGAT replied to my tweet with baseless justifications about why the tweet could be true. I laughed and congratulated him for Kenyasplaining my own country's history to me. And what do you know? Some Kenyan man came to the MAGAT's defence in my mentions. 

This lends credence to my theory that men are natural idiots, but that's a blog post for another day.

Opportunity Seems to Come Out of Nowhere but Nah...

Wow, guys.

The world is changing before our eyes, is it not? When George Floyd's daughter said, "My daddy changed the world" she had NO idea.

We're seeing the domino effect of Black Lives Matter because hey let's face it, not all of us value even our own lives as much as we do white lives or white adjacent lives. Hell, I hear the police in Kenya are harassing black protestors in front of the US embassy and leaving the white protestors alone. 

But let's go back to the genesis of this - Colonialism and the myth of White Supremacy.

Our history has been erased. Who we were, what we are capable of...even now it continues to be erased. The lack of COVID in New Zealand celebrated. But what about Mauritius? Also have eliminated COVID. Nobody is celebrating it. No, the press is waiting for African bodies to start dropping in the streets to train their cameras and say "You see! Africans are dying of COVID in droves."

But here we are, continuing to defy expectations. 

Nobody is talking about it. Yesterday I was thinking about how in other ways, everybody is erased from history except for white men. According to history books, they did everything. But think about it. Marilyn Monroe offered to sit in the front row of a club so that they would let Ella Fitzgerald perform. That's the only evidence of activism I have of the people around JFK. What if, as his sidechick, Marilyn did some whispering in his ear about civil rights? But she's never mentioned in his history aside from anecdotally so we'll never know. The women are never mentioned. But who is leading Black Lives Matter protests on the streets right now?

Living through 'interesting times' as they say really brings home so many revelations to me. Do you think K-Pop stans will be mentioned in the official history books? How they drowned out the voices of racists with fan cam videos? How they flooded Dallas police snitch sites with fan cam videos? How they matched BTS one million dollar donation to Black Lives Matter with a million dollars of their own?

No, I expect that will be buried in favour of whatever speech Al Sharpton will eventually make.

But what has brought us here? I blame food.

You see I write a lot of historical romance for a living and in my research on what a regency household served for dinner or what Scots ate in the 1500s, what jumps out at me is the sheer blandness of the food. So they travelled around the world and found that not everyone was living with boiled apples and roasted venison. They discovered places which had tea, tobacco, and spices. They discovered silk. They discovered precious stones. They coveted.

But they had nothing to trade. Nothing these people would want anyway, so they decided to take. And the way to take would be to use the one skill that they have honed better than anyone else. Manipulation and lying. They turned Christianity into a weapon. They used guns as a tool of power and fear. They decided to use the colour of their skin as a status symbol. They wrote the history books and so they turned myth into fact.

 Centuries of conditioning later, and most people didn't even question it. Not white people, not black people, not Asian people. 

Very many people still don't.

Every day though, those people grow less blind. Thank you, Cheeto Satan, for showing everyone white supremacy's ass.

So here's where opportunity comes in.

A man named George Floyd was killed by four policemen. His funeral, in fact, was yesterday. In the face of the protests, it was easy to forget that at the centre of this latest uprising is a dead man. Yesterday's funeral brought it home to me with a bang. Man, I hate funerals.

Anyway, so.

A man was killed, the four policemen who killed him were fired. And then it looked like that would be the end of that. Except...a video of a man being chased by two white men and subsequently killed had just been doing the rounds. Ahmaud Abery's killers were yet to be tried and convicted. Breonna Taylor was shot in her bed by police, as she slept when they raided the wrong house. George Floyd's death, captured in HD and lasting eight minutes and forty-six seconds was just that last straw. 

It was too much really.

So 1+1+1 made infinity. First locally, then regionally, then countrywide, then international; the cry for justice spread like wildfire. Now it wasn't just justice for George Floyd although that remains the kindling. No, it's justice for everyone who has ever been unjustly killed or hurt by police brutality. It's a cry for an end to that particular scourge.

People are finally seeing the biggest gang in the world for what it is. A racket. A tool of imperialism designed to oppress and suppress rather than to serve and protect. Or rather, they serve and protect the authors of imperialism. They make sure you and I, stay in line. 

And now people are saying NO.

It seems to have come out of nowhere, this opportunity to change the world but it's actually the result of slow attrition. Starting with Trayvon Martin and that jury which set George Zimmerman free and birthed the Black Lives Matter movement. George Zimmerman showing his ass so that anyone with half a brain cell KNOWS that the jury made the wrong decision. Watching Philando Castile die on Facebook live, knowing that Tamir Rice's killers were still working like they did not kill a twelve-year-old boy. Then When They See Us came out and showed how police obtain convictions. And every day, the tide turned a little more. Let's not forget eight years of an Obama white house meant that the generation that is responsible for a lot of change, the K-Pop stans, the Parkland students, the little girl in Flint, the white girls challenging their parents, grew up knowing that a black president is just a thing that happens. And it all came to a head with this one death. Opportunity looks like it just sprang up and yet, every little thing contributed to it. 

Speaking of which, I saw this account on twitter complaining about how libraries always claim they don't have books by black authors in their roster and she knows they lying. So I replied that my books are available on Scribd, Overdrive. 

An hour later she got back to me about one of my books. Like fastest sale, read and book review I've ever had. So because she was looking for black authors, I had my books in online libraries, and I'm black, but had I not answered her post, the opportunity would not have come to the good end it did. 

So in order to take advantage of fate, there must be action. Positive, deliberate action that is met with appropriate REaction.