Library Days

They say some birds can remember faces years later and even if you change your clothes. Long ago, during writing breaks, I’d feed or shoo birds away outside Windhoek’s national library. I’d have packed some snacks to fuel a long day of unemployment and, eventually, I’d eat them out in the sun.

That’s when they’d come. Some demure, others more demanding. A delegation of birds pleading food scarcity and cross-species aid. They say some birds will remember that too. Whether you were kind or cruel, magnanimous or miserly with a crumb.

Many years later, the birds outside the national library don’t seem to recall me at all. They sit high on the trees above the parking lot. The morning light cuts prettily through the leaves and I think of the self who would frequent the building.

Young, recently graduated, unemployed yet finding free and forgiving sanctuary under the national library’s high ceilings, amid the quiet and the books.

I don’t know if buildings, like birds, have memories. But if they do, I like to think the national library would be happy to see me. I grew up. The 20-something-year-old who’d come in looking a little lost, who’d greet the kind, elderly male librarian enthusiastically before writing the notes for a short story that would eventually win a small award.

She doesn’t write much fiction, but she became a professional writer, a longtime personal columnist and arts journalist for Namibia’s biggest national newspaper.

She’s travelled the world, earned writing grants and international residencies, lived through the dystopia of a viral pandemic and even exhibited her documentary photography in the United States, at home and in Berlin.

The me who made the national library an unofficial office, who holed up there to get away from the shame of studying for years and not finding a job straight out of the box, would be proud.

She never dreamt of any of it.

It’s still kind of hard to believe that I actually managed to make a life out of this writing thing or that my photographs are worthy of exhibition. But those things happened anyway, despite the profound lows I felt between the books.

I tell you this to say: hang in there.

If you’re young and unemployed and feel like you’ve made a mountain of mistakes, know that you’re only at the beginning. If you feel like you chose the wrong university course, you aren’t good enough or that you’re a disappointment to your family, understand that life takes the most incredible twists and turns and eventually leads you back to yourself.

Sitting here at the national library, at a window-facing booth that didn’t exist the last time I was here, I am older than I ever imagined.

I haven’t sat and worked here in almost two decades. But suddenly I’m back, maybe searching for parts of myself that I’ve lost but which I’ll need for my next chapter.

Windhoek’s national library has changed considerably and for the better.

There are more seats than I remember. Scores of places to perch, facing the trees, the street or the sky. There’s free Wi-Fi so you can bring your laptop, but intermittent posters warn not to leave your property unattended or in the custody of strangers.

Nobody hurries for the row of computers because so many of us have the knowledge of the world in our hands, just a mobile Google search away. I remember when nabbing one was an utter triumph. I’d arrive early, linger determinedly outside the library’s big wooden doors and rush to plonk myself in front of a computer I prayed was actually working that day.

If I got one, I’d get to it, researching random fascinations, writing stories or looking for work.

Once, the national library was my whole world and I feel a deep sense of gratitude as I walk through its doors.

The kind old librarian is long gone but I imagine his neat, dark suit, slight frame and warm smile.

I choose a booth below a large window with a plug point and a view and watch big, fluffy cumulonimbus clouds float overhead.

At lunch, I’ll lounge in the sun with a snack.

I’ll sit waiting for the birds, for the words and what’s next.

– martha@namibian.com.na; Martha Mukaiwa on Twitter and Instagram; martha.mukaiwa.com

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