Gukira

• Haki Ya Kuishi

  Posted: July 30, 2010, 12:14 am by keguro

  Ili kuhakisha kwamba una haki ya kuishi —Warembo Ni Yes Warembo Ni Yes, a coalition of Kenyan women activists with the beautifully translated name “beauties are yes” articulate wisely and rightly what is at stake in the political: the right to live—haki ya kuishi. In their support for the Yes campaign, they express their hope [...]

• President Kibaki’s Little Things

  Posted: July 25, 2010, 6:15 pm by keguro

  President Kibaki is fond of little things. In a recent interview with the Sunday Nation over the fast-approaching referendum, he quipped, “In the next few days, we will work hard to make sure that those opposing it over one or two little things change their minds and support us.” The statement seems innocuous enough—for now, [...]

• “I am not, by nature, a ‘D’ student”

  Posted: July 24, 2010, 10:10 am by keguro

  A former student apologized for failing two classes he took with me in the same semester. That he apologized is itself cause for a blog post, but not this one. I am struck, instead, by the grounds of his apology. He apologized because failing is not in his “nature.” It is puzzling this sense that [...]

• Fear & The August 4 Referendum

  Posted: July 23, 2010, 9:50 pm by keguro

  In a timely news segment, Rachel Maddow demonstrates how fear is used as a political strategy. As, in fact, the most successful political strategy. She argues, convincingly, that we tend to think effective political strategies depend on maligning one’s opponents. And that might be wrong. The best strategy (and here I am extrapolating) creates affect-coalitions: [...]

• Storymoja Hay Festival Poetry Competition

  Posted: July 22, 2010, 4:01 pm by keguro

  Storymoja Hay Festival Poetry Competition

• Malawi Dossier: Conversation with Unoma Azuah

  Posted: July 21, 2010, 7:13 am by keguro

  6/4/2010 Keguro, I am interested in this project but the frame is still blurry to me. Do you want my/a response to the arrest or would you want a picture that paints Africans as sensitive to human rights? More clarification would help a great deal. Thanks in anticipation. Unoma Dear Unoma, Thanks for your speedy [...]

• Langston Hughes, “Joy”

  Posted: July 17, 2010, 8:55 pm by keguro

  I went looking for Joy, Slim, dancing Joy, Gay, laughing Joy, Bright-eyed Joy– And I found her Driving the butcher’s cart In the arms of the butcher boy! Such company, such company, As keeps this young nymph, Joy! Langston Hughes, 1926

• Whispers from a Safe Place, Perhaps a Closet

  Posted: July 17, 2010, 6:18 am by keguro

  Despite many years of training myself to write through fear, and to speak anticipating indifference, if not malice, I am, once again, in a too-familiar space: trying to make a case for something dismissed as relatively unimportant, my life. I cannot trust that such a life has any value in the Kenyan space. Those who [...]

• Dissertation-Era Writing

  Posted: July 16, 2010, 9:28 pm by keguro

  Although issues of gender normativity and social respectability run through Afro-diasporic discourse from at least the mid nineteenth century, the genealogical imperative comes into its own at the precise moment when black diaspora studies and black studies in general were being institutionalized in the 1960s and 1970s. The implications of this historical coincidence range far [...]

• Tins

  Posted: July 13, 2010, 9:12 am by keguro

  Tins At the edge of the lip Where the cut meets the fold At the fold of the grain Where the lip tells a yarn Where the seam meets the cut There’s a story of a lip Through the grain of the cut As the story folds a seam And the cut of the grain [...]

• Smashed

  Posted: July 13, 2010, 9:02 am by keguro

  Smashed

• Kenyan Tanka, 9 pm

  Posted: July 13, 2010, 8:53 am by keguro

  Kenyan Tanka, 9 pm

• Half Life

  Posted: July 13, 2010, 8:46 am by keguro

  Half Life Fade to black, charred by definition You were glowing the moment you melted Charcoal incarnated, shadowed by time We curl into ourselves, by instinct, Born to millipede destinies What is light tarnishes, the elders said Photography: Andrew Njoroge Poem: Keguro Macharia

• Malawi Dossier: Introduction

  Posted: July 13, 2010, 7:46 am by keguro

  Africans talk to each other all the time. We have rich, textured conversations on food, fashion, politics, policy, football, rugby, economics, farming, sex, beer, fruit, photography, cockroaches, traffic, shoes, shoelaces, headscarves, lace, beads, sculpture, painting, lions, sunsets, funerals, weddings, affairs, abstinence, ants, ostriches, huts, mansions, heart transplants, religion, witchcraft, and the five secret spices. The [...]

• Rumored

  Posted: July 8, 2010, 2:12 pm by keguro

  The word is that during the upcoming African Union Summit, to be held in Kampala, Uganda, July 19-27, Egypt will propose a special amendment to the idea of human rights. The proposed agenda item: Promotion of Cooperation, Dialogue and Respect for Diversity in the Field of Human Rights. Whispers suggest that “diversity” is a polite [...]

• Because the Dawn Breaks

  Posted: July 7, 2010, 10:21 am by keguro

  We speak because when the rain falls in the mountains the river slowly swells Comes rushing down over boulders across roads crumbling bridges that would hold their power against its force We speak for the same reason that the thunder frightens the child that the lightning startles the tree We do not speak to defy [...]

• What is the Fourth of July to the Alien?

  Posted: July 5, 2010, 5:17 pm by keguro

  Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be                                —Langston Hughes I wake up to Langston Hughes’s insistent “Let America be America again.” A quiet refrain. It won’t let go. It won’t let me be. It insists, nags, irritates, demands. Respond in some way. America the dream. America the [...]

• Fissures

  Posted: July 3, 2010, 6:22 pm by keguro

  “I hate primitiveness . . . Me, go native? Not on your life. I will fight for a free Africa and Asia, not live there.” –George Padmore to Richard Wright, 23 August 1955.

Blah blah blah

Fish cakes

Alas a fish cake.

Yet more fish cakes

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

The end of the fish cakes