Approaching 30

An esssay by HASSAN KASSIM

Excursion day – 15th March, 2020. 

The 1998 Nairobi bomb-blast memorial, previously the American embassy, at first appeared a refuge from the fast-paced streets. We weren’t privy to its identity, wandering in this unfamiliar city at the mercy of our tour guide, Ben. This part of the writing residency was geared towards sharpening our powers of observation, fortifying our prose with our most immediate objects.

The bomb blast centre, as I recall it, was a calm liminal space. Families with their kids were beaming on that overcast afternoon. 

There’s a passivity, I believe, that desecrates the sanctity of memorial spaces. The modern malaise of screen-mediated experiences comes bundled with the adaptation of shifting rapidly between contexts. Reality attains an ethereal nature. We, the habituated, evolved to lack the capacity to sit with things, to ponder. The sparks of our short-lived emotions are quickly fizzled out, overlayed with our onset of voyeurism. Our focus shifts towards selfies we’ll take, wide-smiling portraits staged for posterity. Yet in spirit we are scarcely present. We remain tethered to a secondary audience, announcing ourselves to them even here, on this national death site.

It is the culture of great tragedies to alter the identity of a space, becoming the foundation that wipes all that came before. 

My gut hollowed when I discovered what this place was. An austere feeling. I began decoding my own physiology. Before the onset of goosebumps, charged nodes of emotions usually cluster in my joints. They demand a burst of energy to break them down, releasing as vibrations that ripple  through me like shockwaves. I could feel the node formation begin as my awareness of the space deepened.

*

I was born in 1996, two years before the bombing. So the bombing was something I’d heard of off-handedly through the years. A clincher by Mr. Obanda in his social studies class, a footnote undeserving of more than a few seconds. I was born poor, a social group that gives even international events the intimacy reserved for neighbourhood gossip. And even so, the bombing of ’98 was spoken of with so much frugality in Mombasa. The bombing, off the top of my head, was always 9/11, which happened an ocean away, eclipsing all terror acts that came before. I attribute that to the scope of consequence, perhaps, which determines what tragedy holds in our imagination. Or perhaps tragedies at home need better publicists. 

Memorials, after all, function to allocate physical space. They root history in a place where it cannot be uprooted, it cannot be portable, and therefore cannot attain universality. Here’s the place where that terrible thing happened. Let us make sure it never happens again. The end. 

Memorials are knots of time, eternalised commemorations of what was, loops that play over and over, indifferent to the marching of time.

My heart has a raw point for terror attacks committed by Muslims. There’s always a complicity I feel, by virtue of faith and shared history. The modern world has unfortunately drilled that into me. It doesn’t isolate perpetrators. It blankets members of faith, and the burden of proof falls on us all to produce a communal statement of condemnation. As if peace is not a fundamental human want.

We walked into the memorial building, and they took us through the history of the bombing. A short film screened, survivors’ voices recounting the day in play-by-play detail. The heroes. The hero-worship. A testament to emerging stronger on the other side. 

My memory of the whole episode doesn’t burn as bright as it did those six years ago, but I recall how physically overwhelming I felt—knots of goosebumps rising one after another and concurrent fits that turned me into a human vibrator. Dismas, a fellow resident and Kenyan writer with an unmatched love for Raskolnikov, cupped my shoulder, noticing the fits of my body. Like any decent human being, Dismas later asked if I was okay, and I brushed it off. 

The reason that memory comes to me again years later is that it’s a buildup to me, still inside the memorial, when I stood before the wall enumerating the death toll—the ledger of victims. I scanned through it name by name, unsettled, until I finally landed on one: Hassan Jarso Soka. A Muslim name. A name that resembled mine. In a warped sense of the world, I breathed a sigh of relief. 

At least one of us died.

*

Twenty days after my twentieth birthday, I disappeared. I’m opting for a weaker description, painting it like a minor act in a magic show but that is to deliberately downplay the incident. I use caught sometimes, sometimes apprehended, all manner of words that reduce it to something minuscule, when in actuality, it was canon. I’d had an entanglement with law enforcement, and these words have never made it to my writing before: I was suspected of being a terrorist. 

Sometimes I think I became a writer just to tell that story. 

The confusion the night of the arrest. 

The escort with rifled men. 

The decimation of self. 

The insertion into the layers of urinary fumes in that sardine-like packed cell, 

The swarms of mosquitoes, as if they were farming them.

The first day in court was completely shattering. I beheld my charge sheet. It said that I was planning a trip to ISIS on my long holiday from university, that I had my visa ready, that I was sought for my IT skills. That night, the accusations were broadcast across the country in the 7 pm news. The next day, the story—with a picture of me in court—was published in the newspapers. Every guard I met since then would ask me if I was that learned fellow they were hearing of on the radio, every new person arrested confessed to having heard my story somewhere, sizing me up in disappointment because I wasn’t adequate to what they’d conjured. Nonetheless, I was a person of national interest. And it turns out the government, without any proof, was within their means to detain me for up to 90 days, but they outlined how magnanimous they were to ask for only 30.

If everyone has one story inside them, mine is of that day and the ten that followed—before being released in secret and told to go home. Days of courtrooms and jail cells and interrogations. All my twenty years were placed in a Petri dish, and I was answerable for all the things I did without much thought. From my Facebook profile picture which Sacha Baron Cohen’s bearded character, Admiral General Aladeen, and asked if it represented my support for terrorists, to which I had to clarify that it was a film, and I used it only because I loved the film; to that other time I travelled from Eldoret to Nakuru for a scholarship interview to the International University of Africa, school of medicine, in Sudan, I had to explain that I was seeking better prospects. Now I must absolve myself by stating that I possess no concrete IT skills like my charge sheet claimed in court, and if I had any intention of acquiring any, the episode was a major deterrent. My passport was clean, unstamped, just another utility I acquired after high school out of peer pressure. There was no visa to Syria I had applied for.

In the end, I’d had enough conversations with cellmates to know not to ask why they singled me out in suspicion. In fact, I understood: there were precursors. This whole pandemonium I found myself at the centre of stemmed from rumours that two Muslim students had travelled to join ISIS, branding my institution as a supposed hotbed of terror. I was now the third of three Muslim student leaders to have been arrested because of that, those before me disappearing without a trace.

I must confess that I possess a great deal of fear writing this, like that incident is not done with me. Awaiting my retelling of it after a decade’s silence for it all to begin again. After my release, I was still plagued by the verdict predicated by every cellmate who heard my story. My end was to be another extra-judicial killing in a few years, for the government makes no mistakes. Such killings were something we had grown accustomed to since Kenya’s involvement in the peace missions to Somalia. Those missions, launched to stabilise Somalia, had instead fuelled suspicion at home, casting Muslim communities as potential threats. Rumours spread that release was not freedom but merely a delay, that the government would come for you later, quietly, as they had for so many others. I’m aware that courage, in defiance of such outlined outcomes, is the substance that makes one live boldly—that if I must die, I might as well go out with a bang. Figuratively. But I’m not that bold. I went home and waited for the bullet.

As a young writer, you reference your starting out as the juvenile years. Your lack of experiences, or menial experience is not regarded worthy enough of saying something substantive about the world. You begin by thinking that the job is to plummet to the depths of yourself in hopes of surfacing with something meaningful about the human condition. But as soon as you arrive at something resembling a voice, you’re invited to your first writing residency. There’s something here they say, but we need to shed it of all its transcendentness. You need to shed the metaphysics and write about the plights of our lived experiences.

They don’t say that, of course. This lack of luxury to be apolitical. It’s all masked behind the duty towards our African identity. Your immediate realities must be spoken for in your writing. Your words are a weapon, when you initially thought of your words being beauty to ornament the world of its dullness. It’s tragic, if you ask me. A tragedy so great that it wipes out every writing identity you previously had.

The tragedy label constantly crops up at every defining moment. It has altered my clock. And yet I still find myself dividing my years into decades like a commoner. The first two are always this interlude to existence, you’re mostly driven and numbed by your free will. Then you arrive in your twenties, a decade spent in search of yourself. You grasp at different things, you by all means repel all possibilities of stuntedness and channel the potential you’ve always been told you had into your wildest convictions.

I’m at the end of that phase, the year, 29, before I cross over. A magical year, when all the sowing you’ve done finally begins to flower. That’s why I’ve been plagued by so much contemplation. What have I done for this existence I fought everyone for?

Tragedy alters identity, wiping away all previous identities. A tragedy opened my 20s, having me foolishly yield to the ways of the world. The stubborn human spirit that characterised my teens was simmered in. There goes another gifted child. I lived looking over my shoulder, in a panopticon where I could only be mild, attracting no attention to myself.

This is not to victimise myself, though. I’m nothing to feel sorry for. I’m wise enough to not want to assign blame. It’s my own fault that I lost the appetite for the world that yields itself to me each day.

After getting back to society, everyone in my hometown advised against going back to university upcountry for fear of the unknown. I knew I had to embrace the unknown, a lot of rapid change would disrupt the equilibrium of it all. So I went back. Miles away. To this place where I was outside of the familial protection, and guess what happened.

The people outside the university Muslim Society who asked me about what happened, I can count them on one hand. My greatest fear, my family’s greatest fear did not happen. There was no bravery in going back. It was just a normal resumption. The fear that there was still some impending doom in the corner, I still harboured it, for the remaining five semesters I had left, and yet nothing. I cut off friends for their protection, I said, I steered away from leadership, and all manner of being seen, and yet, nothing. I could’ve been something, and yet, nothing.

I’m trying to retrace this most defining decade of one’s life, these glorious 20s, convincing myself that they haven’t completely been wasted but I must accept that the most important thing that I did was read, like a man running out of time butthere is no virtue in just that. If one is to spend their entire lives gathering weapons, when are they going to battle?

29. 29 is a maturation year where things begin to make sense, to fall in place as you move to your uncaring thirties. Where the barrel that has always sat at the back of your head, without flinching, you tell them to shoot.

There is no damage much grander than the one we inflict upon ourselves. And no greater pain can we inflict upon ourselves than not laughing in the face of tragedy, holding them sacred. This is who I am. I am that wounded 20-year-old who was arrested from home and believed he would never come back. I’m that 20-year-old with ten days in his life that he cannot speak about. The tragedy is the void. The tragedy is we can only suppress it, and the lack of a physical space to commemorate it makes sure I always carry it with me.

The question would be, where does one go from here? Which the answer seems quite obvious. I go on. In spite of myself. I go on. The tragedy is to consider yourself a relic. The world will call you as it sees fit, but the tragedy is reliving a life inexistent outside of yourself.

That excursion day is the major thing I remember clearly in that residency, cut short by the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdown three days later. Flashes of that wall. Burdening myself with what wasn’t mine to carry in the first place. And I guess the thing about being stuck for a decade, you get a choice, to pick up wherever you want. And I choose to start from another conjured wall. A ledger to the tragedies that were my 20s. A ledger of what I could’ve been, could’ve done, but I had to restrain myself because of governmental incompetence.

I don’t search. I don’t scan. I just look at what the wall enumerates as a clustered collective. What not to be. What not to become. What to warn people against. A tragedy site, which now for the very essence of myself, has to become a battleground.