We all know what happened to Eddie; he bought a car and became a new Eddie. A few months ago I was seated at the terrace at Big Fish along Church Road dismantling the head of a tilapia when a sexy, clean blue metallic car parked right in front of our table. I remember thinking, ‘Hmm, a clean and blue like the sky,” when Eddie came out of it like he’s been coming out of cars his whole life. He looked clean too. And healthy. He was wearing the whitest sneakers a man has ever worn. (He only wears/owns white shoes). I recall telling the person I was having lunch with, “That’s Eddie Ashioya” like I had made him using clay and white sneakers. I was proud of him, of course, because owning a car is something we talked about for a year and looked at several cars and now he was coming out of one.
So yes, we all know what happened to Eddie but how come you guys don’t ask about what happened to Gloriah Amondi? She came here and said she was raising some money to go to Montreal, Canada. How come nobody has asked if she got the money or if she reached well or she is still on the ship or if she already arrived and acquired an accent?
Well, once in a while, Gloriah and I chat. Some of you here don’t get her but she really makes me laugh a lot. I think Gloriah is funny and witty and smart. She’s also a bit mad because you can’t be funny, witty and smart and not be mad as well.
So because Monday was a public holiday and I went for Coster Ojwang’s album launch and I was too hungover and I couldn’t write, so I asked Gloriah to tell us what she’s been up to in Montreal.
So here she is, live from Montreal.
Gloriah, can you hear us?
It’s a bit windy there, Gloriah, do you mind turning away from the wind, your mic is whistling.
Gloriah?
I think we lo-
Ah there you are.
Gloriah, how’s Montreal? Have you run into Celine Dion in the streets yet?
***
By Gloriah Amondi
I’m in Montreal, Canada.
Finally!
I have been here a month now, actually.
To get here, I had to attach all sorts of documents to my application including birth certificates of my entire family to convince the visa officers that I badly want to go back to Kenya when I’m done with school.
Then there was the hobbling across airports with an overloaded hand luggage and a 17-hour flight from Nairobi to Montreal through Paris. On the first flight, a KQ to Paris, the air hostess, a tall otada-looking Luo woman (who looked like she was better suited at the ground office physically fighting against acquisition of JKIA by ADANI Group) was almost querulous with me when I couldn’t get the hand luggage onto the luggage deck by myself. Later, when she came back with drinks (forgetting our initial encounter) I asked for cream for my coffee, which somehow annoyed her because it turned out to be right there on my face; on the tray she was holding. I saw her prepare her mouth to quarrel, and I quickly said to her in Luo:
‘Kik idhawna, abro ywakni pare.’
Don’t quarrel me, I’ll cry.
So, she didn’t.
Anyway, I got here only a week after classes started, and being North America, I found they had almost finished the syllabus. But I have classes only two days a week which is kinda cordial. At Concordia, there’s a metro (train) line that runs below the campus buildings, so you get off and get into class, and students are allowed to call their professors by their first names only (I’m struggling with this) and they have a library the size of Kasarani Stadium and everyone is liberal and nice and so helpful you could design your own curriculum if you wanted to.
As part of my admission conditions, I am a Teaching Assistant for a medieval British Literature (up to 1600 A.D. ) class which should be fun if you think it’s just Shakespear, except I am teaching texts written in medieval English that read like this:
Thenne ho gef hym god day, and wyth a glent laghed,
And as ho stod, ho stonyed hym wyth ful stor wordez:
“Now he that spedez uche spech this disport yelde yow!
Bot that ye be Gawan, hit gotz in mynde.”
Translated (you would never guess!) as:
(Then she bade him goodbye, glanced at him and laughed,
And as she stood astonished him with a forceful rebuke:
“May he who prospers each speech repay you this pleasure!
But that you should be Gawain I very much doubt.”)
The text, by the way, is from ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,’ the alliterative verse written in 1375 A.D. in Middle England, in the middle of the Hundred Years’ War when King Richard II and Prince Charles VI were locked in a political and constitutional struggle, and artisans and workers did the first ever popular rebellion to protest the poll tax imposed on top of the very unpopular ‘Statute of Labourers.’
Now, why does 1375 A.D. England give me that feeling of déjà vu, hm?
However, I am getting used to it, and I’m liking it even more. Especially because I get to sound clever outside class saying things like:
‘The medieval chivalric romance concept involves different components such as humility, the religion of love and adultery- because often the dedication is to a married woman.’
Or,
‘Prodigality, like courtly love, is a big characteristic of renaissance literature…”
Or,
‘Did you know that at some point Christmas was considered a backward festivity by the puritans who controlled the English society then?’ Clutching my forehead for dramatic effect, I will add, ‘Oh, but the domesticated holiday Elizabethians made out of Christmas!’
You might think this is vain, but that’s how you get yourself someone here to warm you through winter. It’s the equivalent of ‘I am in Harvard.’ (or, for some of you- ‘I went to Alliance’.)
Winter is coming.
Now that I have been here for a while, I am starting to have secondary needs, which are often projected in the form of search histories such as:
Cheap salons near me that retouch dreadlocks
Where to trim African eyebrows
How do you know if a Canadian is flirting with you?
Do SAQ sell cheap wine; Are SAQs open at 1 am?
Cheap concerts near me
On this last one, the cheapest was CAD 50 at the time.
Being a little bit tipsy, I went online and left comments on a number of Instagram posts of some Kenyan artists’ accounts including Blinky Bill’s inviting them to Canada. To some, I said, ‘you should come to Montreal’ or ‘Have you ever considered playing in Canada’ or ‘Did you know there are so many Kenyans here who listen to you?’
To one, I said, ‘Be iparo wa ga samoro ka inindo?’
But then I deleted it before I sent it. Mercifully.
***
I have been trying to experience Montreal before winter- trying to do things that Montreal-ers like to do, like eating smoked meat, or bagels and having small talk about metros. I’ll say, “Oh, where you live, is it Orange line or Blue line?” and then the person will say, “Green,” and then proceed to tell me everything about themselves. I like that.
Sometimes, I forget and say my metro station is ‘ATwaTer’ instead of ‘A-wa-er’ and often the person will look at me and ask where I come from.
Take the girl at the counter of a Koodo store that I went to last week for instance. I needed to have my sim line reconnected after failing to pay the 250 CAD bill on time (which hiked because I made an international call to my former caretaker in South B, Nairobi, twice, to threaten him with calling cops if he didn’t send me my deposit.)
The girl at the counter said in a voice so polite it was infuriating, “I’m sorry M’aam, but it seems the payment has not been received as you claim. There’s nothing I can do about it.”
So, I said something about everything being so complicated and that it would never be like this where I come from. (You know it’s not true, I was just talking).
The girl at the counter asked, ‘where do you come from?’
I said, ‘Kenya’.
She said, ‘Kenia’ then proceeded to taste the word ‘Kenia’ on her tongue and eventually decided it didn’t taste like ‘Nigeria’ (Ha!)
So, she found something to do about it and I had my line back by the end of that hour.
In my free time, to keep myself from getting bored, I have been teaching myself piano. Where I live, the (really) nice lady that owns the place has an antique piano inscribed ‘Lindsay’. Whenever I sit to play (randomly, because I am often alone in the house, as my landlady with the grown daughters mostly lives at her boyfriend’s house, and they pop in Tuesdays and Thursday evenings for dinner here, then leave), I wonder who Lindsay is and what her story was. I wonder whether it’s her mother’s name or a great grandaunt that lived all her life traveling between Montreal and Las Vegas and dreamt of Broadway or whether…
So far, I have successfully learned from YouTube tutorials how to play the ‘Happy birthday’ tune. It goes:
GG A G G C B// GG A G D C
For the higher notes, I’ve drawn a small arrow on top of each letter:
GG G✓E✓C✓C✓ BA
F✓F✓E✓CDC
Next, I want to learn ‘All of You’ by John Legend, because you never know.
***
Last Saturday night, I went to Cyndi Lauper’s concert. Cyndi is on her final world tour, although she said she’ll still be writing songs. She’s 71.
I sat in that stadium full of people, singing along to some of her greatest hits like ‘Girls just wanna have fun’, and ‘I drove all night’ and ‘True Colours’; at some point, she broke down at the end of ‘Time after Time’ where the song always slows down and she just repeats the line ‘time after time’ when the crowd’s singing along overwhelmed her.
Midway through the concert, I realised we weren’t just seeing her.
For a lot of us, we were seeing ourselves in the spaces she had taken us back to. For me, it was the Saturday mornings of my childhood, waking up to my father playing Cyndi’s records while re-arranging stuff- books, furniture- in the living room (always, we’d have to put things back because he’d have made the place worse. Then he’d do it again the following Saturday.)
I have been to a couple of concerts in my life, but I have never carried my father in my heart to any of those like I did to Cyndi’s. Later, in her post on Instagram, I appear in the video of her recap of the Montreal tour and I’m mouthing (it is not audible. The sound is turned off):
“This is for my dad, who couldn’t be here tonight.”
***
Aww.
This is the final call – OK, maybe second final – for the registration of the creative masterclass next month. Register HERE.
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