Reading Gabriel García Márquez in Nairobi

I must have been in high school when I first read him. It was a short story titled ‘The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World’. I don’t exactly remember where I read it from—perhaps it may have been part of the stories we were meant to read in our curriculum, or I might have come across it while reading books in our high school’s library. What was distinct about it was how it piqued my wonder, with its depiction of a large, handsome man who washes up on a settlement in a coastal town and the varied reactions the residents have to his dead body. While the story stayed with me, the author’s name did not because I did not have a great interest in literature then, and the name remained lost to me for a long time until my early twenties, when I decided to become a writer.

In my early days as a writer, I recognized a need to read widely to form a foundation from which I could arrange my world into a language that was unique to me. Therefore, my route back to Márquez was circuitous. It involved a journey through Albert Camus’s philosophical work The Myth of Sisyphus. I read Camus in 2017, when I was doing an undergraduate degree in Financial Economics at Strathmore University that brought me great sadness and despair, because I’d realized, far too late to do anything about it, that it was not a career path I could pursue for the rest of my life. To console myself, I studied various materials and subjects that interested me and were not related to my degree in our vast university library. Any book I selected from the shelves allowed me a space for dreams. I dreamt of a post-Second World War Paris where writers met in street cafés to talk about philosophical ideas, and I began to search for ways in which philosophy could be told in interesting stories. This led me to Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges. Borges was a revelation with his stories that seemingly occur somewhere beyond reality, but he had never written a novel, and even though he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he never won it. Whenever I searched Borges on the internet, somewhere in the vast pages written about his work, there would be the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, a Nobel Prize in Literature winner, and his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude.