Friday Feature: Idza Luhumyo

Idza Luhumyo was born in Mombasa, Kenya. She studied law at the University of Nairobi, earned an MA in Comparative Literature at SOAS--University of London, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State University.  Her writing has appeared in various publications, including Transition Magazine, African Arguments, the Masters Review, and the Porter House Review. Her short story, "Five Years Next Sunday," was awarded the 2021 Short Story Day Africa Prize and the 2022 Caine Prize for African Writing. Other awards include the Margaret Busby New Daughters of Africa Award and the Civitella Ranieri Writing Fellowship. She currently lives and works in Austin, TX.

But That's a Long, Long Time Ago

There's something calming about being stuck in an international airport, for hours, watching the world go by as you remain still, waiting to hear a voice call out your flight number. You're at peace, serene even, in spite of the uncomfortable seats on which you can only sleep in fits and starts. In spite of the dubious Wi-Fi that you know you shouldn't trust but to which you connect anyway. In spite of the fact that anytime you have to use the bathroom, you have to work out the complicated math of lining the toilet seat with tissue paper and then arranging yourself over it as you try to hold on to your carry-on luggage.

You are on your way to a short story festival in Cork, the second-largest city in Ireland. You set out from San Marcos—the small, charming city in Central Texas that houses the Creative Writing program in which you are enrolled. You are taking this trip because, in a lucky sequence of events, which you suppose is how these things tend to go, a short story you wrote many years ago won a major prize.

The journey to Cork is long, and it has been a long time coming. During the visa application process, you had to teach yourself how to trust American couriers with your passport and not think of the many ways everything could go very wrong. Once, things do in fact go wrong: when your passport with the visa stamp is returned, someone in the leasing

office makes a mistake. Yes, it was delivered to the office, they say to you. But for the life of them, they cannot remember to what apartment they sent it. There is a moment there where you forget how to breathe. The person you are speaking to is chirpy and casual, typing away on the keyboard as she tells you, coolly, that your passport—this bright blue booklet of a document without which you cannot travel, or prove your right to be in the USA—is lost. Would you like to give it a day or so, she asks, see whether anything comes up?

She is a sweetheart, really, the person saying these things to you, probably a Zoomer if her 90s-inspired outfit is anything to go by. She is the company's newest employee, one of those people who have a frantic aura about them: always rushing about, chewing fast, typing fast, talking fast, as if they had come to the world late, and were trying to play catch-up. Usually, when you come to the leasing office for your packages, you find her excitability charming, endearing. But as she finally looks away from her computer and tells you to go to your apartment and wait for your passport to magically appear, you pity her for the wrath you’re about to unleash. You tell her, in the quietest voice you can manage, that you will do no such thing. The clipped tone works: in less than an hour, your passport is found.

#

Cork is exactly how you expected an Irish city to be from the Irish novels you've previously devoured. Even though you've come to appreciate how big cities give you an anonymity that you disappear into, you're a small-town girl and find yourself charmed by how this rustic city seems to close in on itself, as if its buildings are huddling towards each other, keeping each other warm. Back home, in the artist circles in which you ran in your twenties, Ireland has always been looked on kindly because it shares with Kenya a brutal British colonial history.

Your hosts are kind. Everything goes as planned: the taxi picking you from the airport; the drive through the rustic route to the hotel; the warm reception the next morning. At first, the restrained demeanour of the festival organizers is an adjustment: in the past year or so that you've been in America, you've gotten used to a certain fussiness, an outward friendliness that seems obligatory. But here, the pleasantness is at a remove, and

people are more than happy to ease into silence when they run out of things to say. It is glorious. Maybe this is why you trust it. And even when the weather drops to single digits and you realize you didn't carry enough warm clothes, something inside of you thaws.

#

On the day of your reading, you stand in front of Irish writers and literary enthusiasts and read a story that pulls no punches in its critique of people who look like them. After your reading, there is applause. The sound of this prolonged applause will return to your mind when, months after the Cork trip, when back home in Nairobi for the Christmas break, someone at a literary gathering will remark that the African stories most likely to win literary prizes are those that criticize the very people who award them. But on that day, after you read your story, an elderly white woman walks up to you outside the auditorium and wraps you in a hug. You catch a whiff of Chanel No. 5 you usually scoff at, but which you start to like from then on. She calls you brave. Clutching your scarves and jackets, you walk down a cobbled path, and she tells you, a little haltingly, that she is a librarian and that she, too, is thinking of publishing some things she's jotted down throughout the years. She tells you that your bravery has inspired her to return to her writing. You hear yourself trotting out the writing advice you've heard throughout the years and which you, yourself, could use. You wonder what business you have offering writing advice to someone who's more than double your age and who, all her life, has worked with, and around, books. When you tell her you will be flying out in a couple of days, it is with a disappointed look that she bids you goodbye, but not before she points out, with barely-concealed urgency, the bookshops and coffee shops to visit before you leave. When you mention record shops, she points one out. Unbeknownst to her, the owner of the record shop is married to a Kenyan woman, and when you go down the stairs and tumble into this underground haven of sonic delight, you spend a lovely hour going on and on about 80s African music with someone whose enthusiasm belies the fact that he has never visited the continent.

#

Now that your reading is done, you allow yourself to have fun. You wonder if it's because your accent doesn't stand out as much, and that you spend as much time deciphering the Irish brogue as other writers try to understand your Kenyan English. You all have choice words about the British Empire, imperialism, the war in Ukraine. You redeem your drink tokens alongside the other writers and sit around a table and talk. In a corner of the room, a folk musician sits with a guitar, scoring the night with sparse chords about loneliness, lost love. You feel right at home in this famous brand of Irish sentimentality. A few writers sit away from the laughing group and brood. They sip and close their eyes. It's cold outside, but you're all sweating, taking off scarves and jackets and sweaters the more you laugh. You talk about writing rituals, Prince Charles III, Sally Rooney, Northern Ireland, Derry Girls, Trinity College, and, briefly, HBO's Succession when one of the writers is delighted you know how to pronounce Siobhan. You have your very first crush on a white man. Of course, he had to be Irish, your friend replies with a laughing emoji when you text her.

#

During mealtimes at the hotel, you’ve taken to looking for the tables that are tucked far away. You want to look at your phone and scroll away in chatter-free bliss. Some of the other writers, bless them, seem to notice and keep away, nodding and smiling every time your eyes meet. One morning at breakfast, you realize you've not spotted any other black person at the hotel. You feel guilty for only noticing this on the last day. But the guilt gives way to something like relief. Yes, you're the only black person at the hotel. Yes, you're the only black person at the festival. But contrary to how you often feel in America, you don't have the sensation of sticking out, you don't feel that a simple conversation will out you for being a different sort of black person altogether.

#

On the last day of the festival, after the first session of readings, you rush back to the hotel to grab dinner. The dining room is sparsely occupied, and most of the diners are elderly. The paneled walls and the perfectly set tables bring to mind a British pomposity that makes you smile. The time difference between Cork and Nairobi is only two hours. This makes it easier to keep up with Kenyan Twitter and Instagram in real time compared to when you're in America. You haven't been on social media all day. The idea is to find a table where you can scroll away in quiet bliss. You find one at the far end. You sit with your back to the room. The table has used utensils from the previous diners. On the top-right corner of the room, a TV shows a football game. Directly under the TV, a table with an elderly couple, sipping what appears to be the last of their drinks. You keep your head down, waiting for the maître d' to greet you and take your order.

You've been lost in your phone for a while when you feel a shift in the air. You look over

to the couple on your right. They keep sending looks towards you, and you keep looking back surreptitiously. At one point, you and the woman look at each other at the same time and send each other a smile. You are reassured. You return to your phone. Someone on your Instagram stories is giving a blow-by-blow account of a developing story about a Kenyan socialite. You're chuckling, you’re ignoring emails, you’re waiting to get dinner. After the reading, you hope you and the other writers will sample a little of the Cork nightlife. You even look forward to stealing a few moments with your crush.

Your attention is drawn to your right again. Now, there are three: one of the waitresses has joined them. They are all facing your table. The waitress nods as the woman talks. On the older woman's face is a look you've seen often on your own mother's when she's giving someone a good scolding.

You take out your earphones. The young woman—she couldn't be a day older than eighteen years—walks over to you, her cheeks flushed. You look over to the couple and they are shaking their heads, frowning.

"Just unacceptable," the man says, still shaking his head.

His voice attracts the attention of the other diners, and now looks are being directed towards you. The young woman, now appearing even younger than you'd thought her to be, starts to clear your table. You can feel the other diners' eyes. She is apologizing. Her eyes are watery. You feel a lump growing in your throat. You pinch the underside of your right arm, an

old trick pilfered from a TV show, to forestall the tears you feel coming. You're not sure who you resent more: the restaurant staff who took too long to clear your table and get your order, or the elderly couple who pointed out the slight and turned you into a thing to be pitied.

The waitress apologizes again.

"Hey, it's okay," you hear yourself say.

She nods rapidly, a smile on her face. Then, once she's stacked the utensils on her arms, she asks in a chirpy voice: "Did one of us seat you here?"

The shift from the teary eyes to chirpiness is remarkable. "No," you say to her, haltingly. "I just came and sat here." 

"I'm really sorry, I didn't see you, you had your back turned..."

You tell her it's completely okay. That you only sat there because you wanted some privacy.

It turns out you'd been waiting for half an hour. She takes your order. Your drink comes soon after she leaves. And then a couple of minutes after that, another server rushes to you with your plate of salmon, mashed potatoes, and a few celery sticks. You avoid looking at the couple on your right. You down the drink and then tackle the fish. The server returns to ask how you're finding the meal. You have about twenty minutes before the reading, so you ask for a cocktail. As you wait, the couple gets up. They walk to your table.

"You had been waiting for too long on a dirty table," the woman says, as if you had only just come to the scene yourself. "We just couldn't sit there and watch that happen to you."

You nod and smile, wishing that you had your cocktail already.

Then the man, in a quiet conversational tone, tells you that they are English tourists. That he had long known of his Irish ancestry and that they were finally taking this trip to see some of his ancestors' burial grounds. This moves you. You feel bad about being previously annoyed.

"And where are you from?" the woman asks you. 

"Kenya,” you say.

"Oh," she exclaims, clutching her husband's arm. She starts to laugh.

"She grew up in Kenya," the man explains, chuckling. 

The woman shakes her head slowly, as if she can’t believe the sheer coincidence of it all.

"But that's before we got married," the man continues, taking on the role of his wife's

interpreter. "She's still got some family there. Her father was sent there as an administrator with the British government. The 40s, it may have been? But that's a long, long time ago, I'm sure you were not born."

"Oh no," you say, chuckling. "Kenya wasn't even a country then."

He's laughing. You're laughing. You're all laughing. Out of the corner of your eye, you see the waitress from before, going to the kitchen with a stack of plates on her arm.

You get up from the table. You've decided to give up on the cocktail. In a single file, the three of you walk to the cashier. And there you all stand, waiting to settle your bills.

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