Viajesalpasado has edited his third book, a work of María Ferreira on Kenya. And so far everything normal, what could be predicted by putting together the words work and Kenya. Because what you can read, we strongly recommend that this be so, it's a manuscript that smells, cry and bleed. Since the author wrote her first post in VaP, all of us who make this magazine understood that she had a different look. His stories from these three years are an x-ray of love, The madness, hatred… I leave you here the prologue that Maria asked me to write for her Land of Bruges. I remember finishing the book last summer while sitting on a beach in Tulum, Mexican Caribbean, which is the country where I live now. So it was just freshly written paper that I had photocopied. My brother, who had come to see me here, he was coming for a long walk on the sand and he asked me what's wrong? And I told him: "Don't know, I just read a wonderful book that I don't know if it made me want to cry or laugh». I smiled when I finished saying it.
Prologue Land of Bruges
This book is a cruel and beautiful love story. Smells of urine, dry powder, to delivery towels and vomit. Condoms break, burials are held in refrigerators and tears are spit. She smiles among the cures of degraded bodies and loves herself in the midst of harsh madness. Can there be more love than loving in such conditions?
The life of a lost Kenyan village and hospital spreads out into its particular routine of witches succeeding, corpses, impossible weddings, escapes to local postín, prostitutes, mentally ill and hot beer shacks where drunks go out. Through the pages of this work that they have in their hands swarm a series of traditional characters from this corner of the world that is Makuyu, example of so many corners of the world that last us a sigh and a heated and supportive coffee conversation that is made with the intimate secret of being forgotten as soon as it is concluded. Makuyu exists for all of us to forget after praying his name.
There are times Earth Bruges in reaching smell everything and you have to separate some pages, breathe and do an exercise of memory is to remind humans. I read a few books on Africa and, course, I have never faced such a work. Perhaps because none of the authors I have read I could tell in the first person what tells Maria. She did not run away from Makuyu, as we would almost all, She stood there hating and loving the land.
There are moments in the Land of Bruges when everything comes to smell
Africa is a messy giant. Me, against what happens to all the intellectuals who strive to relate the differences to wash slights and boast of respect for the alternative, Africa always seemed to me a huge country where everything fits. It fits even Mary with her sick, their owls, baobabs and scorpions. African identity has to do with their lack of respect for the borders that others created for them. Africa always seemed nomadic in its heart and its hatreds. For me, Africa is a great country, the last one left to the planet, full of different quirks.
And in the midst of all that physical space - where the cement is weak and the nights are announced by the smoke from the bonfires that light up in unison when goodbye threatens in dry valleys, deserts with beasts, snowy mountains, cinnamon beaches and flows with boats-, Maria tells us about the madness of being alive in the midst of these strange cities. It tells the naked man of carelessness and cambalaches. Man, only man, and life is always about to leave with the intensity that this implies.
Because this book, where death spreads in the back seats of cars - what better phrase to summarize it than the brave confession of the young author that she has carried more dead men in the back of her vehicle than those who have loved her-, talks about a first-person experience that few mortals go through. However, that is not its merit, that in counting that the bet of suffering rises there should be no glory, but narrating what is not seen, what no traveler will face, with a prose as direct and simple as his vital commitment to that land. That private space only for the inhabitants. There is not a single gesture of concealed pride in this work of those who show off their scars.
There is not a single gesture of concealed pride in this work of those who show off their scars
The manuscripts, like the words, I think they belong to the receivers. Bruges Land there will be thousands, as many as looks, but if there is something in this work that startled me, and there were many things, is that she's totally honest with fears, abhorrent mistakes and miseries that are hidden in a country as unfair in its leftovers and needs as Kenya. Mary chews her truth naturally, to make human life of those who every morning get up to live with that world that, for almost everyone, is an indigestible headline, a sack of horror. For them, the inhabitants of Makuyu, among which Maria is already, is life, without, and they suffer it and they enjoy with amazing routine.
The book also lacks that certain paternalism that some works that relate the continent incur, always excusing everything under that tragedy that is hunger, to dissect one of those tiny worlds that hide in the sewers of the human being. And there, amidst that incomprehensible reality, Mary's gaze emerges to explain, with no more ambition to tell, that you can love a land, a man and oneself without really understanding anything. Even, it remind us, you can love what you are hating. In the challenge of understanding the only door that must be crossed to survive Makuyu and the Land of Witches is born. Why live in a place where fetuses and beers share space in the fridge? "For being alive", Mary tells us.
