Mikhail Lossel is a Professor of English and Creative Writing, Concordia University, Canada. Prof. Lossel was born in Leningrad, USSR (now St. Petersburg, Russia). He first worked as an electromagnetic engineer before immigrated to the United States of America in 1986. He has authored many books of fiction and historical essays. His most recent book is Love Like Water, Love Like Fire, a collection of stories; the other one is Notes from Cyber ground: Trumpland and My Old Soviet Feeling. He has a collection collection of fiction stories entitled “Every Hunter Wants to Know.
In this presentation Prof. Iossel, drawing upon in his various essays, will be speaking on the Making of Modernity in the city of St. Petersburg linking to tales from Nairobi, governance and Soviet ‘expropriation’ of the contested spaces in the US border arenas.
The Moderator and Discussant of this session will be Mr. Tony Mochama of the Nation Media Group, who is also the Secretary-General of PEN International (Kenya).
um uh friends uh good afternoon for those of us who are here in Nairobi and uh for those of us who are listening and watching uh this uh session from different parts of the world uh please welcome from wherever you you are uh my name is uh Kenneth mongi I’m the chair of the host Department of this program which is the Department of history and archology of the University of Nairobi here in Kenya and um we have uh our presenter today who is going to be introduced just in a bit and it is now my pleasure and great honor to welcome the moderator and discussant of this session is a good friend of mine and he’s a brother to me uh Mr Tony Mo uh Tony mama is um a journalist works with the Nation Media Group I’m sure those of you are here and those watching you know Tony and also more importantly is the Secretary General of pen International the Kenyan chapter so without Much Ado ladies and gentlemen uh allow me to welcome Tony to carry on with the program thank you thank you so much um Dr Ken bongi um I’ll very quickly say um this I think this the climatic day of the series you have done so please allow me and join me in congratulating Dr mongi for bringing this rather revolutionary program to the university that allows this hallowed academic Towers to have the ivory fade a bit and engage with both the public ER both your offline and our virtual public because this is the way it is in 2024 there’s no a the Ivory Tower very beautiful place and now we are all in it and it’s wonderful because this is the new sort of intellectual sort of and interdisciplinary engagements that we need and intergenerational also so um thank you very much Dr mongi um today we going to have a very special or rather we already have a very special guest he’s a man of multiple worlds he spent his first 30 years in St p Petersburg in Russia which was then the Soviet Union he then made the transition across the Atlantic to America and it wasn’t just a physical um transition it was also a linguistic one because with his very limited English back [Music] then Professor mik when you hear now is Professor Mikel taught himself not just taught himself English but taught himself English so well that he has eventually risen to the highest eons of Academia in teaching it and he teaches it currently does his teaching practice of English and creative writing at Concordia University in Montreal he’s one of the most senior professors there he’s a 10y professor he has written essay in the New Yorker and other magazines and taught I think a lot of people and also managed in Kenya to Start programs like summer literary seminars and international literary seminars which is where we have the first partners of people like quani and binyavanga who died five years ago a week ago um so that’s just in memorium of binyavanga so without further Ado I’ll get straight into uh today’s topic which is about crosswells you’re going to listen to a lot of things about crosswells and um both within literature and within our world because we no longer live in just you know Northern well we do north and southern hemisphere but the world I’m not sure it’s a global village or now it’s become Global porage in Prof drong would say because sometimes it seems like a bit of a slash these days everything is all mixed up and some even say messed up so I’ll start with a bit of City literature um we are writing the CBD but I’m sure for all of you both H the youngsters of whom some I can see here and to some of my older friends um you’ll notice that we no longer our CBD many years ago I did this book called about a decade ago it was published a decade ago launched Nairobi the night Runners guide and that place no longer exists yeah we no longer have the CBD as the center of leisure Recreation yeah when you’re going home at night it’s quite dark if you leave places like the gut the Alon if you Transit across town it’s a very silent space it wasn’t always so I done this book imagining that it would be the guide that at the airport you could buy it then as a especially foreign visitor or even as a closeted person in the city then You’ read it and know where to go places like Florida 1,000 mad house for the more adventurous of course this spaces do not exist at all anymore what I’ve realized I was actually doing at the time I thought I was writing a living book but I was actually doing I thought I’m doing current craphy but it turned out into a historical document this is an archive it’s a nocturnal archive it’s a piece of nostalgia and sentimental so I’ll read very little because I do want Mikel to take and talk about another city called St Petersburg so this is just literally half a page because the first part of our talk will be on cities the first interaction we’ll [Music] have yeah so here we are um in said HOAs is full this place is a mad football club on K Street the unforgettable opening chapter of wos and Sagal beat France with a single Unforgettable goal and after the game back in 2000 we all raced into the back in 2002 we all raced into the street some of us as far as mama chanting SLE SLE and earning 9 seconds of Fame on KTN that one can only get when running amongst an incorrigible throng in the middle of a football miracle today as the English take on Paraguay I can bet my last Rubble that Hooters will be full to the roof go England go I don’t think so after Hooters the night run crosses over to the garden and P restaurant at the Leon Fran building sitting in those sculptured and designed grounds that are like a pill shadow of French Eden the peran landscape version The Night Runner things of the Magic Man in the European film festival is on at the auditorium if you cross the road you’ll get to a club called Fridays and next to it the secrets Lounge formerly chillers at The View Park Towers this is not aad place for a Night Runner to begin the music is from a club era that is at least 10 years in the midst of time it reminds one kid of the kimti street called club called visions and she bonss the end of the dress well Club where revelers were privileged to sit on leather the era that reminds the Night Runner of what a night Baner we all were Lambada Westlands kok night how many bad sing singers since the first shy Japanese school girl with pretty eyes and a frog’s crck of a voice sang into a talko night and crocked herck into broken microphones the world over okay so um Professor mik yes um my city your city really St Petersburg thank you okay good on okay all right well thank you for coming and it’s good to be here this is not my first or the second or even the 20th time in Nairobi been coming here for many years for decades and uh the Tony and the department asked me to talk about cross boundaries and about the history of the place where I come from I come from St Petersburg Soviet Union from Leningrad Soviet Union and none of those names neither of those two names exist on any up-to-date map of the world anymore so there is no Soviet Union there is no Leningrad there is Russia and there is St Petersburg probably the only city in the world built according to in in the record short time built in record short time um 9 years according to the plan that exists in the head of Peter the Great medar of Russia uh built at the expense of hundreds of thousands of lives uh laying in the foundation of the swamp that underg guards the city um and probably the largest open air museum in the world designed to be the most beautiful city in the world Tony has been there several times and uh um Peter the Great at that time invited invited the best Architects from the Netherlands from Italy from all over the world to build the perfect European city and he sort of wanted to shame Russians into europeanness by telling them as it were see this city is too good for you to live in but this is the city where Europeans would live and you’re not Europeans the history of Russia essentially is an attempt to catch up with the West lagging behind by at least 2 250 years that uh the Mongols occupied Russia and essentially froze it and due to its humongous size Russia saturated itself with the the Invaders but uh and and they and and the Mongols did not move further into Europe stayed in Russia but froze it completely for a couple hundred years so um so so that’s um the very brief exes on St Petersburg Russia uh an unlikely City the largest city in the world so close uh by the only city in the world on the 70th parallel which is to say very close to the Arctic Circle it’s fourth largest city in in uh in Europe so um that’s about it about St Petersburg except that it’s always been in competition with uh Moscow uh and Moscow represents the ultimate quote unquote russianness of the country’s character which is to say it’s not built according to the Grid it’s all completely irregular streets starting with one name ending with another looping up on itself and so forth where people feel Russian people feel comfortable since a thousand years ago and Petersburg was all a grid all a matrix and people tried to Russian people rebelled against it the history of Russian literature in many ways is the history of rebellion against foreignness of St Petersburg that’s the late motif of the writings of dovi of Pushkin and so on so um yeah um that’s about St Petersburg if anybody has any questions about St Petersburg i’ be happy to answer those questions um what should I read um there is no City in this book but um yeah read something for five minutes yeah it’s not in this book so um let me say a few words then about trans transition from St Petersburg to where I spent the first 30 years of my my life uh to um first to the United States and then to Canada and from Russian to English and Russia in the Soviet Union I was um first electromagnetic engineer then I applied to immigrate from the Soviet Union and became enemy of the people as it were traitor to the motherland and so I got a new job um which is to say to be a security guard at the roller coaster in the lenr Central Park of culture and Leisure the lowest common denominator of all jobs where I waited to get the permission to immigrate and when I did it was under gorbachov in 1968 in 1986 um I came to the United States and I at first was hoping to continue being a writer in Russian back in Leningrad I was member of an underground literary club called Club 81 of Sam is that so-called Sam is that self-publishing writer um representative of SEC so-called second culture in other words apolitical writers not approved by the government and so when I came to the United States I was hoping at first to continue writing in russan very quickly realized that you cannot really find leadership in Russian and in the United States and I also was feeling sad and kind of heartbroken after leaving Russia thinking that I had made the greatest mistake of my life and I could no longer go back at least at the that time and so I um started trying to write in English as a sort of like mechanical exercise to soothe myself because whenever I tried to write in Russian Russian immediately aided and abetted me in wallowing in self-pity and misery and depression Russian is exceptionally good for those purposes it’s a very Loosely structured language and it’s if you want to indeed um pity yourself Russian will help you and so um yeah and so but in English I couldn’t do any of that in English I could only be adequate to every given sentence and so in English I was just started writing very short sentences and stories in very short sentences a sentence a sentence a sentence and that’s how the wall is built and then another layer of bricks of sentences sentence and sentence and sentence and then but you have to be adequate to every sentence you have to be adequate to the story line you cannot go off tangents it’s like walking through a dangerous terrain step to the left step to the right and you’re sunk so it was a very difficult and gradual um uh process but eventually after a couple of years I started writing full length stories in English and they started getting published and then a book of my stories got published and then uh my new life in literature had begun um I’ll read you a very very short story from my last book of stories um called life how was it someone I hadn’t seen in 40 years recognized me the other afternoon at the Strand Bookstore the one in New York largest used bookstore in New York Strand Bookstore in middle and high school back in Leningrad he had been one of my closest friends he was buying a coffee table album of New York pictures something along the lines of to see New York and die for his mother-in-law he told me winking and I’d stopped by on my way to a friend’s house in the neighborhood a barly broad shouldered handsome men of vaguely levantine aspect a cross of sords between Hitchcock and oh well those crosses and parallels tend to make nothing more Vivid across between Alfred Hitchcock and Angelina jul how’s that he hailed me good naturely in Russian as I was passing by the cash register m m is that you is Mishka already up north that was an old Runing running High School joke between us Mishka up north had been one of the most popular uh brands of chocolate bar in the Soviet Union its rapper pictured the dignified looking polar bear strolling along a massive flow of Arctic Ice Mishka is the common loving dominative for any kind of bar in Russian be it back black or or polar Mishka of course is also the dimin of Highly irreverent and childlike form of Misha which in itself is was the dimin of Mel which is my name for someone to be quote up north in the general Soviet parland meant his having been arrested and sent off to one of the gulak destinations for his political activities or more likely and pertinently the looseness of his lips the pointless frivolity of his speeches d d i exclaimed not his real initials but close enough already quite certain it was indeed him recognizing him even despite my general propensity for recognizing those from my distant past whom I had never actually met before is that you strange meeting but how did you know it was me I can’t believe don’t tell me I haven’t changed Beyond any you know possibility of recognition since high school or you most definitely have he assured me with a smile is just that I saw a picture of you in a newspaper back home maybe five or six years ago plus I’m on Facebook technically speaking although I hardly ever am there it’s true though there’s very little in the face you have today from the one you used to have back then sorry if that upsets sounds upsetting to you maybe oh no I said no no that’s how I tend to think of myself in any event at present being on my second wholly separate life you know it’s like that old joke about the Historical Museum in janas having an exhibit two skulls that used to belong to chrisa Christopher Columbus one as a child the other is a grown man in every joke well there is a colonel of jok joke as the saying goes he paid for the book for his mother-in-law and we moved away from the cash register and started talking animatedly though he only had a few minutes he was running back to his hotel to collect his wife and elder daughter to head to the airport at home and home he told me the abbreviated story of his life after 20 years of being a Merchant Marine and having circumnavigated the world many times over he was now leaving in Yin Bor it’s a long story he said in response to the posant look that I gave him my wife’s from there her father a meing oligarch of sorts locally and he offered to invest in the tour agency I was starting then 15 years ago if I relocated there and so on so I thought well why not St Petersburg of course is great but eerin Borg has its certain advantages it’s a nice enough City just very far away from everything to be sure but them’s the break you can always want what you get you know we remined some of the key episodes from our shared childhood and Adolescence neither of us could recall as though they’ never happened or rather as though we’d never lived through those moments of our own lives okay yeah well the point of the story is that the two people from two different lives one of them inhabited two lives the other one was left in the other one and we in the end asked each other knowing that we would never see each other so how was it and we understood each other a human life yeah how was it for you interesting I can’t complain could have been worse life how was it anyways all right thank you for listening okay um so thank you and U Misha thank you very much we’ve gotten like a very deep flavor I want you to enjoy Mikel in four cause he have to give us success to um probably his book so you’re getting four different flavors today’s are four fos menu over the next hour so um we’ll move from meal Dr Fred I know you like menus except you keep putting cabbages on Facebook yeah and that’s I can see Dr Fred MoGo has joined us so we’ll just go uh within 15 minute spans so that you enjoy your full forus over the next hour and I can see people are very interested and we’ll have an entire hour with Misha for question 10 so this next bid is going to be about um it’s going to be about the early 1980s yeah and that was a strange time both here and in the and in the Soviet Union the Soviet Union was transitioning from brv from a bunch of leaders I think there was I call them the ABCs andropov bnv and chenko into gorbach and in Kenya we were transitioning in the opposite way sort of because we were transitioning from mu mild mu to Mu mu after the coup yeah you know that’s when things I think got crazy we just saying ear the Dr mongi about h how people would even be arrested in the senior common room here like CH is it CH keep tat is so um so as usual for the cross wordss of the world we’ll just I’ll do something very briefly and then Misha is going to do give another sort of like 10 to 15 minutes of the Soviet situation yeah [Music] okay so 1980 to 1982 and I’ll just jump around this will be about three minutes 1980 probably gave mankind the most unforgettable if you think in a global sense songs of the past four decades starting with Casey and the Sunshine bands please don’t go Michael Jackson’s Rock With You his mentor D Ros is upside down blond is call me and another Bites the Dust by Queen Mo presidency only entered its troubles some twos and threes at about the same time 1980 to 82 was dominated by increasingly open factional conflict among the new ruling team as Char jjo the Attorney General quietly changed to M Kaki for the vice presidency conf conflict had broken out almost as soon as Mu took office and tensions between the kibaki technocrats and the MU jjo team had even been evident in central province in the 1979 elections JoJo’s supporters warned that kibaki had too much power combining the positions of vice president and Minister of Finance they blamed him for the deteriorating economic situation in Kenya Kaki whose interest lay more in economics then in the dark clock and Dagger ders of Cano politics looked in increasingly endangered in his [Music] positions in 1918 J having reached the retirement age of 6 for civil servants took the plunge into electoral politics let me jump the green tensions between the two Kiku rival factions with the third group The Kenyata era leaders on the sidelines enabled president mu to make effective use of his soon to be well polished divide and Rule tactics to announce his own authority gradually k were retired from the Civil Service they were also replaced as Government appointees to parastatal boards that were meaningless in an oan drip drip drip drip drip manner they displaced them cautiously with members of other communities especially kenin in 1982 February Mo felt powerful enough to finally move against his former kikuu patrons and then Kenya since the burning of the kpu in 1969 had simply been a de facto rather than the jur single party state in theory other political parties were allowed to challenge can’s Monopoly of power but all such attempts have been rejected by the regist of societies Rumors abounded in Nairobi before the Air Force attempted who over plot by Kik officers to overthrow the president when he was attending the organization of African Unity conference in Tripoli over the second weekend in August when L Junior officers and other Rank and file Air Force members struck past all was thrown into confusion although the Army put down the coup the delayed response of the army and police revealed the high command’s lack of loyalty to the president Major General karuki of Air Force and police commissioner Ben gey two cukes were discovered to be disloyal and for the first time we became seriously concerned about Char jono’s continued loyalty to him as president the C attempt transformed Kenya’s politic scene severely shaken president Moy relied increasingly upon Army Chief of Staff Major General Jackson muling amama who had remained effective during the confused events of the first and second August and general muhamud Mamud a Somali for nearly a year muling Muhammad and other senior army officers exalted almost as much influence over Kenya’s government decisions perhaps even more than members of the canu cabinet okay this is from this book political parties after political parties um Professor yel talked about transitions um some of you like Drogi may know I was here but I was in parkland’s law school but my interests had always remained and still remain English this book combined my love of English my great love of history and and also religion because those were three topics that even in high school I was very good at and somewhere near the creme deeme history English and religion so we’ll get a man our man of global Transitions and he’s going to talk to tell you about a transitional period at the same time as that that happened what was going on in 1982 in the Soviet Union so um Misha okay um before I get to 1982 let me just give Russia Soviet Union has been a country of transitions at least during my lifetime I was born after Stalin’s death Stalin as you may know ruled Soviet Union uh for 24 years and uh uh over that period of time he managed to kill in excess of 10 million innocent people for no particular reason um um so it was uh I wrote about that the title of my last book Love Like Water love like fire is my imaginary my rendition of of one night in the life of my grandparents in 1939 during the height of stalinist Terror the years of stalinist Terror um shortly after Stalin’s death kushu initiated the so-called thw which is to say the liberalization of Soviet Society he gave a speech at the secret secret speech at the at the uh 20th Congress of the Communist Party in which he essentially dethroned talin he said that Stalin was not the domestic god of the century but a murderer um he needed it for his own political purposes he himself was very much implicated in stuff Ence crimes and uh that was the time late 50s early 60s was the time of great liberalization in the Soviet Union it opened up to the rest of the world suddenly there were foreign youth foreign students foreign tourists it was Joy time for my my parents generation that period ended in 1968 with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1964 kusf was deposed by brn and his group of Co conspirators and ever since then liberalization started dwindling down and uh after invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 it became what is known in Soviet history late Soviet history as the period of stagnation which is to say it was like low clouds hanging over life like lead Laden uh nothing it was not Terror it was not not um stalinist excesses it was not arrests necessarily but it was a highly repressive totalitarian regime where nothing was happening life froze as it were and so um brf towards the end of his life and he died in 1982 on November 10th and I have in’s book story the night when bnv died um and actually I also had a story in the New Yorker published the night and drop of died um can you hear with this microphone I think it’s echoing um so um yeah BF became the last five or six years of his life he was decrepit and highly and basically dysfunctional but the pollute Bureau would not let him retire and uh he had numerous Strokes his speech was slurred he could barely understand his surroundings and um we the very young people at that point had great fun uh there were lots of jokes circulating around Soviet Union about him we had great fun trying to imitate his speech which was cruel but then again we you know had no particular F fondness for him and uh in my personal life I remember how when brn died um suddenly everything went dark in the Soviet Union when a leader died we knew because they started playing uh Swan Lake on the radio in the Soviet Union and on television and so it’s always like when when are they going to show us the new installment of swan Lakes we were all very keenly appreciative of that and so I remember yes I came from my uh overnight shift of taking an of keeping an eye on the roller coaster and fell asleep and then a friend of mine walked me up with a phone call said turn on the radio I turn on the radio and then television and sure enough Swan Le little swans just dancing around um and we couldn’t believe it just because we sense that that was the beginning of a new period in our lives M ruled for 18 years that he was all we knew essentially uh since a fairly early age and uh I was uh supposed to give a reading at the underground literary club that night and I got the there and of course the city was in morning the lights were off uh the underground basement we were gathering was overrun with a KGB and they still let me read couple of stories but with the KGB standing around in the audience it was a kind of surreal experience which I don’t expect or hope to repeat in my life very very unappreciative audience Stone faced so yeah uh and what we knew was going to happen is that they would all kind of predictably uh Ur androp of the most Sinister of Soviet rulers took over uh he was smart he was the head of the KGB which means he knew about everything about everyone among his political opponents and among you know his political Rivals and very quickly he started pushing the world towards nuclear Annihilation he engaged in very eager arms race with the United States at home he introduced um anti-alcohol campaign and also increased uh hunt for the dissidents it was the scariest time also if you remember that was the time of you may not remember but that was the time when the Soviet Union downed the Korean airliner that somehow tangentially entered the Soviet space and killed 270 people on board for no reason um and so um yeah uh but andropov was in power only for 14 months he came into office already being literally ill with kidney disease and he spent the last months of his rule in um in a hospital and then he died and again we were not completely heartbroken when that happened um and then uh bnf’s personal old personal friend and completely um you know a useless person named gregori cherena uh Constantin cherena came into power but he already was completely incognizant and disoriented and predictably he died and so when Reagan was asked there is arms race going on can you meet one of the Soviet leaders said I would love to but they keep dying on me so um and then and then uh suddenly all of a sudden indeed in 1985 uh a total new face totally new person came and uh um his name was Mel gorbachov he started behaving totally uncharacteristically for Soviet leader which is to say waiting into crowds and engaging with people in other words he deater demystified himself he de idolized himself he became like a normal person we couldn’t believe our eyes and ears and at that point I had already applied to immigrate for three years for five years actually and uh suddenly gorbachov decided that he needed to improve relations with the West in a drastic Manner and that meant letting out of the country tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people like me called refusenik and so suddenly one day I got a phone call from Office of visit registration at the KGB who hadn’t called me once in five years since I applied to immigrate and say where are you we’ve been looking for you and I was in somewhere out of town with friends I said well you know I haven’t heard from you from in 5 years so I assume that and so you have 24 days to leave the country okay so that’s how it happened I distinctly remember when I hung up the phone think so this is how it happens which is to say your life changes forever in one moment so that’s how it was that was the period of transition but several transitions that uh essentially were the late stage of Soviet history and then um you know gorbachov ushered in eventually the forces that he couldn’t control himself he wanted he was a communist he honestly and fervently believed in the ideas of leninism and so on and he just wanted to improve the system because when he started doing the inventory he realized that Soviet Union had only $80 million on its account Soviet Union engaged in Star Wars with Reagan right so um he decided to start to start tinkering with the Soviet economy he decided to lift the lid of that pressure cooker and of course the lid flew off and uh the the you know the head of steam hit him in the face and he was um basically soon lost his grip on Power and then yelon came and uh after gles in perista which in Russian is openness and restructuring and um and then the free willing 90s the only period of Freedom that Russia knew have known has known up toate and then in 2000 um Putin came and started returning Russia back into un Freedom essentially so um yeah at next installment of if you want me to at some point I can read a very short piece about the androp of’s death and how I found out about that you want me to uh are you going to send me a note saying I should stop somewhere yes I think that’s that’s the how long it is anyways yeah the night androp of died it was an evening like many others the dedicated drunks Loa and alic two of my fellow security guards at the kristofski Island Amusement sector of of the lenr Central Park of culture and Leisure were sitting at the large plywood top table in the main room of the amusement sector’s Administration cabin finishing the last of of three bottles of toxic airport purchased with money I had given them earlier in the afternoon at the nearest liquor store the one on balen Street some 10 bus stops away in exchange for the agreeing to take my shift at some unspecified point in foreseeable future the two could not have looked more dissimilar Loa who was in his 30s was flaxen haired flat noosed pale eyed void of any hint of muscle tone while allergic pushing 60 presented to the world a CU ball bold sharp featured countenance yet tramping all the superficial differences between them was the simple hard fact that both of them belonged to the Timeless ageless million strong Army of Eternal Russian alcoholics for the past couple of hours they had been complaining bitterly to each other about their lives they effectively had none no families of Their Own no money no worldly possessions to speak of just the accurate smell of their tiny rooms in decrepit overcrowded communal flats and no realistic expectations of any kind for a better more dignified future while they talked I was reclining with my eyes half closed in a half broken armchair by the window Beyond which in the dark in the meiger Moonlight covered in snow loomed the hulking D loocas of the Cities only and the country’s oldest roller coaster it was enormous ominous and comforting at the same time the Russian for roller coaster means American Hills you could always simply kill yourself Loa suggested to aleric and a solicitor Stone as long as there is death there is hope that’s something always to look forward to don’t lose heart there is tandel at the end of the light pouring out into two chap fance couples the remain of the swill of the bottle OIC shook his head with a heavy sight too late Loa too late I missed my opportunity to kill myself when the time was right and now it’s just too late now I’ll just have to wait until it happens naturally in the course of my growing decrepitude there is nothing to be done about it now okay well here’s the merciful death he raised his cup with his pinky held apart from the rest of his Dirty hersuit Fingers delicately High Society style so how this is how this very short story starts but then in the end they live and they extract from the office of the administrator the shortwave radio which I’m not supposed to have and then suddenly just I hear on the Voice of America that androp of died and the world has changed forever for me yeah um thank you Misha that is a that’s beautiful just as always um one thing about this Crossroads of world when we use words is that and for me this has always held an eternal Fascination it’s just the way we are able to be transported into entirely other strange realities and the writer is a person like Misha or the speaker then those WS stop being strange ones and soon they become really they become familiar to you even as they remain separate and um yeah so thank you for bringing that reality to us from another era I I can see Dr boo smiling there cuz he he’s thinking words why can’t you just turn it all into Theater which of course that theater is is is the foremost function of that okay now we live in times where and Mikel is going to expound on this this days is the only thing we think about we were just joking with Dr mongi that at least we are still free to talk here it’s not like now the 80s it’s not 1984 but that’s all we’ve been left the only thing we have free in Kenya now is Free Speech everything else just keeps getting more expensive Mikel was here five months ago and he just noted randomly was like prices seem to have gone up yeah and now we haven’t even had the budget for 2024 yeah I hope OK stops it but um so there was a time maybe it was because we were children and this is an urban story it’s from me them teers there was a season and I remember it was just one season it was in the year 1990 at least for me but I think for also for a lot of people who went who used to go to Nairobi show this thing called Nairobi show of course now there are people who’ve made it in the city their children are City people and you know we still have the malls and so on but there was a time it was a general thing whether you are from East Lando everyone would go to Nairobi show and that was an utopian time I like to call it the last year of utopia and Nairobi shows the embodiment so I’ll read very briefly and you see from theia of planeness the banquet that Nairobi sure was um and I don’t think we have that anymore and we keep longing for those times the kak is a whole different story but this one is colored with teenag so this just the character is called Tommy is is 18 and he’s with some girl called angel I mean in a very no so where I check two angel said and turned away to look at the Sheep thinking of what beautiful white sweaters the wool would make once they were sheared especially for the cold June July weather this days even clim it July is hot sometimes after that the train roll through the poultry stand setting up an Almighty sarking from the chicken cackling from the geese and hising and tuy attacks from the Thanksgiving giving birds that must be the only things glad they were not born in the USA Tommy said you must always think of every animal in its food form angel angel scolded that’s the eventual fate of all domestic fouls isn’t it Tommy said in his defense and now knew what she had meant by you talking of food after the train of all shapes sizes and colors here they were in the Grand Food stands of the Nairobi show where large city clock said it was Now 52 minutes past 5 but some people are still but but some people are still crowded around the food stands getting either late lunch or early dinner I cannot tell Angel observed oh well Tommy Shrugged mom said some folks have no body clocks they’re always hungry the hungry people are like Massy fgas on tractors they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes they were the anxious looking ask staff looking hot and bothered in their Cy outfits around capes women with babies in prams as their hurried husbands held out 100 Shilling notes for food the phenomenon of single moms still being a decade or so away as women born in 1969 and after stopped caring so much about creating strictly nuclear families men with tight jeans and side BNS heating 40 plus those who just wouldn’t let the 1970s go there were the little troops of Boy Scouts and Boy Scouts and squaddies of gges around the stands looking proud of their uniforms telling each other to always be prepared for what they did not know it was better that they did not know they were the outrightly fat folks who wled for food by Shifting the from side to side like cartoon ducks they were the cool teens in their 1980s poish Shades smelling of Brut lar and you guys in pakal Hawaii shirts girls in sun dresses with bikers beneath mingling uneasily the MS with big paper shopping paper shopping bags that say Nairobi show 1990s bu Budd has and Grand Buddhas in their 50s who couldn’t resist the cheap allo of the paper cups that say jamui Park given for free at every entrance that the cool peeps would not touch Over My Dead head and of course the little kids with their plastic watches and plastic sunglasses one of a clown painted faces all these folks crowded and flanked the entire length of Nairobi show food Woods seeping Milkshakes that came in vanilla or strawberry or chocolate favors taking big bites of hot dogs and little bites of smokies licking the picked tops of dairy milk ice cream drinking seven up tarino Miranda sodas crunching on potato chips sming popcorn the kids enjoying a meal other than ugal kumiyama and G that constituted their daily fair at the Nairobi show okay thank you um we will now have a professor thank you thank you we love Professor Mikel y yes and he’s going to talk about the same thing what it was like in 1980 with rubles because these days in our own kadogo economies and brand shifting you know I always say for those entrepreneurs theik is Among Us you should have alternatives to the main Brands and um I think people will really go for that um so that instead of omo you have homo for example and you’re good to go okay um Misha so sure I’ll read beginning of a it’s not really even a story I sort of like at some point St it was all this text you can find if you’re interested in it’s entirely on the New Yorker website under my name and so uh Soviet 12 Days of Christmas I just thought when I started working as an engineer after graduating from college what was the buying capacity of my salary of uh 20 rubles so it starts like so at my first post col job as an entry-level engineer in the department of Submarine screening demagnetization at lenr Central Naval elect electronic Electronics Research Institute I was paid 120 rbl a month in 198 80 to the best of my sporadic recollection and with the aid of some perfunctory and doubtless imprecise online research with 120 rubles in a large Soviet City one could afford 12,000 boxes of matches 50 matches per box 12,000 glasses of carbonated water no fruit syrup from a street vending machine 12,000 standard pencils 12,000 slices of bread at a public cafeteria 6,000 pay phone calls 4,000 glasses of carbonated water with fruit syrup flavor indeterminable from a street vending machine 4,000 small 25 lit mugs of quas a popular Russian drink from a street vendor 4,000 copies of most Soviet daily newspapers Soviet Sports and so on 4,000 street car rides 4,000 glasses of tea with no sugar at the cafeteria 4,000 4,000 eraser tipped standard pencils 3,000 trolley bus rides 3,000 hot meat cabbage liver potato fish piroski dumplings from a street vendor 2,400 Metro Bus Ferris Wheel rides 2004 sprigs of deal partially from a street vendor 2,400 bux a fresh Russian Bagel of sorts donut 2,400 table tennis balls 2,400 tins of mint tooth powder 2,400 glassfuls of sunflower seeds from a street vendor 2000 you getting the picture 2000 large5 lit mugs of clas 2,000 regular postcards 2,000 meat patties cat at a cafeteria which Burger basically 2,000 small tins of vitamin C 1,710 paper cups of fruit ice cream 1,710 Buzz Cuts at a barber shop 1,710 portions of generic vegetable salad cafeteria and 1,710 standard strength light bulbs 1,500 paniki hard Honey Cakes 1,500 standard pocket size notebooks 1,500 glasses of birch tree juice Russians drink that at a grocery store counter and so on 1,333 paper cups of milk ice cream 1,200 glasses of tomato juice at a grocery store 1,200 kilos of salt 1,200 boiled sausage sandwiches at a cafeteria 1,200 kilos of potatoes 1,200 boxes of uh mustard plaster 1,90 hot large open-faced meat peroski at a cafeteria 1,90 copies of literary newspapers which is large thick newspaper um 1,900 1,90 portions of chocolate ice cream on a stick um 1,000 kilos of carrots 923 chicken eggs 923 standard loaves of wheat or white bread in other words food was cheap but but clothes and electronics and everything was so I’ll read you from from the end from the end yeah um yeah 17 wooden chairs 14 pairs of made in China Summer sandals 12 kilos of chocolate truffles 12 L Moscow train rides 11 half linen tablecloths 10 wooden tennis rackets uh 10 months worth of apartment fees in theory because I didn’t pay any apartment fees I just squatted um seven regular shorts seven shirts um six seven leting Moscow plane light flights six and expensive photo cameras five flights to the Black Sea adessa sople four pairs of Soviet made dress Sho shoes three vacuum cleaners two cheap bicycles 1.8 Soviet made suits 0.8 Soviet fall codes 0.67 flights to the other end of the country Blas stock 0.67 pairs of Black Market jeans if you are lucky um so um 0.66 cheap black and white TV sets 0.4 chip bicycles 0.35 Vega record players 0.3 Minsk um or comparable class refrigerators 0.27 portable electronic Amun TV 0.17 color TVs 0.0024 Mage 412 automobiles 0.1 00000000 most other Automobiles and being young and carefree will Priceless obviously so that’s how much it cost here actually um yeah some of you since you mentioned Bia Wanga uh just now let me just tell you very very briefly how so somewhere in 90 late 90s I started uh getting the idea that I want to organize literary uh conferences literary programs in different parts of the world starting of course with my hometown of St Petersburg which is the most literary prob city in the world not because people read books there necessarily but because it was basically a literary project and in the head of uh Peter the Great and so yeah somewhere between 99 um we started having those programs and they started tiny and then they grew very quickly and eventually um in 2005 we even managed to bring you several Kenyan writers including Tony right and including banga and including Billy kahora and of War and the current representative of Kenya at the United Nations Martin kimman and several Ugandan writers Darin bana and Jakie Banda and so forth and so that was a lot of fun um so over the years we started having those programs in St Petersburg and eventually it was well over 1,000 students from across the United States mainly and uh faculty some of the greatest writers in the world um and so then we opened program in uh Lithuania and at some point I found myself in Kenya and I was having at Coffee coffee shop at Yaya Center um was the late uh journalist who wrote for the nation Betty Kaplan you remember her right yeah and so she was wonderful and unfortunately died young and so I was talking to her about about my literary programs in St Petersburg and I said that it would be kind of interesting to explore the idea of having one here as well and said well uh then you need to talk to um this person who just got back from South Africa because he’s organized a group of writers around him and they meeting at the house of Ali zidi and they’re just a publisher of a nation and uh they engag in literary projects and he is the one who’s there I said well what’s his name I said bang and she said and I said okay well how do I find him I said well let me see if I can find him and then there is this huge dude sitting right at the next table in a poncho in dreed locks just turns around said did somebody say literary conferences and that was banga drinking coffee and that very evening he came to uh I was at Lilian Towers at that point he came there and we started trying to figure out how to start the literary program here as well so that was uh recollection of banga with whom we of course later became close friends and so forth so he was one of the most uniquely talented writers I ever met in my life like naturally gifted yeah um yeah thank you Pro for that remin of our friend and K and Legend and um yeah I want to say please make sure you see me everyone in this room if you’re interested in literature well not drong you I’ll come to you as always but please see me you’re interested in literary programs because Mikel that was summer literary seminars SLS but he just founded another one post Co called the international literary seminars um I’m happy to see the winner of one of I mean of the latest award is here Gloria yeah I don’t know she sneaked in she has just arrived yes and she’s also W a scholarship to Concordia where Professor Mikel teaches and purely by Merit I can tell you having worked and seen Gloria through the as a r so yeah please see me because I would want us all to be part of this second part banga was the first wave and I always see um you know there’s always chapter twos yeah if Misha can start ILS again and have other people you can be part of this second part of this journey me I’m like that old ra engine driver for old Kenya even if there’s a third program at different stages of our lives so now I’ll do something very brief because um we are talking about contested spaces yes don’t worry don’t worry drong I’m totally very aware of the time um and so we missa I’ll do I’ll write um because this is the last part of this part of things it’s um the internet is a contested space Mel we talk about a more contested space how every people are always trying to sneak into America and you’ll see from his US border patrol story a bit of how even when you are there even those who are who belong there it’s still a hard space to get into but this one is for from my book 2063 so this is long before 2063 about the internet people and their hopes you know we always dreaming of escape and the internet has provided away way and sometimes people try to make us the victims so this is a guy from Nepal called sanjip and he’s interacting with the character the hero of the story called Morgan chamari some and it’s not yet in the future sanjip Nepal’s messages are in his rest box inbox of course and Moran chamari cannot help taking this sterile back and forth chat chat that they have been having with the would be young colan from Nepal from the top sanjip hi chamaro sanjip have you had a little sip sanjip zip no sip please I’m only child mother died when I was born Morgan I’m very sorry to hear that sanip where are you from sanjip Nepal and you chamari Kenya sanjip Kenya very good how old are you and what you do chamari I’m almost 38 so you could say I’m retired I bet sanjip you bet you bet what Morgan I bet even on Cricket do you like Cricket sanjip no I studed to be medical surgeon stroke technician chamar wow young man I’ve never never heard of that one sanip it is there it is here Nepal I am Oran no zip Morgan I’m sorry to hear that sanjip did your dad also die at child birth sanjip yes please it is my granddad who bring me my brothers and sisters up but he pass away two years ago on Morgan I thought you said you’re an only child sanjip sanjip yes only need 250 Starling pounds in Kenya money complete study I’m 18 I’m final semester please help me Oran Morgan I appreciate that you’re an Oran what confuses me is if you’re an only child or not sanjip yes homely child very homely no smoke no drink no drugs homely only 250 Starling in Kenya money to complete study at CV two semester study charge Morgan slow down sanj you’re losing meia what is CTV sanj Council of technique education vocational TR Morgan what council of Technic education and vocational training vocational training yes help me study 250 staling pound Kenya money only semester Morgan you want to study to be a vocational trainy or to be the council to vocational traines or the technique of being the councel to vocational traines sanip everything but no Fe 250 styling pound money only per enus of course help me okay my new P from Nepal San very good God bless it you sent for Eastern consolidation Union transfer with password okay um I’ll stop there for those ambitious and contested spes by everybody from Nepal Nigeria and um yes so um we back to Mikel and um there yes we should be so yes it’s 1539 yeah so um yeah so it’s going to be it’s um so any any questions on this Kenyan thing before for five minutes before I pass this to Misha for the next about 45 all at once okay yes yes yeah yeah yeah of course we always follow your true north star so yeah M I think um yeah a little bit from the US border control five minutes and then yeah yeah and then the years yeah yeah I was really trying to fit into that whatever you say um yeah well you know um the city of my birth and the first 30 years of my life was only 4-Hour car drive from Helsinki uh capital of Finland um and um it was a whole different world so I always lived in Lial border spaces um on a good sunny day you could see from the shore of the finish the Gulf of Finland one of those U beachfront facilities the settlements not far from Leningrad sarova on a good day you could see the very vague outline of the finished Shore so it seemed reachable by sea but it also was um a world away it could have been the moon was easier to reach and when I became member of that underground literary Club in Leningrad the space that we were given first was in the basement of a building that was barely 50 MERS away from the US Consulate General in Leningrad as though to indicate to us the sheer enormity of the distance you would come there and uh you would look to your right and you would see that us counsel General guarded by the KGB and Marines US Marines and so forth and you realize that here it is it’s just here the other world the other side of the world um but it’s completely unreachable so I think they gave that that space to remind of the complete unbridge ability of that space um so so yeah and of course Soviet finish border was the probably the um most stringently guarded Border in the world completely electronically a large animal would set off major alarm like a moose and then there would be like a big hunt for the Moose trying to cross into Finland um so I’ve known in my life several people who were killed trying to escape well through black by black sea to Turkey 80 miles by sea from Batumi the southern tip of Georgia to Turkey and um and also was taken to the Georgian Turkish border by the Border guard General to show the Turkish side and again the same strange feeling it’s here it’s e dogs are on that side like they look exactly like our Soviet dogs but they’re Turkish dogs they’re the capitalist world to dogs are they luckier than me well you know they don’t know what to do with this Freedom necessarily they just look like they just okay but they’re three three dogs and so um yeah and now I live an hour away from US border being dual citizen of US and Canada I go to New York ofen because that’s where my friends live lots of my friends and um and every time well I usually take a bus and the bus usually comes at midnight because I like night buses and the bus comes to US border and then um every time I have interesting conversations with the Border guards somehow they’re memorable so I decided to write one down um and that’s US border on the way back by the way from New York to Montreal Canadian border guards that just they completely uninterested in you in their lives in anything they just wave you through but not so US border cards so Customs border patrol officer at all berley somewhat goofy looking young man waves me over saying something I cannot make out because of the General de in the large echoing space me approaching handing him my passport taking off my hat Hi how are you Customs border patrol officer Professor me I big your pardon cbpo chuckling ironical are you a professor by any chance me yes I am actually well how did you he grinning didn’t you hear me just now when I said Professor looking at you I immediately thought when I saw you this guy must be a professor he just looks like one that’s why I said professor and you’re just telling me now that you actually are a professor I said uh me yes I actually am one ha well that’s kind of funny uh him you could say that again it’s kind of hilarious we look at each other um smiling for a couple of seconds him uh well and where and what do you profess Professor if I may per permitted to ask me at the University up in Montreal creative writing literature you know creative writing you mean stories and stuff me yes stories and stuff him I was in a writing Workshop once in high school wrote a story about a man who’s like uh driving on a highway all through the night and it’s like beach dark outside because it’s nighttime but then it gets to be Dawn in theory and then morning and so on but it’s still just as dark everywhere endless darkness and he realizes much to his horror that it’s going to be like this forever now going forward the sun has just forgotten to come up like for the first time in a billion years so he’ll always be doomed to keep driving on this empty Highway in the dark Now with uh no destination inside for the rest of his natural life and also also he has this magical capacity to turn invisible at will that guy driving in the dark after drinking his secret potion like ad mixture of his own invention he would turn invisible and start punishing bad people in that state like an invisible and therefore much more efficient Batman that’s kind of a parallel storyline but his dog his only true friend and an Afghan uh so beautiful so No One Believes he actually is its owner which constantly pisses him off a little that dog doesn’t have the same ability to turn invisible and that leads to a whole bunch of uh serious complications in his life me sounds interesting him nah it was stupid but anyway actually let me ask you since I have an actual professor in front of me how do you tell people that their stories like suck which I’m sure they often do you know I guess what I’m actually asking you is how can you tell a good story from a bad one in the first place how do you always know me I I don’t always know but I’ll tell you it’s much easier to say why a poorly written story is bad than why really good story is good him yeah I suppose although frankly I didn’t understand what you just said but anyway so uh you live in monreal me I do he lowering his voice so how is it up there me also lowering my voice it’s okay him following his lowering his voice even further and you were born in Russia me practically Whispering I was him a strange choice of a place to be born I have to tell you well anyway um cool coincidence wouldn’t you say me yeah real unusual um shall we take a selfie together together um we both laugh he hands me back my passport I start walking away him oh by the way you’re not bringing in any illegal substances are you me uh turning back half straight no no way him didn’t think so but still thought I should ask okay yeah okay fine um it’s very nice to see all the smiles after Story post smile glue the post smile glue so now um I like that Prof is a stickler for time yeah yeah so we’ll start H yeah of course with the audience here so we’re going to have H 10 minutes I’ll take any of the Kenyan questions or comments on the things you have spoken about and I’ll just take five minutes from here and five minutes from there and then we are going to give Pro about 30 minutes and it’s very exciting which I’m sure it will be 45 minutes so between 30 and 45 so um yeah any comments about the Kenyan thing or observations or questions from our era um yes and you introduce yourself hello uh my name is Gloria also Gloria masetti um so happy to hear the stories thank you for reading them to us I’m just curious um having gone through all the experiences that you have is it possible and specifically referencing the crossroads stories is it possible for for reality to beat expectation I don’t know if I’m making sense because when we’re at a point of Cross Road there is optimism there is all this but somehow Nostalgia always seems to win and then in the future we are very not bitter but we are you know I wish it was how it was back then so I haven’t had many scenarios or many stories of where a crossroad has happened and then it’s actually better than it was so is that a possibility or no life only gets wor yeah um thank you Gloria that’s a beautiful question um I like that your name is also machete yeah just don’t visit Kali soon they may not welcome you the Gali um yes what I’m going to say is um it helps like my experience I know it’s St Petersburg it Still Remains for me the most beautiful place in the world but I now realize 20 something years after I first went there it helped that first ad read mikel’s essay this city so I’d already built something in my mind and then on the very first day yeah on in this beautiful was it the the library pleas mayovsky there was this welcoming thing you know with all the vodka and all the clever people and then Misha already said what the city is he said we’ll be living in multiplicities of reality I’ve never forgotten that that we’ll believe so that city became to me that it became this place and then all these clever people and literature and then the white Knights and no city on earth has ever equal that experience because sometimes even the words that are created and then of course I knew that you know dooi was from there we went to the cemeteries we went to Nabokov house so it became magic I used to look forward to those trips and I’ve been to many other places after that but none no experience has ever equaled that and when I went back in 2018 now not to the SLS program I went to cover the World Cup quite a bit of the magic was lost because yes it was still fun there all these World Cup people but I found I was resenting them that they’re not literature people yeah okay they are Hooligans from like Mexico and I love football but I Tred to go back to the same places and there all these football people and it was very it was disappointing in that way and the character of the country had changed you could feel the magic you could feel the putinism also maybe because I was also reading continuously interested and I could see you know like i’ come to hate Putin and then Russians had gotten more nationalistic this in 2018 and you see the horrors that were Unleashed later but you could feel it in the air so it was like a magical place like when I was in my 30s the transition and then I go back at you know when I’m almost in my 4 is was still a great event like the World Cup I’m there for a whole month but uh that’s what happens it’s like at a college sweetheart you have the most fantastic time you go away abroad or you know one of you goes then when you you reunite there’s a cynism that has been created so um yes that’s how it was um okay is there one online because I I think I only have space for I only have five more minutes and On LAN H oh okay um okay um unmute yeah if you have a question uh you can okay yeah okay um then we’ll come back here yes ah Dr Fred MoGo my my St brother unless yes okay good afternoon please stand up Griffin teach you to sit down I feel like sitting I don’t want to know you to know how tall I am but since you have insisted so I just you know I just want to maybe Pro matize the occasion I mean because we’ve been listening to stories that are say Russian and so on and then Nairobi stories and so on and currently we we are grappling in these spaces called universities with things called uselessness of degree courses it’s a new word that’s uh floating around this week um so I wanted to know I mean um um why should we care about listening to stories from elsewhere especially because um that elsewhere in this case Russia seems to have been struggling with a lot of ideologies and a lot of uh um management issues or if you want governance issues which which are uniquely um um Soviet USS Irish Russian Etc while we are also for ourselves struggling with other issues you know post Colonial and so on where do we meet um is it is it possible to to merely just decide to take personal stories and therefore decide to to just reason with these stories as human beings to human beings or I guess maybe there’s no question in that thing it’s just trying to understand how can I come into these stories and get out of them with something that possibly makes me whether better or um you know make me understand my surrounding in a clearer fashion I don’t know yeah um H and answer them together okay no let me just answer that one yeah please very briefly because after that then years and then on to Professor M thank you yeah you are right about it being a problematic question and Michelle answer the the second bit of it about the Soviet ideologies so that we don’t mix them up with current Russia although he did explain a lot of the transitions that have happened in that country Dr Fred um I know that’s a bit mischievous misers but I’m happy because you’re a clever monkey yeah and I mean that in you know in a very good organic way um a lot of people oh p is here too a lot of people Kenya has become this country the most dangerous thing that is happening right now is the Mercantile nature of this nation people say the uselessness of degrees we have been reduced to these people proper rats but rats without a context We Exist within vacuums of stories and it’s deliberate you see our political class right now all of them if you take today’s Nation headline UD in turmoil cleopas Malala wants to kick out K Dreadful fellow my old classmate M comen but we are now existing in this era of the hustlers even when they are the biggest thugs but there when you have Hustler mentality and no stories you have no context so the importance of things we have been saying today B oh mu in 1982 those transitions we are getting a generation I don’t know how many of you saw the video it went viral of those genz at tomoya statue and they had no idea who that was they had no idea yet we’re in the age of information we have the most information every they have smartphones and yet we the most ignorant both incoming generation school syllabuses history is being deated there drong will agree and it’s deliberate if you don’t have stories you don’t have continuums you don’t have context you don’t have anything to refer to whether Revolt or to think so you exist in what I can call a Tik Tok vacuum you can have movement and things that please you you can have these things CU you have no history so you don’t know and you and then you don’t have crosswells you don’t know what happened let’s say in the Soviet Union what’s going on in Russia you don’t understand America just know this Trump if you even do you don’t know Tom Boya and you’re at his statue I mean people who are being interviewed you have no idea who that is what a terrible world you just have a Chinese app maybe and and you know I have nothing against the Chinese completely but you have your app you have your Tik Tok talk and you’re talking to each other and the things you’re talking are of within vacuous context within vacuous context that’s why it’s important when we read these stories of 1990 or we talk of 2063 it’s that context so that even when we are being destroyed at least we are knowing what even if we accepting it or we are not accepting it but we know we could be more heroic we could be different understand the past for our present to create the future because without history you have no story you’re nothing yeah you’re just a tick talk waiting for the bomb to go off um thank you Tony thank you m I will ask questions to to both of you uh and you will answer them uh depending on who it falls on but first uh this is very interesting particularly for us historians and I could see friends of ours here both my colleagues from the Department here and my brother from Memphis and uh my very good friend niiko from York as historians this is really very very very interesting cross words of words you know as I listened I could hear of you know live in transitions you know multiple identities and contradictions of global citizen which you seem to be M but I will follow up really what that lady was asking King and I think it was indirectly reinforced by the gentleman now how do this stories represent real people historians were concerned with real people real situations and real lives you know how and because as as uh as you spoke I could um get some resonance to some of the themes we have discussed in this forum before uh Dr G was here oh he’s still around I heard your underground movements the isue of underground movements here uh I could hear the histories of uh heterogeneity in the way we appropriate uh you know social reality which we have talked about in in this in this forum if as literally people and you have very interesting backgrounds very interesting for the students here uh M was an engineer uh this is a lawyer and look at what they are doing with their lives I don’t know what that says to you as as as a student uh both at your ma and ba and what does that say to you so help us just connect all this to to real lives historians we are interested in heny and uh and all that I I will ask another question so that you answer both of them um I have a second one uh you know Tony I don’t know the nairobi’s Night Runner this is on a light note uh what influenc that title whether it is uh history culture or personal experiences but you will tell tell us that now as I listened to your stories about Nairobi Tony and St Petersburg I started questioning what we were reading in in the 90s late 90s about um this great political scientist horo I been Louie horis who wrote this famous book The Three worlds of development uh and finded the first world the second world and the third world we have now moved away from those characterizations and we are more talking about the global North and the global South and Prof the kind of Soviet Union you described and the kind of Nairobi that Tony described were strikingly similar you know we spoke of squala deprivation oppression you know social struggles name it then what happened to this classification because if my memory serves me well the Soviet Union was supposed to be the second world where things were likely to be better than they were in in in in the third world that Nairobi uh was at the time in the 80s and probably in the 90s uh so was this characterization uh uh uh you know uh hot air for Kenyans who are here was it just hot hair was it just uh uh you know something that does not exist in the real world on the ground your comment on that will be very highly appreciated thank you yeah so I’ll just answer my the one question and it’s the my last contribution um before I hand it over to the esteemed Professor Mikel um um I’m going to say because you asked me a very specific thing about Nairobi Night Runner um I sort of know why you asked yeah and we’ve had this cultural I remember Dr gon’s great presentation and then then on bukusu and so on so of course it was informed also by kissy night running yeah that is definite yeah um actually my great grandfather was H was a night run that’s another yeah he was killed in 1912 he was shot by a Briton who didn’t quite understand ER these things um it’s very well known in bog then his son was killed in a more heroic manner that one is buried in Moshi my paternal grandfather was killed in Japan in BMA by the Japanese at at the Battle of AKA but him is buried with he the one we talk about we don’t mention his father yeah a priest to him my grandfather so there’s that and then we have a Night Runner here my fellow right night fellow nocturnal man Patrick kuki will explain that there was an error when that thing because I think he also wrote a column on that it was very fashionable to run around in Nairobi those banga years I don’t know what we were trying to discover but we had romanticized our city the underbelly what happens when the Sun goes down so that was also that’s it’s called Nairobi Night Runner a night guide and like i’ explained earlier it was to be a night guide everyone was supposed to open that book and see where to go but like I said sometimes everything recedes into history and archives and in institutions and what you thought was going to be a map becomes a museum so um thank you I’m going to pass this on to my mentor Professor Misha take it from here thank you I don’t think I need this well there are more questions here than than working there are more questions here than um um than we could possibly cover with answers uh in several hours for instance you asked me in your office Professor um well it was a rhetorical question the rise of right-wing politics in Europe and throughout the world there are very specific reasons for that there is a very specific reason for why trumpism preceded Trump and how it came out of Tea Party USA and what how it’s connected to the rest of the world um the question by the gentleman there about what specific practical lessons one can um derive from uh the political development first of Soviet Union then Russia you can view Russia as a cautionary tale and you can view it as specifically questionary tale for Kenya if you want what Putin did uh in 1999 2000 well first he was very um timid in a way but then oil prices went through the roof what did Putin do he immediately started taking Independent Media he jailed owners of Independent Media television newspapers uh he kicked them out of the country he subjugated Independent Media and though it still seemed like a uh a fairly liberal Democratic country it no longer was it was hollowed out democracy it was illiberal democracy what we’re seeing in the world right now is the rise of illiberal democracies good example would be Hungary under Victor Orban it seems like a democracy people elect the leader but then the leader attacks the opposition closes down Independent Media and gets reelected time and and time and again could it happen in Kenya probably not Unthinkable at all so um so that right the world is in a state of high disbalance right now um it’s in constant motion because of globalization immigration uh the fact that Putin started a war in Europe for the first time since 1945 further destabilized the world in a great way China is now looking to attack Taiwan the world is in state of disarray uh Europe is uh uh not doesn’t know how to cope with a very high number of immigrants that leads to the rights of right-wing politicians obviously same in the United States where tens of millions of people mainly males who used to derive their sense of selfworth from being middle class from working on a conveyor belt and bringing home decent salary and have two cars in a picket fence and so forth now our unemploy employed because all their jobs have been shipped abroad they are sealing with anger with impotent anger and of course they blame everyone who is not like them which is what Trump is all about a sense of victimhood it’s not my fault that my life has turned out so badly it’s them who are them well the elites on both coasts people who don’t look like me who don’t think like me who don’t worship like me who don’t love like me I am afraid of those people and I hate those people and so that’s the root of trumpism and of course there is violence obviously and then there is there are so many more things that one can talk about but the right now the world is in probably the greatest state of Discord that uh was in place since 1945 maybe it’s difficult time everywhere and that’s why when you know um no country is an Island United States is an island L literally the continent of North America and that is both has its pluses but it has lots of minuses sense of isolation from the world sense of self-righteousness sense of belief that we are better than everybody else in the world and so on and so forth but uh the there is a powerful movement called America First that America needs to be isolated from the rest of the world and not get involved anywhere else that was the case again um 100 years ago approximately America first movement when America was not supposed they were against entering World War II and so on everything is connected everything is connected in today’s world and in some strange way our presence here is connect part of some larger picture okay thank you uh thank you very much my name is Lydia Muma good afternoon profess Dr mongi long ago I was in the department of History I am a visual artist but but in the last few years I have concentrated on telling the story the history of the Arts now I have a question for you Professor it may not be directly related to what you read but I am addressing you as a trainer of creative writers because I understand you have spent your time doing just that um first of all it must be very tricky to get another person to be creative depending on what one understands by creative and it was very interesting to hear about your um transitioning from telling your stories in Russian to telling them in English and of course there was a transition not just in the context but in the person who is telling the story now here comes my question I think I do a similar job uh that you do and I find it difficult to tell my story without I mean I I’m in the danger of daming down pressing down the creativity of my students I I feel that sometimes I force them to see the world using my eyes which is not what I want I want them to make their own story as they live their own lives and learn how to speak not only in their own voice but using their own tone to choose what they want to tell and tell and it is a daunting task if you have a tricks to how one achieves that I I would like to hear um Let me Give an example that maybe I don’t know how appropriate it is I truly admire dostoevski I have never visited St Petersburg what I know about St Petersburg is through the literature of the literary works of dooi I cannot write like dovi I am not even a writer um I suppose because of my history and who I am I’m able to look at his view respect it as what it is appreciate it and then set out to write my own and in my career that’s what I try to get my students to do I do not many times I don’t get there I do not manage if they admire doski they’ll try and use his style of writing and you know I want to shout at them you’re not Doki you’ll never be be yourself how do they retain their authenticity when the teacher the trainer is desperately trying to get them to be creative without imposing One’s Own Way of seeing the world thank you yeah um yeah uh it’s it’s a great question question but it its parameters are not necessarily um coincide with what I do um um I I do not teach people to be creative and I don’t want I don’t try to make them creative they already are creative uh I teach in graduate writing program which is highly selective so we accept maybe like 15% of people or 20% of all the people who apply so I know already that these people want to be writers and my task is to make them to find them help their own voice and to discover something about their right which is more difficult than surprisingly than it is U you know opera singers spend our spend years in training trying to find their their natural Voice without stifling it without essentially suffocating themselves with trying to imitate somebody else same with writers and uh and I’m just trying to find something in their stories that frees them up uh and I try to find this the the seeds of story that are hidden in the story and I find the vectors of possible meaning in the story and I try to reorient them all in the same direction so that they help the story become about something significant so in other words I help them discover their stories which gives me satisfaction because it’s a highly creative process for me also but that is what I do my suggestion however when I but I also teach undergraduates and those mainly are teaching literature classes so we read a large variety of primarily short stories by authors from all over the place including Africa and um I want them to understand what the author was trying to do and um invariably I try to pitch higher so I take the highest common denominator people who are the most engaged the most interested and I appeal to them and it’s the task of other people in class to catch up I won’t pitch lower I will pitch higher every time so um no need in my opinion to try to bring somebody up to the level of uh of your level or somebody else’s in class just be yourself um the literary equivalent of that would be that in writing my stories in English about Russia I don’t translate Russian reality for the benefit of an American reader I let them well now it’s easier with Google but I let them just to uh to understand it without me explaining it um as a teacher you have the great capacity to influence them with your passion with your degree of Interest energy is highly transferable it’s contagious if you’re passionate about your subject students will catch on and they will appreciate you for that um even if what you trying to teach them necessarily didn’t coincide with their personal aesthetic and those who won’t respond to that you know what there are different Avenues in life they don’t have to be animated by your passion they will do something else in life the best of my ability I answer your question um Jeff kindly no me just yeah Jeff would you kindly like unmute and then ask your question okay um thank you very much professor mik and Tony I hope you can hear me and clear thank you thank you um I want to appreciate H your presentations the two paired presentations in my view uh they are what I can call a mutually refor forcing but although contrasting parallelism uh I come from the Department of literature that’s why I’m using those terms um two issues that I would want you to respond to uh and the the issues are intertwined for both of you first I was expecting to hear uh from both of you and how you situate yourselves within the historical uh dialogue because you are writing in history and you are reflecting historical uh moments you are giving us what we call a vivid recording of history but in a fictionalized presentation so um how do you uh reflect on these writings of yours uh that that’s something that I didn’t get um and then the second ER is the fact that um uh I’ve not heard your voices Visa your contemporaries and also the authors or writers who preceded you if I just give a short run for Russian writers for example the famous to story Doki mayakovski Maxim gorki sakarov ver FNA and Ginsburg so I would want Professor mik to uh try to situate himself within that panum that continum of those Ian writers and for Tony I also would like you to um situate yourself within that Pantheon of Kenyan writers dating back to our owni mangi Mau Ma margareta and your contemporaries such as Ado sidang yon war and Morita thank you very much I’ll just answer first so that I quickly as always defer to Prof um thank you very much Jeff for your questions um they’re both intelligent and slightly unimaginative I only mean to say unimaginative intelligent in the sense of I find them very pertinent um the one about situating yourself I think takes a rate of both great arrogance and a sense of themselves within history to be situating themselves within stories where do you place yourself like Jank yeah I don’t know about that what I do know is that when I write like the four books I’ve referred to if I do n Nairobi nitr I spent one and a half years on Nairobi streets I took notes I wrote it B if I write meet them teas I went back to my childhood 1990 what I thought Nairobi looked like I wrote it B if I did political parties it’s an analysis of six years of of political party history it was a lot of work during covid that was condra now foundations Commissioned I needed the money and I wanted to do a good job one that Dr Griffin would be proud of he was you know back to washing the cup clean B so to ask where I rank myself this is sort of for me a bit ridiculous you know a bit like the football thing within history people will rank us I don’t even know what that is I’m very happy today I sing drong if I he someone is studying my book here I’ve had one or two for PhD the the on doing the ranking whether to pass exam whether nobody ever reads their life will rank you or you’ll just feel sad become a suicidal po it’s also they’ve also been great writers or even failures who you know I can always end up as a suicidal point but I should hope not I should hope that you know I keep getting invited to places and I can make a few coppers from the writing but that’s not where I do it because when the thing comes and it’s and it’s a topic or whatever it is you just do it to the best of yours so I can’t rank myself anywhere whether in history or with my contemporaries yeah I won say that I’m the here to be or you know is you know my great Shining Light to okay no let me SH now first um where where do I well I I situate myself in the very Central World historical process um seriously though um I well you know I I was lucky and I I do believe it was luck gift is luck Talent is luck and certain linguistic capacities luck I was lucky to pass through this through this Ling listic membrane at my age probably the only one in my generation of Soviet immigrates and so I’m taking advantage of that because I feel nobody’s placed any mission on me but it’s since I’ve been able to do this then I tell certain stories that other people tell in Russian and I do it in English and so in a way I’m writing Russian sentences in English um in then I’m I cannot begin to compare myself to Nabokov or who was a genius um and so on um but uh seriously speaking um among those names that you mentioned not all of them were writers to begin with but in the 19th century Russian literature passed under the sun as it were direct rays of sun and in a very poor 80% illiterate country suddenly the one of the greatest literatures in the world emerged they were Geniuses like to you have to read to St I think if you want your life to be a little better I mean nobody forces you to and you don’t have to you live a perfectly good life without reading to but with reading him it will might become a little better and um same with chov DVI was God forbid for any of us to have his life he was also not a great person to put it very mly and he lived a very very hard life but he was a genius so if you want to read tolto chov dovi uh indeed and then there are great writers of the same rank they’re just not that well known like that and um like T and um TV and and gurov and whole whole whole host of them they’re just not that well known in in in in the western culture just because to in of Andi occupy such humongous space and then they were Geniuses of the 20th century residual the sun was still shining but already there was of course the most repressive regime in the world in place there but they were poets Poets of the rank of Mam and Pastak and anaka and others poets can exist in airless totalitarian space much better than Fiction writers um because they work in shter form and they have a firm purchase on what they’re doing fiction writers cannot survive a repressive regime generally um so um um if I were just to give you an advice and I don’t presume to that it’s my place read those Russian writers that I suggested and then um um and then you’ll life will you will see it somehow slightly it will change for the better as it has for so many other people to come back yes I just kind of Correction to my [Music] friend first of all I want to appreciate both professor and Tony and Tony for their responses and and also to uh just through a caveat that I was not interested in ranking uh or asking them to rank themselves Visa uh their contemporaries or those who came before them what I was looking at is the historicity of literature for example when we read googi there are certain contemporary writers who Echo googie’s themes and style when we read totoy There are modern writers who also Echo totoy and so on so this is the context within which I was looking at the two present whether for example they might have been influenced in their writings by either their contemporaries or those who came before them or whether they took a different tangent and and this as a a scholar myself and a a researcher I learn a lot when I interact with great writers like yourselves I learn the influences that gave birth to your works this is why we the university pays us when we interact with we we grow so Tony I I I just wanted to um correct the impression created that I I am asking you to rank yourself visi or maang or somebody like that I I I was just looking at for example the influences how you capture history and how goog captures history whether there are any differences because you read a lot you’ve just given us an example of how you do a lot of research before you come up with the work so that was the um the trajectory I had in mind when I raised my issue thank you very much for your responses Professor Antony okay so yeah I’ll be very brief um and I don’t go reading a whole bunch of writers like I said whatever I’m going to write about usually I try to keep like an original mind as possible but this where a bit of that legal training comes in stories for me are like cases you have to make your case you have to make your narrative case you have to convince your reader it has to be authentic it has to have a great Arc it has to be believable so what whatever I’m doing I’ll just try I want go trying to look for cratches that oh who wrote about this how did they write about it because you also have to have a bit of ability and Faith within your originality and your own command of language and your research methodology so yes I’ll I’ll read what I consider relevant but I’m no longer looking for Style at my age me so yes so what I’ll just do is um whatever topic it is there’s everything from Google to traveling to talking to you know the likes of wongi if need be about historical things then you put your mind power there and you try to you know this why we all went to school yeah they say why cows were sold or goats or whatever and then you apply it and you do it within your timeline and with some modicum of discipline and with a skill skills that are already inherent within you yes as opposed to an academic type of trying to search who did what how did they do it you know what can I borrow or deviate from I think that confuses arate a lot thanks about what well I grew up I grew up within Russian literature in Russian culture and uh I had favorite right and of course you know uh uh we spent in 10th Grade of high school whole years reading war in peace and most of us hated it and um but we read a lot I grew up I was fortunate to grow up in a household where there were lots of books because my mother liked uh buying books and she sometimes would spend whole night literally 12 hours overnight standing in line to bookstore where in the morning collected works would be subscribed to certain people according to the number there was a limited number so I spent my childhood reading books we all were reading books because there was nothing on television there was just one channel uh we played soccer and we read books that’s all kind of we did Growing Up and um boys and um and when I started wanting to be a writer and that happened somewhere when my liter teacher told me in fifth or sixth grade that I have talent and I won first place competition somewhere by describing a postcard of some sort and I oh this is wonderful and so I told my parents have literary talent and they so get shut up and but then yeah then I I I started writing quite a bit and uh um and then I started winning literary competitions and so I would had the right of entering lenning University without entrance exams to philology Department literature department but for a variety of reasons of political situation in the country I couldn’t do that eventually so I gradu I went to technical in college and so I graduate with degree master’s degree in engineering electromagnetic engineering so um the writers that I loved and they’re not known here although some people writers writers know them in the United States maybe like vasil aov I emulated him I adored him because he was essentially imitate parodying the Soviet propaganda language the language of Soviet newspapers the Socialist realist language um and I found it very freeing very liberating and I loved it and there were other writers like that and then I became a writer myself an underground writer which to utter horror and despair on the part of my parents for obvious reasons because that was an step that forever threw me out of the normal circle of of Soviet life I would never be my my father was a highly positioned scientist and I was basically uh a dissident traitor to the motherland and so um but when I came to the United States of America and passed eventually through over years managed to pass through linguistic membrane and come out on the other side of it then I found myself fairly isolated I have to say because my role models and favorite writers are American Writers now um that’s part of my culture but I realized that my I I keep writing my stories are set in Russia primarily because the gravitational pool of Russia is enormous Nabokov couldn’t overcome it I can’t overcome it either nor do I want to necessarily so um yeah you know I feel that um that I’ve lived two lives yeah let’s have another round of applause for this a great one yeah yeah thank yeah thank you um and so with that yeah um we’ve just been so privileged first I’ve been privileged to have Mikel here I’m very grateful for the gentleman that I’ll introduce not introduce welcome to the lecture next to close this for us and uh guys girls I call you that because your vampires eternally youthful um yeah including Dan who have come from far away places um thank you so much for being here um kindly I’ll volunteer that you register because I would be interested in us being still in touch with each other with a Gloria just stand up uh yes please your phone number and your email address kindly leave it to that so that we just stay in touch in these cross wordss and worlds of a literature politics and many other good things so to our fantastic host the this man who has opened up these spaces ER doc I’m very very proud of what you’ve done within the University we know how it’s not a is not a small thing yeah to open up spaces like this and make them both interdisciplinary and open to the public and to the online it’s not as Kenyans are fond of saying we don’t take it for granted it’s a cliche but we don’t take it for granted and I really appreciate you very very much so thank you thank you um thank you thank you uh Tony for those many B words for very small man like me you know now listening to both of you I had something I described here as a a cry of the oppressed a cry for justice I remember the book I think is mangi who wrote Kaki is it mangi how many of you have read Kaki it resonated very well with with that as um Prof bours the rise of rightwing uh you know politics across the world and as you Bourn the diminishing of of Nairobi as the romantic and night capital of Africa you know this is a conversation that we want to continue to have with our goal of bringing history andology from the Ivory Tower uh to where the people are and and and these are the people those listening online and those listening uh here in a live uh uh uh audience and for for us the students of History we begin to appreciate the multiple sources of the historical reality that we study that’s what I had for Ma and PhD students and those of us who are involved in the study of historical methodology um you you can see how literature can be a great source uh to the trade that uh we we do and that is historical uh uh discourse and I want to believe that uh our colleagues from literature department and those of us from history and achology we we have appreciated the work that you have done so I have stood here Prof to say thank you so much for agreeing to come and join us and for being part of this uh uh this conversation uh for our colleagues who joined us online from across the continents we want to appreciate you and for my colleagues here from the Department malonga thank you Dr G utu uh and our students I can see Mark at the back and Kimo and your friendo and the rest and and of course above all our friends from the diaspora we can see my very good brother there from Memphis uh welcome home again uh Nicholas you’re home already uh I’m sure the jet lag is over now not like you were last week uh so welcome uh this is the end of our presentations for this semester uh this one was an extra we wanted to accommodate Prof uh thank you very much for agreeing to be the very last this semester we we resume in mid September with uh a new series that uh is going to cinate in our International Conference in in in October uh just at the eve of masu we have an International Conference uh coming up we are sending out the adver just shortly uh for people to express uh interest please join us so it will be done within the broader context of the series that we will have have between September and and December so that we end the year for all of you our guests uh I saw our former student lyia I think she’s sted out uh and and everybody else uh our media crew uh Delta media led by my very good brother Isaiah Mesi uh thank you very much for taking us to the world for the W work uh this great team is from my local church here in Nairobi kangata SDA church and they’re helping us to do a great a great job and for the Secretariat from the Department led by uh none other than our register amamos thank you with your team for making all these Logistics and and making this possible this Nairobi afternoon thank you and may God bless you all and have a very good evening a good afternoon and a good morning uh whatever you are thank you very much