Unrehearsed Futures (S4) #9 Between the Old & the New Story: Spaces of possibility

It was December 2007. Kenyan storyteller, dramatist, orator and theatre-maker Ogutu Muraya was in busy pursuing his higher studies in international relations and diplomacy with an interest in environmental studies when the violence in his country broke out.

Kenya was in the middle of a contentious presidential election that year. The then-Opposition-leader Raila Odinga (who belonged to the Luo tribe) was poised to defeat incumbent president Mwai Kibaki (from the majority Kikiyu tribe). On 27 December, the country cast their ballots. By 29 December, as the counting of votes began, Odinga appeared to have a stronger lead. Yet by 30 December, the gap narrowed, and by nightfall, behind closed doors, the Election Commission of Kenya declared the Kibaki as the winner. However, a few days later, the Commissioner admitted that he “did not know” who had actually won.

It didn’t matter, for minutes after the announcement protests broke out on the streets of Kenya that Kibaki had “stolen” the election, marking the beginning of a long-drawn out violent conflict where the country slipped dangerously close to a civil war. In the months that followed, close to 1400 people died while 600,000 people were displaced from their homes.

A combinatorial play

Until this point, Muraya had approached theatre as a hobby, something one pursued after one’s office hours. However, the post-election violence of 2007-08 in Kenya changed that for him. Theatre became the space where he found himself in between stories of ethnic tensions, of identities (his father is a Luo while his mother is Kikiyu) and of his country. In this aftermath, Muraya began engaging with art differently to explore this sense of in-betweenness as part of post-conflict reconstruction.

We are living through a fractured time, grappling with old stories that we laid a certain claim to and new stories that are now another claim to certainty. Talking about navigating this in-betweenness, Ogutu recalls the artistic interventions that took place in Kenya in the aftermath of the post-election violence. “It was a way of meeting together in this in between-ness and asking ourselves, what did we just do? And how can we live with ourselves, with each other?”

As part of a commission from Kwani Trust, Ogutu visited several Internally Displaced Camps (IDPs) and spoke to people affected by the violence — less from a journalistic view and more from a storyteller perspective. Around the same time, Kenyan artists began documenting living memories – Living Memories by prolific writer Al Kags captures the narratives of elderly Kenyans who grew up through the 1930s, 40s and 50s and their lives during the struggle for independence; Cut Off My Tongue, a poetry performance written by Sitawa Namwalie (and performed by Sitawa, Melvin Alusa, Aleya Kassam, Willy Rama, Boaz Otien), which looks at the evolution of Kenyan history through Sitawa’s personal journey; Land of the Kitchen, written by Oluoch Madiang. “This was a really formative period for me,” shares Ogutu, “because then being an artist meant engaging with social political context. And engaging with a social political context meant negotiating or questioning certainties.”

Through all this, Ogutu began questioning and articulating his artistic voice in this practice. It began with his debut as a playwright Are We Here Yet? The play was an attempt to combine all the experiences he was engaging with at the time, in terms of politics of memory – what is forgotten and what is conveniently left out as well.

The story is of two Mau Mau freedom fighters who find themselves stuck in a forest and don’t find out that their country gained Independence till 20 later, because they’re still in the forest. It is only when they encounter a group of British tourists that they arrive at the truth. When they find out, the Mau Mau fighters struggle with accepting and processing it. Historically, Mau Maus were members of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA) who fought against European colonialists in Kenya, the British Army and local auxiliary militia, and pro-British Kikuyu. Over time, they’ve turned into mythic figures.

When Ogutu’s play opened, the audience was divided – there were people angered by the comedy in the play and felt that it demeaned the memory of the Mau Mau while there were others who found that the comedy helped humanise the Mau Mau from being mythic figures who fought for Kenya’s freedom. Despite the reception, Ogutu felt this dialogue-driven drama wasn’t his voice, rather him trying to follow someone else’s.

In order to focus on his practice more and find the poetics in politics, Ogutu moved from Nairobi to Amsterdam to study. What he ended up with there, and something he still works with, is what he calls ‘combinatorial play’. He describes it as a meeting point between creative non-fiction and fiction, an essayistic practice which focuses on performance essays that work with different voices and personal narratives. During this time, he also started examining the impact of colonization on culture. “What were the knowledge systems that were destroyed? And how that meets the essayistic?”

The restricted body

In his 2019 essay I am multitudes, Ogutu expressed his dissatisfaction with a system that did not allow him the freedom to imagine. Even though he had moved to Amsterdam to discover a deeper and freer practice, “living in Amsterdam I completely forgot to imagine and craft the worlds I cannot live without; I was too busy focusing on pointing out what doesn’t work in the worlds I lived in and I totally forgot to imagine and craft.”

He was confronted with the restrictions around mobility in Amsterdam, where he found a policy of discouragement existed. “The idea was to make things as hard as possible for someone to wants to come, and when they arrive to make things as hard as possible for them to want to stay,” he mentions, referring to visa systems and more.

Growing up in the Kenyan educational system, Ogutu was taught to fear failure. “Failure was unacceptable. It was either shamed, embarrassed, humiliated, or punished physically through labour. You had to be certain all the time.” But, in Amsterdam, the student was put at the center of their own learning. “The school was there to support your own imagination, to support your ideas and thinking, but there was also the attempt to create, and at the same time, be critical around what you’re creating, which was a struggle,” he shares. What this resulted in was the development of an artist who became busier with his fear than exploring craft without fear. And so, he decided to return to Kenya, and create, in a way, ‘a room of his own’, a space that he gave himself to try things out.

For Ogutu, a part of this practice has been looking back at memories and approaching the pain points with consideration and care. “How do we introduce playfulness into the process? What does it mean to play and to engage in play with that material?” he asks. This ‘room of his own’ also allows for and welcomes failure. “The other idea was how to shift from anxiety to curiosity? How can we look at curiosity and its broadness – not only as a seeking of gaps in knowledge, but also as a seeking of what is of interest, from a place of wonder?”

Ogutu has also been thinking about decomposition – of habits, of practice, and identities. He recalls observing an ice sculpture of Leopold II by a Congolese Belgian artist melt – changing in form and dissolving. A powerful image, it reminded him that in the practice of deconstruction, the main structure remains in the pieces that have been broken down. “It never transcends the thing you’re deconstructing.” But what happens is a transformation, a process that is vital to life, and is part of what generates life. It then becomes a question of what must be let go of to generate something else? How can one allow conditioning to decompose and re-compose as curiosity, asks Ogutu.

“So, directly within the practice of storytelling is: How do you reframe a story? How do you retell it? How does it become something else?” says Ogutu. “This idea of editing is also part of decomposition as well. And it’s part of retrieving the memory and working on it. And something transforms within that process. And something is allowed to die and leave as well.”

As the conversation veers to an end, Ogutu asserts that this idea of decomposition is a large part of his practice today, where there is an un-establishing, un-habiting and un-learning of ideas, and allowing certain stories, certain certainties to die, and from that death let something new arise. For the practice of storytelling is less about the capacity to tell a story, but more about the ability to listen.