Soon after her unico hijo (only child) was born, my eldest sister began encouraging and cajoling our parents to write their life stories. “Your grandkids should know their roots and share your memories with their own children.”

After more than a decade of not hearing anything about the project, out of the blue, I received a bound sheaf of papers from Dad. As I stared at the title page, the words Under the Mango Tree leapt up at me. “I finally wrote the memoir your sister had been badgering me about.”

The title brought a smile to my face. It referenced one of my father’s most memorable anecdotes: taking grade school classes under the leafy tropical giant, while Japanese soldiers glared down at them during the Second World War in the Philippines. It was a time of strife for the world, but it was also a time of growth for Dad as he suddenly became the de facto parent to their orphaned brood of three brothers.

My sister’s foresight proved to be spot on as almost 20 years later, the scene of Dad in his schoolboy shorts and shirt and the stool he dragged around with him has acquired frays around the edges. My memory of his memory has become hazy and confused. Did he say he got promoted up a grade level every month? I’ll have to look for my copy of his memoir to revisit the truth. It’s his immortality made tangible, destined to outlive all of us.

Memoirs and biographies are not self-indulgences — they are archival materials, cultural artifacts that are a literary medium of saying, “Kilroy was here.” Your life is not just about you; it’s about you against the backdrop of a particular milieu. We know how apartheid South Africa was through Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, or how it was like to grow up in a Mormon household of doomsday preppers in Tara Westover’s Educated. No one else would have had the authority, right or gumption to scribe those experiences except them because they have absolute agency and ownership over their own stories.

At one point, in the early years of my volunteer work in Kenya, I organised a gathering of women from the Great Lakes region to tell their stories about how they survived the brutality of the genocide. We weren’t aiming to create a documentary; we were giving them a safe space to make sense of their losses and pains. Memory writing can be that, too: a form of catharsis, a way of processing life’s roller-coaster ride. At a time when the world is seeing an increase in mental health issues, narrating life on paper can offer relief from the madness of life.

When I was studying art history for my undergraduate degree, I remember learning a lot of Greek culture not from up the eyrie of Alexander the Great, but from the unknown plebeians whose daily routines could be “read” from the pottery shards, wall etchings and bent metal tools in various archaeological sites. They told me a lot more about Greek society than the Parthenon ever could. The same principle applies in contemporary times.

Even when Matthew Perry writes about his addiction in Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, he’s not just a celebrity exposing his underbelly to the world; he’s another individual whose life reveals the machinations of an illicit drug trade that operates even under the glare of klieg lights. If for nothing else, his memoir also becomes a cautionary tale for future readers and a map for actors to avoid the landmines of fame and fortune.

There is no such thing as an uninteresting life. Somewhere behind the weary smile and rigid posture is a human who has run the gauntlet in a bid to live and thrive. There is someone in that person’s circle or even a complete stranger who will want to know the how and why.

And that’s why I encourage people to get into narrating life. For their catharsis, to feed other people’s curiosities, to mark their place and time in history, to leave a legacy for the next generations. Just to say: I was here. I know I’ll read that story myself. Because each person matters. 

John Kiriamiti, Terry Wafula and Agatha Verdadero will share the podium in a two-day writing workshop titled, Narrating Life: How to Write Memoirs and Biographies, on February 7-8 from 8am to 5pm at Gem Forest Hotel Nairobi. For more information and to register for the workshop, visit https://agathaverdadero.com/writing-workshop-details/.

Agatha Verdadero is a writer and editor by profession and volunteers at a local Christian university