MY neighbour’s having violent sex again. Every time it happens, I text C—. It’s a running joke between us, who between us two has the raunchiest smutty neighbours. Yester night it was terrible, she was grunting, he was grinding. Someone was doing it right—or a lot of good guess work. I tell C— this and she laughs. “Maybe they are praying!” She says. But I am no fool. I know how to differentiate between an “Oh God” when one is seeking the Lord’s name, and Oh God! when one takes the Lord’s name in vain. C— has little patience for religion, she borrows God for convenience. When you meet her, her eyes fixate on you like a rodent. But her skin? She has skin like dark honey. And tastes like it too.
I‘ve lived here for three years. Three of the neighbours I found moved out within the year. Time passed. New neighbours kept coming in. Most of them were young, and so they made us aware that we were no longer young. When I moved in, it was all sylvan silence, trees erect and pulsing with the coarse energy of life, before they started building the Ngong Rd Viaduct, before the Talanta Stadium or Raila Odinga Stadium or whatever they choose to name it stadium, before a church moved under my balcony.
It’s a Legio Maria church. They have big drums. And on Sundays, I witness them exorcising the devils, demon chasers, beating the drums so hard, in between chants of Riswa! And Hallelujah! and Amen! for every knee shall bow, and every tongue shall confess. That’s right. Glory to God, for I, too, a participant-by-proxy, puts on the Breastplate of Righteousness, because with the fervour they cast out demons, it is rumoured that the Devil himself has to avoid that area for days afterward.
Here’s what they don’t tell you about being a captive audience. Where two or three are gathered in his name, the Lord will be there. I like the Lord, but I don’t always like him around. Besides, the Bible says do not lead your brother to sin, which is what my neighbour does, which is how Satan works, chipping at your faith little by little. But, in the same breadth, will this church lead me to heaven? Scripture is silent on that.
I was raised as a baby believing that God ain’t gonna let nobody go too far. God, they said, don’t like ugly. My father, an Anglican, had something in his style that made God an accessory, or accomplice, perhaps that’s a better word, to his shortcomings as a man. “I did not make this world,” he’d say, “I only make my way in it.” For all have fallen short of the glory, and though he never said it, he indeed led us to believe that even God will look the other way when you bring a tenth of what you’ve earned, because He will know you by not what you said or did, but by what you’d hoped and intended. I inherited his scepticism because he and I are one with the same ancestors and whatever fires rage in him I must look to find smouldering of within myself.
“Kamata shetani!” “Kanyaga yeye!” “Riswa!” The rest of the country goes about its business, going berserk on Twitter, putting out trash, or putting up with their marriages while the church below me exorcises and chants and calls for hellfire on sinners until kingdom come; and my neighbours above me worship in each other’s temple, moving the bed, moving me, me, stuck between the world and the Word. Oh God! They will shout, every knee bowed, each tongue confessing, each in their way, reaching a different heaven.
Every Tongue Shall Confess
