What is in a name
Memsahib
Amaunette
A title of rank and a name from the dark water before form.
A woman who assigns herself her own rank.
Memsahib arrived in East African coastal culture through centuries of layered contact: Arabic trade routes, South Asian presence and colonial adjacency. It settled into the vocabulary of the coast as a form of address for a woman of rank.
Not merely wealth, though that may be part of it. A Memsahib commands particular shifts in the rooms she enters. Her presence reorganises space. Her dignity is assumed, assigned and, most importantly, self-given.
Where a queen inherits expectations and codes of conduct, a Memsahib decides what her Madame-hood is about. She chooses what she wears, how she lives, whether she will be legitimised by anyone beyond herself and whether any room deserves her presence at all.
“A Madame, a Memsahib, has agency. She is free.”
The dark water from which light eventually rises.
Amaunette is primordial. The dark water before form. Not the goddess of one category, but the sacred feminine that preceded the categories: the void that is not empty, but full of all potential.
She did not arrive into a world that was waiting for her. She was the condition of the world’s existence. She is not illuminating anything. She is containing everything: the space in which truth becomes visible.
“I carry her name because I know that is what I am doing here—not shining the light for its own sake, but being the depth from which the light has something honest to say.”
Child of the water
The ocean does not explain herself. She does not justify her depth. She does not apologise for her storms or perform gratitude for her calm days.
The work has its own name.
One of the names behind the persona is Wanjiru, which becomes Cirû. SHIILOSOPHIA is a play on Cirû and Philosophia.
It is integral because the speaker is Memsahib Amaunette, while the speech and the writing are SHIILOSOPHIA. The name holds a way of thinking in which psychology, faith, metaphysics, culture and politics are allowed to remain connected on the page.