Voices on the New Diasporas - an MIT student journal
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A Transplanted Culture
by Waciuma Maina
I know I am there when I hear the music. The sound is wonderful, the most fabulous polyphony, rhythms of drums and guitars and wind instruments, and sweet singing. The dulcet tones are so pleasing that I wish I could understand the lyrics. Unfortunately, the language is utterly foreign to me, and I have never taken my parents up on their offer to teach me the languages of their home. That home lies several thousand miles across the sea, in the lush hills of Kenya. Both my parents are members of the Gikũyũ tribe, which has as it’s home the foothills of Mt. Kenya, some of the richest earth in the entire nation. My father takes pains to explain to me the pure joy of sitting under a mango tree on his father’s farm, eating the ripe fruit and basking in the warm sun. It always creates some jealousy, as the mangoes I eat in New York are tasty, but surely not as fresh or plentiful as having a grove in my back yard.
So much of what I know about Kenya is related to food, the part of my Kenyan heritage easiest to pass on to my generation. Each night we sat down to eat as a family was a little instruction on the glory of Kenyan cuisine: the soft and tasty white bread we call ugali, eaten with collard greens or spinach boiled with goat meat to create an irresistible meal; the ostensibly Indian bread Chapatti served with beef, chickpeas, and potatoes; even a simple stew livened up with doma, a bitter potato-like root that made each bite without it that more delicious. I would wake up in the morning and find a breakfast of roasted guace, a Kenyan variety of sweet potato with less sugar but a far more pleasing texture. In the winters, that breakfast would be supplanted by ucuru, a lemony and sugary brown porridge so hard to get in the U.S. that relatives always make sure to bring some of the flour with them when they visit.
These memories of food are what so closely connect me to Kenya because, beyond that, there is not much my parents still retain of their homeland. My father came to the U.S. as a college student in the early 1970s, but after a short while left his studies to find a job, and became a New York City taxi driver. He has not once been back to Kenya in the thirty years since. My mother arrived in New York in the ’80s to work at the Kenya Consulate in Manhattan. Both left virtually all of their family in Kenya to start off on their own in New York. Fortunately, fate smiled on the two ex-pats and brought them together so far away from their native land.
My father had grown up during Kenya’s revolutionary struggles, and as a teenager he was witness to the glory that was hard-fought independence. However, Kenya still had its fair share of problems, which were only exacerbated by the corrupt policies of the new government. Looking for more opportunities than life in Kenya could afford him, my father traveled to America to study at Queens College in New York City. The big city enchanted my father, and he decided to start working so that he could build a life in the Big Apple. At that point, two of his brothers were also living in New York. Together they acclimated to the big city and to life far away from home. Soon though, the brothers separated, moving on to different places to follow their careers. My father, however, stayed in the city and became a taxi driver.
My mother came to America over a decade after my father left Kenya. She had grown up in the independent Kenya, had attended university and gotten her degree, and had settled into a nice job working for the Kenyan tourism board. When she was offered a post in New York City, she decided to leave home and start a new life in the big city. She started off working in the Kenyan consulate before moving on to the Kenya tourist office in Manhattan.
Still, the odds of two people in New York City meeting were just as low then as they are now. They never would have met were it not for one of my father’s sisters. This aunt of mine had known my mother back in Kenya and was visiting New York when she invited my mother to a gathering of Kenyans; a gathering my father also happened to be attending. Thousands of miles away from Kenya, my parents met at a party meant to, in some way, reduce the distance between their homeland and their adopted home.
This distance has made me wonder how they were able to maintain a connection with the culture of their home. In the traditional sense of the word, they had little in common with their native culture. They were both fortunate enough while growing up to go to some of the best schools in Kenya; unfortunately, that meant they went to the British schools, established by the white settlers in Kenya, and operated like their educational counterparts in England. My father and my mother were both afforded great opportunities by going to schools such as these, but they also were molded by this education system into the British manner of thought expected of the white students. Religiously too, my parents were separated from their native land, as both had, at one point or another, decided to stop believing in God. They let go of the more traditional beliefs of their people, as well as the Christian faiths spread throughout Kenya which quickly replaced the traditional gods. They had to even let go of their language for the most part, as very few Americans even know what Kikuyu or Swahili are, and virtually none can speak those two languages of my parents’ people.
My parents were not about to entirely turn their back on their native land, however. They always looked forward to the visit of a relative with tidings of life in Kenya. Invariably there was much discussion of developments that had not made their way across the Atlantic, along with plenty of goods from the homeland. However, these visits were rare and could not compensate for the land they missed. My parents could not maintain their contact with Kenya regularly, so they sought out ways to stay connected on occasion: by attending gatherings that to them represented what they missed most, and could best recreate, of Kenyan life.
I know I am at one of these get-togethers when I hear the music. It is the same sweet sounding style I mentioned earlier, oftentimes they are the same songs I hear my parents play at home, and have heard them play for years, most of the music is older than me. Most of the people in attendance are too. The main party-goers are people like my mother and father, Kenyans who have found themselves living in New York and New Jersey, living lives far different from the ones they left in the old country. It is a felicitous turn of fate, then, that many of these Kenyans in the New York and New Jersey area have other Kenyan friends nearby. So interconnected are all these people that when my parents arrive at one of these gatherings in New Jersey, that always find friends of theirs from back in Kenya, as well as people they have never met before. The men and women there I have met before I generally do not recall. Though my parents always make a point of taking my siblings and me, the parties happen so infrequently that it is hard for the people to make an impression on me.
The actual gathering is what stays in my mind. My father would drive the family to a deep and unknown part of New Jersey, to the house of a friend he hadn’t seen in a long time. The house would seem like nothing special, sharing a quiet street with several other identical homes, but once we entered, the sound of the music and the smell of Kenyan food immediately told me I was in the right place. Immediately the adults would flock to greet my parents, and suddenly English nearly ceases to exist, as they switch to speaking in their native tongue. The adults go off to talk amongst themselves and reminisce, while my siblings and I would go sit with the other displaced children brought, but left in their parents’ wake. There would be nothing to do but sit around while dinner was prepared and the adults were drinking and dancing and talking. Dinner may not be the most precise word to call the meal. Maybe feast would be more fitting. The hostess and any friends she recruited to help her would roll out a table covered in the very best of Kenyan food: sumptuous stews, appropriated Indian dishes, various roasted meats and fresh vegetables, salads, and a tantalizingly sweet fruit salad for dessert. Then the parents would go back to socializing and the children to seconds and thirds until, eventually, the party wound down and everyone headed home.
I could never understand why my parents enjoyed these gatherings so much. It never seemed like there was much to do besides eat and dance. However, for people who left Kenya in their youth, when this sort of gathering was the best way to enjoy their time, this is the best way to reconnect to their past, to their culture. They may not be able to experience everything they valued about their home, but in this way my parents are able to maintain contact with their homeland through food, music, and old friends.
This contact is mainly lost upon me however. At these get-togethers, the older generation is able to simply sit around, discuss, and reminisce about their old lives. I, however, have no memories about Kenya to look back on. The displaced children sit around on these evenings, with nothing to do but eat and talk to the unfamiliar offspring of the strangers their parents travel so far to see. The connection to Kenya is missing for us of the younger generation, as we cannot look back to similar gatherings back in the old country.
Fortunately, this lack of a connection does not affect my Kenyan identity. I have never actually been to Kenya, however, this also does not make me feel less of a Kenyan. The trips to New Jersey do not make me feel like I am in Kenya, but they have taught me a very important lesson. There is something about those parties that make my parents take our whole family on a two-hour car-ride, something that pushes them to attend each one of these gatherings. These parties are important because they reinforce their culture, a culture so valued they will gladly go the extra-mile to preserve it. It is this importance that I learned to appreciate from the parties. I understand the importance of Kenyan culture to my parents and so have decided that it is important to myself as well. And so I stay in touch with what I value the most in Kenyan culture: the food and the music.
Though my parents are quite disconnected from Kenyan culture, they have managed to keep alive what is important to them, and in the process, they have transferred along to me the same drive to keep alive what I value of Kenyan culture.
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