All That It Ever Meant by Blessing Musariri
We have a heartfelt and lovely guest blog from author Blessing Musariri about her childhood and how it translates into her book, All that it Ever Meant.
My dad used to take us on road trips. An older cousin used to take us on excursions and day trips. I had a lot of fun growing up. My family was big and boisterous, with numerous cousins swelling the ranks. There were never less than ten children in our house at any one time. We don’t have a word for cousin in my language so we were all brothers and sisters together. Any time we went on any kind of trip, there were at least seven or eight of us piling into the car. Sometimes we would squash into a sedan, some sitting forward and others back a bit until we settled like the proverbial sardines in a can and it became comfortable. Some times we would stick the littlest ones in the boot, if it was a hatchback. Other times we would be in the back of a pick up truck with a canopy. We would have drinks and snacks with us. We would sing songs and play word games, we would tell jokes and tease each other — at some point someone’s feelings would get hurt, they would start crying and the games would stop — for a while. I was a middle child, like Mati. I spent a lot of time creating things in my mind and allowing my imagination to run away with me. I created games with whole entire worlds that I would outline to the rest of the kids and I would make the rules as we went along. Like Mati, I like rules, but they also have to make sense to me otherwise it’s a problem.
Sometimes a whole group of us kids would spend the whole day outside moving from one game to the next, using whatever was around us as towns, lakes, safe harbours, houses and havens. We would go out barefoot into the street and gather the neighbour children to join us and whoever’s house was the most fun or had the most fruit-trees, we would settle there for a while and generally make a noisy nuisance of ourselves but most times nobody minded because that’s what was expected from children. Had Chichi, Mati and Tana grown up in their parent’s native country this is most likely the kind of childhood they would have had, depending on the area in which they lived. Things have changed so much since then and likely this is something Mati’s mother might have wished for her children, but that she knew they would never have. Maybe this is part of what made it difficult for her to adjust to life in the UK and why when friends and family came to visit with them they brought traces of this life with them — in their shared memories, music and laughter over things that might not be as funny once translated into English.
I chose to take the Mufanana family on a road trip with their father, because of my own memories of travelling with our father as children. My mother never came along. Now that I am older I realise that this was time my father took to get to know us and teach us things that he wanted us to know — we hardly ever remembered. He would stop frequently and teach us names and uses of plants, trees and shrubs, even grasses, and let us pick wild fruit. On the next trip he would ask us, what is the name of this tree and what is it used for, or what fruit does it produce? Crickets, usually, and he would shake his head and explain all over again. I still know many of the wild fruits, because it was easy to remember something you ate and liked or didn’t like but if you were to ask me to pick a “toothbrush” stick for you, you would probably live (I hope) to regret it.
Whenever we had to leave the comforts of city-living, we would complain a lot for the first day or so and then eventually forget about the “deprivation”. We would start to appreciate the adventure of days that could present us with the unexpected at any turn. I wanted that sense of wonder and adventure for Chichi, Mati and Tana — going on a trip where they never knew what would come next but everything taking them a step closer to bringing them back together. I wanted to relive the trips myself because they are such precious memories and there is such beauty in all the places they visited and much more in those they didn’t get to. I love a good road trip myself and am always ready to go on one but like Chichi I am a bit fussy about where I lay my head, much to everyone’s annoyance. I will probably never go on a guided nature walk, I don’t know if I am still brave out in the wild, but I used to be. I will be imagining a lion around every turn or a snake or injured buffalo, it’s a conundrum — is it better to have a boring uneventful walk or one filled with drama and possible danger and daring feats and rescues so that there is a mad story to tell after? Sometimes we don’t get to choose. It just happens and before you know it, you’re your own superhero.
All That It Ever Meant by Blessing Musariri is published by Zephyr.
