March 8, International Women's Day
Until the lion tells his tale, the hunter’s version holds sway. – African proverb
(For Susan Ndung'u who never got to give her version of the story and to all the good men out there striving to do the right thing)
Her story:
I am Wanjiku. I am named after my paternal grandmother. I did not know her very well. When little, we would visit her monthly to take her the usual: flour, maize meal, sugar and a bit of money.
Wanjiku lived right at the bottom of a very steep and slopy hill. I dreaded this part at the end of our trip and was always afraid that I would fall while trudging down the hill. My mother would tell me to keep to the narrow, beaten trail otherwise I might trip over tangled grass. She was right. Once, I did not keep to the trail and I tripped, tumbling a third of the way down to my grandmother’s homestead.
My grandmother kept a very tidy homestead. Her cows were fed and watered as should. There were no weeds in her garden. Her granary had no mice. Once when I shyly asked her how this was so, she explained cryptically that to keep mice away, she did what she had to do.
My parents were not wealthy. I excelled in school thanks in great part to various bursaries and scholarships. Right before the end of my high school education, a generous benefactor promised my parents to pay for my university education. He kept his word and I found my way to an Ivy League university. There, I thrived in an outstanding academic environment. It was also there where I met Kinga.
Kinga was studying medicine. He was cerebral, extremely witty, and lots of fun to be with. He considered it his duty to use his knowledge in helping those without the means to help themselves. There was, therefore, no question in his mind on what he would do once he has finished his studies: he would go back home. I loved him and admired him for that.
Kinga finished his studies a year before I did. We got married a year later once back home. My husband would always tell me that he was my bulwark. He would never allow anything to come between us. I loved that. I felt safe with him. His patients must have felt the same way too. From what I could see, they loved him and trusted him. He was an excellent doctor, very human.
I got a job in an NGO and steadily rose up the ranks. Nine years later, I was running the NGO. It is at around this point that my marriage hit a rock. Kinga did not change overnight. No, the changes were subtle. At first, the barbs were funny, or so I thought. We did not have children, but this had never seemed to be a problem. We had each other, Kinga would tell me. I was not to mind what others said. But now, he would appear to chide me.
Before, Kinga would tease me and say that he was my first and only child. Now he would laugh and say that he had been upstaged by an abstract entity: my job. He was now the "other born," the lesser child, while my NGO, he would stress, was my baby, the first born. Hearing this, time after time, was no longer funny. Why did I work late some nights when he was not working late? He now would wonder. And did I have to keep on travelling? Was I not fed up of hopping on and off planes for all these years? I should probably leave a set of clothes in each part of the world I kept going back to.
He started calling the cities I flew to my lovers. But oh! Of course I trust you, he would murmur in my ear when he would see that I was getting upset. I am only teasing. But the so-called teasing would not let up. He started reading my emails, looking more closely at my expenditures, monitoring my calls. Darling, he would tell me, you are all of a sudden so busy that I thought I would ease things a little for you. Consider me as your personal caretaker, ha ha! His teasing became tasteless jokes which became barbs; barbs which evolved to snide remarks.
He killed my spirit the day when he said that were it not for my career and travelling, I would never have had all those multiple miscarriages and made it impossible for us to have children. During my final miscarriage, I haemorraghed so much, I almost died. The obstetrician/gynecologist said that that was it for us. Although Kinga apologized for his cruel comment, he did not stop talking about children: how he loved treating them at the hospital, the funny things that they said. Could he not see that it more than upset me, that it broke me just hearing him talk in such manner?
One Saturday evening, I was in kitchen in the process of kneading dough for chapatis. Kinga came to the kitchen for a chat. We talked about this and that, while I got the dough done. I, then, cleaned the kitchen counter and set out the oil as well as my heavy, black, cast iron chapati pan and a recipient for the chapatis. I am unable to explain how our conversation took a peculiar turn from talking and laughing about this and that, to having a heated discussion about children.
Kinga, finally raising his hand, palm outward to signal the end of our exchange, rose from the kitchen table and I, unable to let go of the discussion, followed him to the living-room. He turned towards me and with a mocking smile said, “Do you know the origin of the word “hysteria”? It stems from the word “uterus” and you, Wanjiku, a woman, should….”
He never got to finish his sentence. I raised my hand and the next thing I knew, he was lying down on the floor, unconscious.
I walked back to the kitchen, put the chapati pan on the burner and started dividing and rolling the dough into balls, smooth and without cracks. I did what I had to do.
His story:
I did not see it coming. Honest. Allow me to introduce myself. I am Dr. Kinga, a resident paeditrician at the Children’s Hospital.
I am the first of three siblings and am named after an illustrious grandfather who fought in the First World War with the King’s African Rifles. Kinga Sr. died when I was two, so I never got to know him. However, I feel like I know him for his feats have been recounted to me over and over again.
My grandfather was a man of his word and not only did he not abide fools gladly, but he also had no patience for slackers. In all that your hand finds to do, he would say, strive for excellence. Give back to the community that has nurtured you; our future depends on it, he would stress. He was a person you would have wanted in your camp in time of trouble.
After high school, I was accepted at an Ivy League university to study medicine. While at university I met a beautiful, brilliant, and absolutely with-it student. I was drawn to this girl who was very reserved. While other students found her aloofness slightly intimidating, I was absolutely charmed by it. Wanjiku carried herself with assurance and she sure did not abide fools gladly!
Wanjiku does not talk for the sake of talking. In her opinion, if you have nothing to say, then for heaven’s sake, say nothing. She is also very neat and orderly. Her grandmother, from what she has told me, was even more so. She had no mice in her granary. Is not that amazing?
Wanjiku likes nothing being out of place, all must be in order. Everything in the kitchen is neatly stored and labelled, each item on its shelf or in its drawer. The magazines on the coffee table are neatly aligned; nothing is off-centre. My wife is outstanding.
I courted Wanjiku as a gentleman should, in a way that Kinga Sr. would have approved. I never had any intention of living and working overseas. Wanjiku understood this and embraced my dream of coming back home to help others.
I graduated summa cum laude a year before Wanjiku. I promised to wait for her and I did. Like my grandfather, I am a man of my word. Wanjiku is a woman who makes me proud. She is, well, my backbone. Oh, how this drives Wanjiku up the wall. She says that almost all my metaphors refer to parts of the human body or to their functions. Well, I am a doctor, aren’t I? I am certain that if I told her that she is the wind beneath my wings, she would find that very inappropriate.
We have had a really happy marriage with its lot of challenges. I love my work with children. What I do is more than work, it is my vocation. I love children and would have wanted to have my own. However, this is the hand that life dealt us, our one wild card: childlessness. Oh, how we tried, miscarriage after miscarriage. We would go down for the count, and would somehow find the strength in each other to rebound, until the final round when Wanjiku almost lost her life. She had to have a hysterectomy. This was very difficult for both of us, especially for Wanjiku, who, thereafter, threw herself into her work. Melancholy hang over her like a veil. I would try to lift this veil by making her laugh. She has always loved my wacky sense of humour, but I guess with time, she tired of it. She found my humour not only ridiculous, but also galling and said that my jokes had become “barbs.”
Kinga Sr. used to say that one should never be a prisoner of his past. He had seen enough horrors during the war. He, nevertheless, refused to carry those horrors into his daily life. If you live in the past, he would say, you dwell on what you can neither change nor control, therefore, diminishing your life. I felt this applied very well to our wild card: it was no use crying over what we had no control whatsoever. I would try to shake Wanjiku, to wake her up to the present by joking that her job had become her baby. Once out of sheer frustration, I dared to suggest—and I admit that I was way out of line—that if she had not been working so very hard, she would have been able to carry a pregnancy to term. Wanjiku was extremely upset and I doubt that she forgave me for my callous statement.
Shortly after, I felt that our marriage was going through one of those rocky patches which made me think of lips puckering on coming into contact with a tart lime. As if this was not enough, one afternoon, her cell phone rang. As I took the phone to her, I happened to glance at the screen and saw that the in-coming call was from someone called David. That surprised me. I thought I knew all her friends.
I soon realized that this David person called her very often. Yes, I would rush to peek at the caller ID when her cell phone would ring. What on earth? Was she cheating on me? Who was this David? Was he a colleague? Was she really working late or was she keeping a tryst? Did this David accompany her on her business trips? I had to find out, so I started checking her emails, her bank account statements and eavesdropping on her calls. She must have known or suspected my shady behaviour because she became pretty edgy and felt that I was intruding on her privacy. I, of course, did not agree with her.
Some weeks later, I could not take it anymore and did what I should really have done in the first place: confront her. And you know what she did? She burst into laughter. I was pleased to hear her laughing again, although I did not see what there was to laugh about.
Turns out that “David” is Wanjiku’s best friend from elementary school; they met and bonded on their first day of school. Her best friend’s first name—as appears on her birth certificate—is Maria. Why then did she call her “David”? They had both participated in a school play. The boys had been given the feminine roles in the play and the girls, the masculine roles.
Maria had played the role of King David and Wanjiku had been Jonathan. This had been such a hoot that they started calling each other by their role names. So much ado about nothing! With that said, I doubt that men would do such kind of a thing: go around calling each other “Mary” or “Victoria” or “Juliette.” It simply would not do and if any men did, the rest of us would look at them twice and probably cross to the other side of the street. It just is not done.
Once the “David” enigma had been sorted out, I thought all was back to normal. Wanjiku seemed happier, almost the woman I knew before and loved. It was, therefore, with no apprehension that I joined her in the kitchen as she set about to prepare chapatis for dinner.
I told her a story about one of my patients which was rather hilarious. Wanjiku threw back her head and laughed her throaty laugh. What I loved about my little patients, I told her, was their ability to live in the present moment, however critical their situation was. I wished Wanjiku could try to do the same. I must have stirred up a hornet’s nest.
Wanjiku whipped round, half-laughed, started yelling at me and then, suddenly, stopped. I thought she was done so I rose from where I was sitting and headed for the living-room. She followed me and before she could continue her tirade, I, in a flash of hurt and anger, turned to her and started saying something about hysteria. I do not think I got to the end of my sentence. What I remember seeing is this raised hand holding the cast iron chapati pan. She must have whacked me with it for I felt this astonishingly loud ringing buzz and then darkness.
I doubt that Kinga Sr. ever had anyone, least of all my grandmother, thumping him over the head. Did I have it coming then? What am I going to do? I surely do not want to make newspaper headlines: “Doctor Battered by Angry Wife” or “My Wife Whacked Me on the Head with a Kitchen Utensil, Says Doctor.”
At the same time, the word “battered” does not sit too comfortably with me. We have all heard or read about battered wives, women who have been subjected to repeated violence by their spouse or partner over a period of time. To “batter” means to strike repeatedly with a hard blow. In human relationships, the hard blows can also be in the form of words. In that case, I am not really a battered husband, am I? But if this “incident” will give voice to all the battered men and women who find themselves beaten, or with broken bones, or burnt, or hacked, or stabbed sometimes to death, then I guess it will not kill me to appear on national media.
If Kinga Sr. were here, he would say that there are often two sides to every story, with either version having elements of truth as well as intended and unintended falsehoods.
Is there some central truth I missed about our marriage? Surely I do not have to join Maendeleo Ya Wanaume, the Men’s Development group, and boycott meals in my own home so as to delve into this truth and unearth the falsehoods and assumptions that led to the “incident,” do I? I doubt it and do not need to see my grandfather’s spectre nodding his head in agreement.
I feel like I have lost all control. My heart is flooded with tears. I will lie still on this hospital bed for a while and, thereafter, recuperate.
(Weaving alongside P. Muthoni Tongues, Burnt Food;
Inspired by M. Mwangola, C. Simeoni, and W. Mwangi)
