Welcome to Fantasy Magazine! We’re so pleased to bring your story “Nairuko” to our readers. Can you tell us how this story came to be?
I was once told a story about a Maa community that lived in Laikipia in pre-colonial times. They were very fierce, feared by the other communities around them, and they were closely related to the Maasai. However, when the British arrived during the colonial conquest, they were massacred to extinction. This story affected me in many ways, especially given that I could only find little written information related to it. As a result, this made me ask questions about whether there were tribes which were entirely lost during this period, but more so, it made me ask what happens to the survivors of genocides, and how that affects their descendants down the line. I’m not sure I was quite successful in finding an answer to that question, but it did give rise to my story.
What was the most difficult part of writing this story, and what came easiest?
The most difficult part of writing this was trying to understand what tone to use. While I felt that the story always contained grief, it was hard to write about collective grief in a way that didn’t seem abstract or too expository.
The easiest part was the narrator and the writing of place, what she sees and how she interprets it.
What authors or stories have most influenced your work? Are there themes that you find yourself returning to in your writing?
The authors who have most influenced my work are Gabriel García Márquez, Ted Chiang, Lesley Nneka Arimah, and Ken Liu. Through them, I was able to fall in love with speculative fiction and magical realism and understand how to weave those aspects into fiction.
I always find myself returning to the theme of identity in my writing. However, this is not necessarily a conscious thing, and perhaps as I experience life more, different themes will emerge in my writing.
Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about this story?
No. However, I am hoping that it will motivate readers to seek out histories which may have been erased by colonial domination. They may not be written anywhere, but hopefully they still survive through songs or stories that only a handful of people know.
What are you working on now, and what can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?
Right now, I’ve started work on a novel titled Other Time, Other Life. It is mostly about the experiences of exile and how exile makes one feel as if they occupy two planes of existence, a past we cannot reach and a present in a different country that doesn’t fully explain us. At least this is my hope for the novel; I’ll see how it develops.
In addition, I’m also working on more speculative fiction short stories still dealing in some way with lost histories and memories.