This is me walking away. Looking at this photo, I ask myself, just where am I from and where am I going to? To answer the question satisfactorily even as I embark on a pseudo-evaluation of myself, I will try to bring your attention to this place in a discreet attempt to compare it with where I come from.
This place is peaceful, really peaceful except for its scorching sun and salty, acidic air that has rendered other forms of life almost impossible. Many plants are not to survive it, buildings too do corrode soon after they are erected. On this lagoon are cadavers: dry scales, dry bones, scattered dry feathers, floating on the stagnant salty water left by the residing ocean. Everything is degrading fast into dystopia, apocalyptically.
One persistent image radiates though; that of a mirage - a steadily rising heat from cracks on the ground, hot humid air which one is obliged to breathe and an overwhelming thud of the ocean that somehow absolves perception of time into a static occurrence rather than a metric event.
Here time happens as a long sunny day almost on a leveled plane without fluctuations. It’s as sunny early in the morning as it’s throughout the day till late evening. Life and time merged into one long moment until the sun slips over the rim then everything goes dark. And when darkness finally arrives, it does so for no reason except that light has gone. Sun is the only permanent pulse running by itself here. It gets very hot until breathing becomes an effort - and then to die would be better than life.
Korogocho where I grew up, which is also called a crime city is not peaceful at all. And for that, it’s believed that anger and violence reign there, could be. I do believe anger in Korogocho is good. I really do. Though I don't romanticize anger, especially the kind that leads to violence. To be angry, to be positively angry if such thing as positive anger even exists at all, is good because it makes us think and talk. Not really talk talk but rather speak up. In talking we think then in thinking, we take action and risk. And risking entails a degree of violence inherent in the action already.
To be angry for example is to question why I do what I do. There is that difficult relationship between anger and thinking but not like that which is between anger and violence; the latter often leads to moral outrage. Some people say, don’t be angry lest you lose your mind and look stupid but I tell them, losing one’s mind is freedom in finding oneself.
In the photo, you can see that anger occupies every part of me, which is attributable to Korogocho where I grew up, it’s the environment one grows in that plays a huge role in shaping one’s character. Korogocho is an unstable place that promises only possibilities of violence. And so whenever violence escalates, it does so cavalierly. Mostly it's whisked off in a contemptuous shida yako attitude especially if that violence is waged upon a stranger.
Growing up in Korogocho, I was one of those boys and I have suffered for it most of my life. At an early age already, I had numerous scars inflicted on my body. I got the scar on my forehead when I was 14, on my lower back, and on my sheen when I was barely ten. You may never have noticed them because of the clothes that I wear. Now you know. Memories that are supposed to enliven childhood and adolescence can not make me forget how violent the wounds were afflicted, mainly at the hands of people I know, some really close. But it is Korogocho that my character owes its inner melancholy, pessimism, and fear of social contact that today inhibits even my slightest impulses.
I was apprenticed so young to loneliness and cruelty. I lived an isolated existence, a withdrawn secluded life in which I learned too young to withdraw and to reject. A solitary life that in the end grew into habitual paranoia - it has made me hypersensitive within myself, incapable of externalizing my joys or my sorrows - I reject everything I love and turn my back even from things I feel attracted to.
Self-love in the face of corrosive dehumanization.
When to be is a liability, how do we reach beneath the self?
How else can we feel the way we want?
The cruelty of life.
The desire to love oneself in the sense that no one wants to love us.
Lived experiences: how else can we talk about our lives
if not framing it in terms of the pains we have gone through,
type of wounds afflicted on us.
Can there be other grammar to articulate ourselves?
in the sense that life is more than that of rage?
and recycling wounds in the mundane of our daily living?
This lack of self as an object worthy of love has grave consequences though. For one thing, it has kept me in a state of profound inner insecurity. As a result, it inhibits or falsifies every relationship I might have with people - it is something that makes me uncertain of myself.
Affective self-rejection invariably brings extremely painful feelings of exclusion, of having no place anywhere. I am always in a shaky, unstable position, always on guard, ready to be rejected, and unconsciously doing everything needed to bring it about.
There are characteristics that accompany such dread of showing oneself as one trully is. Which manifest in broad field of fears: fear of disappointing, fear of displeasing, fearing of boring, of wearying and consequently of losing the chance to create a bond of empathy with others or if this bond does exist, then of doing damage to it. As such I doubts whether I can be loved as I am, for I have had cruel experiences of being abandoned when I offered myself to the tenderness of others as a little child.
Fears make people ashamed of their existence, wrote French psychoanalyst and philosopher; Jean-Paul Sartre. Not being aware of the potentials they have even when what is needed is to hold oneself to the heart of the world, to interrupt if necessary, the rhythm of the world, to upset the chains of command and stand up to the world.