Book review: Hoping when despair seems more logical

What you need to know:

  • Paul’s mother –his only hope – gets involved in a car accident and Paul’s neighbour, Chalo capitalises on the misfortune.
  • However, thoughts of his ever industrious mother propel him to action and he relocates to the street to fend for himself by seeking sanctuary at Jeevanjee Gardens at night.
  • Leonard Kibera cashes in on the merits of writing in the first person point of view. The story of Paul is chronological and easy to follow.

Title: The Reunion

Author: Leonard Njenga Kibera

Publisher: Longhorn Publishers

Reviewer: Gaylord Gitau

The Reunion is about Paul, a boy brought up by a single mother whose memory of her estranged husband is very bitter.

To confound the matter, Paul and his mother live in a slum where the author deftly uses the anagram Mururu for Mukuru slum.

Their house is neatly placed between an ageing acacia tree and a mould of earth. It was said to have housed a water pump for the city’s water supply decades ago but was abandoned.

The small 10X10 with two of the walls made of cardboard was their abode. The iron sheets were rotting and leaked in several places.

A tiny cardboard room at the back served as the bathroom and a latrine.

Here, the slum’s pathetic living conditions with decaying matter that became a festering waste which generated a putrid stench are captured vividly by Leonard.

THE IRONY OF IT ALL

Paths were dirty and dilapidated dwellings ran along Nairobi River.

And the irony of it all was the steady stream of people who comprised of forsaken maidens stigmatized by family and friends who poured into the slum to seek sanctuary.

Hopefully, the much hyped devolution in our new Constitution will address this endemic anomaly.

There were also fugitives and hardened criminals escaping from the law.

With alcohol wrecking havoc in the slums also brings to the fore the failure of the City Council in coping with the cyclic humanitarian challenges of the city today.

At the verge of Paul and his mother’s destinies brightening up by anticipating to moving to a house with two bedrooms a shower and a toilet inside, the ghosts of near-success-syndrome strike this family, shattering their dreams.

Paul’s mother –his only hope – gets involved in a car accident and Paul’s neighbour, Chalo capitalises on the misfortune and swindles him of all her mother’s earnings by masquerading as the uncle of Paul at Rawal’s shop, the old, gentle, grey-haired Asian of Indian origin.

Chalo took the lease documents of their house and legal agreements and moved in with his family.

As though not done with him, floods also displace Paul from their small house in Mururu after his mother’s accident and helplessness compounded by a longing to identify with his non-existent father weighs him down.

SEEKING SANCTUARY

However, thoughts of his ever industrious mother propel him to action and he relocates to the street to fend for himself by seeking sanctuary at Jeevanjee Gardens at night where he curls up in dustbins like a threatened animal.

Learning the ropes in the streets and eating from dustbins until he got work cleaning cars was a move that replicated his mother’s attributes of intellect, hard work and honesty.

A lesson to parents that parenting is not hinged on the environment where one lives but rather a conscious decision by the parents to raise their children well.

Leonard Kibera cashes in on the merits of writing in the first person point of view. The story of Paul is chronological and easy to follow.

It makes the story simple and memorable to the target audience.

The reunion of Paul with his mother, who had earlier been declared dead in hospital after the accident only to come alive from a coma, and Zefa, Paul’s absentee father, came while he was busy looking for direction in his shattered life and still fending for himself in the city.