Tracking The Scent of My Mother

Writer tackles incest, betrayal and murder in outstanding novella

Title: Tracking The Scent of My Mother

Author: Muthoni Garland

Publisher: StoryMoja

Year: 2007

Reviewer: Kitui Wakape

If you've ever had doubts on whether Kenya has great novelists or not, then you may have to consider Muthoni Garland's novella Tracking The Scent of My Mother. This book was a shortlist of the prestigious Caine Prize in 2006 as a manuscript and was completed in Naivasha during a Caine Prize African Writers' Workshop.

Set in the rural Mukuruweini and Ithanga, Garland's story looks at the brutalised life of Scholastica who was born into a polygamous household with her senior mother having five daughters and her mother having two.

She develops a certain bond with her mother that she guards jealously as they work the fields and do house chores together. It is this jealousy that leads her in killing her 14-year-old half sister at a rickety bridge over river Ragati. She was just nine years old. Police conclude that they were playing, as children do, and that's how Faith fell to her death. Yet Faith's mother refutes this as the two weren't close. Yet her mother's tribulations begin at this point and this would not be Scholastica's  last murder in protecting what she loves.

When her mother who has began prostituting because of hard economic times, Scholastica is with her and sees everything, but she's still protective of her mother against lustful men, placing “...the paperbag of Hairglo on her mama's exposed thighs..."

A series of domestic violence pushes her mother away and Scholastica is left vulnerable, lonely and exposed leaving her father to plough her as she did her mother. And when her search for her mum becomes unfruitful, she begins prostituting, giving in to her father's ploughing as though through that she'll get back her mother.

However, having given birth to her father's retarded child, she is renounced, leaving home to fend for her and her daughter through hawking but her tribulations never end, yet she still searches for her mother. The society judges her and her tribulations continue but her search never stops.

Garland tells her story so beautifully and her style of writing is quite unique: shorter, punchier sentences that may leave the unaccustomed floating in confusion. But what do you expect of someone whose stories have been published by Kwani?

Her story makes for an interesting read for it's short thus fast paced, and so the reader has to take in Scholastica's brutalised life in one gulp. Yet the issue of incest pervades throughout the book, shadowing religious hypocrisy, polygamous unions, fatherless families and education among others. Though short, this book has to be read several times for the reader to really understand and grasp the underlying issues presented therein.

Garland began her writing career when she hit forty and has penned other works of fiction including Fallen World, Eating, and Halfway Between Nairobi and Dundori.