Can long distance parenting work?

There is this thing that distance does where it subtracts warmth and context and history...” Those are the words of this year’s African region winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, Lesley Nneka Arimah from Nigeria.

I was, and I know many of us were, rooting for the two talented Kenyans — award-winning Muthoni Gichuru and the freelance writer and filmmaker Alexander Ikawah — but the judges had a different view.

Muthoni, who had been shortlisted for her story, The Itch, was previously the first runner-up in the Jomo Kenyatta Foundation Literature Prize, Youth Category, in 2011 while Alexander was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2013. This time he had been shortlisted for his story April with Oyundi.

Even though the judges thought otherwise, our writers have made progress. Well done, Muthoni and Alex.

Nneka’s story, Light, is not only well written and interesting, but also, I daresay, timely because of what it addresses, and as you read it, the profundity of the truth it lays bare blows you away.

She decries the negative consequences of exile in her opening statement, saying when you let a loved one go into the unknown, you never know what he or she will meet and in what form or state he or she will return.

Feminist trumpet

Nneka quietly blows a feminist trumpet as she, cunningly, goes against the grain to focus on a man who grapples with the fears, imagined and otherwise, and challenges of bringing up his daughter when his wife goes to America to study for a Master’s degree.

She seems to be telling men, “Here is a taste of how women usually feel when you drop the burden of parenting on their shoulders as you pursue other things and parent from a distance.”

The writer captures this in the very first paragraph when she alludes to the fact that the world takes women, mistreats and robs them of their ‘better parts’, and returns them ‘hollowed’.

Nneka does this by exposing the main character, Enebeli Okwara — notice that Enebeli sounds like Annabel, as if Nneka is for a while assigning Okwara ‘wifely’ duties — to what it feels like answering questions that many men usually avoid with a wave of the hand and phrases like ‘go ask your mother’.

Enebeli is forced to talk to his daughter about sex and condoms when her uncle makes a careless joke about sex.

Nneka alludes to the fact that we fear talking to our children about sex and the only thing that can force us to talk to broach the subject is the fear that a stranger may not only teach them the wrong thing but also demonstrate it to them.

Yet this burden of teaching is usually assigned to women.

As Enebeli thinks that the worst has passed, his daughter experiences — frightfully — her first periods.

He is forced to explain what he has never experienced and reassure the girl that all will be well.

Even with the advent of modern feminism, it is quite clear that some roles are best left to a particular gender.

Then another wave homes in. The daughter writes her crush a love letter, which the teacher confiscates and summons Enebeli to school.

Certainly, Nneka is calling time on parenting from a distance.

She does this by having Enebeli’s wife correct her daughter’s ‘waywardness’ and try to shower her with love via Skype.

This totally fails due to distance: “Her mother attempts to correct the girl herself, much is lost in transmission over the wires and a long absence has diluted much of the influence a mother should have.”

Good training

In all this though, Nneka thinks the greatest problem facing parents today is what each one of them thinks qualifies as good training: “It is one of the things Enebeli and his wife disagree on, this training up of the girl, and it has widened the schism between them.”

This, she suggests, is made even worse when a parent has to prepare a child to face the world from a distance. Exile and exposure to foreign cultures seems to dilute one’s own culture.

What Nneka decries most about distance ad absence is that it breaks families. Enebeli worries that his daughter will be taken away from him once her mother gets a job in the States.

Worst of all, he fears losing ‘his daughter’ — the happy wild spirit that she is and eventually being forced to converse with a ‘cool’ child who grows cautious under the mothering of a woman who loves, but cannot comprehend her and is coached to behave and respond in a particular way.

Overall, Nneka, apart from questioning the idea of parenting by distance, challenges the reader to make the right choices when it comes to relationships. She points out, which could be debatable, that the worst mistake this couple made was to decide that the wife would stay in the States for the duration of her course.

This is a new form of feminism, where a woman writer reverses roles to make men see what the women want men to see. Nneka addresses a universal theme that is bound to resonate well with readers across the world, but above all, her style is up there and she certainly deserved to win.

The challenge to the Kenyan writer is to now surpass this new level and bring home the gong come 2016.