Behind the Story: The Heartbeat of Lenah
I had an amazing childhood, growing up in my village Turesia—surrounded by family, friends, and a close-knit community. I played non-stop, laughed my heart out, and ran freely up and down the hilly landscape. I ate my fill, and lived without a care in the world.
It was the best time of life, and I cherish those memories. They make me glad of home.
It therefore goes without saying that when I started writing, I wanted to write a story about that childhood. Growing up under God’s enormous skies—under the striking, magnificent African skies. So when I finally began writing, I wrote:
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“Once upon a time on a chilly August morning like all the seasons past, a drowsy village lying on the slopes of the Kerio escarpment steadily awakens.
Outside, the wind hauls and whimpers against the walls of a wooden two bedroomed house.
Someone stirs in their sleep and a bed creaks. A small radio coughs and stutters in the adjacent bedroom as father tunes it to a clear frequency.
A small girl of about eight drags herself out of bed and yanks a jacket from the pile of clothes carelessly stuffed into a big woven basket at the corner of the room. Lifting herself up and standing on the soles of her feet, she unlatches the bedroom door from the nail that kept it shut, staggers towards the living room’s door and draws it open. The cold wind stinks her face and she winces, holds her jacket tightly around her chest and pulls the hood over her head. She steps out and stands on the top stair pulling the door shut behind her.
The year is 1994.
Two planting seasons from when she lay on her back staring into starry skies while listening to her older brothers talk of rumors of ethnic clashes drawing closer to them by the day and the horrors of alleged slaughtering of innocent lives. Stories of death and blood in its wake. All those killings triggered by political manipulations of long simmering ethnic tensions over land and power.
Peace was in a turbulence and the uncertainty that engulfed the nation then and the fear in the faces of many made the days unbearable. And even before the war was barely over and the soil washed off the stain of innocent human blood, the highlands of Keiyo was subsequently ravaged by horrors of a yellow fever disease that swept over the land like wildfire…..”
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But at some point, I paused. I was sure this would make a terrific short story—but too short for a book. And I wanted a book.
That’s when I remembered the other story.
The story of womanhood. Of moving from an innocent girl in my father’s house to a woman who slowly realized that life for women is not a walk in the park. In fact, many women are dead on the inside—unable to voice their pain, unable to heal, unable to call it quits and live different lives.
I went on a quest to voice the ills that women go through. The values they desire. The insolence they endure.
And yet, many of these women were like me once—full of life, bursting with laughter, running through open fields with the boys and their dogs. Innocent to life’s impending burdens.
And that birthed us LENAH!!- A composition of these two worlds.
A beautiful contrast in this mysterious existence.
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