Dear Natasha,

My friend, thank you for reading and appreciating my last letter. The letter took a lot of time and courage to write, and publish; and given the overwhelmingly positive responses it received from you and many other readers, I believe all the time, thought, energy and emotion invested into it was well worth it. As I told you before, I initially thought the idea of writing a love letter to my friend was rather crazy but I stuck to it, stuck to each one of the 3704 words that became of it. Like that one leper, out of the ten lepers who were healed by Jesus in The Holy Bible, I felt it upon me to say thank you. Like the griots in West African cultures, I felt it upon me to ‘sing’ the story of the revolution at Colgate University, so as to preserve it, for us and for those who come after us, the only difference was that my instrument was the pen and my voice the written word.

Weeks later, as I was sitting in my dorm room, nervously brainstorming ideas for my next essay project, my muse softly whispered to me an even crazier idea: “Muturi, why don’t you build on the success of that first letter? Son, unleash Dear Natasha 2.0.” I found that exciting. However, as is common with our (feeble) human minds, a dissenting voice of doubt and fear was ready to oppose. It questioned: Muturi, can you even write another letter as potent as your last? Can you write anything more interesting and different about the sit-in? My muse pondered this for a second and advised, “Okay, Muturi, maybe it’d make more sense to write about something else, albeit related.” I heeded the advice. However, the doubting voice was unrelenting. Can you be able to create a layer of audiences — both real readers and implied readers — with this letter such that it would matter to somebody who has never known a Muturi all their life as it would to Natasha? This voice of doubt taunted and haunted me, “Muturi, can the introvert that you are find the courage to be vulnerable in writing about yourself — your strengths, flaws and all — address this to your ‘so-called Natasha friend’, and invite the world to read the product? At this point my muse ran out of patience, looked at the doubting voice across the dark chambers of my brain and, waving the deuces, shouted, “Bye felicia, let’s talk once the letter is done!”

***

It’s on the links on my Facebook timeline, every minute, every day. It’s a recurring theme in books I read. It’s the topic of brown bags I attend. The it in the last three sentences is what some have called the F-word: F-E-M-I-N-I-S-M. My idea to write about feminism came from the first Sisters of The Round Table (SORT) meeting I had the privilege of attending about a fortnight ago. Christelle, Co-Chair of SORT, asked a question that struck something in me, a question I felt I had been evading for a considerable period of time. She posed, “It’s not like I am pointing at anyone, but what do the cisgender males in the room feel about identifying as feminists?” In the ensuing discussion, you, my friend, mentioned the concept of positionality, which I thought was rather interesting. After the meeting, I insisted that you explain the concept further to me, which you did and even sent me this ‘definition’: “positionality is often used in the context of the inductive approach to social science inquiry as an exploration of the investigator’s reflection on one’s own placement within the many contexts, layers, power structures, identities, and subjectivities of the viewpoint.” If anything, this letter is my humble attempt at exploring my positionality with regard to feminism. It is a product of a very painful process of learning and unlearning, of self-reflection on my identities, contexts, privileges and experiences. I hope you see it as such.

***

My friend, say you were me.

Say, 21 years ago, you were born in your grandmother’s house, in a beautiful village called Subukia Valley in Nakuru, Kenya. Since then, you have always imagined that day you were born as a cold, foggy July day because July is notoriously the coldest month of the year in Kenya. You have also imagined that it rained heavily on that day, for drops of rain mean blessings among your people, most of whom are small-scale farmers. Say, on that cold and rainy day 21 years ago, you were born to an unemployed single mother, 21 years of age, who could not afford to deliver you in a maternity room. Say for being born at home, you did not possess a birth certificate, the official paper to document your existence, until you needed one to apply for a passport to fly abroad.

Say, then, that your single mother toiled night and day, like a species of ants your people call duduvule that never stops drilling until it bores through the hardest of woods, woods that even break chain saws. Say your mother loved you so much that she dedicated her life to making you thrive. She worked as a househelp so you would never cry hunger to her or to anybody, ever; she apprenticed as a labourer in a health center where she was incredibly under-compensated, extremely under-appreciated yet ridiculously over-worked. If not peanuts, tell me, my friend, what then is a monthly salary of less than 100 dollars for working over ten hours daily — including on every other weekend — in a health center serving thousands of people? But say your mother hustled, for you; she worked at the health center not for one year, not two, not three, not four…but, yes, 15 years strong. Say when naive, young you repeatedly asked her why she still endured working there, she responded, “Child of mine, don’t you know I have to educate you? That is the only way we can get out of this poverty.”

Say someone then asked you, “Your mother did all that for you, but where was your father?” Say the perfectly correct answer to that question was, “He disavowed me even before I drew my first breath.” Disavowal: that lemon-bitter word Professor Nick Shepherd taught us in our first night at the University of Cape Town, a word he told us means to actively refuse to see a reality which is all too obvious — like arguing that the USA is a post-racial society or that global warming is a myth or (the currently trending one) that Africa is an ebola-infested country. Say to your knowledge, to your father you did not exist, at all. Well, not until…not until much much later.

Say because you were your mother’s only child growing up, while she became both your mother and your father, you became both her son and her daughter. “Gaka niko kahii gakwa na kairitu gakwa,” she’d pride herself as she introduced you to her friends. This, here, is my only son and daughter. And since your people also believe that actions speak the loudest, say your mother did not stop at calling you her only son and daughter but she also taught you to live life uninhibited by traditional gender roles. She did not discriminate the chores she assigned you over the holidays when she left for work every morning. She made you cook, she made you clean the house, she made you fetch water and firewood, she made you read all your books, she made you work on the shamba and she let you go play soccer with your male friends. As if to make sure your complexity never flowed out of your consciousness, she also gave you her name: Njeri, the adventurous one. No wonder, you’d later call yourself the Son of a Great Woman.

***

Say, when you joined nursery school, the teacher who taught you to read, write and draw your A,B,C,D… and your 1,2, 3, 4… was a woman. Ms. Wanja was her name. The next teacher who taught you, exclusively, in your first three classes of primary school was a woman too. Mrs. Irungu was her name. Mrs. Irungu taught you English; Mrs. Irungu taught you Kiswahili; Mrs. Irungu taught you Elementary Math; Mrs. Irungu wrote keep up the good work on your report form when you consistently emerged top in her class. While your father, and the socio-economic systems that be, disavowed your existence, Mrs. Irungu cheered you on, as if screaming her lungs out, Go young Muturi, you matter and it’s only a matter of time before the world knows it!

All this time, say your father’s disavowal made you think less of men. In fact, it made you hate all men because you did not understand why an organism would be so cruel as to deny its own offspring’s existence. Or is it my fault that he doesn’t care about me, you thought to yourself. However, say in your young mind you had childlike dreams of success and in those dreams you swore your father would never reap where he did not sow. In those childhood dreams, you would be the best in the world, you would build a castle and buy a private jet for your mother but you would never spare a shilling for your father.

However, as you grew older, you learnt about the notions of logic and irony, and you wondered: isn’t it ironic that I hate all men while my father is just one man? In any case, how can I hate myself; am I not a man, too? Also, you learnt about forgiveness. You listened to the South African legendary reggae musician Lucky Dube sing, I show love to those who show me love me, show love to even those who hate me, I bless even those who curse me. Your bitterness against your father then dissipated. After all, you had gotten wings to fly without him: you had broken academic records in your primary school, you had attended a top national school in Kenya, you had studied in the incredible African Leadership Academy in South Africa, and you had earned a scholarship to study in a top liberal arts university in the United States. You asked yourself, what can he do for me that I can’t do for myself now? Another voice emerged from the opposite side of your brain, saying, maybe he can help me understand my identity better, help answer that nagging, recursive question: who am I?

Say you are the one who then extended him an olive branch. During one of your summer holidays, you, in some way that can make a detective novel of its own, got his number and asked him if he’d like to have lunch with you. He accepted and on a rainy Sunday afternoon, the two of you were seated face to face, for the first time, in a restaurant in Nakuru town. No one else knew about the meeting. My friend, you must have yearned for this day; my friend, he must have dreaded its inevitable coming. On that day, you were feeling like a charging rhino, a cocked gun ready to fire, but your anger was tempered by Lucky Dube’s message of love and understanding. You placed him on the hot seat, or rather, on the dartboard, and shot the tough questions. You first sought to clarify whether indeed he was your father, and he responded positively. With that out of the way, it was time for the elephant in the room, The Why Question. Looking at his face, you could see that his eyes were starting to turn red and that the hand he held his straw in was shaking incessantly, like a cassava leaf in the Harmattan winds. It crossed your mind to spare him the question, but you had spared him twenty good years already. Furthermore, the tiny sadistic part of you was enjoying the kind of control you were having on him during this conversation, it was a rare kind of control, one that people never get have on their parents during their lifetimes. So, you took a swig from your soda bottle, looked straight into his reddening eyes and asked, “Mbona uliniacha?” Why did you leave me? Silence. Twitching. You looked on. His answer was below unsatisfactory: you know women, and the way they are emotional beings that you cannot understand, that misconstrue things…blah blah blah. You looked at the man, impatiently, and wondered if he was worth the audience you were giving him. So, my friend, let me get this right, according to him it was your mother’s ‘emotional womanness’ that had made him abdicate his parental responsibility to his own blood? “Dude, at least her emotional womanness has raised me for twenty years; how I wish I had eaten your non-emotional manness, but you know what, I’d have died on my first day on earth,” you thought to yourself and even thought of retorting it to him but Lucky Dube intervened again. Even so, you had to give it to him point blank, “That doesn’t make sense at all.” Nonetheless, you listened to him as he recounted his version of the story of what had transpired. You had every right to walk away but you listened to him, and pitied him, because you understood that it was not about him being a bad person at all — actually he was rather warm and he even paid for your bus ticket home that day — but about the rotten system that he was a product of. How much weight you gave to his story is a movie for another day but you were glad at least you got a few answers to some questions you thought you’d never get answers to.

***

My friend, say you had a beautiful sister, your father’s daughter, a few months younger than you. You and your sister might not have grown up together, but I am sure you know what they say about blood being thicker than water. Say as you become older, you decide to establish a connection with her. So you get her number from a mutual friend and you start calling her once in a while, asking how she’s doing, what she likes, what she’s currently working on, et cetera. Say she doesn’t know you’re her brother, because her (your) dad never told her, and so, unsurprisingly, she thinks you’re hitting on her. Then one December evening over winter break, you make that important call, from ten thousand miles away. You’ve been thinking and reading a lot and you decide to ask your sister if she knows that you guys are siblings. She’s surprised by the ‘news’ but she believes it; she says, “This is nice, I appreciate you big bro. I always wanted a big brother.” The warmth you feel inside you can melt all the snow outside; it feels awesome to finally have somebody call you brother. Growing up as an only child, you certainly wished for such a day. However, say, before you hang up and smile into sweet slumber, she hits you with news of her own. There is silence on the line. Then tears. Then, “Peter, brother, I need you now more than ever. I was raped…I am pregnant.”

Darkness.

Silence.

Tears.

***

[#TheMasculinityPolice]

Talking of tears, dude, why are you crying? Come on, don’t be a lil’ bitch now! Don’t you know that real men don’t cry? Man, that ‘Jesus wept’ verse in the Bible must have been a mistake, my boy John meant to say ‘Jesus slept’ but auto-correct failed him.

Dude, real men do not have feelings. They are tough, muscles, rocks. My nigga, do not be gentle, kind, cooperative unless you want to be labelled weak.

Especially, now that you’re black, you’ve gotta be gangster, violent, aggressive. You’ve gotta smoke that joint, gotta smash those pussies, gotta know how to handle that chopper in the car.

Bruh, womanness is your worst enemy; in everything you do, you must not be like a woman lest they call you a wimp, emasculated.

Cooking? Caring for children? Laundry? Never ever learn to do these women stuff, you can easily get a bitch to do them for you. Seriously, isn’t that what marriage is for?

For heaven’s sake, get a man’s job! Writing? Psychology? Painting? Dude, you gotta make that paper.

***

[#ThePrivilegeCongratulatoryCard]

My friend, now that you’re me, don’t you feel great to be part of the sex that won the sex wars, part of the gender that won the gender wars, part of the sexual orientation that won the sexuality wars? Don’t ask me when those wars were fought and why your gender, sex and sexual orientation won, just be happy you won. You’re now a tall, able-bodied, college-educated, heterosexual male. Congratulations! Ati gender and sexual orientation are spectrums and not binaries? Ati ask people for their gender pronouns? Ahhh, come on, as one member of the weaker gender and race once aptly put it, aint nobody got time for dat!

Smile, you’ll automatically, on average, receive a higher salary than a female working the same job. Congratulations!

Smile, you’ll never have to worry about getting sexually assaulted and getting blamed for it, for ‘asking for it.’ Congratulations!

Smile, you’ll never be undressed on the streets of Nairobi for “dressing indecently.” Congratulations!

Smile, you’ll never be catcalled on the streets of New York City because, of course, no one believes that when you walk around the city all you’re looking for is attention and unsolicited ‘compliments.’ No one believes that you’ve got nothing else to do or worry about other than dishing out your cell phone number. Congratulations!

Smile, you do not have to fear ever hitting a glass ceiling in your corporate job. Your career will never plateau in mid-management positions; you’ll easily join the ogas at the top in the C-Suite. Congratulations!

Smile, your candidness will never be interpreted as being ‘bossy’ or ‘unjustifiably angry’ and you’ll never be disliked for trying to dominate. Congratulations!

Smile, you will never be policed by society and told to be ‘homely’ and ‘classy’ and ‘sweet’ lest you lose the envied gift of getting married. Congratulations!

Smile, laws that control your body will never be made by legislatures whose memberships don’t even have 30% representatives of your gender. Congratulations!

Smile, your voice will never be silenced or discounted, simply because of your gender. Congratulations!

Smile, you can even dream about being President of your country, because political pundits are not fixated on the idea of “whether your country is ready for a male President or not.”

Congratulations sir! You’ve really earned it! Shout outs to all people, dead and alive, that worked really hard to produce and preserve patriarchy, the tree that yields fruits of your privilege.

***

Enough with the satire and the role reversal; Natasha, I am sure by now you understand where I am coming from. Plus, I need to answer Christelle’s question. Now, I might not have heard the word feminism before I came to college, but I supported the idea of regarding all sexes as equal even before I went to nursery school. While the term is important, and I do identify as a feminist, I think that’s just what Christelle would call ‘the semantics of it’; as Emma Watson said in her speech to the United Nations earlier this year, we shouldn’t be fixated on the term but rather the idea and the oppressive systems that produce gender expectations and inequities. I know I am still ignorant on a lot of aspects of feminism, which is why once in a while, you’ll find me perusing through the pages of the Chimamandas, the Anzalduas, the Steinems, the Audre Lordes, and the bell hooks of this world. All the same, for me, being a feminist is not about doing women a favor, it is very strongly personal. It is about my friends, who I believe should not live in pain and fear because of a quality of themselves they cannot control; it is about my mother, who has made me the man I am despite what society dictated; it is about my younger sister, a survivor of the horrors of an unjust system, one kind and strong soul; it is about the children I hope to have one day, who I believe we should be building a better world for; and ultimately, it is about myself, because I deserve to be who I am and who I want to be.

With love,

Your friend and think mate,

Peter Muturi Njeri.