Dolly Parton's coat teaches us to find meaning in life's scraps

How shall I remember Dolly Parton, who passed on last week? She was more than the light of a clear blue morning. To borrow her own words, she gave the world musical islands in the stream.

Dolly was the heart rending queen of country music, who taught us that scraps can become something beautiful. While she composed thousands of songs, Coat of Many Colours vivifies lives many of us have experienced. Born in a poor family, her mother made her a coat from pieces of cloth, because there wasn’t money for anything better.

She wore her coat proudly, as a tribute to the love that went into each stitch. Others saw poverty in her coat. She only saw love, even as she remembered Joseph’s coat of many colours in the Bible.

Dolly’s coat teaches us many things, despite the potential danger of prettifying poverty.

Indeed, poverty must never be romanticised. Poverty humiliates and maims. There is nothing to celebrate about a naked hungry child. I know a thing or two about this. For, while I cannot describe my childhood as one of poverty, in truth I grew up in a family of modest means.

Would I exchange that modesty for the mythology of deprivation? No. Yet, I also refuse to erase it. For I know what it means to sleep on an empty stomach. Our childhood environment gave us less material than some had. But it also gave us certain solid intimacies, ways, and solidarities that I have carried into adulthood. Dolly animated that childhood with Coat of Many Colours without making us feel romantic about penury and indigence.

The child in my quasi-autobiographical short story titled “The Dark House,” published in the volume Tender Memories (1989), belongs to that world.

Darkness was a regular unwanted visitor in the house we grew up in, in Ofafa Jericho, Nairobi. Yet, there was also tenderness within the same walls. There was want, but there was also dignity. This is the dignity that Dolly found in her coat. Above all, there was love. And love taught us that scarcity does not necessarily have the last word in our lives.

Poverty, such as Dolly sang of, does not necessarily make people good. Nor does wealth make people bad. Prosperity liberates and dignifies. Yet, does there exist a disturbing transition? Can “having” sometimes cross the line of “living”, to become the measure of life itself?

Voltaire mocked Rousseau as “a poor man’s philosopher.” Yet, does appetite for accumulation sometimes take away the very meaning; the joy and beauty of “having and living”? Can obsession with “having” take our sights off what we “have” so that we stop living? Like Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, we want some more, all the time. But unlike Oliver, it is not because we are starved. We are just greedy.

Achebe, in Things Fall Apart, has Unoka wondering about “the folly of not eating what one had, during one’s life.” He does not, of course, canonise, or even beatify Unoka. Unoka is an irresponsible failure. Yet, he reminds us that life cannot be an unending exercise in accumulation. Life is itself a coat of many stitches. And they can make a beautiful robe. The different pieces of the human garment include race, tribe, religion, culture, and many other defining factors. Trouble begins when one piece wants to dominate the rest. Or it imagines that it is the coat.

The human contest for resources has turned our world into a rat race bubble. It has turned neighbours into competitors, abundance into status, and possession into self-worth. But neither should we romanticise the opposite. A humane world doesn’t ask the poor to celebrate their poverty. It seeks to abolish degrading want, while refusing to enthrone limitless appetite, especially in countries like Kenya.

 I believe that there is a middle ground. Enough without indigence. Prosperity without excess. Difference without contempt. Ambition without dehumanisation. That is why Dolly’s song can touch us without nostalgia. Dolly’s coat was her story. Yet, the world also wears a coat of many colours. Some pieces are beautiful, some torn and dirty; and others in our individual lives come from places we want to forget.

My pieces have been stitched together by myself, and by people I have loved and loved me. Others, by those with no love lost; some, places I have inhabited, books I have read, wounds I have survived, and memories that cannot die.

 The task of a life is, perhaps, not to pretend there are no scraps. It is to find their meaning.

That is how I shall remember Dolly Parton.

Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser. www.barrackmuluka.co.ke