Some of the stories I tell didn’t start with me. Or rather, the storyteller in me didn’t start with me. This yearning for words woven together — it was passed down. And I’m still trying to find the stories that were passed down… or that should have been. The longing to connect through story didn’t arrive in leather-bound volumes. It came in outside kitchens and family gatherings. In long queues and matatus. In whispers during weddings.
I grew up in a family that loves to talk. They didn’t always call it storytelling. They called it “talking,” or “remembering,” or “just saying.” But they were archiving. Preserving. Making maps out of memory. And the joy of retelling was mine. Our stories weren’t shaped like literature — they were shaped by life. And in that living was all the adventure we ever needed. I’ve come to realize that so much of who I am as a writer was formed by listening.
The way my auntie said someone’s name when she didn’t approve. The way my grandmother used pauses for punctuation and sarcasm for punchline. The way stories were told, and repeated, and told again until they became ritual. The way the grapevine did its thing — ensuring the story passed through every ear at least once, depending on when you jumped into the mix.
I think of those voices often when I write. I feel them behind me, or maybe inside me. As though, in telling these stories and recalling those names, I’m keeping something alive. I hear them in my inner narrator, like I’ve been plugged into the central vestibule of our family’s hopes, regrets, resilience, and song. These stories connect the threads I want to weave together — not just in what was said, but how it was said. The rhythm. The emotion. The silences that held meaning. The jokes. The laughter. The way we cherished the moment. The ache of missing those who left too soon. Or those who just plain left. Of those who we don’t mention but hold important parts of the story.
Lately, I’ve been trying to archive more of these stories while I still can. To sit with my uncles and aunts and even cousins. To ask again. To write it down. Because when I hear about our people, even in fragments, I feel fuller. Richer. I feel connected to a wellspring of love that I didn’t have to earn. My inheritance lives in that love and in the stories that demonstrate this love.
These are the stories I inherited. Not because someone handed them to me formally, but because I was there. Because I heard. Because I listened. And now, I carry them into my own work — not to rewrite, but to respond. Not to preserve the past in glass, but to let it breathe through something new.
I’m always aware of the privilege of telling. Of being given space to shape these stories in my own voice. Of turning memory into meaning and hoping that, in doing so, we don’t lose our people. That we keep mentioning their names. That we keep the thread woven and intact.
I am certainly not the beginning. I’m the continuation. And I think I tell stories because someone once told a story… and then another. And because my ancestors dreamed me into existence with story inside them, the story now lives in me too.