Claudette Oduor
Written by Claudette Oduor
I don’t know when exactly I first discovered the magic of stringing words together and watching them explode into confetti behind my eyes. I can’t remember when I first had the patience to see what would happen at the end of the sentence. I wonder, did my eyes widen that very first time the letters held each other’s hands and waved at me from the pages?
I never fell in love with books. I jaywalked in love with them, haphazardly crossing Nairobi streets with my eyes gobbling up words. How intriguing books were. How could entire cities fit in there? How could I see horses galloping across the pages, and yet not a single word had moved?
The people inside books had such odd concerns. Like the people in Pride and Prejudice -the Bennetts- how could such rich-sounding people claim to be so poor and unfortunate?
The books of my childhood were all about chartering my young mind. They were also about looking for friends to keep me company in the hovels of my loneliness.
Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women gave me a bunch of sisters. Meg, Amy and Beth March were always there for me. Jo March wasn’t there for me; she was me. She was ludicrous and clumsy and unaware. Like me, she wanted to be a writer, and that’s about the only thing she was sure about herself.
I read books set in the prairies, about Indians and pilgrims and pioneers, of savages, of girls who only had buttons as souvenirs of their boyfriends’ love. I wept!
And then I threw those books out because I realized that I didn’t need to get ulcers just because Edward had lost the silk handkerchief that had Love, J. S embroidered in the corner. For one, I couldn’t even imagine how a handkerchief could be made of silk. How practical is that, really?
My literary palate converged towards books whose characters I could relate with. I was growing up. People claimed I was a young woman. I didn’t feel like one though (young, maybe, but a woman? I didn’t even remember feeling like a child). At this point in my life, out of respect for my age group (let’s call it that and not peer pressure), I read Judy Blume and Francine Pascal.
Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret was my first ever Judy Blume text. In it I was sorely reminded that I was a young woman (there was too much talk of Tampax and bras *gag*). In Sweet Valley, the Wakefield twins had boyfriend trouble from when they were eight! Do you know what I was doing when I was eight? I was a long distance runner; running to keep up with my dad’s long steps.
Perhaps to forget that I was a young woman –whatever that meant- I delved into the riveting world of crime fiction. Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys kept me up each night. Forget CSI and NCIS. These characters invented the art of finding an eyelash inside a dumpster.
It was at this point that I started reading the grown-uppy stuff; John Grisham, Sidney Sheldon, Danielle Steele. These books however were PG 18 and one had to read them in the confines of Primary Maths. Whereas I didn’t think much of Danielle Steele’s books, John Grisham perforated my literary ulcers and staved and starved and ravished my young mind.
The turning point of my literary life came in the form of a Margaret Ogola text I found in the library. Opening The River and The Source was like learning to read all over again.
This book turned me from a religious reader into a spiritual reader. I stopped reading because I had to. I began to read because the book appealed to my spirit and appeased the spirits that resided in me.
The words in the pages spat out libations to the gods in me. I swallowed the libations, revering those gods in me, respecting myself as a vessel that sheltered the gods in me. From thence, reading ceased to be some sort of literary pagan ritual. Reading became sacred. Each book was a prophetic medium that interpreted inspiration into a language I could understand.
In books I found a home for my homeless heart. Books taught me the tenets of tolerance and respect. I learnt love and peace and strength. Books taught me how not to be ashamed of being a young woman, how to embrace the person that I am and the person I am destined to be.
Find Claudette on Twitter: @Soul_fool
