Requiem For Njeri

By Waithĩra MbuthiaProtano

Mental illnesses, such as clinical depression, bipolar, schizophrenia, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, etc., are some of the most misunderstood of all diseases. The triumvirate of fear, ignorance, and superstition, especially, as it pertains to Africans and other people of color not only exacerbate problems for peoples struggling with horrible and insidious maladies but make it harder for them and their families to seek help. What many of us forget is that the brain, like any other organ of the body, is susceptible to disease. We rarely think twice about naming an illness afflicting us or our kin—cancer, diabetes, heart failure, etc.—but, God forbid, if that sickness involves our brain! Yet, mental illness is as pervasive worldwide as some of these other diseases.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordeee
• Release date: Dec 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781946274045

Waithĩra MbuthiaProtano

Waithĩra (waithera) Mbuthia-Protano is a native of Kenya. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in English from Jersey City State College and a Master’s Degree in Educational Administration from Teachers College, Columbia University. She is a New York State certified English teacher, who has taught in high schools in the New York City Schools System and Westchester County as an English teacher as well as an adjunct lecturer at the City University of New York. Waithĩra’s various essays, poetry, African folktales, children’s stories and translations have appeared in literary journals and contemporary magazines, such as Confrontation, The Literary Review, Crosscurrents, Bomb and Essence. Some works have been published under “Waithĩra Mbuthia” and “Waithĩra Mbuthia Karanja.” In the year 2000, Soundprints publishers commissioned Waithĩra to write a children’s book as part of a Make friends Around the World series, dedicated to “promoting the understanding of different cultures among young readers.” The result was My sister’s wedding: A story of Kenya (2002), which talks about one of the ways the Agĩkũyũ (agekoyo) people get married. In July 2004, Waithĩra won a grant from the International Center for Writing and Translation (ICWT) at the University of California, Irvine, to translate some poems by Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes and Pablo Neruda as well as Aesop’s fables and folktales from different parts of Africa into Gĩkũyũ (gekoyo) language. A storyteller, public speaker and an active contributor to—and one of the editors for—Mũtiiri, a Gĩkũyũ literary journal founded and edited by Kenyan writer, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Waithĩra is fluent in spoken as well as written Gĩkũyũ and Kiswahili languages. For the past several years, Waithĩra has worked as a substitute teacher in the White Plains City School District, while pursuing her love of writing and other personal endeavors.

Book preview

Requiem for Njeri,[1]

by Waithĩra Mbuthia-Protano

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[1] N is silent.

Requiem for Njeri

Copyright ©2016 by Waithĩra Mbuthia-Protano

All rights reserved.  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

Book Layout:

Book cover design by BespokeBookCovers

For more information log onto www.waithirambuthia.com

Published by Wordeee

E-ISBN: 978-1-946274-04-5

New York, United Stated of America

Email: [e-mail]

Website: www.wordeee.com

I think every parent must have a sense of failure, even of sin, merely in remaining alive after the death of a child. One feels that it is not right when one’s child has died, that one should somehow have found the way to give one’s life to save his life.

—Frances Gunther in Death Be Not Proud, by John Gunther

Is there no way out of the mind?

–Sylvia Plath

I dedicate this book to the memory of my beloved daughter, Njeri, whose young life was claimed by bipolar in 2004. May the peace, love and joy, which the disease and the sometimes cold and apathetic world denied her, each be multiplied five hundred trillion-fold.

Thaai, thathaiya Ngai. Thaaai.[1]

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’ can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

― David Foster Wallace

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[1] May God make it so

TO THE READER

Wherever possible I have rendered, phonetically, unfamiliar names, words and terms that may be too hard for some readers to pronounce. For additional information, actual spelling and explanations of the same, see glossary page in back of the book.

1

A MOTHER’S LAMENT

Njeri!

Njeri!

Njeri!

Where are you

my second born child—

where are you?

Where’s the little girl

that was attached to my hip—

the last