Items by keguro

Gukira

• Re-Reading Leo Bersani (From Nairobi)

  Posted: December 14, 2011, 9:07 pm by keguro

  I first read Homos in 2000, when I lived in Seattle. A friend was taking a class in queer theory and because I was starved for intellectual stimulation—trash romance wasn’t doing it for me and I had plowed through my stacks of Marguerite Duras and Jean Rhys—I begged for a copy of the class syllabus [...]

• Dear Kenyan Teenage Boys

  Posted: December 13, 2011, 9:25 am by keguro

  I have been told that you do not read. This Christmas, please ask those who love you and buy you things to get you a copy of John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, available in the Penguin edition at Text Book Centre and Bookpoint for the princely sum of Kshs 180. You will thank me. I assure [...]

• “I’m Not Listening”: Kenyan Whiteness

  Posted: December 9, 2011, 2:05 pm by keguro

  Kenyan whiteness is righteous rightness. Hyper-corrective toward non-whites, hyper-aware of its privileged status, hyper-willing to exercise its privilege and whip the natives into place. A blustering white man yelled obscenities at my cab guy. When I subsequently confronted the blusterer—it’s that kind of day—he insisted: “he broke the law,” and repeated several times, “I’m not [...]

• Listening to African Queers

  Posted: December 9, 2011, 8:08 am by keguro

  A few weeks ago, I broke a longstanding personal rule and left a comment on a mainstream, very popular, award-winning U.S. gay blog. A long string of comments by mostly gay men (if web identities count for anything) supported the U.K.’s decision to consider sexual rights in granting aid. Many of the commentators condemned not [...]

• Medical Emergencies

  Posted: December 8, 2011, 7:50 am by keguro

  The Kenyan education system considers medical doctors, including dentists and pharmacists, to be our best and brightest. In our competitive—and elite-making—public education system, medical doctors are the cherry on top, the prize, those who have proved themselves worthy. Medicine is not considered a vocation; I write this understanding how the term “vocation” can be misused [...]

• At War?

  Posted: December 4, 2011, 12:38 pm by keguro

  Despite the guards who routinely search us as we enter Sarit Centre, Yaya, Westgate, but not Junction (curious, that), these being high-end shopping places, and despite nervous titters about bombs and terrorists, Nairobi feels indifferent to the war. Mainstream newspapers barely cover it—a recent article in the DN, treats an excursion into the “Somalia jungle” [...]

• Reading Caroline Nderitu

  Posted: December 3, 2011, 4:29 am by keguro

  Caroline Nderitu is, arguably, Kenya’s most public poet. As the Profile in her collection Caroline Verses notes, since August 1996 her “unique brand of original performance poetry has become a regular feature at government, corporate, educational and charity functions. She has “a poem for every occasion.” I am boggled by Nderitu’s 15-year career as a [...]

• World AIDS Day & Rape

  Posted: December 1, 2011, 7:51 am by keguro

  A friend tells me that 50% of schoolgirls in a local primary school have been raped. That is, girls aged from 6-14. Elsewhere, it’s 70% of the girls. I’ve yet to find numbers on the boys. Of the over 5,000 cases still to be tried from Kenya’s Post-Election Violence in 2007-8, not a single one [...]

• Friends Forever

  Posted: November 26, 2011, 3:06 pm by keguro

  I am well aware that I could not do justice to the subject without offending those “professional friends of the African” who are prepared to maintain their friendship for eternity as a sacred duty, provided only that the African will continue to play the part of an ignorant savage so that they can monopolise the [...]

• The African Sonnet: Notes on Kenyan Aesthetics

  Posted: November 24, 2011, 10:17 am by keguro

  On learning that I have been “hiding” in my apartment as I work on the book, Njeri Wangari took pity on me and invited me to see the sunshine and good people at POWO November, held at the IHub. The topic was, broadly, African languages, pasts, presents, futures, including, and perhaps especially, digital futures. Amidst [...]

• Unprotected Territories

  Posted: November 20, 2011, 3:59 pm by keguro

  As yet more articles flood the newspapers about Uhuru Kenyatta, William Ruto, and Raila Odinga, I wonder about the names and lives of former residents from Kiang’ombe and Mitumba whose houses have been torn down by the government. Strikingly, while press coverage of Syokimau, a middle-class enclave, has offered story after story of bank loans [...]

• Locating War

  Posted: November 18, 2011, 5:53 am by keguro

  On October 21, 1952, a day after the official start of the emergency in Kenya, colonial forces bulldozed my maternal grandfather’s stone house. My grandfather had, by this time, already been arrested and placed in detention, along with many other Kenyan men. His crime? He taught in an independent school in Githunguri. This scene is [...]

• More G. Brooks

  Posted: November 17, 2011, 4:13 pm by keguro

  the progress And still we wear our uniforms, follow The cracked cry of the bugles, comb and brush Our pride and prejudice, doctor the sallow Initial ardor, wish to keep it fresh. Still we applaud the President’s voice and face. Still we remark on patriotism, sing, Salute the flag, thrill heavily, rejoice For death of [...]

• From Gwendolyn Brooks

  Posted: November 16, 2011, 9:14 am by keguro

  They make excellent corpses, among the expensive flowers. . . . Nobody is furious. Nobody hates these people. At least, nobody driving by in this car. It is only natural, however, that it should occur to us How much more fortunate they are than we are. It is only natural that we should look and [...]

• “Suspicious People”

  Posted: November 14, 2011, 10:15 pm by keguro

  Today we know very well that it is not necessary to be wounded by a bullet in order to suffer from the fact of war in body as well as in mind. –Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth Meanwhile, CID director Ndegwa Muhoro is asking you to remain vigilant and report any suspicious people [...]

• Reading Binyavanga III

  Posted: November 13, 2011, 8:17 pm by keguro

  First always comes the ability to believe, and then the need to. —Carl Phillips, “All it Takes” atmospheres are sonically saturated —Gayle Wald, “Soul Vibrations” Despite the uncertainty that runs through One Day I Will Write about This Place, the final sentence suggests something of the accomplishment of the bildung: “We fail to trust that [...]

• “Stop Beating Students,” Or, the University’s Mission

  Posted: November 12, 2011, 8:43 am by keguro

  The front entrance of Nairobi Primary faces “Box,” a women’s residential hall at the University of Nairobi. When I was at Nairobi Primary, the easiest way to get to the city center was to walk through the compound of university housing. In those days, teachers nurtured our dreams that one day we would “walk across [...]

• Quick Notes

  Posted: November 10, 2011, 12:13 am by keguro

  Given OWS, I am intrigued by what appears to be the Kenyan non-reaction to recent articles on the banking system. Banks Making Killing on Loans Commercial banks have reported Sh65.3 billion in pre-tax profit for the first nine months of the year. Overall, the industry generated Sh175.8 billion in revenue, of which 86 per cent [...]

• Race(ing) Queer Studies

  Posted: November 8, 2011, 10:47 pm by keguro

  Elizabeth Freeman and Christina Sharpe have recently, separately, written about Isaac Julien’s The Attendant. I want to think a little about how their approaches to the film index the place of race in queer studies. This question interests me as I continue to wrestle through my own writing, especially as I think about the frames [...]

• Reasonable Violence

  Posted: November 8, 2011, 9:17 am by keguro

  Meanwhile, in Africa Review, “powered by the Nation Media Group,” Janet Otieno offers what some might consider reasonable positions. In a 2010 article arguing for the presence of “homosexuality” in pre-colonial Africa she argues, Although there is no data to substantiate a genetic or biologic basis for same-sex attraction, homosexuals prefer the biological explanations of [...]

• Monday Quotation

  Posted: November 7, 2011, 10:47 am by keguro

  Of course, if manual sex often starts with the first two fingers, the others frequently follow, and very often the fingers eventually double back upon themselves. –Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds

• On the Blazon

  Posted: November 5, 2011, 2:56 pm by keguro

  Again, as always, it is necessary to pay attention to how gender functions. On the one hand, the intensification of a militarized masculinity that beats the war drums incessantly, revels in the idea of “killing” the enemy and “protecting” the tourists, that struts around, chest out, convinced of its rightness, deaf to any and all [...]

• Queer Wanjiku?

  Posted: November 5, 2011, 11:35 am by keguro

  Over the past few years, Dorothy Kweyu has been a leading conservative voice against queer rights and activism in Kenya. Actually, she has been a leading conservative voice against queer existence. In articles such as “Homosexuality an Abomination in the Eyes of God and Man,” “The Dilemma of Lesbian Schoolgirls,” and, most recently, “UK’s Aid [...]

• Sessions 6 (Draft)

  Posted: November 3, 2011, 8:38 pm by keguro

  Simply. He sweeps. Simply. There is dust and settling, as on a surface. His shirt lifts and sighs, bares and bears. He might be called Sam or Kimanzi, Turuk or Salim. Or boy from then entering now. He smells like yesterday’s boy, now legal, still barred. In yesterday’s time he is never more than and [...]

• Essential Reading

  Posted: November 1, 2011, 1:43 am by keguro

  As Kenyan public space continues to be transformed by increasing militarization–soldiers with guns roam our malls in increasing numbers, a small but telling sign; and those traveling on public transport are now subject to new screening procedures–I am keeping a close eye on “Occupy Everywhere.” Two very compelling must-reads: Lili Loofbourow, “The Livestream Ended: How [...]

• 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.

• 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 [...]

• Richard Onyango’s Bodies

  Posted: August 31, 2011, 11:16 pm by keguro

  Drossie was so unique and familiar, and she was my first lady. Maybe she influenced me to see the big ladies first before the other ones. So when I see a big lady, it is much easier for me to see her than any other lady, and again, I discovered that most men don’t like [...]

• Welcome Mourning

  Posted: August 30, 2011, 10:27 pm by keguro

  In a ghoulish video somewhere, I hold a dead man’s photograph and precede a coffin processional, a scene I remember too well from a long-ago production of Oliver Twist. The suit is navy blue—a color I associate with funerals and detest. It’s easier, now, to let Oliver Twist color my imagination of that day, to [...]

• Masturbation is Great!

  Posted: August 29, 2011, 3:59 pm by keguro

  Go masturbate! Seriously! I have never believed that masturbation was a layover on the way to secure (or consistent) partnership or, as some would have it, an adolescent habit on the way to adulthood. Earlier in my sex-career, I discovered that finding sex was hard work. First, the finding, then the having, then the after-having. [...]

• Richard Onyango’s Memory Work

  Posted: August 28, 2011, 5:05 pm by keguro

  I came to Richard Onyango later than I should have. Which is to say, I came to know about him later than I should have, even though I recognized his work and style, especially his Drosie portraits. In (or around) 2008, Kwani? published The Life and Times of Richard Onyango, a narrative of his life [...]

• Imagining Futures

  Posted: August 27, 2011, 9:05 am by keguro

  A recent article in the Daily Nation begins, Imagine you are invited to address an international gathering of “young leaders” — those brilliant, world-travelled, multi-lingual twenty-somethings who graduate from top schools with top honors and — having walked away from six-figure salaries — work for almost nothing in NGOs. One of these “young leaders” is [...]

• Seeing, Staring, Looking

  Posted: August 25, 2011, 10:57 am by keguro

  [Seeing] is a product of battle-tested strategies and hard-won epistemologies honed into tools for carving out a space and habitation of survival.—Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection Aaron Bady’s recent essay on Tarzan in American Literature (AL, open access, it’s a good thing) thinks through the fantasy-reality of Tarzan’s flight as Tarzan moves from Burroughs’s universe to [...]

• Sudsy

  Posted: August 24, 2011, 6:16 pm by keguro

  [T]he family identity produced on American television is much more likely to include your dog than your homosexual brother or sister.—Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” Contemporary gay men must be delivered from unseemly, uncivilized sexual practices carried out in the great cities of Europe and America just as savage, if somewhat childlike, Africans [...]

• Those Terrible Poor People

  Posted: August 22, 2011, 12:09 pm by keguro

  The need to play victim and blame others is found across Kenyan society. The poor are some of the worst human rights offenders. Many believe they are owed by society.–Wamuyu Gatheru, Governance Consultant Kenya has too many consultants.

• Frottage (One)

  Posted: August 22, 2011, 2:44 am by keguro

  A friend tells me that books (critical, scholarly) should have some kind of personal narrative, a kind of “this is how I came to this project and this is why it matters to me.” This is an interesting convention. We spend multiple years working on books, and for the untenured, the tenure-track, the hoping-to-be-tenure-track, and [...]

• A Most Perfect Introduction

  Posted: August 21, 2011, 12:21 pm by keguro

  It seems that we are on the verge of something. Although the snows of winter still linger, the light of the queer morning seems surprisingly strong. The thrust and counter-thrust over the matter of so-called gay respectability occur with such shocking regularity that colleagues, friends, and family alike continually remind us that though we remain [...]

• Honey, You’re a Nag

  Posted: August 21, 2011, 10:20 am by keguro

  The third “most popular” article in the Daily Nation as of 8 am today is “Honey, You’re a Nag.” It is the latest in the Nation’s ongoing and relentless campaign to trivialize women’s lives and concerns. Though it focuses on the “private” and the “intimate,” ostensibly the “domestic,” and quotes are necessary here because Kenya [...]

• On the Trivial

  Posted: August 16, 2011, 4:55 pm by keguro

  I am always squinting, a habit learned from before I wore glasses that has carried over, watered by excessively sunny days and a distaste for sunglasses. Squinting does not make objects come into focus, at least not in my case. Instead, I have found it a useful way to pay attention to the everyday life [...]

• Reading Kenyan Marriage

  Posted: August 10, 2011, 3:04 am by keguro

  I have been trying to think about the ongoing work of marriage and marriage legislation in Kenya as a way to approach a range of attachments (and how they are narrated) within Kenya’s colonial modernity. In the more ambitious form of this undertaking, I am interested in the various marriage laws enacted prior to 1963—the [...]

• The Curious Life of Chain Letters

  Posted: August 9, 2011, 11:48 am by keguro

  I received (in error) a letter that fascinates me. Its trajectory is worth remarking. In between every few sentences, picture a slightly creepy, ripped-from-hallmark picture of a little white girl, present in the original version—I choose not to reproduce those images here. The creepiness will become apparent. I claim responsibility for all parenthetical remarks. Okay, [...]

• On Mercy Keino

  Posted: August 9, 2011, 7:50 am by keguro

  In July 2011, Kenyan newspapers reported that Mercy Keino, a University of Nairobi student, had been found dead on Waiyaki Way, a busy Kenyan highway. Mercy had last been seen at a party in an affluent neighborhood adjacent to the highway. As I start to write this, I realize that of the various narratives circulating [...]

• “Put Up a Good Photograph”

  Posted: August 2, 2011, 10:31 pm by keguro

  In the trash romance novels I devour, young women looking to be married often display some artistic accomplishment, or try to. They might play the piano earnestly, with more good intent than artistry; paint watercolors in which the objects depicted crave not to be represented; or sing nice songs in so-so voices. These offerings are [...]

• Alas! You Have Mail

  Posted: August 2, 2011, 9:32 am by keguro

  I have grown very fond of the God-Devil conceit that opens the Book of Job: God: Devil, where have you been? Devil: Hanging out, checking out stuff. There’s something very convivial about it. And I like conviviality. Earlier this AM, I decided to browse around stuff, following the Devil’s example, and discovered Kenya’s leading online [...]

• Fanon’s Aliens

  Posted: July 26, 2011, 8:50 pm by keguro

  But the fact that I feel alien to the world of the schizophrenic or of the sexually impotent in no way diminishes their reality.—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks Who is this “I” who feels “alien”? And what might it mean to take that feeling as a demand, even an obligation? Why does Fanon select [...]

• Sessions IV of X (work in progress)

  Posted: July 14, 2011, 12:25 am by keguro

  You ask if my fear of heights prevents me from loving. Falling is not inevitable, I reply. Fear is more necessary. It is an old conversation, strewn with hubris. Love slays. It comes unexpectedly. It happens when we are not watching. Yet we choose to cross streets, ignoring traffic signs, and I am attuned to [...]

• Arrivals

  Posted: July 14, 2011, 12:02 am by keguro

  An ecstatic voice: “Yes! I’m home! Hallelujah! Two or three try to recreate the rapture, desultory applause, a wave that refuses to rise. We used to cheer and applaud into Nairobi. We applauded the pilot’s skills in landing us, the first wheel-mediated feel of terra firma, our escape from wing-churned skies. One experienced homecoming. I [...]

• The Labor of Intimate Diversity

  Posted: July 8, 2011, 10:55 am by keguro

  I am ambivalent about a recent decision by a Kenyan judge to recognize woman-to-woman marriage as defined by Nandi customary law. On the side of “the good,” this decision recognizes tradition and custom as repositories of intimate diversity, offering useful paradigms for contemporary debates and struggles over diversifying intimate arrangements. And while it seems risky [...]

• Book Review?

  Posted: July 7, 2011, 1:57 pm by keguro

  I keep wanting to like the book I am reading.

• Uses of Fear

  Posted: May 15, 2011, 1:09 am by keguro

  “We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired.” —Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” I have been haunted by this quotation over the past year. So much so, that I asked students in [...]

• Highlights

  Posted: April 25, 2011, 4:41 am by keguro

  Premature as it might be to name highlights of the year. It’s good to mark these as they occur. Two weeks ago, Omise’eke Tinsley at UMD. One of my favorite scholars, author of the beautiful Thiefing Sugar. This weekend, meeting Teju Cole. Author of the wonderful Open City, and one of my favorite people.

• Airport Porn

  Posted: April 16, 2011, 10:30 am by keguro

  Another airport. Another encounter with the racialization of everyday life. I become irritated that I am irritated, desire to convince myself that racialization is better than racism. Everyone goes through this. A fragment of a poem: The message is clear: your penis, your vagina, your testicles, your womb, your anus, your orgasm, these belong to [...]

• On Re-reading a Book I Hated at 20

  Posted: April 5, 2011, 3:03 am by keguro

  I still hate it.

• Object Stories

  Posted: February 19, 2011, 2:26 am by keguro

  While my own writing is directed elsewhere, hang out with Wambui and her ongoing object image stories.

• Baldwin Knot

  Posted: February 18, 2011, 5:23 am by keguro

  I have been staring at the quotation below for the past few weeks, unable to process how it means. Yes, of course, I have frames and paradigms through which to understand it, but they feel inadequate. So I will continue to stare. But there are a great many ways of outwitting oblivion, and to ask [...]

• Seeing Colonial Africa (2)

  Posted: February 11, 2011, 3:04 pm by keguro

  My favorite so far:

• Seeing Colonial Africa (one way)

  Posted: February 11, 2011, 2:59 pm by keguro

  The British National Archives have released (publicly) thousands of photographs featuring colonial Africa. Some that I find intriguing below:

• Roses for Mubarak?

  Posted: February 6, 2011, 6:57 am by keguro

  The Egyptian revolution faces a terrible crisis in the U.S. media: it does not understand how to be a good reality show. It was exciting when it broke out and roses were handed out to twitter and facebook, the key front-runners in who was to woo the world. It got mildly more interesting when Anderson [...]

• Mohamed Bouazizi and David Kato

  Posted: February 4, 2011, 8:57 pm by keguro

  I cannot help thinking of these two figures together, to ask what it means to “incite” a movement, to be understood as “representative.” And representative of what. By now, the stories are familiar. And, I want to suggest, equally random. Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in December, a symbol of protest against a life [...]

• (Un)Canonical

  Posted: February 3, 2011, 3:41 pm by keguro

  I find tedious and boring repeated arguments that young(er) scholars are unread and under-read. I find tedious and boring repeated arguments that young(er) scholars would be somehow better had they dedicated themselves to Shakespeare and Milton, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Melville and Hawthorne, Henry James and T.S. Eliot. I note that many of us still dedicate [...]

• Notes on Africa: Facebook, Egypt, Tunisia, and “the rest of us”

  Posted: January 30, 2011, 10:46 pm by keguro

  IF you pay (too much) attention to African voices on facebook, you become aware of the nagging fear of disorder: anarchy is being unleashed in Egypt, some say; a “revolution” is all well and good, others say, but it needs a “plan.” “Change” is a fine sentiment, but where is the “strategy for going forward?” [...]

• Queer Africa: Mourning David Kato

  Posted: January 27, 2011, 9:43 am by keguro

  News arrives from a dear friend that David Kato, a Ugandan activist outed by Uganda’s homophobic Rolling Stone has been beaten to death. I did not know David, but our networks intersect. Most recently, David was one of three Ugandans who successfully sued Rolling Stone and forced it to shut down its hateful operations. * [...]

• Queer Africa: The Problem of Evidence

  Posted: January 26, 2011, 6:25 am by keguro

  Consider the following: Taken from an archive file dated 9th May 1912, it cultivates multiple desires. For some of us, a desire that these two found comfort with each other, no matter its form; for others, a desire that these two were “gay,” forerunners of some kind; for others, a desire to relocate them from [...]

• Making Academic Labor Public

  Posted: January 25, 2011, 9:16 pm by keguro

  In primary school, I was always puzzled by students who claimed their parents (usually fathers) were in “business.” “Business” had a self-explanatory power that remained mysterious. In contrast, I knew my father was an OB/GYN: I visited him at work, I flipped through his medical books, and while I could not have explained what he [...]

• Queer Africa: Pre-Writing, Writing, Re-Writing

  Posted: January 24, 2011, 5:38 pm by keguro

  Introduction I have been reluctant to write something on “queer Africa,” even though that phrase recurs on this blog and in my scholarly work. The “essay” that tries to “map the field,” so to speak, was planted a while ago, germinated, and then stagnated, “waiting for the rains”: an occasion, a provocation, an intention, a [...]

• Are Students Learning?

  Posted: January 18, 2011, 3:46 pm by keguro

  It’s a good question. Should professors demand more? And will doing so make students learn more? One take from The Chronicle of Higher Ed: The study makes clear that there are two kinds of college students in America. A minority of them start with a good high-school education and attend colleges that challenge them with [...]

• English: A Long View

  Posted: January 16, 2011, 2:52 am by keguro

  A comment from The Chronicle of Higher Education on the “state” of English: Post-colonial studies, transnationalism, postmodernism and poststructuralism have taken hold as the dominant foci of English faculty. It is not enough that these scholars refuse to read the literature of historians, anthropologists sociologists and the like, they also refuse to teach basic literature [...]

• Environments and Acts

  Posted: January 13, 2011, 12:55 am by keguro

  Two overly simplistic narratives have emerged about “the shooting” in Arizona. In the first, careless rhetoric created the conditions necessary for the shooter to take action. Less abstractly: people act on what they hear and see, giving life to metaphors. In the second, the shooter was mentally ill, acting out his symptoms. The first narrative [...]

• Kenya Yetu. Katiba Yetu. Maisha Yetu

  Posted: January 12, 2011, 3:00 am by keguro

  A call to action.

• Slave vs. Nigger

  Posted: January 11, 2011, 7:33 pm by keguro

  How have we come to believe that the word “slave” is less offensive, less objectionable, less hurtful than the word “nigger”? What forms of amnesia and unknowing must we enact to accept this claim? While I understand the claims for “historical distance” that give “nigger” a “bite” ostensibly absent from the word “slave,” I also [...]

• Syllabus Ideas: Queer Africa

  Posted: January 8, 2011, 6:15 am by keguro

  I am offering an introductory class in the spring semester. Still feeling my way through it, but here’s what an advanced version might look like—had I all the time. I am interested in working through sexology-anthropology as a way to get to embodiment. (I leave out “the” “Venus Hottentot” because I agree with Zine Magubane—Baartman’s [...]

• Syllabus Ideas: Folk Modernities

  Posted: January 7, 2011, 8:38 pm by keguro

  This class dates back to my Special Fields exams—the transition to ABD. I was wondering about the markers attached to “afro-modernity,” questioning Gilroy’s formulations, and also thinking about “afro-modernity” through “diaspora,” as a site of cross-identification—essentially adapting Stuart Hall. The question was how “the rural” and “the folk” acted as “modern” points of “identification” across [...]

• Syllabus Ideas: The Black Diaspora

  Posted: January 7, 2011, 5:26 pm by keguro

  Following Aaron’s example, I thought I’d post some recent ideas for future classes. Here’s a grad version of the black diaspora. I tilt in very particular ways, and so it might be really predictable. It ends on two lit-crit works because I’d like students to imagine how the “wide” of the black diaspora can be [...]

• Not Yet

  Posted: January 7, 2011, 3:42 pm by keguro

  A series of quotation that have yet to be processed. That, perhaps, I dare not process. The most recent issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly focuses on the “state” of theory. Ellis Hanson represents one take on “queer” theory. Here he is, “working through” Eve Sedgwick’s concept of “reparative reading”: Faced with the depressing realization [...]

• A Fragment to Open the Year

  Posted: January 2, 2011, 6:11 am by keguro

  places do not change so much as what we seek in them and faith will serve along the way to somewhere else where work begins. –Audre Lorde, “To Martha: A New Year”

• Endnotes: Africans With(out) Crutches

  Posted: December 31, 2010, 8:51 pm by keguro

  An American Negro, however deep his sympathies, or however bright his rage, ceases to be simply a black man when he faces a black man from Africa. When I say simply a black man, I do not mean that being a black man is simple, anywhere. . . . [W]hen he faces an African, he [...]

• Endnote: Intimate A-Modernities

  Posted: December 31, 2010, 4:55 pm by keguro

  I have yet to return to Leo Africanus in any sustained way. What I knew about him in 2002, the moment of our first “encounter,” is probably outdated, if not misremembered. What sticks, a social hierarchy of Africa, based on religion, politics, architecture, skin color, and sexuality. An opening into African Queer Histories? Ovr ancient [...]

• Endnotes: Parrots and Development

  Posted: December 30, 2010, 6:17 pm by keguro

  On September 13, 1984, Daniel arap Moi, then president of Kenya, argued that citizen-subjects should “sing like parrots,” as it was Kenya’s political tradition. He claimed, I call on all Ministers, Assistant Ministers and every other person to sing like parrots. During Mzee Kenyatta’s period I persistently sang the Kenyatta tune until the people said: [...]

• Endnotes

  Posted: December 30, 2010, 5:55 pm by keguro

  Lingering posts that should be posted before 2010 “ends.” Extensions and promises both. Ragged and incomplete.

• Other Times

  Posted: December 28, 2010, 9:47 am by keguro

  Time sticks. * In another temporality, what we call the fin de siècle, young Gikuyu men and women understood themselves as the Kienjeku (sores) and Gatego (syphilis) generations. Kienjeku preceded Gatego by a year or so. During the Gatego year, only women were initiated. * Athomi (readers) were never an “official” generation. Time had split—expanding [...]

• PEV: From Event to Era III

  Posted: December 23, 2010, 2:39 pm by keguro

  We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. –Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider At the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009, I wondered if the PEV signaled the “loss of cosmopolitanism.” I also thought about its [...]

• W(h)ither Kenyan Internationalism?

  Posted: December 22, 2010, 10:34 pm by keguro

  In November, the Kenyan government opposed a UN motion that sought to classify the execution of homosexuals as a human rights violation; in a subsequent vote, Kenya chose to “abstain”; and “breaking news” announces that parliament has approved a motion “to repeal [the] International Crimes Act and ask the government to withdraw Kenya from the [...]

• Ocampo’s Omissions

  Posted: December 16, 2010, 4:49 am by keguro

  Omissions are not accidents. –Marianne Moore It is difficult to overlook the certainty with which many politicians and their supporters claim that ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo omitted names from his list of six. Anyone who read the now “disappeared” Waki Report knows the challenges Waki and his team faced in getting witnesses to testify, a [...]

• Global Studies

  Posted: December 14, 2010, 4:16 pm by keguro

  News arrives that the University of Maryland has instituted a new Global Studies Minor. It is good news. Despite our proximity to DC—ten miles from the White House, we proclaim—UMD can feel remarkably not-yet-global. A Global Studies minor is necessary. I celebrate efforts to promote a global outlook. As I look through the description of [...]

• Verbs

  Posted: December 13, 2010, 3:25 pm by keguro

  Verbs I Like Suture Stitch Weave Embed Lubricate Imagine Verbs I Rarely Use Subvert Undo Deconstruct Challenge Verbs I Prefer Not To Use Fight Deploy Arm Attack War Battle Verbs I Should Use More Love Believe Imagine

• for colored girls: two endings

  Posted: December 11, 2010, 3:55 pm by keguro

  Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem ends with a song: all of the ladies repeat to them- selves softly the lines ‘i found god in myself & i loved her.’ It soon becomes a song of joy, started by the lady in blue. The ladies sing first to each other, then gradually to the audience. After the song [...]

• “The Same”?

  Posted: December 9, 2010, 11:44 am by keguro

  Many Kenyans–I say this based on a sample size of three–use “the same” instead of the pronoun “it.” As in, “John sent me a book, and I will put the same in the mail to you.” Dear Kenyans, when did this become a convention?

• Looking Forward To . . .

  Posted: December 8, 2010, 3:39 pm by keguro

  As the semester ends, time and quiet to read new work by poet and fiction writer friends. Inhabit other imaginations. Write about and around new poetry by Shailja Patel, Phyllis Muthoni, Njeri Wangari, Ngwatilo Mawiyoo–I’m going to be indulging in Kenyan women’s poetry. Quiet to let the year’s readings soak in–to begin completing patient projects, [...]

• Forgetting Internally Displaced Kenyans

  Posted: December 8, 2010, 1:12 pm by keguro

  Since 2008, when Raila and Kibaki signed the power-sharing accord, Kenyans have tried very hard to forget the internally displaced. We did so, in part, by adopting the legally correct name, internally displaced, and then stripping them of any belonging by terming them people. Not Kenyans, but people. Internally Displaced People. This (un)naming helped us [...]

• 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 [...]

• “Uncreative Victories”

  Posted: October 28, 2010, 7:44 am by keguro

  The distortion of relationship which says “I disagree with you, so I must destroy you” leaves us as Black people with basically uncreative victories, defeated in any common struggle.—Audre Lorde “Unable” to write, I turn to Audre Lorde, find comfort in the familiarity of citation. Not simply comfort, but provocation. I return to the question [...]

• Encounters & Gratitude

  Posted: October 26, 2010, 4:57 am by keguro

  It does not occur to me, as I speak to a group of first-semester students, that I might be the first out, queer instructor they have met on the campus. Or, more likely, that I might be the first out, queer African professor they have ever met. It does not occur to me that I [...]

• Defining People

  Posted: October 25, 2010, 4:13 pm by keguro

  In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Thomas Benton writes, “People resent professors even more when they seem to attack the institutions that give people’s lives meaning, such as the military, the church, and the traditional family.” Many things can be said about this remarkable statement. For now, just one. Thank you, Thomas Benton, for letting [...]

• Making “It” Better

  Posted: October 25, 2010, 7:52 am by keguro

  I have been thinking about the “itness” of “it.” What is meant by the proliferating “its” now in circulation? Is my “it” the same as your “it”? What happens when my “it” meets your “it”? Can we believe that your better “it” also betters my “it”? My “it” might interrupt your “it,” disrupt your “it,” [...]

• (un)Making Kenyan Women

  Posted: October 24, 2010, 6:15 pm by keguro

  The way you felt when the chokora reached for your left breast in the street, held it, you in your checkered school uniform and bag, socks and shoes, the breast barely settled in to its seat on your chest, he sooty and blue, coated in unknowable filth. —Ngwatilo Mawiyoo, “The Way You Felt Remains” Stories [...]

• Isms & Phobias: Intent & Indifference

  Posted: October 21, 2010, 11:12 am by keguro

  Frantz Fanon has been haunting me—he is a constant ghost. Haunting me as I try to think about the Tyler Clementi case and about the frames used to evaluate the two students whose actions may have led to Clementi’s tragic death. In what I take to be a representative, moderate position, Richard Kim writes, I [...]

• Craving Writing

  Posted: October 20, 2010, 8:08 pm by keguro

  At the start of this academic year, I vowed to cut back on my blogging. Not only to write fewer posts, but to write shorter ones. In part, I wanted to save my writing for other forums. I also wanted to experiment with different modes of approaching writing. With the Koroga Collaborative, I was interested [...]

• Trite

  Posted: October 17, 2010, 4:00 pm by keguro

  Trite: –adjective, trit·er, trit·est.  1. lacking in freshness or effectiveness because of constant use or excessive repetition; hackneyed; stale: the trite phrases in his letter. 2. characterized by hackneyed expressions, ideas, etc.: The commencement address was trite and endlessly long. 3. Archaic . rubbed or worn by use. Gukira was recently featured in a section [...]

• Better. Lubrication.

  Posted: October 14, 2010, 7:07 am by keguro

  At 21, I came out to my mother, a year after I had come out to my siblings. I was living in free campus housing (luckily); working a summer student job making something like $4.50 an hour; spending too many hours at Pegasus, the downtown Pittsburgh club; and trying to figure out what “gay” meant [...]

• Always. Historically. Associated.

  Posted: October 12, 2010, 5:03 pm by keguro

  Dear Person I am watching on youtube: I am glad you are a public intellectual. I am happy you are doing necessary work. Kill the sloppy sentences. Something cannot be “always historically associated.” “Always” and “historically” cancel each other out. Concerned Viewer

• Kenya Prison Homosexuality (1969)

  Posted: October 10, 2010, 11:10 pm by keguro

  Few commented on the loss of heterosexual relationships. It did not appear to be a major problem of adjustment since within the prison they were not exposed to, nor did they read in their life outside to, visual erotic stimuli. There were few, if any, pin-ups or treasured photographs, and indeed only one case of [...]

• On Courage

  Posted: October 10, 2010, 10:06 pm by keguro

  While I am very glad to see influential figures support queers in Kenya—Betty Murungi and Makau Mutua—I want to resist seeing them as exceptional, as risking more than the queers who continue to fight for recognition. As we recognize the work of allies, let’s also recognize those who have enabled those allies to speak. David [...]

• Calluses

  Posted: October 9, 2010, 4:23 am by keguro

  In a brave video, a young lesbian of color responds to Dan Savage’s It Gets Better campaign by saying that it does not get better. Instead, one gets stronger. I have been wrestling with this video, wanting to endorse the sentiment—race and class do make a difference—but also wanting to texture it. And wanting to [...]

• For Us

  Posted: October 7, 2010, 5:58 am by keguro

  I have no figures on how many queer Kenyans commit suicide, or attempt to. I have no figures on how many queer Kenyans are bullied into normativity, into silence, into despair, into drugs and alcohol. I will never ask anyone to write these stories. I will never ask anyone to re-live the experience of being [...]

• Suspended

  Posted: October 6, 2010, 5:52 pm by keguro

  As we approach Nairobi, the flight tracker information continues to display Local Time as Amsterdam. Local Time at Destination remains stubbornly blank. We are heading to the land time forgot. Falling out of time. This falling is mirrored by those who keep saying that they are going to Africa. Africa? A book one thumbs Listlessly, [...]

• Why Teaching?

  Posted: September 27, 2010, 2:34 am by keguro

  Because every so often, and often very often, a student teaches you to look at something you had missed. Strange Hurt In times of stormy weather She felt queer pain That said, “You’ll find rain better Than shelter from the rain.” Days filled with fiery sunshine Strange hurt she knew That made Her seek the [...]

• Heronormativity

  Posted: September 25, 2010, 4:49 pm by keguro

  A fortuitous textual slip. I will have to find a way to use this!

• A Response to the GOP Draft

  Posted: September 23, 2010, 11:33 am by keguro

  Let America Be America Again Langston Hughes Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free. (America never was America to me.) Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed– Let it be that [...]

• Semester Rhythms

  Posted: September 21, 2010, 3:43 am by keguro

  When the amazing bus system in Urbana-Champaign introduced GPS tracking at bus stops, I learned the distinction between saying a bus was 3 minutes away and saying that a bus would arrive in 3 minutes. As we enter into the fourth week of the semester, I am reminded of how time contracts and expands, bends [...]

• We have just finished reading Angelina Weld ...

  Posted: September 18, 2010, 2:02 pm by keguro

  We have just finished reading Angelina Weld Grimké’s incredibly difficult play Rachel, a play whose confessions highlight its dramatic ellipses and silences. Rachel unfolds as a series of Dickinsonian dashes—strewn throughout the text and increasing in frequency as the play proceeds. Narrative progress halts and the play inhabits what a student (who probably has not [...]

• Visionary Writing

  Posted: September 14, 2010, 8:32 am by keguro

  I have been trying to figure out how to feel about Makau Mutua’s latest writing. At first, I thought it was rage, then sadness, then disappointment. I am not yet sure. Probably a mix of all three. Simply, I expected more. His article a few weeks ago hailing the Kamba as a bloc was irresponsible. [...]

• September 12, 2001

  Posted: September 12, 2010, 5:30 pm by keguro

  On September 12, 2001, a stunned world responded to the U.S. with love and care, with expressions of comfort and solidarity, with grief and mourning. On September 12, 2001, the U.S. experienced the arms of a loving, ethical world, arms that it had itself extended to so many nations over so many years. On September [...]

Blah blah blah

Fish cakes

Alas a fish cake.

Yet more fish cakes

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

The end of the fish cakes