I remember not knowing Mariah Carey was Black.

I remember pretending to fall asleep in the backseat of my mother’s red Toyota Corolla; I wanted someone to hold my head.

I remember porn on VHS cassettes.

I remember Kris Kross and everything backward.

I remember Fantasy and not knowing Mariah Carey was Black.

I remember the bomb blasts in ’98. How, muddled by anecdotal accounts about American revenge, I kept glancing up at the sky, waiting for an invasion headed elsewhere.

I remember it was just the three of us then – my mother, my sister, and I – and the woman who died next door, murdered by her husband.

I remember standing at bakery windows and looking at frosted cakes, biscuits dipped in chocolate, and the crimped edges of meat pies in the display case.

I remember my sister standing too long and my mother having to go back and fetch her.

I remember how difficult it is to be away from home, in your body, and in other ways.

I remember the girl who serenaded me on the Mississippi River, a guitar on a summer night. It was too beautiful and you could tell she had rehearsed. I can’t remember the song, only that I wanted it to stop.

I remember being in college and getting a puppy. A ShiTzu we named ‘Weezy’ after our favourite rapper who had a song about licking a rapper. The dog wheezed a lot.

I remember blackberries in the garden. When they were ripe, they grew fat, begging to be popped. It was us against the birds.

I remember hot metal slides on Sunday afternoons, how they burned the backs of your legs if you didn’t pull your dress all the way or fold your legs at the knee.

I remember the first story I ever published; it was about a girl who was too much inside of me, a thing I needed (to say).

I remember looking down everywhere I went, I hated killing things even then. Once, by a tree in the school field, I buried tiny ant carcasses in penance. It was a spoonful of a grave and I never went back because I couldn’t remember which tree it was.

I remember being terrified of the trees and waking up to shelling peas. The two are related.

I remember ‘maziwa ya Moi’* slurped out of Tetrapaks on Friday afternoons and how good it felt.

I remember Lucy Kibaki throwing hands in an editorial room and the devil-may-come look in her eyes at the press conference where no one spoke up.

I remember the women who chained themselves to things.

I remember the colour of loneliness in Havana. Like something saffron or something blue.

I remember Daymara handing me a map. She curved her finger around the shape of Havana’s seafront. “If you’re ever lost,” she said, “find your way back to the water.” After she had left, I wasn’t sure what to do so I went shopping for trinkets and spent the afternoon searching for myself.

I remember French kissing a French girl and telling her I didn’t know how to French kiss. I still don’t know how to do it or whether I'm doing it correctly, and every lover I've asked steers my tongue elsewhere.

I remember sugared milk and my grandfather’s house, all of us in front of the fire.

I remember watching the fire raze the slum next door. We were standing on our balcony and someone older than me told me the landlords did this sometimes, clearing out tenants who couldn’t pay or wouldn’t leave. We went to sleep that night.

I remember Highlands Tropical and ‘making juice’.

I remember cha mama, cha baba, and the little omenas we pretended to cook.

I remember being little.

I remember sitting on a hill packed with red dirt. It was the three of us, my mother, my sister and I. I remember the sound of a creek nearby and that we were all sad, but no one said it.

I remember braiding grass so we could catch someone’s foot in it.

I remember the first story I ever wrote; it was a novella about a girl who wasn’t sad, told in the style of Sweet Valley High. I wish I could find it now.

I remember watching Harold and Maude with a suicidal girl once. After the fourth or fifth scene, we agreed it wasn’t a good idea so we stopped the film. Whenever she drove us places, I worried she would drive us right into oncoming traffic; I never told her this.

I remember the way you held your jaw. It was my first time in L.A. and you told me how you had broken almost every part of you (on the night you nearly died).

I remember that Jazmine Sullivan song about not being scared of lions and tigers and bears, and how I was never scared with you.

I remember the first story I ever wrote for a national magazine. It was about a man who nearly died—how he’d broken so much of him.

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About this post: Joe Brainard’s ‘I Remember,’ appeared on my reading list like a train of thought on a moderately sunny afternoon. It was striking, wonderfully queer and unabashedly shameful. In the poem, which at turns feels like an essay, Branaird is confessional (“I remember when I thought anything old was valuable.”) or (“I remember my first erections. I thought I had some terrible disease...”). Through his memories, we see Branaird as a vulnerable boy, an artist, the wandering man, the sexual deviant. All the parts of him, it seems. While refrains like, “I remember when polio was the worst thing in the world,” place Brainard within a particular time.

Working with this prompt, my memories took me to the late 90s and early aughts in Nairobi. A time of great political shifts and many big and small dramas airing (for the first time) on our TV sets. It was surprising. Yet when I took a step back, I could see the straight line between that kid trying to make sense of the world and the adult who has made a habit of (small) penances, I confess.

Excerpt of Joe Branaird’s ‘I Remember’. You can read the full poem here.