Letters Across the Grave: When Sons Write to Mothers Who Cannot Answer
- John Mwazemba
- 41 minutes ago
- 4 min read
“Ever since my mum died, I cry in H Mart. H Mart is a supermarket chain that specialises in Asian food... H Mart is where kids flock to find the brand of instant noodles that reminds them of home. It’s where Korean families buy rice cakes... Instead, you’ll likely find me crying by the banchan refrigerators, remembering the taste of my mum’s soy-sauce eggs and cold radish soup. Or in the freezer section, holding a stack of dumpling skins, thinking of all the hours that Mum and I spent at the kitchen table folding minced pork and chives into the thin dough. Sobbing near the dry goods, asking myself, ‘Am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?’”
These heartbreaking words are from Crying in H Mart: A Memoir by Michelle Zauner, where the slightest memories bring such palpable grief in a supermarket.
In many ways, Crying in H Mart echoes the emotional terrain of Kinyanjui Kombani’s latest book, Dear Mama (published by Oxford University Press East Africa)—both in the tradition of elegiac storytelling, turning private sorrow into literary form.
“Dear Mama,” Kombani begins, “You died too soon. And it still makes me so angry... Every week, I think of you.” It is the cry of that teenage boy who had been pushed too abruptly into the adult world of irreversible things. The world Virgil described as: Nulli certa domus; lucis habitamus opacis (None hath a fixed dwelling; we live in the shady woodlands).
The rush of memories can be cruel in the thickening atmosphere of grief. Perhaps, as he wrote, Kombani remembered how the house shrank after his mother’s death, the compound narrower, the corners filled with ghosts of future loneliness. The house full of her things, but none of her. No stomp of feet, no shriek of his name the way African mothers call their children. Yet still maybe half expecting to find her on the far side of the maize field, hands on hips, face torn between mockery and concern, shouting at him to get inside the house before the cold does worse. Or maybe he remembered what we all remember about our childhoods—the familiar exasperated expressions of a disappointed mother, or her gesture of helpless dismay—palms up and empty—but for Kombani, all this now amplified by death.
Indeed, coming to terms with the death of a parent is traumatic. My father passed away in 2007. And like Kombani thinks of his mother, I think of my father often, though I cannot now remember the sound of his laughter. There are times he comes to my mind unbidden—galloping into my world suddenly—startling me in a rush of memories. I remember minute details, like the days he would buy my sister and me chewing gum, which we would blow into big pink bubbles that would burst and which we would suck back into our mouths.
My father enjoyed the outdoors, and I still remember some walks with him as the air smelt of freshly cut grass. His shoulders scrunched against the wind that sometimes blew the clouds gently, waving one hand in gesticulation as he talked, as if to dispel the evening. I didn’t know it then, but such simple pleasures were with a man whose time was up. The last time I saw his face before the coffin was shut forever, he had a blank stare into the gleaming Taita sun. After that, whenever I see the faces of old men, I also see the absence of one.
With Dear Mama, Kinyanjui Kombani is following an old tradition of writing to the dead. It’s a tradition that started with Ovid’s Heroides (1st century BC)—poetic letters written in the voices of mythological women abandoned by lovers. Though not always addressed to the dead, they embody the emotional style of grief: the pain of the unanswered letter.
Cicero’s letters after the death of his daughter Tullia reveal a Roman statesman completely undone by grief. In several passages, he writes as though speaking directly to her.
In modern literature, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is perhaps the closest modern cousin to Kombani’s work. Written as a letter from a son to his illiterate mother, it is a meditation on family, migration, and the impossibility of being fully known by the one you love most.
This letter form endures for various reasons. First, it allows grief to speak plainly. A letter is intimate; open and direct. For instance, when Kombani writes, “Yes, Mother—I ... work in Singapore, at the global office of Standard Chartered Bank, no less,” death has disrupted the power hierarchy and now it’s the son writing to and updating the mother.
Second, it preserves the voice of the departed. In addressing them, the writer keeps them alive on the page. Kombani does this when he writes, “You did not tell me that I would never see you alive again on that day...”
Third, and perhaps most importantly, it is a testament to love—love that persists even when the beloved is gone.
Dear Mama, in which a son attempts to continue a conversation with his dead mother across the border of life and death, cannot have been an easy one to write. It’s a great feat not only of a new narrative form and a distinctive style but also an ode to Kombani’s courage.
The writer assists people in documenting their memoirs.