paging Stella Ngatho again

I noticed that several hits on my site in the past week have used the search keywords: shailja stella ngatho

So it seemed a good moment to resurrect my search for this Kenyan poet who's vanished into history. I used her poem, "Footpath", in the work-in-progress showings of Migritude in Berkeley (December 2005) and Vienna (March 2006).

This opening piece, the poem about the path, has come in for more criticism than any other part of the show. From "I just didn't get it," to "slow and unfocussed" to "new agey", the comments tell me it just didn't speak to people as it spoke to me.

"Footpath" is a poem I studied in school, for my O-level literature curriculum. I remember the heated debate we had in class about who the narrator was - a child? a new bride who's just left her mother's home? I forgot all about it after O-levels, but a few months ago, it suddenly began to chant itself to me as I walked the hills of Rockridge thinking about Migritude. It became a hypnotic invocation, and I was surprised at how much of it I remembered. I had to wait until I went back to Kenya in June to check the text - I couldn't find it anywhere online or published in the Western world.

When I read it, it seemed to capture every stage of the migrant journey, driven by the displacement of whole peoples by colonialism. It starts with the longing for the mother (security, warmth, the restoration of things as they were) and the realization that survival is threatened (there is no more food and the water has run out). Then the realization that she has to go in search of the mother, negotiate difficult, unfamiliar, different terrains (the way migrants do, believing that if they just pass each test, surmount each obstacle, their will be triumph, restoration at the end of it). The recognition that the mother will not return no matter how far she travels (the way we accept that the motherland, mother-tongue, who we were, is forever gone). And then the choice to reclaim and redefine what is hers, to find the mother in herself, to see her choices (path of the crossways, path of the bridge). The final taking on of responsibility for the world she inhabits, for where she is, for the battles she must engage in. To find her own light, her own fuel, her own power (there is no firewood. And I have not found the lantern).

I've searched for information on Stella Ngatho, the poet. Other work by her. Nothing. Her anonymity is part of the message the poem carries for me - she symbolizes a whole generation of post-colonial African women whose voices have been lost, whose stories are invisible. I see her as a young woman, in the 1970s, writing her poems, submitting them to journals and collections, reaching for community and resources to put her work out into the world. What happened to her?