Unforgettable sentences in literature that tend to stay with us forever
(This article first appeared in the Saturday Nation, May 9th 2020, on page 30)
“As the last rattle of the Land Rover died in the distance, I took stock of my position. I had neither food nor drink…”. That sentence, from one of the titles in the Moses series by Barbara Kimenye, has stuck with me for over 30 years. Whenever I remember it when in Nairobi, memories of childhood kick in; my mind races down Mombasa Road to Mtito Andei, seeing the expansive spaces of Voi to the impossibly lush Savannah grassland of the Taita village of Buguta I grew up in. The gray sky and the dark clouds swashbuckling like unruly wild animals refusing to be tamed. The loud rambling thunder threatening to tear everything into smithereens. The hills rising defiantly in the horizon like warriors ready for battle; daring the thunder to bring it on. The half-moon hiding in the corner of a dark sky. Or the setting sun, an angry and fiery ball in the horizon annoyed that it has to set. Books are pathways to personal histories. If one picks up a childhood favourite book, they could be transported back to their childhood.
Whether it’s a sentence or sentences in a song, poem or book, there are some sentences that stick with us for a long time–a living testament to the power of good literature. One of the poems whose lines have haunted me is Antonio Jacinto’s poem, “Letter from a Contract Worker”. The contract worker was a poor Angolan recruit working in mines for the colonial regime in South Africa. In faraway South Africa, missing his loved one who was back in Angola and afraid he may lose her to another man of means, the narrator chimes unforgettably, “I wanted to write you a letter my love/ a letter of intimate secrets/a letter of memories of you/of you/of your lips red as henna/of your hair black as mud/ of your eyes sweet as honey/…of your lynx gait…
I wanted to write you a letter my love/ that would recall the days in our haunts/ our nights lost in the long grass/ that would recall the shade falling on us from the plum trees/ the moon filtering through the endless palm trees/ that would recall the madness of our passion/and the bitterness of our separation …”
Closer home, John Kiriamiti’s first sentence in his famous book, My Life in Crime, stuck with me for good, “Before my life in crime, I never believed that a man or a group of people could sit together and conspire to rob, blackmail, kidnap, murder or commit other acts of felony”. These lines draw vivid pictures in the reader’s mind; pictures sometimes indelibly printed for a lifetime. These pictures are probably what T.S. Eliot called “the auditory imagination” in his book, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, where he wrote that, “What I call the ‘auditory imagination’ is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, …bringing something back...”
And the sentences don’t have to be long to create this “auditory imagination”. In “Ulalume”, Edgar Poe uses a seven-word sentence with fearsome percussive force: “It was night in the lonesome October”. Seven words that pack a punch for the ages.
Tony Mochama, the renowned Kenyan writer with the trademark dreadlocks that swirl in momentary jigs as he moves about, has also penned some unforgettable lines. In Nairobi: A Night Guide through the City-in-the-Sun, Mochama writes two sentences that I consider gems for bringing Nairobi into life especially at this time, “The light drains out of the evening sky until it looks like a cheap T-shirt whose colours have run from over-washing. Nairobi, by weekday dusk, is a mad asylum of matatu mayhem and stone-faced pedestrians, hurrying to get home.” These sentences make one long for the way the city was in the pre-Corona days! In the Covid-19 era, the city in some places looks as desolate as a house that has been ransacked by thieves. Mochama’s two sentences are enough to remind us of how it was when we would roam freely in the streets of Nairobi without a mask, sanitizer or being startled by a stranger’s dry cough. The joke now is that pre-Corona, we said, “bless you!” when one sneezed but now we ask, “do you want to kill us?!”.
In Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton, the prose stylist of confounding desires of the past and present, ruminates, “There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it. The road climbs seven miles into them, to Carisbrooke; and from there, if there is no mist, you look down on one of the fairest valleys of Africa. About you there is grass and bracken and you may hear the forlorn crying of the titihoya, one of the birds of the veld. Below you is the valley of the Umzimkulu, on its journey from the Drakensberg to the sea; and beyond and behind the river, great hill after great hill; and beyond and behind them, the mountains of Ingeli and East Griqualand.” Now, those are unforgettable sentences. They stick for a lifetime.