Gukira

• Raila Re-Defines Kenyan-ness

  Posted: November 29, 2010, 7:22 am by keguro

  Kenya’s Prime Minister, Raila Odinga, has decided to join his fellow African leaders on the homophobia-gets-votes campaign. Invoking a non-existent law, Raila said that gay couples should be arrested as the “behaviour” is “unnatural.” As reported in the Sunday Nation: “If found the homosexuals should be arrested and taken to relevant authorities,” Mr Odinga said. [...]

• Touching Junk

  Posted: November 26, 2010, 10:38 pm by keguro

  As we enter the holiday season with a “movement” against “touching junk,” constipated though that movement might be, I cannot help thinking about convergences, less logical than associative, though association has its own logics. After all, the holidays are really about touching junk—packaged affect that still moves us. We invest in touching junk all the [...]

• New Terrorist Threats

  Posted: November 24, 2010, 5:48 pm by keguro

  Dear TSA: Thank you for your service. As a devoted fan of U.S. TV, I wanted to point out that the following can all be used as weapons and to hide weapons. 1. The rectum—which can be a grave 2. Chemical agents disguised as athlete’s foot 3. Chemical agents disguised as ringworm 4. Chemical agents [...]

• Loving Obama

  Posted: November 20, 2010, 5:26 pm by keguro

  A call to writers “from Africa” reads: Following The Democratic party’s defeats in the American mid-term elections and Obama’s dipping popularity, how do you now view President Obama? Has your view changed since 2008? Do you think he has achieved what he set out to achieve? Should he go? Have the American public given him [...]

• On Queer Invisibility

  Posted: November 19, 2010, 6:19 am by keguro

  Anyone who has ever walked down the street and heard the taunts “sissy” and “faggot” knows that invisibility is a fiction. Anyone who has ever walked down the street and yelled “queer” and “homo” makes visible what is presumed to be invisible. Anyone who has entered a bar and been addressed as the wrong gender [...]

• New Vennyan Poetry

  Posted: November 15, 2010, 3:25 pm by keguro

  My co-conspirator, poet Stephen Derwent Partington has an irreverent manifesto on the New Kenyan Poetry. It is a thing. I am very happy it exists. Yes, I know all manifestos are irreverent. Read it.

• On Gratitude

  Posted: November 15, 2010, 7:12 am by keguro

  I knew some Negroes at the School of Medicine. . . . In short, they were a disappointment. The color of their skin should have given us the opportunity of being charitable, generous, and scientifically friendly. They failed in their duty and to satisfy our goodwill. All our tearful tenderness, all our artful concern, was [...]

• African Villages

  Posted: November 15, 2010, 3:17 am by keguro

  Africa is a collection of “small villages.” Later, I will become Fanonian. It is startling to hear Africa as the absence of geography. Or, rather, as the proliferation of geography. Many small villages. Filled with villagers. Kenyan villages are much like Santa’s village. Remote. Fantastic. Connected by being disconnected. More imagined than real. I know [...]

• Traffic Jam / In The City

  Posted: November 12, 2010, 8:05 pm by keguro

  Nostalgia bangs against the new. Even as its space is mediated by the new. In Nairobi’s now-infamous jams, one encounters time as sound—a temporal choir emerging from stalled cars. In this democracy of sound, one bathes in memory. Is showered by sound waves. One might call this the traffic benga. A scene: on a major [...]

• Exiles Without Websites

  Posted: November 4, 2010, 9:12 am by keguro

  An article in the Daily Nation informs us that Philo Ikonya, a friend and colleague, is “now” living in exile in Norway. For this information, we have to thank “the internet.” According to a profile posted on the website of The International Cities of Refuge Network, Ms Ikonya fled Kenya a year ago due to [...]

• Fog

  Posted: November 2, 2010, 6:00 am by keguro

  A cold returns. Its spectacular fog envelops a thicket of ideas—a conference paper in extended labor. The pun, a symptom. Many conference papers feel fog-like, experiments in inhabiting someone else’s unclarity. There is something intimate to this exchange. Inhabit my ideas as they form, float, descend, burst, unfold. It requires generosity to extend in this [...]

Blah blah blah

Fish cakes

Alas a fish cake.

Yet more fish cakes

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

The end of the fish cakes