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“Don’t tell me about the valley of the shadow of death. I live there.”- Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Death has its truths. One of which is permanence. It signifies that the life gone is never returning. This is a truth I had never encountered. Not until the night before my father was buried. That night, with mourners gathered in our compound, my uncle sat me down, his faltering voice asking me whether I had viewed Dad’s body. Yes, I nodded. “You might need to look at him again. After tomorrow, you will never see him again.” The precision with which he spoke terrified me. His words gave me the second truth about death. That it is a terrifying darkness to which we shall return, as American writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin puts it. I walked to where Dad’s coffin had been placed. I stared at Dad under the dim light powered by a generator, my uncle’s words ringing in my mind. His eyelids were partially open, his eyes pallid, not batting like they used to when he was alive. I stood there, beside his coffin, lost and confounded, fixating on his lifeless body. Standing there gave me another truth about death: that it is immovable, that it is an unchangeable event.
Since then, death has become familiar. So familiar that in my two, almost three, decades of living, I have seen a fair share of it. Every two years, we have buried a family member, not counting the friends that I have grieved in between. In recent years, the death that hurt me most was that of a friend, Nigel, who had been my classmate in university. The night before he died, we had been out at a social hall watching a football match between Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United. I remember teasing him after Manchester United lost. Nigel was a calm guy, you could tell from his face, never ruffled. He responded to my teasing with a faint chuckle, not heated up like other ardent football fans who would easily get riled up if their team lost a match. At the point of our parting, I tapped him on his right shoulder, feeling its arc, and bade him goodnight. Never would I have thought that it would be the last time I would see him alive. The next morning, Nigel was dead. The postmortem showed that he had suffered a cardiac arrest in his sleep. This gave me the other truth about death: That it is so, so, so random.
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Some truths about death are yet to be discovered. Philosophers, deep thinkers, death doulas are always pursuing these truths. It is in such pursuit, I believe, that Oyunga Pala wrote his memoir, Strength and Sorrow. Oyunga himself confirms this in a Substack post titled “Why I Wrote This Book”.
“Writing about death and loss was not a choice; it was an inevitability. It was the only way for me to heal, and in doing so, I hope to create a space for others to find the strength to confront their own suppressed sorrows borne from loss. This book is not about giving answers, but about inviting my readers into a long overdue conversation, a public acknowledgment of our shared humanity in the face of death,” he writes.
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In the months leading up to the publication of his memoir, I started rereading Oyunga’s Substack. I used to read his blog in my university days – years ago when blogs were popular – but had lost touch with his writing when the hype around blogs began declining. At around the same time, I was brought to the idea that serious writing was only to be found in established literary journals/magazines, or in traditionally published novels and short stories, not in blogs. Then, one day, as I was surfing YouTube looking for something to watch, I happened upon a conversation between Oyunga and Wandia Njoya. I clicked on the video, a zoom recording done four years earlier. The conversation between Oyunga and Wandia centred on the need for people to gather their stories. Oyunga was articulate, his analysis riveting. He spoke about the African, Kenyan man, a subject that remains close to his heart.
Out of curiosity, I revisited his blog to see what he had been writing. There I discovered that he had moved to Amsterdam and was now about to publish a memoir. He also had a series titled “Reflections of the Ones We Lost” running. I read the series, paying attention to the euphemistic yet authentic, respectful, gentle language that he used to talk about death. The dead, it seemed, deserved such a language.
After reading the entire series, I sent links to an Italian friend who had sometime earlier asked if I could suggest Kenyan writers who were writing about the “Kenyan condition”. In my message to her, I observed that writing about Kenyan loss, death, was part of writing about the Kenyan condition. A day later I received a response, the text concise but ambiguous: Oyunga seems to always be moving towards death. I looked at her message, tossed it around in my head, trying to comprehend what it was she meant. I read her message again and again, marvelling at the profundity with which she had summed up Oyunga’s writing.
Is it a bad thing or a good thing that Oyunga is always moving towards death? I replied.
Ellipses danced on my little screen, suggesting that she was responding to my message. Then they stopped. She is yet to respond.
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Strength and Sorrow opens with a poem by Anyango Adhiambo, Oyunga Pala’s sister. It is a poem that reminds us of the fallibility of the human body:
We depend on it,
Illness, pain and ageing come to reside in it
when these bodies reach the end of illness,
pain and ageing
they break down and die.
This poem is reminiscent of Sylvia Plath’s Edge, considered by some to be her last poem before she committed suicide. Sylvia writes:
“Body wears the smile of accomplishment/the illusion of a Greek necessity
feet seem to be saying/we have come far, it is over.”
Both poems agree on the ephemeral, impermanent nature of human life – a major theme in Strength and Sorrow.
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Divided into four parts – family, country, forgotten ones, and meditation – Strength and Sorrow opens with the writer’s near-death experience which, as he has written elsewhere, is the impetus that drove him to confront his mortality.
“It wasn’t until a motorcycle accident that would happen the same year that I hung up my spurs after 11 years of writing The ManTalk column that I arrived at a critical turning point. It shattered my detached observer role and forced me to confront my own mortality.”
Oyunga describes how he feels as he lays helpless, the world hazily spiralling, him experiencing an out of body experience. He wonders why he has survived death despite a witness to the accident pronouncing him dead. Maybe his survival is so that we could have this book.
In the second part of his book titled “Country”, Oyunga reflects on the deaths inflicted on Kenyans by the state. This section is delicately written, perhaps aware that he is writing about events that have marked the becoming of a nation. The delicateness is evidenced by the epigraphs he uses at the beginning of each chapter. “The child of a kite doesn’t eat vegetables”; “A chicken that keeps scratching the dunghill will soon find the mother’s thigh bones”. They are heavily metaphorical, not giving away what comes next. “Country” also plunges the reader into some of Kenya’s historical moments like the 1982 attempted coup, the 2024 Generation Z-led protests, and the 2017 elections. Oyunga examines the Nyayo philosophy, “a philosophy which broke us”, as he asserts. Oyunga ends the section by mourning his friend, Henry Ekal. Ekal’s death has him thinking about the place of memory and silence in Kenya; both have been described as part of Kenya’s languages by celebrated Kenyan writer Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor.
“Forgotten Ones”, the third part, looks at the lives and deaths of three Kenyan “heroes”: Mzee Ojwang (Benson Wanjau), Whispers (Wahome Mutahi), and Benja (Benjamin Otieno Ayimba). It ends with a fictional piece written in memory of an unnamed soldier of the Kenyan Defence Forces. Here, Oyunga uses remembrance to honour the men who have contributed to his life in various ways, to safeguard the legacies of these men before they are completely erased from collective memory. That the main characters in this part are all male could suggest that the current Oyunga – much like the younger Oyunga – is still interested in exploring the dilemmic positions occupied by men. He thinks of these men as beacons of inspiration who urged him (us) to live with purpose.
The last part of Strength and Sorrow is harrowing. It underscores the point that I make in this essay. Nyangi, the central character, recasts in my mind the image of life running out. Her body is wilting under the weight of illness. Nyangi, however, turns that same body into a site of knowledge and investigation. This she does even as her brother, Oyunga, seeks to save her life. They try and try and try until Nyangi dies. In these pages you notice the juxtaposition of life and death; how one can have the will to live while yet welcoming the desire to die. “What does it mean to be a walking dead person when an illness proves too expensive to treat?” This question names another pressure that Nyangi’s sickness has bestowed upon her loved ones – the pressure of medical expenses. In a way, Nyangi’s death sets both her and her beloved free.
As you read through the book, it becomes increasingly clear that Oyunga is exploring the art of death. “Death in our family unfolded like a cruel story etched in darkness and despair. It came upon us with the wrath of an arrogant enforcer, plucking away our favourite people with a chilling nonchalance…” His personification of death reinforces the idea that the nature of death is incomprehensible and that, perhaps, by personifying death, we can somehow grasp it.
Oyunga also goes beyond using death as just a trope or motif in his memoir. Death, he seems to hint, is a useful event; it brings us sorrow which if recalibrated births strength. He includes the deaths of his father, sister, grandmother and brother in the book as a way of revealing how intimate and close death has become to him. “How do you reach a man who hides his pain? How do you respond to what remains unsaid?” are questions that expose the multifaceted admissions Oyunga makes throughout the book; his mourning, his endurance, his deep pains, his silence, and his ultimate wish: the wish that there were other ways by which to transition to the other world other than through death.
Strength and Sorrow joins other books that have tackled the art and riddle of death. Mortality by Christopher Hitchens, The Art of Death by Edwidge Danticut, The Tibetan Book of the Dead edited by W.Y. Evans-Wentz, and Our Ghosts Were Once People edited by Bongani Kona. In fact, there is a reaffirmation that Oyunga aims for in this book. The reaffirmation made by Slyvia Plath in one of her poems:
dying/
is an art/
and like everything else/
I do it exceptionally well.
The stories Oyunga shares in his memoir reveal him to be a man who has become a steward of grief, a teller of sorrows, a seeker of strength. The ending of Strength and Sorrow is macabre. It elevates the terror of losing a loved one. I read it and felt the helplessness that death brings with it – how it burns our hearts to ashes. The ending confirms that death is always going to be a possibility as long as we remain alive. Until we die, resilience is perhaps the surest armour in the face of the suffering inherent in every human life.
