Gukira

• Quotidian Interruptus

  Posted: October 29, 2011, 2:52 am by keguro

  It’s raining in Nairobi, on Friday, during rush hour. Time extends in auto and human traffic. Burst sewage lines block pedestrian paths: we are all cars now, or pedestrians, depending on how one gauges being from speed. The four-minute ride that takes me home takes half an hour. All of this is normal rain-panic. Still, [...]

• 75, 44, 9, ∞

  Posted: October 28, 2011, 7:36 am by keguro

  Al-Shabaab has asked for a truce. Chances are that this is a gambit to throw Kenya off-balance and make us look bad when we hammer them, as we must.—Mutuma Mathiu What is the mathematical symbol for a body? What is the mathematical symbol for killing? What is the mathematical symbol for death? What does one [...]

• On Hate Speech

  Posted: October 26, 2011, 11:29 am by keguro

  When is hate speech not hate speech? Kweli has been documenting, beautifully, the fraught project of Kenyan ethnicity: how, that is, some ethnic groups become Kenyan while others remain aslant, oblique, effaced, and abjected. Not quite, not right. The project of Kenyan ethnicity—the making of Kenya as 42 tribes—is also a subject-making process: it designates [...]

• Credible Threat

  Posted: October 24, 2011, 11:01 pm by keguro

  “ . . . the U.S. Embassy in Kenya has received credible information of an imminent threat of terrorist attacks.”—Front Page of Daily Nation, October 24, 2011 I linger over death, funeral, and memorial announcements in the Daily Nation. “Gone too Soon,” “In Loving Memory,” “Celebration of Life,” “Celebration of a Life Well Lived.” Deaths [...]

• Over There–Notes in Transit

  Posted: October 23, 2011, 9:58 am by keguro

  I live in a country where war is an abstraction. For many of us, perhaps most of us, war is something mediated by actor-appropriate (not always pretty) men who demonstrate the right mien. War is precisely the absence of suffering and loss; rather, it secures borders and selves. And it is always something that happens [...]

• No Public Access

  Posted: October 22, 2011, 7:07 am by keguro

  I wanted to write something about Occupy Baltimore, located in McKeldin Square, about two blocks from the Hilton, where I have been attending the ASA conference. I walked through McKeldin Square, notebook in hand, trying to watch, see, catch a vibe. A man seated on the sidewalk watched me walk in, walk by, walk around. [...]

• War as “Viagla”

  Posted: October 21, 2011, 10:36 am by keguro

  We inhabit a moment of profound gender anxieties in Kenya: the 2/3 gender rule in the constitution has produced discomfitures; our Chief Justice sports an earring and has a record of supporting queer and trans activism; 6 leading Kenyan men representing such robust male institutions as the Ministry of Finance, the Kenya Police, the Civil [...]

• Nativist Desire

  Posted: October 21, 2011, 9:48 am by keguro

  In my ongoing quest to demystify what academics do, here are my remarks from a roundtable at the American Studies Association conference on the “preposterous encounter” between American studies and postcolonial studies. The term “preposterous encounter” comes from a seminal essay by Brian Edwards, who kindly joined the roundtable. I am currently obsessed with the [...]

• skins, borders, terrorists

  Posted: October 19, 2011, 3:09 pm by keguro

  I have been reading Sara Ahmed on pain and skin, her reading through psychoanalysis and phenomenology of how we come to experience our bodies as ours through encounters with border-making experiences. Pain and irritation alert us to the places where something we define as us meets the something that is not us. Bordering or, to [...]

• Against: Homophobia, Transphobia, Imperialism

  Posted: October 17, 2011, 3:52 pm by keguro

  Let’s begin in 2006: 7. (1) Registration of Gay Clubs, Societies and organizations by whatever name they are called in institutions from Secondary to the tertiary level or other institutions in particular and, in Nigeria generally, by government agencies is hereby prohibited. (2) Publicity, procession and public show of same sex amorous relationship through the [...]

• Occupy DC (hasty notes)

  Posted: October 16, 2011, 12:12 pm by keguro

  I walk to McPherson Square, one of the main arteries of Occupy DC. On a first pass, I am reluctant to walk through the park. A few earnest people are talking to some of the DC homeless who stay around the park. I recognize a certain “I have come to help Kibera” look. And feel [...]

• Reading Shailja Patel

  Posted: October 13, 2011, 1:04 am by keguro

  I’m reading Migritude alongside other work on temporality—utopia in José Muñoz, temporal drag in Elizabeth Freeman, primitivism and Afro-modernities in a range of articles, history in a friend’s work on Gertrude Stein, the loss of time in trauma. I have not yet settled back into US time—I am waking up too early, want to sleep [...]

• Reading Rasna Warah

  Posted: October 12, 2011, 5:34 pm by keguro

  I promised myself (and Rasna) that I would write something about Red Soil and Roasted Maize, her recent collection. I hesitate to use the word “review,” because I want something more textured, less bound to the conventions of the review: overview, significant moments, assessment, evaluation, and so on. I have mentioned, previously, that I am [...]

• Anti-racist Critique

  Posted: October 12, 2011, 3:25 pm by keguro

  If critiques of racism are not working, are not getting through, then it is indeed time to repeat the critique, which is of course not the time of repetition, as to repeat what has yet to be heard is not a repeat. –Sara Ahmed, “Problematic Proximities: Or Why Critiques of Gay Imperialism Matter”

• Reading Binyavanga I

  Posted: October 9, 2011, 5:41 pm by keguro

  Over the next few weeks (perhaps months), I hope to engage with One Day I Will Write about This Place. I’m interested in what it means to read it now, what it means to read it as a Kenyan, what it means to read it as an academic, what it means to read it as [...]

• Dolls in Africa

  Posted: October 8, 2011, 8:27 pm by keguro

  A foundational chapter in Sitawa Namwalie’s memoir in progress focuses on the doll. Set in the late 1960s in independent Kenya, the chapter captures the experience of race in a still-integrating Kenya (for the most part, the process of racial integration failed in independent Kenya): Susan’s doll looked just like her. Blond hair covered her [...]

• Heaven in

  Posted: October 6, 2011, 10:25 pm by keguro

  A perfectly brewed cup of silver needle

• Some recent thinking

  Posted: October 2, 2011, 3:27 pm by keguro

  With Wambui Mwangi that attempts to bridge (or suture) critical and creative selves.

Blah blah blah

Fish cakes

Alas a fish cake.

Yet more fish cakes

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

The end of the fish cakes