Edinburgh Festival Fringe: Njambi McGrath - "The cancer of my parents' trauma gnaws me unendingly."

My grandmother would have given her right arm for it. My mother was prepared to give her life for it. And my aunt got shot because of it. But I have it. I possess a commodity so valuable that to those that came before me was just a mere pipe dream. I have a platform. An outlet which so many round the world are denied. Muffed by the mighty force of hypocrisy. Those calling the loudest for democracy yet doing their absolute best to quash it for the undeserving.

The global pandemic and gruesome murder of George Floyd opened a conscious conscience to the trauma endured by black people. Like a drizzle in the desert, it evaporated at a moment’s notice. Like a fad, it was very quickly described as a woke moment and some even suggested that British history was under attack. It is in this arena that I find myself seeking a space to speak of colonial crimes and the pain born by those in the path of its wrecking ball.

How does one sooth a cauldron of pain, anger, sorrow at the cruelty endured by their family and country in the name of the British empire? Write a comedy show! The subject matter, how your pride and joy is my pain and torment. How your progress is the noose around my neck. That my people must be sacrificed for yours to thrive.

The cancer of my parents’ trauma gnaws me unendingly. Like an addict I feel I must speak of what they went through and how their torment ravaged my childhood. I am unable to leave the stage without injecting a little of my people’s pain, letting rotting puss ooze from the wound in my soul.

Raw from my father’s funeral, I was like a fire ball threatening an inferno. My father’s trauma had turned us children into a drum which he beat whenever he chose. Filled with rage about my father, my mother, grandmother and what Kenyans had endured at the end of the British reign in Kenya, I didn’t know how to cope. So I messaged a comedy industry friend who I hoped would help advise me on how to write a book.

Staring into his coffee like a clairvoyant, surrounded by excited Soho theatre goers, he simply said turn your torment into an Edinburgh fringe comedy show.

My grandfather was castrated. My mother, grandmother, aunties and indeed their entire tribe were in a concentration camp. Systematically starved. Surely, I couldn’t talk about that in a comedy show. ‘Why not?’ he asked. I replied that I couldn’t even speak about it without crying, let alone make people laugh. He shrugged and replied, ‘You’ll find a way.’

I embarked on the mammoth task of writing my first hour long Edinburgh fringe show about how Kenya was declared a British protectorate by Queen Victoria, a proclamation that would rip my family from their birth lands turning them into pathetic destitutes so that British settlers could have their slice of the colonial cake. I was frightened and angry.

How would I stand in front of British people and make them laugh about how their government castrated my grandfather and other men of my tribe for asking for a little land to grow food for their families. Where were the jokes in mass starvation and public hangings of innocent people? My confidant’s words rung in my ears that pain is the very essence of a brilliant show and even with the grimmest material there’s always a joke hiding there.

The first time I stood on stage in a room full of people, I was engulfed by a loneliness I couldn’t describe. I wished I could talk about online dating or other mundane things. But I was bound by the pain I felt in my mother’s voice as she describe how the camps were systematically starved and all grown-ups drafted into hard labour as death became so prolific people just shrugged. She was sure they would die and as a small child she knew she had to do something to save her family. That’s when she began walking for miles with hordes of other children in search of manual labour to buy beans for her family.

In a room made of British audiences I recounted how their government punished my family. I was astonished by their reaction. They laughed where there was humour and cried where there was pain. I saw guilt and anger in their faces. Many hugged me at the end and said they were horrified by what their government had done in their name. These people had heard me. They knew my grandmother’s strength. A woman who refused to be a victim and with other women in her camp made a pact they they’d paint their faces white to erase their femininity and that they would die smiling when the time came and they were beaten to death by the soldiers.

Having spent the final year of my mother’s life listening to her account of the 8 years she spent in British run concentration camps, whilst researching my memoir Through The Leopard’s Gaze, I realised I was the only audience she ever had to hear her truth. And yet, I’ve been granted more audiences than she could ever dream of. My grandmother had no one she could debrief to. She carried her trauma on her scrawny shoulders hunched with the beatings and pain of watching her children starved. All this she took to her grave.

Painful as it was, my mother had offloaded the burden she bore on her Parkinsons-riddled shoulders to her audience of one. Like a baton I’m now the one carrying almost half a century’s trauma.

Whilst other comics are fortunate to have grown up trauma-less and their only woes are online dating and wanking, I have to select which bit of trauma to illuminate for yet another Edinburgh fringe new show.

My torment is conflicted and complicated by having an English husband and kids, but my parents bore the full might of the British colonialism and that I cannot ignore. It’s a cold lonely place but I’m unable to pretend all is okay. My parents and grandparents were never given an opportunity to speak about their experiences. I feel it’s of great importance to speak about the real harm done to people by racism and it’s not just a matter of name calling.

The platform awarded to me isn’t something I take for granted. I cherish it and make sure every word that leaves my mouth is to amplify my people’s torment. Don’t ever underestimate the fuel pain gives to a broken soul.

Njambi McGrath: Benevolence, Gilded Balloon Patter House, 3pm until 26 August.