by Shingai Njeri Kagunda
Anu’s parents declared him a girl when he was born but as soon as he was old enough to start eating knowledge, he told them he knew he was a boy. His skin would peel whenever he was put in a dress, and his hands felt like they belonged to someone else. He ate the knowledge of himself secretly, quietly at night before he fell asleep, and it felt all at once whole and incomplete and the truest thing he had ever known. That was the first time he was certain he could taste knowledge. Of course they didn’t believe him at first, but then he started eating their knowledge. When he found a strand of his mother’s kinky afro he plopped it into his mouth without thinking. He found her fear and told her about it.
He told her that she did not have to worry about his spirit going to hell, he told her she was a good mother, and even if she wasn’t a good wife, it didn’t matter. It was enough for her to just be a good person. That was the first time she cried in front of her child. Bewildered that he was a mirror, reflecting what she did not know she needed to know.
Two years later Mama and Baba separate. They do not divorce yet, because that would be too much of a scandal in the church community. Mama Anu has enough knowledge repeated back to her by her child to know that whether she deserves better or not does not matter as much as her child’s knowledge being protected.
When Anu’s Aunty comes to visit here and there, after the separation, he mostly hides in his room. He doesn’t really like this Aunty, but she is Mama’s older sister and mum always says you are to respect your elders even if you don’t like them. Anu has mostly thought this doesn’t make sense. Especially at his age, when he knows so many grown ups lie about the truths of themselves.
The first incident happens accidentally when Anu is fourteen. Mama Anu is away most evenings for her night school class and Aunty Miri is cooking dinner. She asks Anu to come keep her company in the kitchen and he grudgingly obliges. He has a hack already. All he has to do is ask Aunty Miri basic questions and she will talk and talk and talk about herself for hours on end. He doesn’t even have to listen while she talks, he can zone out, thinking about the secret knowledge he has collected and tasted from strangers around him.
Usually, most of Aunty Miri’s monologue is manageable as long as he can escape into the back of his mind, the things she says about “these” and “those” groups of people he tunes out. This time it is harder to disappear into his own mind, he can't help but tune back in, catching onto how this is not the country that God and the president had promised it would be.
“Lakini yenyewe, that president. You know we prayed him into that seat. Now look, he has gone and taken what God has given him for free and turned it into a playground for him and his friends. We have to pray harder Anisa.”
Anu balls his fists at the name and wills all of his intention into the chopping of vegetables Aunty Miri is busying herself with. The knife slicing in to chop onions, tomatoes, carrots, and ginger for the stew his mother loves.
“Do you pray for your Baba?” She continues without waiting for an answer. “I told your mother before she married that man, I told her that his people were not to be trusted, but that woman is stubborn. It is no wonder she has raised such a child.”
Aunty Miri looks Anu up and down and up again. He twists his neck waiting for what he knows is coming.
“You can’t just be normal, Anisa? Already, it is stressful enough with your mother having to raise you by herself now but everywhere you go together they ask questions even she does not have the answers for.”
Anu, fists balled, staring at the knife chop chop chopping away does not respond. Aunty Miri has never been the type of woman who needed a response to continue talking.
“There is no sense in talking to a child whose fruit falls from a stubborn mother is there? Lakini surely, you know she does not know how to talk about you? Your mother says you are her child, not her daughter, just her child. When people ask more she does not know how to respond.”
Aunty Miri gets more and more worked up, chopping with ferocity as she talks. Anu holds his breath for thirty seconds tight tight counting. The knife catches flesh, slices. Aunty Miri gasps, choking on her words as blood splutters out of the gaping wound. Anu unclenches his fists, adrenaline pumping through his veins, awoken from what feels like a trance. He runs to fetch water from the sink as Aunty Miri looks for serviettes to wipe around the deep clean cut. Anu puts a little salt in the water the way Mama taught him to do for wounds and finds the cotton balls in the hidden drawer at the back of the kitchen counter.
Aunty Miri sits on a high stool and bites her lip as Anu takes her hand and dabs all around her palm with the salty water. The hunger he has begun to become accustomed to, the desire for knowledge gnaws at his belly as he bandages the wound. He staves it off, but only for so long.
“You…” Aunty Miri whispers as he cleans, “look like your mother.”
“I think you should go lie down on the couch for a bit.” Anu says. “I’ll finish off the stew. The water is already boiling.” He leads her to the brown leather couch that is almost as old as Anu. He goes back to finish cleaning the kitchen and slips on the pool of blood he missed when wiping down where Aunty Miri was standing. He catches himself with his elbows, his lips grazing the floor. He lets himself drink. Aunty Miri’s blood tastes like ginger, and lemon honey tea which is new. The knowledge he has been given of people can be anything from what they had for breakfast to their deepest fears. He tastes something else too, something that scares him.
“What are you doing?”
Aunty Miri is on the other side of the kitchen window, wrapped palm cradled in her other hand, staring at Anu who does not have an answer for her.
**
“The child is cursed I tell you, cursed, I know what I saw. Okay?”
“Listen, Miri, I know it does not make sense, but I think you should hear what Anu has to say.”
“Anisa not Anu. You see dada, this is why the child is cursed; as if a person can just decide who and what they want to become just like that. That is not the way the world works and hear me well, there are consequences for pretending that it does.”
Mama Anu is silent for half a heart-beat, then she takes her sister’s hurt hand in her own, uncannily similar to the way her child had merely a few hours before.
“Do you remember when we were younger, and Baba would make us stand through reading ten chapters of scripture every evening. How he would beat us for falling asleep, not paying attention, or not having memorized everything word for word.”
Aunty Miri looks away, shame and denial taking turns as expressions. There are many things they do not bring up anymore from their childhood. She does not understand why her sister would want to talk about any of it, let alone now, yet Mama Anu continues.
“Do you remember the way he would make us perform in public; the perfect family. We played his game. We smiled and hid the bruises, like Mama did. Do you remember what you told me? What I have always carried with me even after I became my own person, after I married my own husband, after I had my own child? The thing you told me that I have never forgotten that I will never forget, it is just for now, we are going to change it.
We get to change it dada. That man told us that our value could only be found in being the most disciplined, righteous daughters who would never ever disgrace him, and look at us now ehh? You have never been married, and I am separated from the father of my child. The one who our whole family came to give me away to. We changed it.
We changed who they said we were going to be, and you know what Miri, tuko sawa. Anu, my child has been more honest than any one of those men and women who stick up their nose at how I have decided to raise him. More honest about himself and about those who love him. Why do you think I left his father? I had to protect my child’s honesty, my child’s right to change it and change it and change it over and over again, until Anu’s own skin is his home. Now will you be like the man who refused to see anything outside of his narrow view of what a world is, or will you be the sister who taught me how to listen to change?”
Anu who is standing with his ear against the door holds his breath. Ever since his mother left his father, she has been less afraid of her own shadow. This is the most direct he has ever heard her speak to her older sister. The silence in response is so loud Anu thinks he can hear his mother’s, his auntie’s, and his own heartbeat. He walks out of the room where his mother sent him to go do his homework while they talked.
“You are sick.” This is the second time he has said these words. He barely got through it the first time before Aunty Miri denounced him to all the realms of hell, and called him every word for demonic in several languages. He was on the floor, tasting her blood, being hit with the knowledge of dying blood cells. This was before his mother was finally called to come intervene before Miri slapped “Shatani” from the pits of Anu’s soul.
Now after his mother’s conversation with Aunty Miri, he wonders whether she will finally listen. That is all that matters, whether she curses him out or not. What he tasted in her blood matters more than anything her curses and words could do to him. The refrain Mama used to sing for him jumps into his brain “stix and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”
These words, the ones he has for Aunty Miri, hurt. He says it again. “You are sick, Aunt Miri. Ni mbaya.”
Mama walks up to Anu, bending on one knee by him in the hallway between his bedroom and the kitchen. “What do you know baby? Did you get anything else?”
She softens Anu with a gentle shoulder rub. “Tell us her knowledge.”
Anu’s heart beats almost past the touch of his mother’s fingers on his chest. He does not know how else to say the worst truth he has tasted. Aunty Miri’s body is eating her up inside out. “Cancer.” Anu says, “like the one you told me Nyanya had in the skin.”
Aunty Miri looks away and Anu recognizes the other things he tasted in her. Fear, shame, denial. His mum looks up at Aunty Miri with a question in her eyes, concern flooding her expression.
“You told me you were doing routine tests at the hospital, what were they for?”
Suddenly Aunty Miri’s bleeding finger has become the most interesting thing in the world to her. She fiddles with the edge of the wrapped bandage. Anu knows that when adults express a feeling there is always hidden knowledge tangled somewhere below, underneath the bigness of the loud feeling. Aunty Miri’s anger does not scare him because he knows underneath it there is so much fear.
“Miri, answer the question.” Mama prods gently.
“I…uhh, I” Aunty Miri stutters, and in this moment, she is not his mother’s bigger older, meaner sister. In this moment she is a small girl in a grown woman’s body: overwhelmed and scared and caught in a secret she did not even know she was holding onto. She clears her throat.
“I did not lie.” She shakes her head emphatically to prove her point. “I was unwell, I didn’t think it was anything unusual. Menopause fatigue, that’s all I thought it was. The doctor said we should do a cancer test. I have not received the results yet, so I don’t know. I didn’t lie.”
She shakes her head again, a little tremble in her voice. Mama Anu leaves his side and walks towards her sister whose shoulders shake more the closer she gets.
“Ohh dada.”
Anu can hear in those three syllables the history of their whole lives. The pain, the heartbreak, the jarring reality of potential loss. This knowledge he does not need to lick, or bite to know. This knowledge catches in the air like static, electrocuting every breath with the taste of heartache.
Aunty Miri looks at him and says “I’m sorry, Ani-Anu.”
*
The second incident is the last time Anu sees his father. The incident itself is not his fault, he swears it is not his fault as he is dragged into the principal’s office with the stupid girl Janelle! He was caught biting her arm but only because her, and those dumb kids made him do it. Then he told her knowledge to her and she didn’t like it. It is not his fault she doesn’t like it but the principal takes her side anyway.
The teachers always believe other students over him. He knows they call him a problem child behind his back, and they call him a girl to his face. He doesn’t know what they hate more, the fact that he isn’t a girl or the fact that he always tells the truth when he is asked for it. He has learned that most adults barely even know what truth is. Janelle’s truth was that she ate her sibling in the womb. Vanishing twin syndrome. The words popped up in his thoughts as soon as Anu tasted the sweat glaze on Janelle’s forearm. And the fact that she thought she was better than everyone around her even though her dad was that rich politician that everyone knew had stolen money from his constituency. The second part of the statement is what gets Anu in trouble.
Even after three ruler hits, Anu does not apologize or take back his words. When Baba Anu walks in, he is the last person Anu expects to see. What Anu does expect is everything that comes out of the man’s mouth. Baba Anu says he is disappointed, and Anu says it does not matter. His father grabs him by the elbow, hissing and growling.
“This thing of yours, ni laana, umesikia? You have cursed this family, your mother and me. Nothing lives with unwanted truths.”
This is nine months after Baba and Mama Anu have separated, three months after he predicted Aunty Miri’s positive cancer results, and one month after she has begun going for chemotherapy. The school confused pick up days and called Baba Anu to come collect their unruly child instead of Mama Anu. Anu does not cry when his father digs his sharp fingernails into the tender flesh of Anu’s upper arm. He does not cry when his father whispers curses, wishing this child had never been born, wishing moreso that this child had been born normal like every other child. In fact, Anu does not even cry when his father yells at him incoherently in the car on the way to his mother’s home, begging Anu to tell his mother to take Baba Anu back. By the time they get to Mama Anu’s house, Baba Anu has started crying, asking Anu for forgiveness, saying how he will change his ways if that is what it takes. Anu is bored. Bored and angry.
Baba even goes so far as to give Anu his tears, demanding that he drinks them.
“Just see.” Baba Anu says, “you will see I am telling the truth. Just tell your mother to take me back vile nimebadilisha. Taste and you will know it is true.”
Anu indulges him, lifting the scarred wrinkled palm with captured tears to lips. He sucks and lets the water flood his taste receptors with knowledge that makes him want to punch the air in his chest. His father waits, holding his breath as Anu swishes the tear around his mouth. Anu looks up at Baba and says, “all this tells me is that you are a cowardly, selfish man who cares more about how other people see you than about loving people the way they ask to be loved.”
Anu spits on his father’s shoe as he grabs his bag from the back seat of the car and runs to the front door of Mama Anu’s two-bedroom apartment, leaving Baba Anu stunned on the sidewalk for the first time in most of his lifetime with no more words to say. Only when it is safe from people who do not deserve his tears, does Anu finally cry. When his mother asks what happened, all he can get out is, “They hate me, all of them hate me. I shouldn’t have been born.”
“Who are they?” Mama Anu gently rocks her baby back and forth. “They are no one, my baby.” She hushes him and holds him close, the way she did when he was small. He cries and tastes his own tears and cries more until there is nothing, he wants it all gone, the knowledge, the truth that no one wants to hear. It is unfair that he has to carry it. Why can’t everyone just carry their own knowledge of themselves.
“You know something Anu?” his mother says, “you are not special.”
She says it so softly, in a way that makes the content of her voice jarring.
“Or rather,” she continues, “you are only as special as everyone else is special, as different as everyone else is from everyone else. Your honesty, the knowledge you carry that is deeply rooted in the truth of yourself is tied to the truth most of us have been taught to ignore. If they make you feel unwanted it is because they do not know how to want themselves. In fact, I believe it would do a lot of people good to just hear that they are not that special. There is so much more than everyone’s little tiny experience of the world.” She shakes her head. “You know I learned in my physics night class that the earth is 0.0000000000000012% of the whole universe? Ayii chineke. People need to get over themselves.”
Anu laughs, hiccupping through his tears. His mother smiles and tickles him. “What? You think I am funny now?”
Anu says. “I spit on him.”
His mother raises her eyebrows.
“Spit on who now?”
“Baba.” Anu looks away. “he has never been truthful to you, and the things that he said to me…” Anu falters, remembering his father calling him a curse. His mother squeezes him tighter and this time he does not need to taste her to know that her squeeze is more anger than anything else, anger that shields him, covers him, protects him, even from itself. Her voice is steady.
“You do not have to see him again, not if you do not want to.”
And that is that. Baba Anu will not see Anu again until decades after, when Anu is a grown man with more knowledge than a little wounded boy-girl’s heart knows what to do with.
On this night however, after the sniffles and the giggles in memory of Mama’s stories of spitting on people in her youth, there are cuddles on the couch, and a hot cup of drinking chocolate for Anu while Mama drinks Rooibos from a big mug she holds close to her chest. They watch Spongebob Squarepants and Anu shows Mama the tiktok Afro-beats rendition of it. When it is time to go to bed Anu tosses and turns, not knowing what to do with his body. Mama asked him if he would like to sleep in her room but he knows there are some nights that he has to be with his own knowledge, so he bites off his fingernails and this is what he learns:
1. With his left thumbnail in his mouth, Anu learns that he does in fact want to have been born. There is something inside every muscle of his body that fights for air and blood to race through his body. Every fibre of his being exists because it wills itself into being.
2. With his right middle fingernail, Anu learns that he is still holding tear-saliva in his mouth which he did not want to swallow. Leftover from his father and his own, intermingled with spit. He does not know which one of them the knowledge belongs to.
3. With his forefinger nail, Anu realizes that his father’s knowledge was more than just the darkness of empty promises, that his father’s knowledge had committed to growing and being better for them. But it is too little too late.
4. With his left ring fingernail, Anu realizes that his knowledge clouds over other people’s knowledge.
5. With his right pinkie nail, Anu realizes that his resentment is the reason his father will not return. He accepts this, knowing that nothing that has been broken can be fixed without time.
Anu stops biting his nails and rocks himself into a fitful sleep.
**
The country that Anu is from changes. It is a country that has always changed but this time it feels different, or he is merely old enough to hear the differences. He takes his mum to the salon close to their house, where Denno gives her micro locs. Baba used to say Mama’s hair was like a cow’s tail, long and luscious. Anytime she wanted to cut it he would look at her disapprovingly. When she left him, she cut it all and started again with a tiny afro. Then she read the story in the paper about the death of the woman who fought against the settlers long ago. The one who had dreadlocks soo long they reached down to her ankles.
Mama often says, these days, “we are on our way to freedom.” She sings Miriam Makeba songs and dances to Hugh Masekela’s marketplace. Anu who is sixteen now wonders what the instrumentalists sweat would say about their lives. The drummer and saxophonist tag each other back and forth in the concert that travels back through time on their TV screen. Anu wears baggy sweatshirts to hide the way his body changes without his permission, and he wonders if the freedom in Miriam Makeba’s voice can be eaten.
Money does not work the way it used to. Zeroes at the end of every pricetag increase, and everyone is talking about leaving, migrating. But to where? No one talks too deeply about the how of migrating. The president on the TV screen promises that he is working to make deals with countries in the Northern hemisphere, countries that would eat their Black labour for the value of a higher currency.
Denno at the salon says, “yes I know, majuu you struggle but at least there is cashflow there. Here you struggle and there is no cashflow and no imagination. We need more imagination.” He starts talking about some guy called Ramdas and his philosophies.
Denno has always been kind to Anu. When Anu first came into the salon he was so overcome with the hunger for knowledge that he started eating hair strands he found on salon combs. Denno laughed it off, talking about how nothing surprises him in the salon industry anymore. He had seen stranger things. Denno is good at getting answers without being direct.
“Sikiza kijana, kama unasikia njaa tunaweza nunua chipsi while you wait for your mother’s hair to be finished? Usikule nywele at your big age.”
This is the first time Anu shares why he eats what he does to someone outside of his family who believes him. When Denno asks how the knowledge eating works for him, Anu shrugs his shoulders and says, “you want to see?”
Denno cuts half a centimeter off one of his locks in the back and hands it to Anu who plops it in his mouth, rolling it under his tongue so the stringy dry strands get wet enough that they don’t get stuck at the back of his throat. He is flooded with the knowledge of Denno’s spirit. It feels light; soft soft like clouds. The one who says to his friends often, life is for living not for waiting. There is also shame, and fear. There usually is with all adults who have been told they have to live one way. Anu shows Denno with his words what he has eaten.
“You are going to be an okay father. You already know that there is no one way to be ready.”
“Ayii kijana.” Denno immediately leans against the wall, as the truth fights its way past denial, working with gravity to pull his body to the ground. He sighs, looking like he has no energy left to fight whatever it is he has been fighting.
“I love the girl but this?” he shakes his head back and forth, “this, I was not prepared for.”
The secret of Anu’s knowledge eating uncurls itself into rumours and gossip that spread throughout their neighborhood. He enjoys it, the way people see him now in a way that they have never seen him. Even when the knowledge is heavy, it is true, and that comes with a sense of certainty. Anu knows more than anyone what it is like to live with heavy knowledge. When school is on break, Anu spends time at the salon with Denno even when his mother is not there. He learns how to wash and blow-dry hair. Denno even gives him pocket money. Soon he is eating the knowledge of customers from every corner of their city.
He tells Mama Joe that she needs to quit her job. When she asks if she will find another one he shrugs his shoulders and says the knowledge eating does not work like that. He tells Sof to break up with her boyfriend already, the one whose anger becomes bigger and bigger the longer they are together, and she does. Most of the time he is only telling people the truth that some part of them already knows, but does not know how to confront.
It is not surprising as it goes with these things that people start demanding more.
Aunt Miri’s friend from church, Mrs. Sudu comes to the salon and asks for Anu to heal her sick child. She has been praying and praying and the doctors still do not have good news for her. She heard about Anu’s interpretation of Aunty Miri’s sickness. Somehow the story became Anu’s truth eating powers saved Aunty Miri’s life.
The truth is Aunty Miri is alive because she went for chemo and the community changad to make sure she had enough money to pay for good medicine so that now she is in remission. All Anu did was make it safe for Aunty Miri to be afraid with her family.
He cannot heal and he says this to Mrs. Sudu when she brings him an eyelash from her sick child with tears in her eyes. What he does tell her when he wipes one of the tears that fall and touches it to his mouth, is that she is stronger than she has been told she is, and yes it is unfair that she has to be because strength is not a sign of goodness, but she carries what it has meant, does mean, and will mean to survive in a way that many people do not. Whenever she is asked after this what Anu’s knowledge revealed to her, she just shakes her head and says, “from the mouth of babes.”
Denno brings a new girl to work one day, she is young, about Anu’s age. Quiet at first, stand off-ish, grumpy. She barely acknowledges Anu and that irks him, especially when all of the attention Denno usually gives goes to the girl instead. At some point in the course of the day Denno makes a passing comment introducing her as his younger sister, Wandia. Anu cannot see the resemblance.
“You have a younger sister?” He whispers in the back to Denno during a lunch break when Wandia leaves to go on a walk by herself. She’s barely interacted with the customers and has only showed vague interest, when Anu did his knowledge eating for some of them. Denno is unbothered.
“Sijakuambia? I’m sure I have told you.”
Anu shakes his head fervently. He is certain he would have remembered. Denno shrugs and takes a massive bite out of the chicken wing he holds between his thumb and forefinger.
“Mjuaji. Si you already know everything anyway.” He says between mouthfuls and does not offer more information.
*
The first thing Wandia says to Anu voluntarily is “You are a liar.”
Anu is so stunned he does not even know how to form the question to ask what she means. Then as if nothing was said, she is gone to another customer, and another and another and the morning passes like water. This time when Wandia goes on her lunchbreak walk, Anu follows her. She walks quick quick, and he has to jog to keep up with her long legs. She barely acknowledges his company, but she does not tell him to go back. After ten minutes, she finally stops. Anu inhales to catch his breath as she sits down on the rock jutting out of a little bed by a stream he has never noticed.
“Is this where you go? Everyday? How did you find it?”
She grunts, and unwraps her smocha. The smell of roasted sausage and fresh-cut kachumbari on warm melt-in-your-mouth chapati intercept Anu’s nostrils like angry wind. He sits down beside Wandia, and opens the container where mum packed pilau and beef stew for him. He notices her watching him as he takes a bite. An in.
“You want some?” he holds out the container so that the flavours can hit her nose the way her smocha hit his. She shakes her head.
“I’m okay.” She leans back on the rock, looking up at the sky. She inhales deep and holds her breath so long Anu is scared she might suffocate. He has never wanted to eat someone’s knowledge as much as he now does with her, but something gnaws, the feeling that she will reject that idea, that she guards her knowledge even tighter than most people do.
“What did you mean?” He asks instead. “When you said that I am a liar.”
She shrugs her shoulders and closes her eyes, half eaten smocha nestled in its wrapping on the rock.
“You don’t go around telling people they’re liars.” He says hoping his voice carries more meaning than his expression, seeing as she doesn’t seem interested in even opening her eyes to look at him. “People don’t just do that.”
“Don’t lie then.” She says, eyes closed, half fed, a lizard on a rock under the sun.. He is annoyed with himself for staring, but it is hard to pull his eyes away from the long lashes, high cheek bones, and septum piercing that glints, refracting light. There is some redness on the skin around the piercing, like it is a recovering wound.
“I don’t lie.” Anu says between gritted teeth. He does not want her to have that perspective of him.
“Overcompensating is the same thing as lying.” She opens her eyes and gets up on her elbows. The sound of the stream bubbling carries almost as loud as the people moving about their day behind them. Hawking bodies flittering in and out of the marketplace, cars honking at stubborn buses that take up too much space with drivers who have a hard time following any type of rules. All of this is behind them, and for the first time in a long time Anu feels almost quiet. He does not need or want their knowledge. Only the girl in front of him.
“I’m not going to let you taste me, you know?” the corner of her mouth lifts.
“I know the craving. The hunger for it. You’re better at hiding it more than others I’ve met.”
“Others?” Anu hates that she speaks in half meanings, teasing him with words that could be interpreted many different ways.
“Yes, you’re not special you know.” And the memory of Mama Anu saying the exact same words to him returns. Wandia stands and walks towards a jacaranda tree growing by the water. She bends, loosening mud by the base of the tree with her fingernails, and lifts the loose sediment up to her lips. She chews the mud and swallows while Anu stares mouth agape. She laughs, well something close to a laugh.
“You eat fingernails, hair, skin, and this is what is finishing you?” She squats, sifting the rest of the mud between her fingers. “This land is filled with secrets. Hidden knowledge of those who came before and those who have not yet come. What you do with people can be done for nations by tasting the soil.”
Understanding dawns on Anu.
“You eat knowledge too?” she does not answer so Anu asks more questions. “What did you mean when you said I am a liar? And you said there are other knowledge eaters? What did the soil tell you?”
Wandia pulls her phone from out of her jeans pocket and looks at the time.
“We need to head back.”
She starts walking, not waiting to see if Anu is following or not.
**
He follows her every lunch break after this, asking her questions that she half answers. They take walks around their little corner of the world, finding streams, spaces between buildings, accessible rooftops to sit on and watch the transient nature of their moving city. Everything feels uncertain these days. They start to exchange knowledge: slowly with words, new information being offered here and there.
Wandia asks good questions. Anu immerses himself in the answers he offers. She is more interested in trying to know him than in getting him to reflect her knowledge back to her. She tells him about the blood that was shed on the land they now work, and live, and build on. The curse of ancestors, whose needless death caused by the power hungry have not been mourned. Those are the secrets of the soil she says. The knowledge that it is causing the collapse of a nation that speaks in silence.
“You cannot eat the knowledge of the land you are on, if you are not honest about the truth of yourself. That’s why I call you a liar.”
“I have been eating my own knowledge since I was old enough to call myself by my own name.” Anu pushes back, frustrated.
Wandia shrugs.
“That’s something you must figure out for yourself. I can tell when a knowledge eater is blocked, and I see that in you. Knowledge eaters who aren’t honest with themselves are dangerous. That’s what happened with the president.”
Anu looks up at this.
“The man who has been blamed for the active falling apart of our country’s economy is a knowledge eater?”
“How do you think he got so many people to believe he was God’s chosen inheritor of our national throne? He ate our people’s knowledge. I mean,” she shrugs and looks at the city skyline, “everyone is always eating something, but there are some who just consume and consume and consume, and then instead of feeling, they bury what they have swallowed. Power has done that to him. You can have knowledge and ignore it, refuse to see it as truth. Most people already have the knowledge of themselves, but they refuse to see it as truth until someone like you comes along and confronts them with it.”
“What is the point of all this?” Anu asks, drawing his knees into himself.
“Point? I don’t know if there is one. I mean, knowing the truth doesn’t change it, it just gives you permission to sit with it and feel.
“It gives you choice, too.” Anu adds what he has learned from his little experience. “You can make different decisions when you know the truth, but those decisions are yours to make.” Wandia is silent after this.
They sit in the quiet for a while. Then she shares her knowledge.
“I got kicked out of boarding school for kissing a girl. Her parents are catholic, poor, strict. The consequences would be worse for her than they have ever been for me, so I took the fall. When the school administration questioned her, she said I peer pressured her into it. She was terrified, I could taste a hint of it on her, and shame, so much shame she had inherited. I didn’t argue with her version of events, so they expelled me. My parents want nothing to do with me now, so I live with Denno.” She shrugs.
“I feel like a burden half the time, and I know I have to figure out how to pull my own weight especially with Denno’s girlfriend being pregnant and all.” Wandia looks at Anu.
“He told me that you tasted his knowledge about that when you first met. That we were similar in that way, though I stopped eating other people’s knowledge after…”
Anu can tell she is thinking about the girl.
“The way all this knowledge does not give you any solutions. These days I just eat the soil and listen to what our land has to say. I mourn the history we have inherited that makes so much of our present unbearable, and that is all I can do. Every time I taste the truth of the soil, I taste the truth of myself, and all of it asks to be grieved.”
Anu places his hand on Wandia’s. This startles her but she does not remove hers from underneath his.
“You can taste.” She says, answering a question he has not asked out loud yet, and she leans in. Anu reaches for the truth of her, catching her bottom lip between his tongue and top lip.
**
That night Anu realizes his lie. He is playing back the memory of Wandia leaning in as Mama Anu plays Todii by Oliver Mtukudzi on the loud-speaker Anu saved up to buy her for her fiftieth birthday. Aunty Miri is in the bedroom she shares with Mama when she comes to visit, and the electricity goes out.
Mum kisses her teeth. yells from the kitchen. “Ahh this stchupid stima company.”
The power outages have been happening more and more frequently as the country changes, and Anu often imagines that their country is being eaten inside out by a knowledge eating monster that none of them can see. One that was planted with the desecration of the earth to build skyscrapers and houses too big for those who forget there are some without. He pulls at his peeling skin. A habit he has had since he was five years old. He absentmindedly carries the dead skin up to his tongue.
In the darkness, the speaker, still fully charged, yells Mtukudzi’s cry.
Todiiii
What shall we do?
The question stays Anu’s hand. Anu flicks away the dead skin. He does not need to taste to know. Bile gurgles up in the back of his throat. Anu has been trying to atone for himself in the world, making himself useful to everyone with the knowledge he offers them. The aftertaste of insufficiency. The refrain gifted to him by his mother and Wandia returns with the truth he has been keeping from himself.
Todiii
What shall we do?
He cannot save other people and he cannot save himself and he is not special, and he is just enough for this world as he is. No matter how badly he wants to be able to know, Anu might never have the knowledge of tomorrow in his skin. Everything changes always, including him.
Anu finds Aunty Miri and Mama Anu in the living room reminiscing. They laugh so hard they cry through their stories of chasing escaped cows on their parent’s farm. They share childhood knowledge that feeds Anu’s soul. Knowledge that he knows does not require anything of him but to feel.
© Copyright 2024 Shingai Njeri Kagunda
About the Author
Shingai Njeri Kagunda is an Afrosurreal/futurist storyteller from Nairobi, Kenya with a Literary Arts MFA from Brown. Shingai’s work has been featured in the Best American Sci-fi and Fantasy 2020, Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2021, and Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2020. She has work in or upcoming in Omenana, FANTASY magazine, FracturedLit, Khoreo, Africa Risen, and Uncanny Magazine. Her debut novella & This is How to Stay Alive was published by Neon Hemlock Press in October 2021. She is the co-editor of Podcastle Magazine and the co-founder of Voodoonauts. Shingai is a creative writing teacher, an eternal student, and a lover of all things soft and Black.