performed miracles in the dining hall, handed you his phone to read out a text from Jesus; something about not letting a hair of your head perish. Brother Jack’s bullet voice tore into your flesh as he placed pulpy…
A rather unusual incident with a Catholic Charismatic Renewal Movement brother during my first year of high school at a girls’ boarding school in Western Kenya is what seeded “Brother Jack,” which I initially wrote as a poem for Dr. Emily Skaja’s workshop in the Spring of 2025. As I was drafting the poem, I was reading Diannely Antigua’s debut collection Ugly Music, and her examination of sexual identity and the policing of feminine desires by religious institutions lit the fires of remembrance in me. Until then, all my attempts to scrub off the stain of such memories had failed, but this time, when the memory made its way to me from across time and space, I was pen-ready.
Writing this piece was, therefore, another attempt to exorcise the spirits of the ‘Brother Jacks’ I’d encountered throughout my schooldays, right from my early years at a Catholic sponsored all-girls primary school founded by Ursuline Sisters from Holland in 1928. Ironically, just after I wrote “Brother Jack” a story broke out in Kenya’s top national girls’ school about a male educator who used his position as teacher and religious mentor to abuse impressionable girls. Reading through the exposé shook me; the man had too many similarities with Brother Jack. The girls could have been me. My disbelief turned to rage, then helplessness, then sisterly concern for young, impressionable girls who continue to be preyed upon by powerful, predatory males posing as mentors and men of the cloth.
My original idea was thus: Try to make sense of an incident that had stayed with me for years. But I’d done so in earlier poems. In revising, I therefore decided to complicate the issue somewhat; perhaps as a last act of defiance toward insufferable school administrators who demonize and shame girls for having desires. The result is this flash piece that gives girls agency and brazenly celebrates the music of feminine desires.
I tried to tie the setting to the characters’ shifting emotions because of my fascination with geographical phenomena. Having taught geography in high school for eight years, of course I had to find ways to sneak in my obsession with levees and riverbeds and boulders and electricity. Those who study poetics may wish to read deeper meaning into such things, and to refer to them as tactile imagery or figurative language aimed at engaging a reader’s senses and creating an immersive experience. Yet it is possible that this geography teacher simply wanted to talk about river flooding and the miracles of electricity. Or did she?
GLORIA MWANIGA ODARY, a writer and educator from Kenya, is an MFA candidate at the University of Memphis and Managing Editor of The Pinch Literary Journal. Odary is fascinated by historical revisionism and the intersection between research and imagination. She is a recipient of the 2024 Georgia Review Prose Prize, the 2024 Isele Nonfiction Prize, the 2021 African Land Policy Centre Story Prize and a Miles Morland Writing Scholarship. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Isele, Lolwe, Weganda Review, The White Review, Porter House Review, and elsewhere.
