Gukira

• Essex Hemphill Comes Out Twice

  Posted: September 27, 2011, 11:36 pm by keguro

  In the tradition of the very brave, I am posting an (incomplete) draft of a conference paper. I’ll be working on it as I travel to State College, PA, for the Celebrating African American Literature conference. Like all good academics, I believe that plane trips are opportunities to complete conference papers. Given I’ll be flying [...]

• Wangari’s Daughters

  Posted: September 26, 2011, 1:06 pm by keguro

  Over the past few years, it has been my immense privilege to meet and come to know women I now think of as Wangari Maathai’s daughters: Sitawa Namwalie, Wambui Mwangi, Shailja Patel, Njeri Wangari, Muthoni Garland, Mshai Mwangola—there are many others. I mean daughters in a sense perhaps best expressed in the founding Gikuyu myth: [...]

• Tentatively

  Posted: September 25, 2011, 11:28 am by keguro

  I find myself intrigued (and terrified) by certainty in Kenya. I’m fascinated by the complex blends of fundamentalist belief and fact dissemination that govern not only what can be said, but what can be heard as being said. Rarely does one hear or read “perhaps” or “maybe” or “might” or even catch hints of hesitation—we [...]

• Slumdwellers

  Posted: September 25, 2011, 11:08 am by keguro

  Since the Sinai event—it is ongoing—a startling consensus has emerged in Kenya’s newspapers, or perhaps simply the Daily Nation. It is probably best captured in Dr. Lukoye Atwoli’s statement: Poverty has been made into the stock excuse for all the criminal activity we carry out, and we are bringing up children with a sense of [...]

• Current Obsession

  Posted: September 21, 2011, 6:20 am by keguro

  Touhami Ennadre

• The Gikuyu Soprano

  Posted: September 21, 2011, 5:55 am by keguro

  The Gikuyu soprano is an amazing thing. Alternating between reedy thin-ness and shrill hearing-destroying, it is, I suspect, one of colonialism’s last (and worst) jokes. For many years, I did not know that the PCEA choir at my local church—dominated by Gikuyu women—was singing hymns that had words. Instead, their ventures into music always sounded [...]

• Fissures and Futures: Reflections on Hay

  Posted: September 20, 2011, 11:35 am by keguro

  A strange thing happened on the way to the Storymoja Hay Festival. By some fate of planning, the sessions I participated in ran alongside those featuring queer issues. While I was chatting about poetry and fiction and literature and the task of the writer and cultural production more generally with Sitawa Namwalie, Yusef Komunyakaa, and [...]

• Notes on Queer Scholarship

  Posted: September 16, 2011, 8:35 am by keguro

  Somewhere around 2007, I found myself reading Alexander Crummell’s sermons. I use the strangeness of “I found myself” to register my sense, even now, of how unexpected that was. I was, after all, writing a queer dissertation. Surely, my objects of study could have been more, well, queer? There are no scandals in Crummell’s life, [...]

• Thoughts on Sinai

  Posted: September 14, 2011, 7:02 pm by keguro

  Informalisation of the economy has bred careless behaviour, indiscipline, and disorderliness. The way we drive unnecessarily aggressively and without regard to traffic regulations, our propensity to walk on the road rather than the footpath, the matatu playing loud music and making maximum noise with the horn in silence zones, are all examples of lack of [...]

• Wambui Mwangi and Melissa Williams: Gender and Representation in Kenya

  Posted: September 13, 2011, 8:03 am by keguro

  Here and Here

• Other Anniversaries: 9/11

  Posted: September 12, 2011, 3:41 pm by keguro

  I have been trying not to write about the so-called 10th Anniversary of 9/11. In now-erased work, I have suggested that the problem of 9/11 is not whether it is remembered, but how it is remembered. I have wondered whether I “feel” safer,” even as my residence near the nation’s capital over the past few [...]

• Anniversaries

  Posted: September 5, 2011, 2:06 pm by keguro

  Kenya recently celebrated the one-year anniversary of promulgating a new constitution. It is a strange thing to celebrate the one-year anniversary of a “word” or “act” that few of us can pronounce. And an even stranger thing, I thought, to say that what had been achieved was what had been fought for—that the promulgated constitution [...]

Blah blah blah

Fish cakes

Alas a fish cake.

Yet more fish cakes

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

The end of the fish cakes