This is the perfect piece to include in the style section of my portfolio because it’s personal, experiential, and culturally specific—just like my other work. It’s actually my mother’s, and as a Maasai writer, to share it is to preserve a fragment of my own history. A lot of my work is about identity, survival, and the struggle between tradition and individual ambition, and this piece does that perfectly.
The way that I describe moments—like the chill of morning, the stream’s call, or the weight of what wasn’t said—is much like my usual style. I like to write so that the reader can imagine they are there, experiencing it in the moment. First person has them close to me, ushered into the life of my mother and into the choices that she had to make.
This also connects to something I often think about: traces. It’s the marking that remains behind—by family, by culture, by the fight for something better.