Caine Prize Blogathon: My Father's Head

Once in a while one comes across a story possessive of such profound poesy, quiet strength, attention to detail, and a unique portrayal of a character’s feelings that it leaves a long-lasting and magical impression. Okwiri Oduor’s My Father’s Head is one such story (read it here).

Oduor adroitly portrays Simbi’s mourning of her late father in a unique and uncommon way: Simbi attempts to draw her father’s head but finds that she can’t remember how it looked like. That Simbi terribly misses her father is something that starts gnawing at you soon into the story, taking a life of its own and morphing into a palpable feeling of loss.

Told in the first person, My Father’s Head is reflective. Simbi reminisces about her father, recollecting her memories of him. In one of these flashbacks, we see death as something that wasn’t very far off from her father’s, and her own, thinking. To her father, it seemed imminent: “My God, everyone is going. Even me, you shall hear me on the death news very soon.” To Simbi, it was a foreboding thought, an unsettling disquiet about how she will face her father’s death: “I was mourning the image of myself inside the impossible aura of my father’s death.”

When her father died, and even though his death, described in graphic terms (perhaps a graphic content disclaimer should be appended to the story), was horrific, Simbi didn’t weep right away. Her grief is therefore painted as a festering wound that refuses to heal, even after the passage of time: “…what more is there to think of your father, eh? That milk spilled a long time ago, and it has curdled on the ground.”

The story also portrays the sense of belonging as a fleeting one – we feel we belong or people belong to us, when it is not really the case:

“Only the food you have already eaten belongs to you.” “Maybe the day you go back home to your people you will have to sit in a wicker chair on the veranda and smoke alone because, although [your people] may have wanted you back, no one really meant for you to stay.”

In the end, Simbi is able to overcome this debacle when her father returns from the dead (perhaps here the story becomes a fantasy?) – she asks her father to stay.

Oduor’s writing is interspersed with some lovely, dreamily poetic spurts such as this one:

“In the grass, ants devoured a squirming caterpillar. The dog’s nose, a translucent pink doodled with green veins, twitched. Birds raced each other over the frangipani. One tripped over the power line and smashed its head on the moss-covered electricity pole. Wasps flew over the grass. A lizard crawled over the lichen that choked a pile of timber. The dog licked the inside of its arm. A troupe of royal butterfly dancers flitted over a row of lilies, their colourful dancing skirts trembling to the rumble of an inaudible drumbeat…”

With such alive writing, it is easy to see why this story won the Short Story Day Africa’s “Feast, Famine and Potluck” Short Story Competition in 2013, and why it is a strong candidate to win the 2014 Caine Prize for African Writing. Will Okwiri Oduor be the first Kenyan winner since Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor in 2003? Seems highly likely!