Book Review: My Father’s Head - Okwiri Oduor

In My Father’s Head, author Okwiri Oduor moves seamlessly through time, space and perspectives to capture the contradictions and ambiguities inherent in the contemporary Kenyan world. As the female protagonist Simbi attempts to recall her father’s head, the reader traverses in eight short pages the themes of religion, love, memory, death and heritage in Kenya.

Through Simbi who works at an old people’s home, Oduor presents old age and death juxtaposed with the faithlessness of religion represented by the figure of Father Ignatius. The stories’ beginning suggests that like the old people in the home, the time and place for religion is in an old people’s home awaiting death or life. Simbi is critical of the way the Father pays for his bodaboda with money from the old people as well as his maiden sermon on love.

“Love your neighbour as you love yourself, that kind of self-deprecating thing… What I wanted to know was what type of person Father Ignatius thought he was, instructing others to distribute their love like this or like that, as though one could measure love on weights…”

The story flows fluidly from point to point like a collage of all the scenes Simbi encounters, has encountered or encounter through other sources; the old people’s home- the garden, the kitchen, and the dormitories; her father’s veranda; her own home; and the scene of her father’s death. It is as if, by moving from place to place, she assembles her father’s head; by assembling many images she can form a tapestry which will lead her to her father.

“He whistled to himself. At first the tune was a faceless, pitiful thing, like an old bottle that someone found on the path and kicked all the way home. Then the tune caught fragments of other tunes inside it, and it lost its free-spirited falling and rising.”

Okwiri traverses the concept of memory by leading Simbi through ‘fragments’ of memories inside the memory of her father consequently unearthing his spirit. These fragments include memories of her father, interspersed with her present, mixed with a narrative description of returning home after being away. Her incapacity to see her father’s head at first seems to be a metaphor for the incapacity to capture or reconcile herself with his death, as well as reconcile herself with her ‘people.’

My Father’s Head can be seen as a remembering of her father; his death, his legacy and his love for her “that did not need to be doctrinated or measured in cough syrup caps.” The story is also a remembering of her ‘people’ and herself in relation to them. It’s almost like in order to reconcile herself to her current position in life, Simbi must bring her father back ignoring the warning proverb from Bwibo, the cook at the old people’s home,: “it’s only with a light basket that someone can escape the rain.”

A comparison can thus be drawn between Simbi’s remembering her father’s head which “was shaped like a butternut squash,” and finding or accepting her position with her ‘people.’ Just as Simbi tells Bwibo “we have to send [my father] back,” she also explains: “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 they may have wanted to have you back, no one really meant for you to stay.”

So does Simbi relate to her ‘people’ the way she relates to the ghost of her father? If so, can the reader thus assume that like the ghost of her father, which she eventually invites into her home and offers a cup of tea, Simbi’s relation to her ‘people’ will be reconciled if she invites them into her life. Like she does with her father will she ask her ‘people’ to stay? Simbi is looking for her father’s head as well as her place among her ‘people’ and when she finds and accepts one, the reader is encouraged to think she has found and accepted the other.

“I looked at my father. He was something at once strange and familiar, at once enthralling and frightening – he was the brittle, chipped handle of a ceramic tea mug, and he was the cold yellow stare of an owl.”

By Ondi Madete