Silas Nyanchwani and the Literature of Remarks
An essay review of his latest book Man about Town
This may be my first book to complete this year. I’m glad I finished. It is the first Silas Nyanchwani book I am reading. Like anyone active on Facebook, I have come across his writing on those streets often, mostly to do with masculinity, the infamous memos that have feminists from here to Loitoktok burning his effigies.
Having known him as a red pill prophet, this book was a pleasant surprise. The attitude naturally remains from a man’s point of view, but it’s a gentle book. In fact, there is much here of what Amerix and the others would call simping. Seeing as he is a red pill adherent, you can be sure that Silas’s simping here is utterly self-aware. I admire that.
Often when I have written a story that is from the heart, I will when I sober up from the flight of inspiration, read it and cringe at the vulnerability it exposes. Once upon a time I tried to write a memoir. Not that I have lived enough to do so. In any case, I couldn’t. I found it impossible to expose myself like that. I want to be deadpan. I only expose my heart in fiction, sometimes.
So I admire Silas’s capacity to bare his mind and heart on the page for his readers to scrutinize and judge. As a man, that is not easy to do, especially for a man in a leadership role in the red pill community.
See, men who talk masculinity find themselves steadily losing their authenticity as they become chained by the legend they have built around themselves and the doctrine they have mainstreamed. Everyone wants to judge them by their teachings. Remember how Kevin Samuel was judged harshly for apparently dying in circumstances that seemed antithetical to his gospel.
Masculinity is a performance on so many accounts. A mask. Not that there isn’t such a thing as an inherent, authentic masculinity. But the performative aspect of masculinity is more prominent because it is in your face and has clear rules and attitude. Of highest significance: no simping.
In this book Silas simps. A lot. That’s how you know it’s an honest book. We have said before, and Silas supports this somewhere in the book, that it is men who are the real romantics.
It is men who write love poetry. It is men who literally worship the opposite sex and immortalize them in song, sculpture, painting, literature … It is men who have waged wars for women (remember the ten-year Trojan war was waged because of a woman, Helen of Troy). It is men who are ready die to protect women.
Society weaponizes this simping nature of its men to protect herself – men are sent to war to protect their mothers, wives and daughters, and they die willingly because their hearts are bursting with the beauty of their sacrifice ...
I think this balances out the memos. A lesson from Silas to his readers that studying the red pill shouldn’t mean you pluck out your heart and put it in an ice box. Love and romance and sentimentality are part and parcel of this book. There is scarcely any mention of the red pill. This is a book of life lived, not a book of doctrines. It’s not Silas the prophet here, but Silas the bachelor, writer and irredeemable romantic.
He remarked somewhere that he has been accused of declaring every woman he meets is the most beautiful. I understand this perfectly. See, only beautiful women are worth writing about. Only beautiful women inspire you as a man to take up a pen and write. Of course beauty here goes beyond the physical. At that particular point in time when a woman inspires you to write about her, she is the most beautiful woman in the world. That this book is full of beautiful women is therefore not surprising.
Most of the essays are about women. And parties. And clubs. And most importantly, they are about Nairobi. The book is Man about Town. The man is Silas. The town is Nairobi.
He roams the streets and clubs of Kanairo with a studied eye that never misses a thing. He is an invisible guest who haunts every spot of the city, watching, studying, analyzing, judging.
This is an anthropological study of the Nairobian. The middle class Nairobian to be specific. The kind Biko Zulu writes about. Silas is like a wildlife filmmaker in these Nairobians’ habitats, watching them with a camera that is his pen and giving us raw insights we might not find anywhere else.
The book is about Nairobi as much as it is about Nairobian women. You might say that the city is yet another of Silas’s most beautiful women in the world.
Not that he explicitly sings about the city the way Arturo Bandini in John Fante’s Ask the Dust simped for LA: “Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town!”
What Silas does here is to capture the mood and soul of a city and to immortalize it. I dare say he has done for Nairobi what Henry Mlller did for Paris in Tropic of Cancer. Henry Miller wrote: “Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing, you can’t wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked.” And elsewhere he simped thus: “When spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise.”
When I read Henry’s book, it made me wish I had the chance to go to that Paris. Or the Paris Hemingway immortalized in A Moveable Feast. And when I read Silas’s book, I wished I knew as well as he does this Nairobi he has described.
You can live in a city and still be an outsider. See, a city isn’t just its buildings. What makes a city is the social ecosystem within it. You can live in a city and not be part of its most exciting social scenes. Silas writes as an insider. He knows everything an insider ought to know: who is who, what to drink, what to talk about, how to behave, where to go, what not to do … The essays are one extended masterclass on how to enjoy Nairobi.
The book is full of the kind of commonplace witticisms that some people are so good at dispensing. I admire people who can make those kinds of blanket statements so casually. Let me give you ten examples from different pages:
- The crop top is only necessary for girls with flat tummies.
- I find Nairobi women to be militant. Very masculine. Partly because they take gin.
- Visiting a night club solo with no intention of seducing a woman or even mildly developing interest in a woman is one of those criminally underrated human experiences for any man.
- A woman’s greatest gift is her youth. A man’s greatest gift is his wallet.
- A man in his 40s sometimes must overspend if he is to get a prized early 20s chick who is a 10.
- Women are heartless when dumping a man.
- What I have learnt from my breakups is that women have no human capacity for remorse. I know because all the woman who dumped me, did so because they had to choose between me and the other man. And of course, the other man won.
- It is not only women who will treat men with money better than broke men. Actually, at a personal level, when I have money, even my male peers love me better.
- The loving and nurturing instinct kicks in some women when they notice a vulnerable man.
- Most waitresses, if not all, have young babies.
I don’t know about you but these kinds of sentences knock me out. I used to read them in Gertrude Stein’s writing, particularly in her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. It’s the kinds of remarks that make you aware you are listening to a real person. Only a real person would say, “Most waitresses, if not all, have young babies”.
Of course I suspect these kinds of remarks are the same kind that made dear old Gertrude Stein remark to her young protégé Ernest Hemingway: “Remarks are not literature.” Which is strange because her own writing was a literature of remarks like “Nothing is really so very frightening when everything is so very dangerous.”
As I was googling, searching for the exact Stein quote, I found this passage from an interview with a writer known as David Shields, and I love it because it expresses my admiration for remarks in literature: “I’ve always loved that Gertrude Stein dictum to Hemingway--Remarks are not lit, and yet, of course, I couldn’t disagree more. I care about almost nothing except remarks anymore. I read almost nothing anymore except books of aphorisms and epigraphs. What else is there to say.”
I love this literature of remarks because it gives us an accurate snapshot of the writer’s attitude and point of view. It takes a non-phony writer to be so honest.
As you can see with the ones I have selected randomly, Silas’s point of view is naked. Not everyone will like or appreciate his point of view. It’s an unapologetically male point of view, even with the simping here and there.
Something tells me feminists won’t like this book either. But the funny thing is that no one is more honest with their remarks than the feminists. And when they are probed on the accuracy of their remarks, they go ballistics because they expect the “not all men” to be inferred not explicitly stated.
That’s the nature of remarks. They are not laws. They are simply observations. They are extremely idiosyncratic. They are often inaccurate. But they are human. And that’s what makes them relatable but also potentially problematic.
This is a book of remarks on so many things, but chiefly Nairobi, women, men, clubs, parties, food, alcohol, manners, the delicate art of bum-pinching, and so much more.
PS: And I have to note that I went on a date the other week to a spot that was recommended by Silas in the book. Very nice place.
