Gukira

• Currently Reading: Goldfinger

  Posted: June 30, 2009, 11:12 am by keguro

  Who is this Pussy Galore from Harlem? ‘She is the only woman who runs a gang in America. It is a gang of women. . . . She is entirely reliable. She was a trapeze artist. She had a team. It was called “Pussy Galore and her Abrocats”. . . . The team was unsuccessful so [...]

• Stutters Break Time

  Posted: June 30, 2009, 9:38 am by keguro

  I am engaged in yet another conversation in which my interlocutor looks at me patiently, pityingly, and gently tells me that “this is Kenya.” I snap back that it doesn’t have to be. My interlocutor offers what can only be described as the woiye expression. I have been having these conversations for as long as I [...]

• Candid Obama

  Posted: June 26, 2009, 11:22 am by keguro

  Two candid shots of Obama stand out on the Obama wall. Both shots feature him seemingly unscripted, his suit crumpled, his face turned away from the camera. This is Obama at home in public. They are good shots, clear shots, evidence of solid, if unimaginative, photographic work. They are, in fact, evidence of the kind [...]

• Long Distance

  Posted: June 26, 2009, 8:46 am by keguro

  Your voice echoes and I ask you to repeat. Distance ghosts and prolongs haunting. We are always hanging up and re-dialing, looking for sunny spots where voices are less reedy, mis-timing the interval of a sentence. We are always breaking up. You are convinced that the right phone card will solve the problem, and have set [...]

• Shrines

  Posted: June 25, 2009, 9:30 am by keguro

  You mentioned, once, a trip you took in time. A childhood place where you hoped to find a long-ago laugh. Sound dissipates, and while yesterday’s waves linger in new configurations, happiness is not always waiting. I remember this as I review the list of places I shall not—because I cannot—return. One weighs the molding impress against [...]

• Ordinary Returns

  Posted: June 21, 2009, 10:13 pm by keguro

  Like my U.S.-born friends, I can finally write about the ordinariness of holidays, of traveling to see “the family.” It is not that everything is familiar, more that I can handle the unfamiliarity with greater ease, even when it is my own unfamiliarity. Returns “home” are invariably ethnographic, especially for those of us who travel infrequently. [...]

• Trying Sodomy

  Posted: June 21, 2009, 7:47 am by keguro

  Sodomy is always presumed guilty in Kenya. Last year, we discovered that sodomy debauches prisoners and this year we are discovering that sodomy debauches young street children. That it has similar effects on what are presumably two unlike populations speaks to its power as a corrupting force. In both instances, the discourse on sodomy produces a [...]

• Budgeting for Sodomy

  Posted: June 20, 2009, 9:23 am by keguro

  The news is discussing the budget and sodomy. It seems oddly appropriate.

• Hetero-Kenya

  Posted: June 19, 2009, 6:24 am by keguro

  He was the kind of guy every guy wanted to suck off. He inspired fantasies of teabagging. His ass inspired fantasies of rimming. * I have been thinking of ways to make evident everyday heteronormativity as an expectation linked to desire. Initially, I wrote, “he was the kind of guy every guy wanted to fuck,” but that was too easy. [...]

• Sounding African

  Posted: June 19, 2009, 6:05 am by keguro

  On the plane, a white man who lives in Maryland tells me that I don’t sound African. He is vaguely disappointed, and comments that I must have lived abroad for a long time. When he tells me that he has been to Tanzania I cut off that line of conversation. I don’t do comparative Africa [...]

• Alien vs. Immigrant

  Posted: June 12, 2009, 5:56 pm by keguro

  She asks if I’m an alien. For a moment, I am rendered silent. We are looking at a legal form, so the question has a context. Still, it is not a question that one is asked regularly. I mention that it is a strange question, and she replies that she was once an alien. She prefers [...]

• Returns

  Posted: June 10, 2009, 10:10 am by keguro

  Let’s begin with a much-rehearsed scene: the first visa interview when one is a student. Q: And what are your plans when you complete your degree? A: I will come home to help build my country. The answer is required, and is uttered, sometimes, with sincerity. This performance has been going on for as long as I can [...]

• Becoming Black

  Posted: June 9, 2009, 4:42 pm by keguro

  I have promised for some years to write about becoming black in the States. It is about another way of becoming ordinary, or experiencing a different kind of ordinariness. It is about the thingness of blackness, the hypervisibility of invisibility. And is such a banal story that its telling, its unfolding might be better passed [...]

• Playing Sex & Safe Sex

  Posted: June 4, 2009, 6:05 am by keguro

  The phrase “playing sex” lives at the junctions of class, age, geography, and education. My parents’ generation—those rural to urban pioneers, provincial to cosmopolitan mediators, history makers and consumers—use it. It is also a phrase found among domestic workers, rural to urban migrants, younger children. It conveys the difficulty of translating across life-worlds: from rural [...]

Blah blah blah

Fish cakes

Alas a fish cake.

Yet more fish cakes

Guess what ... yeah ... fish cakes.

The end of the fish cakes