All I had was myself: "Mbiu Dash" by Okwiri Oduor

For a story that's all about absences, "Mbiu Dash" by Okwiri Oduor sure begins with a lot of presence. "We were all there that day Mr. Man came to town, driving that blister-colored tin car." With those words, the narrator, Mbiu Dash, seems to be fully a part of a community. We're about to find out how isolated Mbiu Dash actually is, but for the moment, Mbiu seems to suffer from an embarrassment of riches, socially speaking. It's a lively scene. It's "Epitaph Day" in Mapeli Town, Kenya, a day of remembrance for the dead. The townsfolk (the "we") are drinking mead, getting drunk and happy, dancing, and telling stories about departed people they miss. Mbiu Dash isn't just around a lot of people; as a "we" narrator, she's part of them. This is the second story in Best American Short Stories so far that's had a first-person plural (we) point of view. At least at the start, anyhow.

The old saw comes to mind about there being only two stories, one about a hero going on a quest and the other about a stranger coming to town, but the story doesn't follow the path it teases early on. Although Mbiu thinks that "we" thought to ourselves, "A man like this must have a good story lodged beneath his tongue" and so "we" wanted to get it out of him, that's not what the bulk of the story is. This isn't the Ancient Mariner telling his tale of woe. We do eventually get to what Mr. Man has to say, but for most of the middle acts, Mbiu Dash is going to steal the show.

Mbiu steals it so much, in fact, that the "we" disappears. She shatters the second person plural when she switches abruptly at the beginning of a section first-person singular. Mbiu Dash wants to go out with the townspeople to dance the chini-kwa-chini with them, but the townspeople refused, telling her, without explaining why, that she had "best sit here and keep our guest company." Thus rejected by the town, the narrative switches from "we" to "I/me." "Me, I always thought of my mama on Epitaph Day." She gets both the object and subject form of the first-person singular in right from the start, as if to emphasize how much she's on her own. 

There are a dizzying number of songs out there that appear to be named "Chini Kwa Chini." This one is obviously from way after the time period of the story. The Swahili "china kwa chini," if the Internet can be believed, means "incognito," something that perfectly describes how Mbiu Dash is getting through life.

As soon as Mbiu Dash switches to "I/me," we start to get a whole different view of the town. It's a place where so many abandoned teens wander the street, nobody bothers to keep track of them. It's a place where men shove their fists down the mouths of teen girls they are raping, presumably so the girls can't scream. 

Mbiu Dash became one of these orphans when her mother robbed a bank and was killed by the police afterwards. It was something of a Robin Hood robbery--she threw the money to the townspeople--but the police killed her anyway. They kind of had no choice, since she was pointing a Kalashnikov rifle at them. 

How did the mother come to have this rifle? She'd studied in Moscow. This was common for a number of African countries back during the time of Soviet-U.S. global competition. What was also common was that the African nation would change sides in the global competition. That's what happened in Kenya, and Mbiu Dash's mother went from being lucky to have studied and become a dentist to being suspected of communist sympathies. Her life was spent under police watch, and she eventually snapped and went on her one-day bank robbing spree.

Absence

Mbiu Dash is obsessed with things that aren't there. Her surname, Dash, is self-given. It stands for a surname that used to be hers but that she didn't feel fit her after her mother died. Now, only the dash stands in its place, a glyph for what isn't there anymore. She wanders through the town after her mother's death, looking into windows. She needs reassurance that the whole town hasn't disappeared. Looking into the empty houses on Epitaph Day, she thinks to herself that "absence was just as meaningful to observe as presence." The story itself, taking place on Epitaph Day, is surrounded by absences that are making themselves felt.

In a way, Mbiu's mother kind of set her up to think of absences. Although a dentist, her mother didn't worry about Mbiu eating sweets that would give her cavities. Instead, she "never once made me brush my teeth before bed. We had an understanding: I could ruin my teeth, perforate them with holes big enough to lose five-shilling coins inside, and she would patch them up for me with silver amalgam someday." In other words, Mama has taught Mbiu that her absences will be filled. No wonder Mbiu cannot move on from her mother's dead body, riddled with bullet holes. No wonder she is still living in the "bullet-riddled Volkswagen that my mama had laughed her way out of this world in."

I imagine some readers would look at this preoccupation with absence and immediately read French philosopher Jacques Derrida into it. Derrida kind of had a thing with messing around with absence and presence. Derrida's interest in absence, though, was primarily linguistic, whereas Mbiu's is existential. For Mbiu, the absences in her life are like when the power goes out and you find yourself hours later still stupidly flipping switches every time you walk into a room and find it dark. The absences only make her more acutely aware of the thing that isn't there anymore. If you want to do a reading a la Derrida, go ahead, but I always found it like jerking off with sandpaper, somehow both onanistic and painful at once. 

Me, myself, and I

So Mbiu is truly all alone. Well, is she? She has her "darling," another teenage girl without parents. Her darling's name is "Ayosa Atarxis Brown." Atarxis is an interesting middle name, meaning something like "the absence of stress or worry." Ayosa might seem like someone who could make Mbiu feel less alone, but even her solace is a solace of lack--absence of pain and suffering, which is mostly what the whole town associates death with.

Mbiu and Ayosa don't talk to each other. They're soulmates, so they don't have to. They're not the only soulmates in the story. Turns out, when Mr. Man finally catches up to Mbiu, who's been running from him since Act One, thinking he was another rapist trying to stick his hand in her mouth, we learn that he was the soulmate of her mother since they studied in Moscow together. They weren't lovers, just soulmates. 

And speaking of souls, Mr. Man is lugging one around with him. It's his son Magnanimous. In Mr. Man's case, when the government came for him, they shot his son instead, and Mr. Man can't let his son go, so much that his son's soul is a tangible presence about him others can see. You could say that where Mbiu Dash is all absence, Mr. Man has too much presence. Mbiu thinks she is all alone, while Mr. Man can literally never be alone. Maybe this is why Mbiu lives in a still-shot up Volkswagen, while Mr. Man has pieced together a car from scraps. The departed don't leave Mr. Man. 

There are some telling symmetries between Mr. Man and Mbiu. Obviously, they are both linked by Mbiu's mother. Morever, with Ayosa, Mbiu has also put together a Frankenstein vehicle, in their case, a bicycle. But the symmetries are offset by the differences. 

One wonders if in a sense, Mr. Man is supposed to continue his role as the mother's soulmate by providing companionship to Mbiu. It briefly seems like it might happen. Where the town has refused to give Mbiu mead, Mr. Man makes her a sweet tea from lemongrass. It seems like he might be able to offer her something, but for the moment at least, Mbiu is unwilling to let Mr. Man any closer. 

Mbiu is both obsessed with absence and also longing for connection. After the "we" disappears, it briefly returns again at one point. She can't extinguish her longing for connection, to be filled, but when Mr. Man seems to offer a kind of connection, she refuses him, at least for the time being. What might be most interesting about the story is how it refuses to come to a resolution. Maybe this is because is Mbiu's world, the only real resolution is death.