A GROUNDBREAKING AND WIDE-ANGLED
MEMOIR BY KENYAN WRITER BINYAVANGA WAINAINA
The first book by the Caine Prize winning
author of the famous Granta piece "How to Write About Africa”
Binyavanga Wainaina tumbled through his middle-class
Kenyan childhood out of kilter with the world around him. This world came to
him as a chaos of loud and colorful sounds: the hair dryers at his mother’s
beauty parlor, black mamba bicycle bells, mechanics in Nairobi, the music of
Michael Jackson. In this vivid and compelling debut memoir, Wainaina takes us
through his school days, his mother’s religious period, his failed attempt to
study in South Africa as a computer programmer, a moving family reunion in
Uganda, and his travels around Kenya. The landscape in front of him always
claims his main attention, but he also evokes the shifting political scene that
unsettles his views on family, tribe, and nationhood.
Throughout, reading is his
refuge and his solace. And when, in 2002, a writing prize comes through, the
door is opened for him to pursue the career that perhaps had been beckoning all
along. Resolutely avoiding stereotype and cliché, Wainaina paints every scene
in
One Day I Will Write About This Place with a highly distinctive and
hugely memorable brush.
“I love this book. An insight into a world I’ve never
seen before. Binyavanga Wainana opens the doors and beckons us into the
portrait of an artist as a young Kenyan. An examination of language, loss and
return. Great stuff.”
—Colum McCann
“Brilliant. What makes the book good is its impassioned
account of the Africa we need to hear more about: the Africa of schools,
weddings, television shows, jokes, politics, family gossip, and idiosyncratic
dreams. What makes it great are Wainaina’s beautifully elastic sentences which
fizz and crackle, pounce on their meanings, stretch and snap back into place,
and evoke not only the self-replenishing wonders of childhood but the more
complex wonders that follow. An outstanding book, bursting with life and full
of love.”
—Teju
Cole, author of Open
City
This book is made possible through a partnership with the College of Saint Benedict, and honors the legacy of S. Mariella Gable, a distinguished teacher at the College.
