Last Saturday, May 24th afternoon, my father Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o told me and my sister Ngĩna that he had come into enough mojo to pen a novel, and complete his last memoir, Horseman of the Sixties. Good news. Celebration. So, he asked to go to a jazz club. You see, inspiration and then memories for him were packed in rhythm and melody. “There is poetry in music Cikũ,” he often said.
Since he had moved to the north of Georgia, whose landscape reminded him of his birthplace in Rĩmuru, starkly different from California where he was Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, he and I, and later Kwame Rĩgĩi, his favorite musician spent a couple of hours, at least one Saturday every month, in pursuit of rhythms.
We would comb through jazz listening rooms, blues cafes, and piano bars near our home. Soon he became familiar with places in GA and whenever my brother Ndũcũ or sister Njoki or friends visited he would show off what he thought were his street creds. “Better to turn on Sanders rd., and perhaps take route US 400, the I-985 may have too much traffic.” And then chuckle when they noted how well versed, he had become with his new home. Twenty, sometimes forty minutes, or an hour depending on traffic and place, we would arrive at the designated place, all eyes on the elderly gentleman in Kinte or Kitenge shirts, flat cap to boot.
He would bop to the beats, and then when the music got inside him, he would casually make his way to the dance floor and move this way and that way in the true fashion of a non-dancer. But it didn’t matter, it’s the joy he planted. As some looked on, and most joined him on the floor, clearly hypnotized by his enthusiasm for life, I imagined that they aspired to be as youthful and energetic throughout their years, so that they too would boogie and shimmy with gusto. On the dance floor, he wasn’t a literary giant, he was my father, a man for whom rhythm was in printed in his soul.
On the way home, he would want to know if we had enjoyed the show as much as he had. He would point out how the saxophonist swayed the crowd, or how the lead guitarist stole the show or wonder if we had noticed the quick second the drummer skipped a beat, so the bassist had to improvise. Did you note how they got back in sync? I knew it’s not perfection he sought. I knew because he had often told us that beauty in music is most often embedded in its imperfection. And so, we moved from room to room, and dance floor to yet another, in pursuit of beauty.
The next day, inspired, he would sit in his favorite chair in the balcony listening to the wind, watching the chickens in the coop below, trees in the yonder, and his laptop, and write. He didn’t finish the memoir or write the novel but his life was marked by beauty—a lifetime of it, in the finished, unfinished, in the lived, unlived rhythms of life.
As I grieve for my father, I take shelter in the love we shared. It is musical. I’d even dare say magic. My hope for my daughter and for my nieces named after my mother Nyambura, and for us all is that we may pursue beauty in the rhythms of life.
