New Years

i.

For the first time since I started trying to grow tomatoes, I have timed them correctly. Tomatoes fruit best when it’s hot, and it never gets too hot in Nairobi. I planted them in November. No, that’s not correct. Almost all the tomatoes that are growing are volunteers. They were growing elsewhere in the garden and in growbags I had filled with homemade compost. And so, I must yield to volunteer tomatoes. It is not that I timed them correctly; the tomatoes timed themselves correctly.

The best time to harvest tomatoes in Nairobi is January and February, when the days are hot, the bees active, and the demands of the new year encounter the molasses-slow pace of bodies longing for cooling water and refreshing siestas. The volunteer tomatoes knew to germinate in November, so they would be ready for harvest in late January.

Plants have figured out stuff. We simply need to learn from them. We—meaning I—are not always good at learning. I am always planting things out of season. The seduction of the tropics is the belief that anything can grow at any time. I should know better.

The violas I sowed have refused my seductions. I will have to wait for the cool season. Sow them in April or May.

ii.

I love the figure of echo. Not the lovestruck nymph. The voice that returns with a difference, the voice that builds worlds, the voice that multiplies. The different ways a voice can venture out and return as many others, carrying the shapes and textures of the objects it meets along the way. A voice that returns—surely, some of it travels beyond where it can return, to shift into something else, to encounter others who have similarly traveled, to shape the possibility of other types of sounding. Perhaps some musicians are possessed by echoes and surrender to those elsewheres and elsewhens.

I am trying to think of what it means for a year to end and for another to begin, of fruits that grow in one year to ripen in another, of sounds that start in one year to be heard in another, of filaments that move hoping to encounter welcome. They move tentatively.

iii.

What lingers.

What persists.

Linger: 

verb (used without object)

• to remain or stay on in a place longer than is usual or expected, as if from reluctance to leave: 

• to remain alive; continue or persist, although gradually dying, ceasing, disappearing, etc.: 

• to dwell in contemplation, thought, or enjoyment: 

Persist:

verb (used without object)

• to continue steadfastly or firmly in some state, purpose, course of action, or the like, especially in spite of opposition, remonstrance, etc.: 

• to last or endure tenaciously: 

• to be insistent in a statement, request, question, etc.

iv.

My parents’ wedding anniversary falls on January 6. This year would have been 55 years for them. They had 22 years together. I am never quite sure how to feel about this anniversary.

I miss them.

v.

And, still, I wonder what it means to live in pandemic times. To live in their disavowal for the sake of capital. Kenya is open for business. Perhaps, for a brief moment during lockdown, the many calls for mutual aid helped to amplify not simply precarity, but the quotidian harm of neoliberalism. The response to this quotidian harm was to elect a president who champions hustling.

Hustling is not an economic strategy at all interested in collective welfare and mutual care. Hustling individuates everything. If you fail, you have not hustled enough. Or in the right way. Or with the right people. Hustling is the state withdrawing its obligations to provide healthcare and housing and safety. And if the lockdown emphasized how much investment we need in social welfare, hustling refuses to accept that the state has any role in providing social welfare.

And so, we talk of Covid in cryptic asides, in hushed warnings, in unofficial tweets. Cases increase. Cases decrease. Mass testing hasn’t existed for over a year.

Across government offices, you see notices: “wear masks, maintain social distancing.” Government offices are always among the last to take down signage. Such signs are harder to find in supermarkets and malls and entirely absent from clubs and bars. I have been thinking about these remnants, about the government employees who do not mask, about the empty hand sanitizer containers.

I do not yet have the language to write about the material remains of an ongoing pandemic. Disavowal is one word. Perhaps not the only or best one.

vi. 

Carnations are blooming. Sunflowers will bloom soon. Cosmos is in bloom. Dahlias are blooming. Coreopsis never stops blooming. Hot season flowers are happy.

Until recently, I had never understood a strategy in Audre Lorde’s poetry: she will write about the most devastating, ugly things, and then mention flowers.

Now, I get it.

When our worlds are unkind, we can turn to the generosity of flowers. The beauty they give unstintingly. And, perhaps, their generosity can return to us a sense of how we might inhabit the world, with unstinting generosity.

vii.

Nairobi can be kind. Even plants grown out of season produce fruit. Sometimes it’s meager, but it still arrives. If I were writing one of those Daily Bread entries, I might say something about retaining the capacity to be surprised and the bounty of well-tended soil. I’m tempted to say that Ecclesiastes is wrong about seasons, and that in this era of climate catastrophe, we can no longer talk about the appropriate seasons for anything. We prepare for and delight in the unexpected.

Or, as with 2022, we turn to plants whose memories and practices extend beyond our own. We call them indigenous, these plants that have grown with the soil, moved with the wind, flavored the waters, and infused light. These plants that are in relation with the earth in ways we will never understand; these plants that share that wisdom with us by nourishing our senses and appetites.

I started the year by sowing new seeds. I yield to their promise and wisdom, and hope to tend them as they, in turn, tend me.