WHAT JOHNSON MAINA MEANS TO ME

Johnson Maina. Familiar? Probably not. It may help if you sound it out. But it won’t. Shot dead at seventy on the 17^th, on Waiyaki way. You mustn’t remember. It’s okay, I didn’t either. He was shot in front of his daughter and they let him bleed out. Please say his name. We’ll say it together so that we don’t forget.

Life has no definition even in this century, yet it is in this century that the fear and wanton destruction of it thrive most. Life is still what it was in Olduvai Gorge yet…was it easier to pick up a blunt object and kill in the evolutionary name of ‘’ survival of the species’’. Did existence mean more when it was just cryptically, per Nabokov ‘’…a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness’’ and no more

Or is it modernity and science that have made life less. The very possibility of finding life on other planets could alter its meaning here. We don’t die as much as we used to. Six billion and some.. many die and many more live. A baby is born for every second of the day in India, in Africa six thousand die of AIDs to match. It sounds almost normal, and it is. Life and death have no meaning for society, they retain the initial surprise element on an individual level but there is a sense of collective normalised detachment. This is the era that has complacently witnessed two genocides, in that Swiss-neutral non-engaged manner we love so much. This is also the dawn of stem cell research. We can clone the dead. We are demystifying life. We can imitate it, replicate it and even create it.

What does it mean to make something of life? To die unknown. Take Johnson for example who came to me on the evening news as a cautionary tale on protests and trigger-happy policemen and may even live perhaps to be some kind of perverse anecdote. He was a hawker and perhaps there be more bleeding hearts if some upper-west side fake Hyacinth Bucket type had been downed. Albert Camus applauds this with tickled nihilism: ‘’We always exaggerate the importance of an individual life, so many people do not know what to do with their own that it is not completely immoral to take it from them.’’ We are all whiny selfish bastards at heart, we want our presence here to stand for something. I personally want it to rain on that day…God’s tears shed in grief. I want it to thunder, earth to register its protest and disdain. The sun will not shine and if it does, if it must it shall turn the evening sky an unnatural crimson . isn’t this how we, I flatteringly imagine our death?

Well, get over it. The meaning of life is that it ends , Kafka or Stendhal? Existentialism 101. This is what I hate about my generation. We don’t have a sense of history. We are not at the front for anything that matters. Nazim Hikmet urges us to take living so seriously that ‘’you can die for people/ even people whose faces you’ve never seen/ even though you know that living is the most real/ the most beautiful thing’’ and it is.

Perhaps this is impossible in this age of the ‘disposable’. We know too much about life, not what is positively by way of definition but its nature: how we can lengthen it, how to make it more, how we can end it…cleanly, painlessly. And knowing scars us in a way that we cannot truly understand until we know. It makes us, per Coleridge, ‘’sadder and wiser men’’.

Here’s the greatest thing about living for me, that each day life offers us the ability to make our faith grow by acting on it. We can live faith, deepen it. Yet faith comes with a cost- suffering, which without faith isn’t really tested. It doesn’t walk over live coals or on water and is therefore useless. And thus in a way, to live more is to suffer. To live more is to bleed. We can go out on an adventure in search of our humanity, forge our own heroes from our own imperfect selves, an when we find it- coming face to face with the sea or else in a fire- we stand in the world, and in a sense for it and we see what it all means, what it’s really about.

Life is bigger than us. Posterity will study us in awe or shame: question our values, what we stood for, what we died for. Here we are actively and casually writing history…

And in comes Abubakar, a tour driver in my French class who promises to quit smoking when I warn him of death. It slips out, not accidentally but in passing that his 13-year-old girl died, the way a private man’s griefs slip out. A while back, he adds in musical Swahili. His brows fall somewhat and then rise in genuine laughter at my crestfallen face. ‘’C’est la vie,’’ he adds in prettily accented French. It’s not fatalism. It’s because ‘’although you fear death/ you don’t believe in it/ because living…weighs heavier.’’- Nazim Hikmet.

The dead are still very much so, yet we must welcome grief, search it within ourselves, because it shows us how plainly and truly we feel it in our soul. A remorse for any death is in its own way a celebration.

Advertisement