Dear Professor Ngũgĩ by Thomas Glave

Wasafiri Associate Editor Thomas Glave pens a letter in tribute and grief for Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (1938-2025).

Dear Professor Ngũgĩ,

My neighbour downstairs has complained bitterly to me several times through these past few days of the Biblical flooding coursing down from my flat into hers, threatening to destroy everything she owns. Salt everywhere, she has raged: saltwater destroying her plants, she has shouted, as the water has wreaked feral madness upon her bedroom sheets, her blankets, her mercilessly fitted tile floors, and even her television. (She has not mentioned whether or not she owns books.) Her cats loathe all of this. They despise it. They hate me. What have you up there in that flat of yours, she has angrily asked, an ocean? An inland saline sea? It must stop, she has remonstrated. You have to address this catastrophe head-on, she has insisted.

Yet the flooding will not and cannot stop — and how can I possibly tell her, good woman and only occasionally testy neighbour, that I not only cannot address the problem head-on – I’m simply incapable of doing so right now – but also that, since your death a few days ago, I have quickly retreated to the past.  I’m no longer living as a fully cognisant person in this century, in our beleaguered time, in our present, without you here, amongst us, walking amongst ferns, buildings, children, all sorts of animals, and the deeply breathing trees that always knew and understood both your name and the softest murmurings of your flesh.

If I could find the words, I would tell her (but very quietly, and with the most sincere contrition): Good woman, please accept my apology. I am so very, very sorry. The flooding that has been devastating your flat has of course been occasioned completely unexpectedly by tears — by an ocean or inland sea of them indeed, produced by eyes not only mine. And yes, my own eyes have been somewhat red since having seen the terrible, the simply much-too-soon news of this beloved man’s death. But again, please understand, dear neighbour, that the tears have abruptly appeared, everywhere, from others. I never expected ghosts both thin and weary, but also always grimly determined, to arise keening out of my dreams and the dreams of others, washing their salty torrents into the living world. These were the ghosts of millions of people from everywhere across that ancient, vast continent that long ago birthed humanity, but especially from your own country, Professor Ngũgĩ: ghosts crying and grieving in innumerable languages but especially in Gikuyu, and sometimes (although with a terrifying unearthly growl, as if simultaneously choked and choking) in English.

If I had the words to properly and precisely explain all this and more to my poor beset neighbour, I would reach blindly out into the darkness that always lurks just beyond and above the sacred firmament, searching there for your face that some will insist now, between stars, is gravely recounting tales of memory. They will say (or, more appropriately, whisper) that those ghosts were crying for and about you, Professor Ngũgĩ ... but also crying for themselves. Crying with the memory and knowledge in their wasted selves that sometimes (and didn’t you write about this somewhere time and time again, and then again?), the wretched tears of both ghosts and the living will join their torrents. They will shower saltwater upon prison cell bars, upon dark torture and interrogation chambers, and upon the hands of state-approved, professional assassins whose tongues have never known the bitter sting of salt. Indeed, didn’t you know these truths better than most?

If I could find the correct and accurate words, I would tell my besieged neighbour all this and more, dear Professor Ngũgĩ. But I simply can’t manage it, at least not today. My eyes are still a bit too blurred, just a bit murky, and in this moment, in my own apartment, the warm saltwater, coursing as if time has no end, appears resolved to rise above my waist.

But swirling warm saltwater, despite its origins in our most secret places, like the earth’s, is not and never will be the same as blood, although it can summon the same power as blood to raise screaming ghosts out of dreams produced in part by words scrawled across crackling manuscripts that marshal themselves into books. The ghosts inhabit the blood-infused dreams typed into novels, written or scraped onto prison walls, carved onto handcuffed kneeling bodies, and occasionally burnt with glee into living human skin. But how, dear Professor, do I tell my neighbour all this? Her realm has been invaded by the harsh waters, but hasn’t yet known entirely the footsteps of your books’ memory-haunted ghosts. How can I possibly tell her that the presence of merely one book of yours in her flat may result in her struggling to awaken a few days, out of blood-thickened dreams that may well have once been someone else’s? How to tell her that the thin and weary ghosts conjured, but also remembered forever in those pages, and all other sorts, might well one night surround her and accompany her for the rest of her life and afterward? And how, how to assure her that even amidst blood-thickened pages and reaching spectral fingers, your words also told us of joy and hope? Hope and the bravery that managed to free a mouth and throat from a tongue they had never wanted nor requested.

But then I believe at last that you will have to tell her all these truths and more, dear Professor. For even after your death, you still possess the words — and the absolute truth that we know more than ever now, is that every single ghost, both living and dead, will long remember your name, your words, and all the words scrawled long ago across your face and flesh.

But dear Professor, if you will bear with me, here is a very small, very brief prayer: really, a plea. A prayer that by and by the salty coursing waters shall recede, as the walls of everything, including those of the torture chambers, 'detainment' centres, and prisons, become dry again, as the redness in various eyes gradually disappears, banished back to the epochal deserts. This is what you would have wanted, and what from your earliest days you always wanted. And so let us hope, as you hoped and made clear time and again, that the prospect of not only one woman but an entire continent of people drowning in an ocean of tears, caused by a grief not properly their own, shall simply disappear. Let someone in a novel, or someone soon to walk toward your final resting place, pray that even as the sun and sky daily grow fiercer and more impatient above our foolishness, your watchful face, and even your face now and then agleam with tears and occasional joy, shall still be visible to all of us amongst the most vigilant stars.

If I could find the correct and accurate words to explain all this more clearly and succinctly – casting out upon the ground today’s bitter sting of salt in my mouth – I would say it. I’d say something like, You have to stay longer, or It’s not time yet. Something foolish and hopeful and pathetically human, in order to continue holding, holding fast, the warmth held so deeply, right there, within your folded hands.