Letters from Nakuru — Letter 3: The Matatu Stage

You remember the stage at Nakuru, where the tout shouted "Nairobi! Nairobi! One remaining!" even when the matatu was empty? I left from there in 2016 with one suitcase and my mother’s insistence that I not look back, so the tears would not follow me.

I did look back.

Essays in this collection:

1. On Not Going Home for Christmas — the economics of return, and why we lie about being "too busy."
2. The English Inside My Swahili — code-switching at the Home Office and at the shamba, and why my son says "please pass me the sufuria."
3. Nairobi Is Not a Monolith — against the single-story city in foreign memoirs.
4. What We Carried: Lessons from my aunt who sold mandazi at the border for thirty years.
5. A List of Things I No Longer Translate — sheng’ jokes, uncles’ proverbs, the way grief sounds when it is in Kikuyu.

I write these letters not because I have answers, but because the Rift Valley taught me that land can hold both lake and volcano. Identity, too, can hold departure and belonging without splitting.

Excerpted in Chimurenga and The Johannesburg Review of Books.