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Writers pay tribute to Binyavanga Wainaina

Wednesday, May 22, 2019 — updated on September 30, 2020 - 4 min read

Binyavanga Wainaina with writers Yvonne Owuor and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie during a Kwani? book party. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

By Elvis Ondieki

Binyavanga Wainaina was a wordsmith and his fellow writers are trying to find the best words to express their loss following his death on Tuesday night.

Some turned to poetry. Others chose brief but thoughtful reactions. In all, it was a testament of how the fallen writer and activist left people with a desire to express themselves as freely as they could.

He worshipped life.
Dived into it head first, broke his head on the rocks.
Didn’t matter. The rocks also shattered.
& out of old fragments, ten thousand still lives rub open their eyes and emerge.
An army made out of words, called into being by the mad, fierce cosmic summoning of this one who saw, who knew, who believed in another ‘us’, a wilder, fiercer, flamboyant (as he was) African ‘us’ writing our universe and then more, and then others.
….
Urghhh!
….
Goodnight, darling, goodnight.
Today, and tomorrow and the day after tomorrow...look...there is no one word that can contain (for me) the meaning of this, your crossing...(Look)…Next year maybe, or the year after that..
But today my love, as you stride (past us) towards those dim, unknown horizons….
A frantic, futile howl inside the wordlessness of this the darkest of nows…(a phrase that has been cried out before in disbelief....):
Requiescat!
Requiescat in pace!
My brother. My friend. My teacher. My champion. Iconoclast.
Oh my human! My human!
Good night, again. Goodnight, my love.

The gods have gone crazy. They have taken a second intellectual pillar in the space of a few months.
Binyavanga knew that Kenya was crazy. He knew that there was something deeply inauthentic and insincere about Kenya. He knew that the Christian, middle class nonsense some of us were raised on was preventing us from being whole.
And he struggled to be whole. To openly love whom he loved. To take his art where his imagination took it.
I first met Binyavanga in form six, when we went to Lenana School for the national drama festivals finals. We were both acting for our schools. Then we were in KU together for a brief moment before he left for South Africa. When I was in the US, he came to the college I was at to listen to my lecture. Can you imagine? It was such a pleasant surprise. I didn’t even know he was in the US.
When we came back, we met off and on and tried to be intellectuals and artists in this very dysfunctional space called Kenya. Binyavanga left us a rich legacy: Kwani?, the arts festivals and celebrations of urban creativity, against a rigid literati of the education system, especially at the university literature departments.
Those of us who grew up in the fake, Stepford Wives scenario that was the Kenyan Christian evangelical, bourgeois, heterosexual family are too shy, or too twisted, to admit that we grew up on a very dysfunctional social model. Binyavanga knew. And he tried to tell us.
Rest in love, my brother.