Notes about my father, four years on
How do you interpret the legacy of the primary male figure in your life after he's passed on?
We have to be grateful to those who have the nerve to force the conversations we refuse to have and the boldness to prod the things we refuse to acknowledge, like Mukoma Wa Ngugi and my brother.
I lost my dad in September 2020. While my brother remained in school to finish up, I travelled home to assume the role of the first son. When it was time to prepare the burial brochure, I had to deal with an interesting situation: tributes and Eulogies for my father. When my brother sent his write-up, I was stuck on the first sentence.
“My father was not my friend”.
Valid opinions can challenge your perceptions.
That statement stung me for three reasons. First, I had struggled to describe my relationship with my father. It wasn’t my fondest relationship. I had a deep respect for him but struggled with many of his methods and choices, including some that left me scarred for life. There were also some I had vowed I would never tow. Part of our contention as I got older was that I was bold enough to disagree with him on some of them.
The second reason was the condolence visits we had. People who visited us had a separate description and reality of my father from what we were used to. There I was, sitting in the parlour, when nearly everyone who came, young and old, stung me with new information. My father was jovial, happy, funny, thoughtful, and thorough but principled.
I didn’t experience the first three much, but I know he offered them in abundance to others. Let me put that into context. We were on a rare family trip a few years back. My dad was driving in utter silence. To break it, he made a dad joke. The joke did not amuse his kids. Rather, the attempt amused us. We looked at each other as if to say, what on earth is wrong with the world?
The third reason was that I felt guilty for the way I felt after his death. When he was going through his final throes, I wasn’t at home. But I had a terrible illness that coincided with when he fell ill for the last time. In a way, I knew I was somehow connected to my dad. When he died, I cried, but once, then I felt numb and bland, like white rice. I knew I had lost my dad, but I didn’t feel the pain and emptiness that most people say they feel when they lose a loved one. I assumed responsibility for my family because this was what I should do. Deep down and for a long time, I kept asking myself if this was the right feeling. A few years down the line, I still can’t explain it. Now, I can say I miss my dad for the conversations we didn’t have more than the ones we did. There was a lot of wishing.
My brother’s eulogy forced me to confront all these feelings at once. I agreed with him, but who my dad was was a complex web of human being. We had no right to determine that individually. Of course, the parts of him that affected us most would be the lens through which we primarily saw him, but that couldn’t be all. If we wanted to understand my father’s legacy, we had to consider all the part. Both the ones we liked and the ones we didn’t experience. That was him in his full humanity.
We hate to see our heroes be human
Eventually, I elected to keep my brother’s tribute. Some people will argue that we should have left it out. But why did it even matter? My dad was a hero and mentor to many people, including myself and my brother. Did it make sense to put out that information about him now that he was late? I’m glad that for everything my father was, no part of his interaction with people made him a danger to anyone. Unfortunately, Mukoma Wa Ngugi did not enjoy such privileges.
There is a way we like to see, perceive, and think about our heroes—faultless, blameless, and untainted. Some would go as far as proverbially gouging their eyes or editing their moral compass just so that whatever their heroes do is considered good. We hate to see our heroes stripped; even with a deposit of sinister darkness, we cooperate with them to carefully hide their flaws or defend them to elicit worship. Because if we ever accept that our heroes are flawed, the interpretations might be ominous. To really see them, we must bring them down from the pedestal we have placed them on and deal with that darkness. It doesn’t mean we strip them of honour, but we remind them and ourselves of their humanity.
Unfortunately, many of us lack the courage and willingness to face our own darkness. Because if we do, we will be forced to change. We hate change. Worse if it’s painful. Recharacterising the images of our heroes deprives us of a way of being we can aspire to so that we can think of our flaws as components. It allows us to keep our raw, unbridled, and selfish natures, which need to undergo an incredible amount of shadow work to be fit for society.
How do you expect us to face the darkness of our heroes if we seek validation to permit the darkness in our lives? If these heroes can’t be entirely good people, there is nothing to aspire to, no leverage to hold. So we permit the image where the hero is always good, even when the distaste in our lives is a direct consequence of their crassness.
Earlier this year, Mukoma Wa Ngugi, writer, poet and Associate Professor of Literature at Cornell University, said his father, the famous writer, playwright and scholar Professor Ngugi Wa Thiong O, physically abused his mother Nyambura and silenced her to erase her from his story. It was in a lengthy X (formerly Twitter) thread where he described the gory details of his father’s abuse of his mother. This is even when that entire episode that lasted for much of his childhood could have affected his perception of women around him.
There was a public outcry, not a condemnation of his father’s actions, but about why he would speak out. More people were content in dealing with an incomplete depiction of this famous writer while deleting the lived experience of his son and wife. Throughout the period when that story trended, I thought it was unfair for people unrelated to him to demand he be silent.
People didn’t want to deal with the reality that Wa Thiongo could have been an accomplished writer and academic, but he failed as a father and man. I wonder what would have happened if the story of his wife and son were allowed to co-exist and if he would have become as famous as he finally became. The writing community is an interesting one.
An individual lens does damage like a single-story
People are not only what we know about them. Fourteen years ago, Chimamanda Adichie Ngozi gave a popular TED talk on the danger of a single story. A single lens is always almost faulty when thinking about who people are. They are a combination of how they appear in every relationship and interaction around them. As a result, it’s unfair to describe the people we know only in terms that make us comfortable. This applies even to people we think are entirely evil. That someone looks good doesn’t mean they are harmless, and vice versa.
My father was many things, and that’s okay
In that regard, it feels proper to round this out by talking about my father. I loved my father. Many of my favourite memories happened before I was ten; the most famous was when I crawled up behind him to sleep anytime Mom travelled. I loved how go to my father was. In my eyes, he could figure out anything, and if he said he had someone, he always did. I’d never forget the day he dropped me off at the boarding house. I wish I had realised while standing in that big green field with a big heavy safari suit that matched that our relationship would not remain the same.
I don’t know what I would have done because I was 10. But for the rest of my life, throughout all his life, I deeply respected him. We might have argued, but I learned from a very young that puppets achieve nothing in this world and eventually become a bother. I was smallish in size (don’t let my current make-up fool you), but I wouldn’t be a puppet. I got that doggedness from him. I still hope that someday, I will enter a room and command it like he did. My father could get things done. I love people who do that.
For all the things I loved about him, I’ve practically raised myself from age ten. You could argue that he prepared me well before sending me to boarding school. I’d argue that he saw I could handle myself from a young age. I would have loved to have more conversations with him about many things than just money or getting berated. I would have loved to hear his love story. It would have banged coming from him. I would have loved to talk to him about women because I might suck at it.
An incomplete story
My dad had a life I know nothing about. Nothing is more annoying and painful than an incomplete story to a storyteller. I wish we had more supermarket runs as a family when they still made those big malls like Sahad stores and Jifaatu. I wish he had brought his comic self to the house, and we made more fire Egusi soups. Most importantly, I wish he had seen me bend words the way I currently do. I wish he told me he was proud of me, to my face. I wonder if he will ever be.
I think the point I’m trying to make is that the human experience is multifaceted. C.S Lewis famously said, as quoted by Tim Keller in one of his sermons, that there are parts of us only certain people can bring out, and that part dies when they are not there. These days, I think of my dad and have many what-if questions. We had started resolving many of our differences before he passed on. That said, I loved him in all his appearances. To the best of his ability, he lived an unreproachable life. Hopefully, I’m able to live up to that.
Wow! Enthralling. I easily connect with many parts of this as it mirrors my relationship with my dad. My dad is still here, thankfully, and I think I should try to create other memories than those I currently have.
"This is such a good read. I usually feel cheated when people describe my father in ways I can’t relate to, but I now understand that it’s okay. Especially now that I’m certain different people will naturally have different experiences with me.