How leaving Nairobi (and coming back) helped Iman Verjee write her new novel
For Iman Verjee, it took coming back to Kenya to see her home country clearly for the first time. "When I was in Nairobi as a younger person, I didn't see all these issues of race and class," says the 29-year-old novelist, now based in Edmonton. "When I came back to Kenya from 2012 to 2014, after my undergrad at the University of Alberta and then my creative writing degree in England, I started seeing them, and that was really what drove me to start writing the novel."
The result — Who Will Catch Us As We Fall — is the story of Leena, a young woman who returns to Nairobi years after a traumatic event made her leave. In her own words, Verjee talks about how this honest, unflinching and redemptive story came to be.
Bursting the bubble
"I was born in Nairobi and I lived there until I was 18 in my own little bubble of Indians. I left, first for Canada, and then for England. When I went back to Kenya in 2012, when I was in my mid-20s, I got a job working for an online shopping company. I was overseeing a lot of the work by the local Kenyans, so I saw a lot of resentment from them. When they met me they didn't know that I spoke Swahili, and they were talking about me and saying really bad things. So I started talking to them about why they were so angry about Indians. I ended up befriending them and, through them, I met local Kenyans. I went away from my community, and that's really when my perspective on the country changed. I made these really strong friendships that I never expected. But my own friends — my Indian friends — got very uncomfortable. Working at that company was the biggest eye-opener for me. I worked there for a year, and the novel started while I was working there. I think those relationships that I established really helped me write this book."
The writing on the wall
"I was away from Nairobi for 12 years, and the city changed in that time. I came back and saw how younger people were voicing their opinions, and one of the most powerful ways that was happening — and is still happening — was through graffiti. Nairobi is very segregated. The suburbs are much safer, much cleaner, and the downtown is more grungy. That's mostly where all this art takes place.
"Boniface Mwangi is a really big street artist in Nairobi, and seeing one of his pieces in the city really affected me. He's an activist, a Kenyan activist. He does a lot of protests, but he's well known for his graffiti. The piece I saw made its way into Who Will Catch Us As We Fall. It's a woman dragging a politician down the steps of the Houses of Parliament with a chain around his neck, saying my voice, my vote. It was downtown — I remember driving by it and it was on a big wall. It really hit home when I saw that because this artist, Mwangi, is so unafraid. When I saw that, it really inspired me to write the novel, in that I felt like I had a responsibility to tell this story."
Ruthless writing
"I'm the most disorganized writer. I have no structure — I just write and rewrite. I'll write 1,000 words, and then the next day I'll rewrite and go on... I feel that structure limits me. I write in a Word document, and I never have an outline. I'm kind of a 'fly by the seat of your pants' writer. This over 400-page novel was written in one big Word document. And when I cut parts, I would really just delete them. I wouldn't save them in a different document or draft or anything. I would figure that the scene was still in my mind and if it wants to come again, it will come again. I feel so much that the story just comes as it should come. So by keeping things and by hoarding things, you're really just stopping the story from evolving.
"For my first draft of this novel, I deleted 40,000 words and it was so terrifying. It was the most terrifying experience of my life. That's about three months of writing! But I realized that I just couldn't hang on to it, I had to let it go. That said, this is also why I'm kind of hesitant to begin my next novel, because it's a really tough process!"
Homecoming
"Leena, my main character, was informed in many ways by my own feelings. When I came to Canada, I found there are so many things about this country that you can't do in Kenya. Walking around at 11 pm, you don't have this sense of someone's following you. But back in Kenya, you feel so afraid for your life because you've absorbed all these terrifying stories, whether or not they're true. But the longer you live there, the more you kind of adapt to that world, and you realize that actually it's not as bad as you thought. You learn how to make yourself stronger. For Leena, what I was trying to show is that she's coming back from this world where she feels free to one where she feels suffocated, but the longer she stays there, the longer she feels that Nairobi belongs to her. Living there and interacting with other people, I came to feel this, too."
Iman Verjee's comments have been edited and condensed.