Strength and Sorrow

Some writers wield a rare bravery, gazing unflinchingly at what we are taught to ignore, shun, overwrite with platitudes: absence, endings, the terrible fraying that trails death. Strength and Sorrow is a map through grief’s wild terrain, where the soul stands raw before the unbearable: the loss of those we love. Oyunga Pala refuses to turn from death’s dominion or its echoes in every living thing. Like the bold tale-weavers of old, who stitched mortality into life’s weave, he probes what it means to live wholly by facing loss head-on.

With humility, grace, and a beauty that pierces, Pala reveals grief not as life’s rupture, but its thread, tied to hearts, homes, and nations. Here, we mourn not just people, but dreams, hopes, and identities slipping away from us. But we also find, too, the stubborn glow of what endures.

More than memoir or mere reflection, this is a sacred witness. A tender gift unveiling how a soul, perhaps a community, wrestles with life’s transitions. With a philosopher’s curiosity and a poet’s care, Pala suggests that to mourn deeply is to love fiercely. The stories we tell of the departed mirror our own fragile, radiant humanity. To read Strength and Sorrow is to enter the depths our older poets drew more readily from to deliver dirge’s essence. Entering into death’s void, its stark emptiness, and finding there a strange, steadfast light. Void, not darkness, for in Nilotic lore, darkness is the shelter where light goes to rest. It is a companion. The real contention is nonexistence. We recognise this in this tender memorial of a book. Here we may admit to the deepest and most relentless of fears in our resistance to the reality of mortality, the fear not necessarily for ourselves or our future deaths, but that of our Odhiambos, Otienos, Anyangos. All our beloveds.

Dear reader, take this book tenderly. Sit with its souls. Be kind to them, and to the silent wounds it stirs in you. Those left unvoiced amidst society’s rush to “move on,” or shrouded by a faux-spirituality that smothers our fleshly truth with bland comforts, urging us to ignore our sense of death’s sharp, brutal sting. In Strength and Sorrow, our guide, Oyunga Pala, in this literary ‘Tero Buru’, ushers us to face it all. With vulnerable grace, he grants us leave to feel once more, to breathe afresh as we trace the scars, death etches, and to trust in the enduring, mysterious light that glows within what we can only call the long life of the dead.

What’s the language of death? In this weeping meditation on mortality, acclaimed writer Oyunga Pala crafts an intimate vocabulary for our most universal experience—loss. This is a story of the people he has lost over time. This book, his first, is not merely a collection of memories but a vulnerable confrontation of existential questions that the ones who have been left behind have asked about life.

I snatched moments with these pages in barbershop chairs, school waiting rooms, gym parking lots, only setting them aside repeatedly to confront my own mortality and reckon with what awaits my physical form or ‘carcass’, as his departed sister referenced the human body.

Pala’s immersive exploration goes beyond a memoir; it’s easily a guidebook for the living on how to remember (and write) about the dead. A thoughtful read from one of the finest voices of our time.

This book is the obituary we never knew we needed — cathartic and painful in equal measure, like methylated spirit dabbed into a wound. As I read, I found myself reflecting on my own brushes with death — its rawness, its deep cruelty, its finality. But also how that finality stretches the boundaries of our understanding. There are few forces more potent than the passing of a loved one to impart perspective — and this book overflows with those hard-won lessons. Oyunga’s writing beats like a steady drum, shaping his grief-forged wisdom into a dirge — tender, unflinching, and unforgettable.

I highly recommend this book to anyone, but especially to Kenyans who may seek to understand why the struggle for dignity seems vulnerable to constant sabotage and distraction. In Kenya, we are unable to access memory and longevity because we no longer know how to connect with our individual and collective sorrow. Through these meditations, Oyunga Pala leads us on a journey of rediscovering the strength that lies in expressing our sorrow.

Although Kenyans are a proud, resilient and committed people, we are also vulnerable to distraction and compromise, partly because we underestimate the power of connecting with our personal and collective sorrow. Through these meditations, Oyunga Pala reminds us that sorrow is a crucial element of freedom, because in sorrow lies memory, courage, conviction, persistence and strength. I highly recommend this book to anyone committed to strengthening our collective struggle for freedom and dignity.