The State vs. Heartbreak
An Opening Statement from the Omondi Republic of Dust Submitted, with prejudice, by the Supreme Patriarch of Nyakach. Third Bridge From the Left
I will not be taking questions.
I am, as my ancestors and the general weather patterns of South Nyanza will confirm, an Omondi. Of course, not your dean of Omondi School of Character Development. Not even the Omondi who is currently the subject of a class-action lawsuit filed by the sisterhood of East Africa on behalf of every woman who has ever had to burn a sweater in Eastleigh. I am Omondi wuod Nyasigoti Kawiny pier openda oyiech nyiero gi nyasaye. Laktar thiedho gek to mare goye ngero. Jambola wiye oting’o dero kiwang maj tiang’ ma njao ji gi kech. Wuon Awuor, silwal osiep Maria nyajouoje matek tek manosomo weather chon tinde gi gano sigendni milombo godo chuny. Chuny ligangla. Chuny Dimore luokore gi rembe owuon.
At this point, it two things, among many, are clear. I am the Omondi of a different pedigree. We will need good heads to make the person that I am. Ask a translator. They might come closer to my nyatiti translation. Waya madiere ilimo dinuoya. Gimamit isero anuoya nyasaye opande moo ma mit ng’we n’gar.
I, who sat alone on an old rock at Nyabondo, and said, among other things, that if I survive this, I must never, not once, waste a sentence on the ordinary.
I survived.
You can read what that cost me and what it gave me in Precursor, which is available and which you should buy because I have a liver to maintain. One careful owner. Slightly used.
But I am not here about my liver.
I am here because Diana Mosoba, novelist, content creator, certified national treasure, author of the unputdownable Till Death Do Us Part, has issued what amounts to a diplomatic ultimatum disguised as a Facebook post, and I, as the self-appointed orange head of the Republic of Nyakach, must respond in kind.
Do not threaten me with diplomacy, Diana. I am wuod Oywa. Nyakach Kogero. We grew up next to a river that has been fishing thunder and converting it to electricity without your permission for ten thousand years.
Diana has, and she has done it with the skill and cheerful brutality of a master surgeon, assembled the evidence, presented the defendant to the public and encouraged the jury to slap the man sitting next to them. The defendant's name is Omondi. The charge is being Luo. The exhibit is a doctor who was buried deep in someone else's yellow thighs (riper than Ukambani maembe or Murang’a minji minji and definitely hotter than Aisha’s viazi karai that requires diplomatic bypass to access backless dera) in Moyale while Diana, a faithful volunteer for the Kenya Red Cross, assured her mother (eye drops) had crossed twelve hours of armed bandits and broken road to find him.
The sentence is penned all Luo men, in perpetuity, forever, including the ones still in baby school. Or swimming in big and curvy luo joysticks.
Now.
I want to say something about this Moyale doctor. I will not defend him. He is indefensible. A man who receives a woman who has survived a robbery, land cruiser, four policemen and dust thick enough to plant maize in, and whose first thought is conjugal right is a man who has the emotional sophistication of that Siaya roundabout.
I also want to say something about the 50,000 shillings. Diana, you walked through town almost stopping random women to ask if their boyfriends sent them 50k, and you said (and these are your words, madam), “You'd think all my time in school I had grown a tiny brain, but I had none.”
That is not a story about a bad Luo man.
That is a story about what love does to the brain. What desire does to logic. What the broad chest of a beautiful man created, you said, on a Monday morning when the devil had just finished having rabuond Kabondo and apuoya milk for breakfast; does to the decision-making faculties of an otherwise intelligent woman. It is a story about being human and being human, Diana, has no tribe.
I know this because I too have a story from a Murang’a babe. Chocolate fine thing. Round like ong’ino with sukari leaking from the joyful sand of her cameltoes. Dusk-brown eyes. Bewitching smile. Daughter of Wanjiru. As you can see, she was not Luo. She was not Kisii. She was from somewhere that speaks volcanic loamy Gikuyu and she came to me during a conference and she ordered salted caramel at a hotel near the lake and she looked at me as if I were makeki mathwiti she intended to finish later. Nay. Devour. Right now. Epfuu.
I was thirty-three. I am still thirty three. Very litu boi. Imagine. I had just published my first album. I thought this was my sign that the universe had decided to compensate me. I followed her, in the figurative sense that a man who has plenty of rizz and tremendous conviction follows a woman. I took the overnight bus. I wrote her a poem that compared her to the Mara River in August. She forwarded the poem to her friends. Her friends thought it was hilarious. She did not tell me this. I found out three months later, at a point when the poem had acquired something of a group-chat citation. She was generous. Good old bursary. Dero kikane njugu. Njugu ikano e tado e od dayo.
Nyar Okuyu did not break my heart because she was Gikuyu. She broke my heart because she was human and humans are complicate and I was thirty-three and had described a living woman as a river in August, which, looking back, she was entirely right to circulate. Narok to cute pink Nakuru flamingos. Hilly ridges of Ruaka. White chocolate sands of Nyali. Generous o. Moyo mkunjufu. Chunye ler opogo sakramit.
The thing about Omondi. All the Omondis. The doctor in Moyale, the one who caused the missing period and the mechanic named Juma and the one whose mother received an 1,800-shilling sweater from Eastleigh and did not use it to return it to the people who sent it. These men are a type. And the type is not Luo. Both/and.
Someone who has not done the interior work of smelling their bullshit from the glorious tower of horizontal electricity. You can find this type in every community from Wajir to Wigot. Men who speak Freshley’s Stellar heartbreak and Wanganangu’s Wanyendire Gikiriria and Sigu’s Isabela. Men who speak the dialect of North Atlantic English that Kenyan men who sniff white homa through theor noses develop specifically for use on women they do not intend to love back.
They builds a kingdom out of a woman's investment and then asks the woman to be grateful for the title of Ayatollah. A spectacular failure of character, really. It does not respond to beautiful fem-analysis. It does not improve when the sisterhood votes to extend the category to all Luo men, including, I must assume, the ones still in diapers in dilapidated Siaya County Hospital, who have committed no offense other than being born on the wrong side of a joke.
But Diana… Diana who wrote a whole novel about what a woman will endure for a man who is systematically destroying her, sat with Tara's bruises long enough to make a reader feel them and understands, from the inside of the ink, how love becomes a trap, knows this. She knows it better than the comments section does. Her Till Death Do Us Part is not a comedy. It is a devastating account of what happens when a lean broad chest turns out to be covering a generous crowd of women waiting in line for supply of Luo pawa. When a beautiful man becomes the dangerous man. When the Omondis of this world turn out to have an anger problem and a theology of possession.
She wrote the book.
The book is not about Luo men. The book is about men and women who love them past the point of safety, and what it costs and what it takes to walk out. It is one of the most honest things written in Kenya in recent years and I say this as a man who has been trained by economics to distrust sentiment and who, in any case, years being honest with himself in an oncology ward and has a very high bar for the word honest.
Read it. Buy it. Keep it somewhere accessible, because someone you know needs to read it and has not yet admitted that they need to read it.
Comments section, sisterhood applauding and men tagging other men to prove they are one of the good ones. Women who type this is exactly why and feel a deep, clean satisfaction that we are all a beautiful circus in a masked match-making affair.
Diana narrates her heartbreak with extraordinary skill. The timing, chest pains reveal and sweater taken back from Omondi's mother with the fury of a woman who has decided she is done. That is a tour de force. A thing you practice without knowing you're practicing it. I admire it completely.
The applause is not wisdom, unfortunately. The slap that the sisterhood is currently encouraged to deliver to the man sitting next to them. He may or may not deserve it. You haven't checked. You just know that the collective heat of agreement weighs in on justice and justice, online, seems like it costs nothing.
The man who wronged you was not a representative of his people. He was a man. You are not a representative of yours. You are a woman.
The stories we tell about our heartbreaks (mine from Nya Murang’a, Diana's from Moyale, yours from wherever it was that you followed someone at your own expense and came back with less than you arrived with) only become social commentary when we are honest enough to include ourselves in the indictment.
The doctor in Moyale failed Diana. Diana lied to her mother about the eye drops. Diana went anyway. We all love anyway. Risky. Ni mbaya. That is what makes us human and not simply a gender or a smooth kamongo tribe.
Near Sondu, there is a bridge. On one side, Luo. On the others, Kales and Kisii. In the water below is the same river, dredging the soil of both banks, making no distinction, flowing towards something larger than either community's idea of itself.
(A) Heartbreak is that river. It takes everything from both sides. It does not check your ID. It does not even ask where you are from before it takes you under.
I have survived plenty so far. I know what it is to have your own heart become the thing that might kill you, to face a heartbreak that has no human face, no Moyale address, or engineer called Juma to blame.
Precursor is, among other things, about what you discover when you strip away all the stories you have been using to avoid the central question:
What do I actually want and am I brave enough to ask for it without the circus of asking?
Diana asked for love. The doctor failed her, terribly. Dirt and dust. Cake and odeyo. The sweater was taken back. Cold season returned. Fridge and panic attacks. War rooms and taliban application forms.
That is grief, not data.
Grief, which Diana has actually put into a book and not just a comment section, her Tara drags it all the way to a fatal decision, does not require a ONLY a man to make it legible.
It only requires someone willing to risk being human. Decent, after all. Loving.
Omondi Ochuka is the author of Precursor: An Unfolding, a memoir about living with cancer, curiosity, borrowed time and the particular beauty of being still alive. Diana Mosoba is the author of Till Death Do Us Part, which will make you feel things you were not warned about in the description.
Both books are available. Both authors are from Kenya. Both have, at some point, been idiots in love. This is what makes them worth reading.
Buy the books. Slap no one. Drink water. Fuck good. Don’t do dirt on a good person. Unless you make the valleys muddy beautiful. It’s rain season. Wrap a foil when you enter jikon to bake. Please.
Issued with full diplomatic immunity and a light chest cold.