I love books with houses, and fictional towns with a close sense of community. In Things They Lost by Okwiri Oduor the rickety old Manor Mabel Brown is that house, looming high over the fictional Kenyan town Mapeli. Picture a crumbling “lurid and vulgar” mansion—creaking gates, stone angels, yards overgrown with “tangled balls of thorn trees and wildflowers and barbed wire and stiff yellow grass” and spiteful jolly annas that squawk ha-ha-ha. This manor belonged to matriarch settler Mabel Brown, a missionary wife/widow, and inside it now lives her great granddaughter, twelve-year-old Ayosa Atarxis Brown, the loneliest girl in the world. And this novel is the story of things she lost; things the people of Mapeli Town lost, big (mothers, love, memory, children) and small (poncho, red ribbon to braid hair, dentures, Casio watch, biro pen cap).
At the heart of this rich, delicious and dark family saga about four generations of women, is the mother-daughter relationship between Nabumbo Promise and Ayosa—shaky, violent and lacking of love and attention. Mama Nabumbo would often “stumble inside herself” and become like a wraith. Ayosa calls these episodes as being gone to the ‘red city’. This would happen anytime—“She (Nabumbo Promise) would be driving down the open country on assignment when the rift inside her opened and she fell into the land under”, or between lunch. Mama Nabumbo was often ‘gone’, not just in the mental sense. She was a photojournalist and would take off on assignments, leaving Ayosa all alone for months with the Fatumas, sister-ghosts who live in the attic of the manor, for company. Ayosa would spend her days reading, writing, listening to the radio, learning from the local apothecary, talking to the owner of an empty cafe and living on the pity of the townsfolk, while waiting for her mother to come back. When Mama Nabumbo was back, she loved “fiercely, but only just briefly, and then the effort of it tired her, and she forgot to love at all.”
Ayosa keeps a record of the scars on her mother’s body; she spends a lot of time observing her mother when she is back home, sometimes wondering if it is a wraith in the guise of her mother. Ayosa loves her mama unconditionally; they are the best of friends, laughing, even talking about being sisters. But Nabumbo Promise was broken up, “all rubble inside” which made her mean, neglectful and absent. To counter these visceral cruel moments, Ayosa would pour bleach into her mama’s linens or put grass snakes in her mama’s bed or telephone the radio station to say Nabumbo Promise Brown is a diabolical bitch.
Into this life comes another lonesome girl Mbiu Dash who saves Ayosa’s life. They become fast friends, glued by the other’s company and a wonder for the world outside the Manor Brown. Here is a conversation between Ayosa and the other girl that is one of the loveliest passages on lonesomeness. Coincidentally it is this paragraph that sent me running to read the novel when author Gautam Bhatia shared it on Twitter—
After a while, the girl at the window turned to go.
Where are you going?
To watch people.
Because why do you watch people?
Because to see their lonesomeness. Some people wear theirs like a fine fur coat. Others poke at it and turn up their noses like it’s a bag of mealworms. One lady, she invites her lonesomeness to lunch every Tuesday. She sets out her best porcelain and sits her lonesomeness at the head of the table and serves it pork ribs. I suppose that’s really clever of her. If you wine and dine your lonesomeness, maybe it won’t sneak up on you in the middle of the night and slit your throat.
**
True, this is the story of lonely girls and routine days, but the novel is constantly in a state of movement and action. Gnats and dragonflies and grasshoppers and bees spin maddeningly over the head like a ceiling fan, ghosts dance the chakacha with their hips. On every major holiday the people of Mapeli Town gargle salt water, grease their elbows, and gather in mourning. We move between realms, and memories through the borderless prose devoid of quotation marks. Ayosa is blessed (or cursed) with the power to access memories of her ancestors as well as the collective memory of the history of the town. She frequently goes into another world/state where she encounters the trauma that haunts her family line, the intergenerational cruelty that persecutes them as well as bigger events like disappearances, genocide, and the colonial past. Like the things they lost, big and small, Ayosa’s visions are big, small, inescapable and often nightmare-ish. She exists in-between death and life, thrust into memories of strangers, tempted into the unknown by ghosts, but also trapped in the longing to be loved by her mother. She is an in-between person—stuck with memories of a time before she was even born, treading on the line between life and death, on the cusp of understanding the motherly love she longs for and a new-found urge for the world beyond Manor Brown. When Mama Nabumbo comes back, like every other time, Ayosa must decide whether she wants to embrace the outside world with her new friend Mbiu Dash or trust her mother and live the life she has always longed for.
The word lyrical is often over-used in blurbs that sometimes one wonders what the word even means. Pick up a copy of Things They Lost and find the lost meaning of ‘lyrical’. The prose is beautiful, and sensuous filled with the wonder of the natural world, sealed with the supernatural. It slides and surprises, conjures up imagery with words that bewitchingly suit the scene, and remains utterly magical—Mbiu’s mother who was shot when she tried to rob a bank “looked like a carrot grater when they were done with her”, the girl in the window “chewed the ice, cube by cube, like it has a mouthful of hazelnuts”, Nabumbo Promise Brown “came and went like Blackjack needles blowing where the breeze decided” and often “fell inside herself”. Inside your mind are “lives nestled inside one another like babushka dolls”. Unspoken things can sour sistership “like creamy soup left on the countertop for too long.”
Things They Lost by Okwiri Oduor teases with a wonderful play of names. Ayosa’s grandmother Lola Freedom is the free-flying pilot and physician whose actions affect the freedom of the mind of her descendants, her mother Nabumbo Promise is known for breaking promises. Things They Lost paints the most beautiful and unsettling picture about absent mothers and people bogged down by intergenerational trauma. It is an ode to loneliness, and an urge to escape and find one’s story. It is about unspoken things beyond language and memories—both personal and collective—that weight us down. It is a coming-of-age story with wraiths, nightmares, jolly annas, near-drownings, and death news over radio. It is a beautiful story about all the things they lost.
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Things they lost by Okwiri Oduor is about mothers who fall into themselves, daughters raised by ghosts in a crumbling manor, nature and sisterhood in stunning prose Click To Tweet
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