AWITI'S DEATH, must we commit sucide....

=SHORT STORY (BLEAK – the poverty

BLEAK
Death, emptiness, fornication, abortion, prostitution, and chocking stench of poverty, are what described her life; her world, everything she knew. At just nineteen years of age, she had seen more than her grandmother had experienced. She knew how to sell sex, how to be rapped, how to be a criminal, how to pray for death to come quick and how to die while alive. Awiti had known how poverty looked like, smelled, and tasted like. Every morning she saw despair looking back at her in the mirror, in her face she saw a sinner sunk so deep to irredeemable depth. Deep within her, she felt dead, she knew she was among the walking dead.
There she sat, staring blankly in Kayole’s emptiness. She looked around the dilapidated brown almost yellow rusted iron structure where she spent the previous night. This was an emblem shame – of despair – of pure nothingness – and glum. Nobody would want to reside here, let alone take a stroll in; many would rather live in trees or the dusty Nairobi streets than to call this a home.
There were places where the beauty of rising sun brought with it hope and excitement. But here, it brought with it the light of shame. A light that shone on sorry structures that the dwellers would rather remained hidden in the cover of the night; it revealed to the eyes the scars of vanities that took place in the dark; it exposed the monumental hopelessness that constantly hanged on the faces of every one with a face in the squalor.
Awiti ran her fingers as a comb through her hair; she could not tell whether the night was long or short. One thing she could tell, by the time she woke up, her three cousins and her aunt Bella were all awake, and gone about the hustles of the day. The adults to look for anything that could be called food for their children, and children to play with anything their imagination deemed a toy. The air was heavy with numerous smells, (numerous stenches that could make any weak person choke). Her nose wet with smell of rusting iron sheet, she tried as much as she could to keep her eyes away from the slimy black mucus of sewage seething out of a clogged pipe, slowly meandering around the rusting structure. ‘What is this?’ something within her asked. ‘Your life … this is your life’. A voice in her head scornfully answered.
An emaciated goat with its ribs rippling on its sides at every step it made, as it made its way into the compound. She bleated vehemently as if in mourning or in some sort of animal lunacy. The noisy animal made Awiti to turn her head towards a puddle where the black water was collecting. Houseflies and mosquitoes buzzed away from the fermenting pool to give way to the shouting thirsty goat to quench its thirst. The goat lost in some internal pains, drunk the greasy liquid infested with insects’ larvae. Oblivious of the dangers it would cause, it drunk its thirst away.
Awiti, embarrassed for the suffering goat, looked to the opposite direction where her aunt’s children were playing. The two wrenched a helpless one-legged naked doll from one another. They were so rough with the handicapped thing that they decapitated it, and both broke into laugher. Next to them, old beer cans stood filled with muddy water and some over licked fish bones lay in an old broken melamine plate. Awiti wept. She wept not for the children’s lack of toys; not for their lack of joy; but for their future … their dead future. There they were, with their eyes green with malaria and anaemia; their chests deflated by hunger; their abdomens inflated with kwashiorkor and worms; and their muscles wasted by marasmus. “There they are waiting for nothing … nothing but premature death”. Her ears heard something sing melancholically. Then she remembered, a day in her primary school, when her English teacher had brought a poem in class:
I went there in the east and saw them
Smiling with rock lips and desert tongues,
Looking with tired leaking drained begging eyes,
They sat with creased stomachs eating flies,
Waiting for nothing from life, but Eastland's death
I went there in the east and saw them.

Go there in the east you will find them,
With broken hearts and crying souls
Holding everything and nothing but garbage holes,
Knowing nothing about mansions, shoes and dolls
The widows and widowers’ children dying in silence
I went there in the east and saw them.

Why don’t you go there and see them
Eating leaves and bread you threw.
And sniffing the stinking toxic glue you brew,
In tattered clothes your child out grew,
With their dead beings and souls, they still sit there.
I went there in the east and saw them.
Back then, she had thought this to be just a poet’s imaginations, to her poetry was all about fiction and had nothing to do with reality. Now she knew poets were humans just like her, and not people out to confound people with their distress. She sighed heavy at this realisation. ‘These children …’ she whispered to herself. ‘These children, if by some miracle survive to be nineteen; all will be thieves, prostitutes or beggars. And if they turn twenty, all will be dead … Dead not from natural causes, but of bullets, rape, sodomy, or disillusionment.”
Awiti wiped tears that had now begun salting on her face. Pensively, touched her belly, and then sunk in deeper thoughts, travelling far away from the heartbreaking site of the wailing goat and the naked children playing in dust with mud.
She remembered the day before she decided to leave her Kolunje village, where poverty had its sharp teeth on her back. A place she swore never to return. She recalled the exact day. It was on a Friday, the day she was heavily pregnant – Pregnant with hope – Hope of prosperity –Prosperity in the city – The city of hopeful hope. Nairobi promised so much than her barren Kolunje village in poverty eaten Kisumu District could bestow. ‘If I stay here any longer, I will soon wake up one morning pregnant and bare foot.’ She had mused herself then. Therefore, she came to the city, to stay with her Aunt Bella while she looks for a job in the city of hopeful hope – a city of cold water.
Awiti was a standard eight graduate. She could not further her education due to lack of money for books, iron suit case, uniform, shoes, and thirty shillings for fare to and from Ndiru secondary school after every three months. Even with this impotent educational background, she still held hope, hope of getting employment quick ones she was in Nairobi. ‘I could be an office messenger … maybe a cashier at a supermarket … or a junior clerk at the Nairobi railway station.’ Her thoughts juggled with ideas in the bus she had boarded at Kombewa township bus stop to bring her to the city.
When she arrived in Nairobi, her pregnancy was ready to be delivered, but reality downed on her in just one week of trekking the city streets. The pregnancy would be stillborn. She felt the coldness of Nairobi. There were no jobs for people like her. Matter of fact, there were no jobs for many people, even the ones who had much higher qualifications in the colours of collage diplomas and university degrees, still featured prominently on the jobless list at the ministry of labour. She could not believe that she had joined the statistic of the thousand of rural-urban migrants, the ones who had been flocking the city; coming with hope of indulging themselves in living the city’s good life, but were often devoured by Nairobi’s despair. The ones who with intense disillusions, either ended up in Mathare mental hospital or ended up committing suicide in the Filthy Nairobi River – The ones who were frequented in Koinage street prostituting themselves, the ones who littered Nairobi damps with their aborted foetuses, smothered babies and helpless screaming children – And the many that robbed banks and pedestrians. These thoughts followed her every time she was sent out of an office …’sorry we couldn’t be of any help to you’.
Her Aunt Bella had been in Nairobi for eleven years and she was just getting by. She brewed and sold an outlawed alcohol, had three children, no husband, and inconstant look out for the police. This was Nairobi in away Awiti had never imagined it to be. It was savage. It was an abattoir of hope. It was a sea of sadness. It was a cemetery of ambitions. Yes, she had heard of hard life in the slums of Nairobi. She had heard of Kibera and Mukuru, but had never heard of any in Kayole, but there it was in every description – a slum. It was a ruthless empty world.
Imbued with shame, she lamented ‘Here I am pregnant a gain. I came here pregnant with hope, but now here I am pregnant with a baby whose father I cannot tell his face!
She shut her eyelids tight to block tears from leaking from her swollen eyes, but the bitter tears still burnt its way out. The memories of her hardship gnawed life kept on streaming in her head. Behind the closed eyes, she recalled how desperations pushed her to learn her Aunt’s trade. How shame … shame of eating without work – ripping where she did not sweat, led her to accept the most unacceptable life.
With nothing to look forward to; nothing to look back to; nothing to be proud of; and no prospect of any positive change soon, she reluctantly agreed to vend the illegal alcohol while her Aunt was out servicing men escaping reproach from their homes during the day and some time nigh. But this was only beginning of her tutoring into the horrendous trade.
Bella had told her how life was about living for the day, how what one did, did not matter so long as it led to passing the day, and how amorphous one had to be, to accept any shape life came in. In many occasions, Awiti had laid awake in bed beside her aunt and the three cousins listening to her Aunt. It was two months after she had arrived in the city, deep in the night, the children were snoring and beating their limbs probably suffering from nightmares. ‘Awiti, are you awake?’ Bella whispered in the darkness of the night. ‘Yes, I am awake, who can sleep in such a noisy night?’ Awiti whispered back.
‘I am pregnant!’
‘Why now Aunty, what are you going to do?
‘What all women who engage in such an occupation do’.
‘What do they do Aunty?’
‘A prostitute can’t be in business with pregnancy’.
‘So you are going to abort?’
‘What am I to do, anyway it’s not going to be the first time’.
‘Aunty!’
‘This is the third time.’
‘But why don’t you use contraceptives, for example condoms?’
‘There are mad men out there Awiti, the men you see out there are all walking corpses, many of them even plead – some even pay highly to have unprotected sex’.
‘So the price of death has been lowered for the mad men … but you too, you just agree, you life is in peril also?’
‘Your conscience always tells you otherwise, but the reality of three hungry children, ever increasing electricity and water bills, push you into a corner no any type of training can teach you to evade.’
After along uncomfortable silence between them, Awiti’s voice shakily disturbed the chorus of the snoring children. ‘Aunty, what do you want me to do?’
‘Awiti, I can’t tell you what to do, because this is a matter of a person and her conscience; a person and her God …’
‘Bella, God knows our position, He knows we have no any alternative but this, He Himself has placed us here, remember everything that happens is His will.’
‘Awiti if this is what you have independently decided …’
‘Aunty, I will try to gather enough money to start a different business.’
‘Please sleep dear.’ Bella whispered as she pulled blanket to her head.
Selling herself for the pleasure of men, was not the sort of life she had hoped for – The occupation of vending outlawed substances was the least what she expected to engage in - But what was she to do?
She prayed for her death to come soon, but everyday she woke up with her life. Everyday she opened her eyes; she saw what she had only read about in books. Everyday, her eyes swell with so much un-cried tears. Everyday she drifted to the verge of lunacy.
Awiti opened her eyes and found that the goat was silent now. It lay down with its legs stretched out as dead animals normally do. Its mouth wide opened gasping for air in longer intervals than goats usually do. It was as if it was dying from within, as if something unknown to it or the veterinaries, had consumed most of its internal organs. ‘Maybe the dirty things she ate have upset its stomach’. Awiti had assumed.
As she was still determining whether to sympathise or to condemn the goat, a tall man walked into the compound. The sight of him could make strangers take to their heels and the neighbours wary. His hair was scanty and grey like withered grass, his eyes almost sucked in their socket; his mouth dry and red as if he had drank acidic spirits all his life; his skin tacked to his bones; his shoulders formed a depression where his head rested on a neck semblance of a stick. He looked man made, as if a tailor or a puppet maker made him. Awiti stood from her seat and moved from the zombie’s way.
‘Here you are, ‘the man said to the goat. ‘You think pretending to be dead will save you from being eaten. You are very mistaken my friend, even if you commit suicide, your death will lead to the same thing, you will not be a corpse, no, that is what I am, as for you, you are a carcass.’ He then picked it and struggled with it to his shoulders.
Turning to Awiti, he said to the animal. ‘Now look at Awiti pretending not to know me, while she has been my sweet heart many are nights. Why the sudden change? Is it because I no longer bring pelf to her or because what she gave me has eaten the meat in me to this puppet now I am? Awiti, please have mercy, could we go in for awhile, I will even leave the goat here with you as collateral, when I get your price, I will come to redeem this precious animal’. Awiti moving farther away from him, ‘You are drunk; can’t you see the children around; don’t you have any shame in you, to come asking for such so early in the morning’.
‘Shame is what dead men feel, I am not dead, therefore I only request what living men request’.
‘Don’t you know I am pregnant?’
‘Pregnant or not, the money will be money, you need it, I promise to get it for you and that is all there is, nothing more.’
‘You are dying from Aids of which probably you passed to me …’
‘Hey ... if there was any giving, you did the giving, that is your job, you are the prostitute not me.’ At that moment of bitter exchange, Bella’s first-born entered the compound carrying a bag of yellow kales, she was about twelve years old, but in the real sense, she lived a life of a thirty-year-old woman. Seeing the man imposing himself on Awiti, the girl picked a stick, rushed to the two, and hit the man with a devil’s passion. The man ran off with his goat dangling on his shoulders, cursing and promising to return.
Awiti did not ask the girl why she hit the man with such a passion. She knew the ordeals the child had gone through. She had been raped, not once and not twice either, she had been violated multiple times. The child silently went into the rotting iron structure as Awiti still panting resumed he seat and her thoughts.
This incident remaindered her of the first day she arrived in the city. At Machachos, bus station, as she waited for her Aunt to come pick her, she had listened to a sufferer cry to God for help. In voluntarily, Awiti found herself repeating the street poet’s poetry word by word.
‘This is my final plea.’ She began. ‘The sky is gloomy, on knees I am. Teach me oh dear God of yonder skies, to live with paedophiles, rapists and thieves, when you bless me with them for relatives. Teach dogs about mating in secret thickets. Switch off koinange streetlights each night. So when prostitutes expose their private parts, darkness shield my eyes against their thighs. I plead oh dear God of heaven! Please teach fathers of this haven, not make wives their wives’ daughters, and not enter matrimony with beasts! Stop the Babel grant us one language. We will not build towers but a nation – A nation of peace, love, unity, and dignity, of charisma, prosperity, and charity. Please God I plead hear my plea! From dictionary, please almighty delete, Murder, rape, robbery, sodomy, deceit, Malice, perjury, witchcraft, hypocrisy, hate… So we forever never have to learn them. Please bleach our stained conscience. For once, teach us a lesson of sincerity. Efface this horrible haunting vanity. Noisome sins we bear, but please stoop down, Let your eyes of mercy pity our plight. We die in sun and rain, drought and floods. Pin on your original plan; bring us no floods.’ She stopped, wiped her face with her bare palm and stared at the mucus greasily smeared on the palm for a while, and then looked directly to the blistering sun overhead and sobbed. She had jeered the sufferer back then, but now she knew what must have led him to say such a prayer.
Deranged, Awiti got up and wandered off into one of the numerous nameless Kayole’s dusty roads, which sometime doubled up as dumping sites. The wanderer did not know where she was going to and why she was going, she just moved north from her house. Then suddenly, she stopped. Soweto police station stood to her left to her right the church. She then turned right and ambled to the church’s door. Inside, sat the priest, who immediately signal her to enter.
In mucus, tears and sweat she came in with her burdened soul and knelt. Reviewed her life dogged by vanities and debts, tore her cloths; laid her obscenity bear in the cathedral before the man in cloth, the one with blessed tongue and heart of God.
He saw all her scars and knew her pains. Like spears, the scene of her sins pierced his heart. There she was before him and God truthfully naked. He heard her sob, snivel as she wept. “My shoulders are weighty, my soul in debt and heart a strayed – and this body – this temple deserted and cursed. Pardon me father, father absolve me, I cry, remit my soul.” He wept, and in a glee, his blessed mouth said, “Forget your pains; relinquish your doubt, debt and weight. Your temple is sanctified and tenanted, weep no more, wipe your sweat, rise up, rise and go my sister, my daughter now Jesus loves you.”
The priest gave her a fresh dress, which must have been previously used by the church choir. She left the church feeling quit relieved, as if her clogged heart had been unblocked. Nevertheless, outside, nothing had changed. The world was still the same. The stench of the polluted river flowing behind Kayole was still hanging heavy in the air. In the Soweto corner market, semi rotten vegetables were still on stalls for sale; mgongo wazi (fish bones) still lay in sun, swarmed by green and blue houseflies; and drunken men were still roaming around.
In distress, her feet tramped away to the edge of the quarry; she stood there as if readying herself to fly away. ‘I am a poor prostitute’. She cried inhaling the polluted air. ‘Not by choice I am a poor prostitute, because I don’t have courage of going to Koinange to be raped by ten men per night; the courage to be raped with sticks and guns of the city Askaris. I have no courage, not a gram of courage. If I had some in me, I would be rich like the ones whose stories I have heard; the ones who have built rental buildings and open businesses, but at what price ... poor Awiti ... at what price? At the price of such a disease that eats you completely while still alive, and of shame that even the devil detests. I have been a prostitute, the slum prostitute, the one who many times has sold herself even on credit! I have lost courage to live this life, it is not worth living; no, not like this. Aunt Bella says I should have patience and confidence, but confidence is what I do not have, not in myself, not in life, not in anything. I am impatient, please death come quick, life is already bleak … it is nothing … it is empty. Oh dear God keep me sane, let me keep my mind ... keep me sane...”
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With this, she moved closer to the edge of the deep quarry. ‘If I die now, my death will not be the solution to the world’s problems, many more will grow to be like me; but I am tired of seeing this sad way of life, I am so tired. Very deadbeat of it all, I no longer want to be in this world, where politicians lie, where sex thieves walk, this rotten world where nothing amounts to nothing, I am sick of this place... where I have been a disgrace not by choice but out of necessity. I am not a lunatic; I know I am still in my right mind. I am just tired.’ As if in a fit of some internal tremors, she came closer to the edge, she then leapt down the quarry and in an instant; she was lying at the rocky bed of the quarry dead.