Skip to main content

Being Plus Sized in a Skinny Family


RIP Guka Kibira.
Up until last week when I read bikozulu's blog post on a kikuyu burial, I had never questioned the sense behind our burial customs. Now that I viewed them through a fresh pair of eyes, it is a wonder that I have never questioned the logic behind taking photos at a funeral... posing behind the casket! On Wednesday we buried my grandfather, my mom's uncle, and it was a sober, dignified ceremony befitting the respectable 87 year old man.

During the now infamous photo session, the MC called for the late man's nephews to take a photo. he mentioned one of them by name: KiMuriithi Kinene (The big Muriithi), jokingly referring to him by his childhood nickname. As an aside, he added that Muriithi was clearly still kinene (big). I glanced across at my mum, remembering this set of pliers that Muriithi had left at our house when I was only six, and that we had taken to calling KiMuriithi Kinene.

I can bet that you are imagining Muriithi as a hulking, big-boned, big-bellied figure. In fact, he's average in size. His belly is no larger than the average beer gut. He'd fit right in along the hallways of KRA where the beer gut is an identifying trait of the officers. Try stepping into an elevator with 5 or more of those and it's like squeezing between foam mattresses! I have officially developed claustrophobia. However, in a family where the average weight would probably fall between 55-60 Kgs, any visible flab will see you labelled 'fat'. You can now see how Muriithi stood out like a sore thumb in that particular photo.

For a partially deaf man, there was a lot of singing at my grandfather's funeral. The MC opened up a 'presentations' session and a once reknowned Gospel musician, a white haired old man whose vigour made up for his tone deafness and a woman whose rendition of Look and Live was only recognisable from the tune and the refrain: hallelujah! It took a beat to recognise that 'rooku and reeve' was actually 'look and live'! My mum tried so hard not to laugh that her pained look made me laugh. Despicable behaviour at a funeral.

The heat was altogether hellish. Do Republicans still think that global warming is a myth? I drank a whole 500ml of water in a matter of minutes (that is an amazing fete because I cannot stand the tastelessness of water).  The woman who was sitting right in-front of me, who was questionably reading the eulogy upside down, turned towards me, stared at my bottle for a full minute before asking, "Si unipatie hako kachupa." As far as requests go, that is one of the strangest I have gotten. That was before she asked my mum for TicTacs; my cousin to take a photo of her; and my aunt to invite her for a get together that we were planning for in April.

Looking back, I feel that bikozulu had every right to be baffled by Kikuyu funerals. All the way down to the rice, mukimo and cabbage. The important thing, though, is that all these characters had come to lay Guka Kibira to rest. May he rest in peace.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Girl Code... Not Neccesarily in that Order.

"The only rule is don't be boring and dress cute wherever you go. Life is too short to blend in." Society can be such a drag. What, with all the unwritten, unsaid rules and codes. Guys have an elaborate ‘Bro Code’. In fact there’s a whole website . You will be surprised that Rule no. 1 of it is not the (in)famous ‘Bros before whores’. Girls have their own code too, though it’s not set in stone and varies among different groups of girls. The Girl code is especially tricky to girls like me who aren’t exactly programmed like other girls. So, I have a list of essential rules in the Girl Code. Some come with disclaimers and modifications. Some are universal while others are just stuff that my friends and I have come up with along the way. 1.        Should a Girl be critically injured, her Side-Girls are to never make jokes about it, unless the hurt Girl does first. I love my girlfriends…very much, but if said critical injury has risen as a result of a fall (wh

Of Doing Milk and Staying Young

Boredom inspires/ drives me to do the unthinkable... like texting him to say how I couldn’t stand pretending that I didn’t like him...or drinking a glass of milk. I do not DO milk. And no, I am not lactose intolerant. As Max in ‘2 Broke Girls’ aptly points out, “Poor people don’t just run out to buy anti-biotics. You man up, grow a pair, and stare germs in the face...booyah!” I may not be poor but I am definitely not rich. People in my economic bracket don’t get fancy diseases like eczema. We get rashes, and if you want to get all fancy then you will have to do with ‘allergies’. So, no, I am not lactose intolerant. Where I come from it’s just a plain, simple ‘I don’t drink milk.’ But here I am, with a now half empty glass of milk. (I hope you can detect the pessimism there or else my pun will have gone to waste) I suppose the ‘Do Milk, Stay Young’ campaign hasn’t gone to waste. All that sexual objectification of infants wasn’t in vain. “Sexual objectification?” you ask. Yes,

Fighting for my right to be wrong.

I feel as if our relationship has been progressing at an admirable rate... progressing enough for me not to just assume that someone somewhere is reading this, but to hope that this is so. Today has been a Monday, true to form. Murphy s law through and through. Anything that  could go wrong DID go wrong...but I don't want to bore you with the gory details. I do need to mention, though, that I was diagnosed with alarmingly high levels of typhoid fever. To be frank, I didn't feel THAT ill. I was simply mildly sick with a stomach ache and a head ache but the pharmacist wouldn't give me any meds until he had run some tests.Even after the diagnosis I still felt pretty amazing considering the shocked expression on the lab tech's face as he tries to make me understand how 'grave' my situation was. Dad wasn't as flippant about it as I was (His own face-to-face encounter with typhoid had confined him to bed for a week and he couldn't believe that my body was