MAYA (A Novel)

In MAYA, Joseph R Alila, author of “Birthright (a Luo Tragedy),” brings yet another narrative about the lives of ordinary people with human flaws, from which each of them can only run away, or ignore, at his or her own peril.

Maya Boone faces a legal quandary over a death she has witnessed from her hideout on Eagle Street, Harmony, New York. First, she watches Raul, the troublesome husband from whom she is hiding, kill a bulldog. When Maya crosses Eagle Streetto enquire whether the dog’s owner (Mike) is suing Raul, she instead falls in love with the heartbroken man, lures him to her bed, and even contemplates witnessing against Raul. The brief affair ends quickly because Mike becomes a victim to an enraged boyfriend’s arrow of passion. Wounded and helpless, Mike falls into the hands of a moonlighting evangelist named Booker who has a score to settle with him. There is no mercy for Mike, only a slow death, because Booker wishes to maintain his cover while moonlighting at Bar Delirium.

With Mike dead, Maya’s distant past soon confronts her because, also witnessing the events leading to the murder on Eagle Street is Officer Jimmy Depuy—a child Maya abandoned at birth forty years before. Neither Raul nor Maya nor Officer Depuy knows about their shared bond. Then one Detective John unearths the blood knot linking Jimmy Depuy to the Rauls, and soon District Attorney Hess is advancing criminal motives against the trio.

 In MAYA, JR Alila weaves yet another intricate narrative that should appeal to those readers who seek to understand, in human character, matters beyond the mundane of daily life.

 

Whisper to My Aching Heart

In the novella WHISPER TO MY ACHING HEART, novelist Joseph R. Alila tells a story about two eighteenth-century Luo widows who battle against great odds to become mothers of a future people. In this moving-yet-romantic story, a young widow (Apiny) is the bearer of the damning spiritually untouchable label in the patriarchal African society. Ejected alongside her widowed mother-in-law (Awino) and ridiculed by friends, Apiny waits for fifteen years before she receives another man in her bed. Even then, her moment of triumph comes only after Awino remarries and raises a miracle son (Otin), who answers the call to marry Apiny and redeem his fallen brother’s honor. Even after getting all the handsome sons and beautiful daughters, she wished for from her youthful lover, Apiny is not at peace in her heart. She mourns and struggles, in her heart, as her youthful husband inevitably bows to Luo cultural demands and receives a virgin wife.

 

CreateSpace eStore: https://www.createspace.com/3341373

http://www.amazon.com/Joseph-R.-Alila/e/B002QD5TDM

 

Ways of the Wise 3

On day two, the Son of Okech was routinely inspecting his homestead, when a wild cat attacked him at around 2 a.m.

For various reasons, men routinely inspected their homesteads in the depth of night: a cow that was loosely tethered could start roaming about and out of the homestead. Also, he might just be lucky to catch a glimpse of the secret goings-on in the homestead; like some escapades of his teenage sons, and, who knows, even those of his wives. Moreover, he could have unknowingly married a “night runner,” or a practitioner of some strange cult religion. In the depth of the dark nights, such wives would wake up to their true psychic selves. Operating under cover of darkness provided the man with an opportunity to get these kinds of unique information.

What about the secret lovers, the ong’ora, who frisked the landscape late at night? One risk in a polygamous home is that some forgotten women can entertain some ‘boyfriends’ when the husbands’ eyes and ears were trained elsewhere. But spying on one’s wife for the purpose of discovering her secret lovers was an activity our society frowned on. Spying on each other often sowed the seeds of mistrust between husbands and wives. It is human to be weak and stray in love.

The ong’ora had his space in any woman’s heart, and my people recognized this. For this reason, men were advised to make loud and recognizable noises as they approached their homes at night; that way, any strangers in the homestead would have adequate time to make hurried escapes through some cracks in their fencing around homes.

A man was not supposed to invest a lot of energy in trying to find out his wife’s secret lovers, whose existence, or lack of, was assumed. This was for the good and stability of the clan.

The product of this web of underground love relationships was that there were a few homes in which the children were bat-eared, squint-eyed or skewed-legged, and looked more like the children of another clan member, or those of distant cousins.

The reasons for such ‘coincidences’ were acknowledged in whispers, but never publicly discussed for the posterity and stability of the clan. People lived and fought for the clan’s survival, were born in and raised by the clan in the best of its traditions. Naturally, therefore, few eyebrows were raised if a few men cast their stray millet far and wide.

Moreover, the clan, in its wisdom, even covered for impotent male members. Such men married and ‘raised’ children with their wives. The clan and family made sure that eunuchs were married. It was acknowledged that his brothers and close cousins would rule his home in the night.

For reasons such as these, a jealous man was thoroughly advised by the wizened elders on some basic truths of married life: ‘Capturing a wife in love is one traumatic experience; it is one thing a man may not be strong enough to face; therefore, snooping around one’s wife is sin!’

The polygamous culture is by no means promiscuous. Far from it: My people rated a promiscuous man or woman (ja chode) very low on the moral scale. But once polygamy was part of a culture, it had to be accepted that, some of the time, the men were not in charge as lords over their wives in their homesteads.

‘A woman is such a big thing for one to claim the sole ownership of,’ and so our wise rightly observed. So a man had to live within the bounds of these words of wisdom. These words could have been as literal as they were figurative.

For example, no man could claim to be the sole owner of the thoughts and feelings of his wife. A woman in a village full of other men did have another man for whom she had a soft spot; with whom she would laugh her heart out on their way from the market; of whose help she readily called for over such mundane affairs as fixing a hoe or killing some goat; and with whom verbal intercourse was as natural and innocent as with her husband; and yet she still remained truly faithful to her husband.

A man, who snooped around such a wife, would have died, at heart, ten times over an affair that never existed. Jim understood all that. But, sometimes, affairs do occur in every couple’s life.

Jim mulled over these truths, as he wondered about his encounter with the wild cat, and tried to mine some psychic connection to it. What kind of luck did this event portend? Or was it one of those chance events, with the cat and him being in the same space at the wrong time? He did not think so, and neither did he want to believe it.

For the first time in Jim’s marriage to the four very beautiful women, he had become uncharacteristically suspicious of his first wife. ‘Squirrels do not just attack humans for no reason, one has to provoke them;’ so he tried to rationalize, but couldn’t.

Source: SUNSET ON POLYGAMY by Joseph R. Alila,

 available from(www.publishamerica.com); http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002QD5TDM; www.barnesandnoble.com

 

KENYA IS IN A FOOD CRISIS

Kenya is facing a prolonged drought, a 7-million person food shortage, a refugee problem, and the crippling governance and democracy gridlock over the post-election violence, and how the nation can try and punish those who sponsored violence and reconcile the nation at the same time

The famine is so serious that the members of the usually gridlocked cabinet are singing the same tune. A national food emergency response team has been set up under the Prime Ministers office.

Let us remember Kenya in this hour of need.