Items by keguro

Gukira

• 09.05.08

  Posted: September 4, 2008, 9:02 pm by keguro

  
  

  By Standard 3 we knew that one should not cry when caned, and by standard 5 even the most sensitive ones among us knew better than to demonstrate pain when caned. I have yet to understand how our teachers felt, but I suspect they were both frustrated by our pretend stoicism and secretly proud: they had done their job in hardening us.

  Take pain without flinching. This foundational lesson.

  This early structure provides a useful paradigm for considering our schizoid relationship to time: on the one hand, caning disciplines by infantilizing and on the other the stoicism displayed in the face of pain displays something our teachers termed “maturity.”

  In fact, we grew up by being told to grow up. At age 2, we were already being told not to be babies. We all wanted to be what my 2 year old niece calls “big.” Over and over she says she wants to be “big.” I hesitate to term this desire to be “big” a desire for agency. Increasingly, and pessimistically so, I think of it as a desire for hardened calluses, a desire to master pain.

  I must pause here and insist, if only to myself, that I am not interested in writing a counter-narrative of “growing up Kenyan.” I climbed trees, ate mangoes, played shake, and, with the exception of my grandfather’s death, the most traumatic incident from my childhood involved my cousins decapitating my teddy bear (I know who they are, I have not forgotten, and am still waiting for an apology 25 years after the fact).

  Instead, I want to trace the more subtle, often darker, but no less important threads that form part of our national warp and weft. To follow the brown that is so often overshadowed by the red and green.

  I begin from standard 3 because I am interested in how we continue to be infantilized by our leaders. Last week, for instance, in what seemed to be a “government approved” message, Mwai Kibaki and Uhuru Kenyatta told us that tribal politics (my phrasing) are “retrograde” and “childish” (my word). In this new Kenya, this coalition-government Kenya, this post-election violence (PEV) Kenya, we had to think nationally, be Kenyans, not petty, squabbling tribes.

  That their rhetoric repeats in form the colonial apprehension of tribes (or ethnicities) should come as no surprise. As numerous scholars of postcolonialism have pointed out, the post-independence era saw the new national elites redeploying colonial categories and discourses. Encountering the man who had signed his detention order, Kenyatta admitted that detention could be a useful tool—and used it with great relish himself.

  However, to reduce local antipathies—tribal seems inadequate to describe the complex local-based negotiations of the PEV—to petty squabbles, and to reduce lingering resentments and injuries to forms of sulking, and this has been an ongoing theme in the government’s response to the IDP situation and various critiques from human rights groups, is to refuse to engage with citizens as citizens, as presumably mature enough to choose their leaders.

  To return to my niece for a moment: to ask a child to be a grown up is to continue to infantilize the child. To ask grown ups to be grown ups is to infantilize them. To ask Kenyans to be “big” is to refuse to take their rights as citizens with any degree of seriousness or care.

  More to the point, and I cannot underscore enough how fundamentally I believe this, to infantilize citizens by asking them to be grown up is intricately and inevitably bound to how citizens should react to pain and hardship.

  To be grown up in Kenya is to take pain without flinching, learning, instead, to recite a rhetoric that begins with “life is hard” and ending with “God will help,” and I cannot overstate how pervasive this rhetoric is, cutting across classes and ethnicities, genders and occupations. The formulaic nature of this sentiment undercuts, to my mind, any real belief—it is less an expression of faith in religion than it is a shared, oft-repeated mantra, comforting in its banality, as all clichés are.

  To be Kenyan is to be stoic: to be a child trained through pain to feel and not to feel.

  And so those of us who dwell in feeling, or dwell on feeling, are placed in the strange situation of being deemed infantile, not having learned the appropriate lessons, or of having unlearned them through foreign education (and this, I suspect, is one key theme of the been-to novel, in which protagonists who return from abroad to Africa feel “improperly,” this for another day).

  The philosopher Kenneth Burke uses the wonderful phrase “trained incapacity” to diagnose one of the effects of hyper-industrialization. Within economies where one’s job is both hyper-specific, one becomes incapable of learning anything else: one is too trained at one task to be proficient at any other.

  And, so I return, once again, to that standard 3 classroom, to the role of corporal punishment in shaping who we are and continue to be, about the ways we learned to deal with pain and injury, or, rather, not to deal with them, about the impossible injunction to be grown up children, which continues to haunt our national discourse.

  Increasingly, perhaps because I am a teacher, I continue to think about the role of what might be termed the pedagogical imaginary and its persistence in shaping who we are and who we desire to be. I continue to wonder about the relationship between discipline and violence that seems so fundamental to our infantile citizenship. I continue to wonder about our inability to deal with injury.

  And I continue to worry about what we do when we tell our children to “grow up,” when we tell crying babies who have fallen and hurt themselves that they should not cry, when we believe that pain can be wished away or should be borne with stoicism.

• 09.04.08

  Posted: September 4, 2008, 8:53 pm by keguro

  
  

  Used to the beefiness of the Midwest, I find the men here wasted, and it’s easy to understand why corn-fed philanthropists harp on HIV/AIDS. Dressed in poorly tailored too-big clothes, lithe bodies float, registering their resistance to the sartorial straitjackets of modernity.

  Stick figures appear true to life.

  I begin to understand, now, how the word delicate applies so readily here, the bird-like quality of hands and feet, the swiftness, the grace, yet with an odd clumsiness, as though shoes hobble what they should enable. I hated shoes until I was 8 and became scared of jiggers, and I probably project my own long-ago loathing onto the lithe bodies that lurch imprisoned by social demands.

  At the airport, the immigration official spoke in English to the Indian woman ahead of me and switched to Kiswahili when he addressed me, though we were both in the Kenyan line. She was charming and promised to look for a book review I mentioned I was writing.

  Interpellation is forceful—a switch in language, a desire to switch languages.

  I find myself acquiring strange patterns, wanting to switch languages mid-sentence, because I can, but also because, in some way, it returns me here. To understand how the textures of a tongue flavor one’s speech, to use the languages in which I first learned to feel words, and also to obtain respite from the mono-lingual word I have inhabited for so long.

  Yet also to see how language is solicited: my nephews, both of them, seem to understand or respond to Kiswahili better than English, so I polish long lost skills, grateful, in this one instance, that simple declaratives and interrogatives accomplish much, very much.

  Words like “susu” make sense again.

  There’s a lot to take in, and I have yet to go to the center of town, to River Road or Moi Avenue or Kenyatta Avenue, to Uhuru Park.

  My geography, never very good, feels weighed down by new buildings, changed roads, new modes of transport: do I still take the 23 to get to town? Does the 6 still change into the 9? Should I risk a trip to my old schools? Will anyone I know still be there? There is a hint of Prufrock here.

  * * *
  It used to be that those who “returned” were described as “alienated,” psychically dislocated, socially lost. It has been some time since such descriptions applied; among certain Kenyans trips abroad, to Uganda, Sudan, Tanzania, South Africa, Mauritius, the US, Dubai (yes, I know it’s not a country) take place far too often to be remarkable. Returnees are no longer village curiosities.

  I continue to wonder if alienation suffices as a description. One limps along, trying to adjust to others’ rhythms. It is this sense that time has become segmented, sedimented at places, vaporized in others, arranged in some ways, imploded in others.

  One finds others in particular locations, but the geographies of the past no longer appeal, and have often changed.

  * * *

  Here, credit does not stand for what one owes and may one day pay, but for what one has to spend, what one has already spent. Credit, in its most quotidian form, refers to living within one’s limits, living aware of one can do, not an extension but a limit.

  Everywhere there are metaphors.

• 8.29.08

  Posted: September 4, 2008, 9:02 am by keguro

  
  

  I

  My mother’s room is filled with time.

  Multiple clocks float along the wall in various modes of on and indifferent, pledging allegiances to faux-environmentalism and golf. Crucifixes and half-faded photographs of my father form a ghastly memento-mori. On the wall facing her bed, a photograph of elder church women is sandwiched between 40-year old photographs of her wedding: the church, refuge and tomb, what comes after marriage, after widowhood, after.

  The past accumulates here, with time punctured by pictures of her grandchildren. Against this shrine to a life having being lived, their faces seem obscene, as solemn as those of children in obituaries. The flatness of matte surfaces and shiny faces is weighed down by the grisly playfulness of “I was here and this happened.”

  She deems herself a survivor, and in this room of odds and ends, furniture that is too old and too new, the 30 year old vanity, chipped in its pseudo-Hollywood glamour, the brand new wood-hard unforgiving mattress, the desk that speaks to a newly acquired readerliness, and is built for a child. My sister studied for her CPE here.

  This is a room contained in time, and its stories leak away: the curtains from my childhood. “Still good!” she insists. Their worn places tell of years of being opened and shut, the ritual that defined morning and evening in our house, in our lives, the transition from work to rest, from solitariness to togetherness.

  These curtains, more than anything else, tell a story of survival: of what can be used, must be used, should not be discarded, might still have a story, use. In this new era where “wastage” is discouraged, the act of holding on, the promise of passing on extends life and its ghosts.

  Last night, seeking some kind of comfort, I slept in her bed, availing myself of her absence. Perhaps, too, because she slept in my bed when she visited, and my back remembers the convenient discomfort of an air-mattress, too hard, too soft, constantly deflating, a metaphor for a certain state of mind.

  There is a story to be told about beds as metaphors, But I remain caught by the curtains.

  Light peeks in through the torn lining, patches of futurity, where the morning makes itself felt most richly and profoundly. Light calls to tomorrow—it is a survivor’s trick, to watch for the chinks in the wall that might announce, the dawning of a new day.

  Cream, wreathed through in gold braid, in a style I can only call seventies, heavy with a weight that was equated with quality.

  In this country of 12 hours of day and night, these curtains mark the distance between here and there, then and now, deprivation and comfort.

  My childhood returns as a ritual devoted to drawing curtains all over the house, entombing the family, its ghosts and its memories in a protective womb. Rhyme tells an easy story—womb to tomb to womb, and the worn curtains, with their torn lining sing of barriers being gently rubbed away by a child’s hands.

  II

  In the abridged version that welcomed me to Dickens, miss Havisham sits in her faded wedding dress. At 8, I could not understand how anyone could abandon wedding cake to dust and spiders—it was my favorite, royal icing an infrequent and thus treasured treat.

  In miss Havisham’s forever-preserved wedding day, a notion of time as desiccating, cobwebbed time, connecting then and now, this and that, potential and more potential. One holds onto time, relying on the tensile strength of memory, the fetish-power of things to ground one, anchors in time, across time, through time.

  This shrine unsettles me. Pieces of her then and now, here and there, being and becoming, but always frozen, the unvarying smile a testament to what lingers.

  I have grown careless with time, sure that it will pass and not return, averse to technologies that freeze it, that announce their freezing.

  I hate photographs.

  More than any other technology, they hold out the promise of freezing time, preserving one, but their glossy and matte surfaces refuse the reassuring comfort of pickles, the taste of time.

  Would that we could be pickled, our lives preserved with flavor, infused with where we have been, who we have been with, touched by the thousands of bodies we have met, touched, and loved.

  III

  I have been sneezing and blowing my nose, my body irritated by this move home, the familiar allergen-dust that plagued my childhood envelops me. In another age, they might have said I am expelling foreignness from my blood, clearing room for the household spirits to invade me.

  In the brief moments when I can see and breathe, I take in the familiar.

  Perhaps the story might be more complex, that I expel the blend of here and there, 7 years away and 12 hours at home.

  Many years ago, I suffered from the traveler’s disease, the adjustments to new food, new food-borne pathogens. Now, I eat without care, but I struggle to breathe and to sleep.

  I wonder if I should confess that I learned to breathe when I left home for the first time, and I am now re-learning how one gets around breathing.

  IV

  What lies behind the curtains?

  In the temple, only the elect could were allowed behind the curtain. One would tie a string to another’s leg and hope that one did not have to use the string.

  Faith. Trial. Error.

  And the little man behind the machine.

  I wonder what kind of faith one must have to keep drawing back one’s curtain, as though tomorrow the sun might rise elsewhere, or not at all. Or the feat that, thrown off-kelter, days and nights will no longer share the hours.

  Tomorrow might be off by one minute.

  As long as the curtains endure.

  They have not faded. The gold braid has darkened, oxidized like real gold, gained in value. And they still divide day and night, in and out, their shabbiness a testament to their labor.

  The curtains remind us that time acts unevenly on color: we fade and darken unpredictably, anchored by foregrounds and backgrounds, adornments and fringes.

• Now I’m Told

  Posted: August 25, 2008, 2:50 am by keguro

  
  

  A few months ago, I wrote that someone I know must have participated in the post-election violence.

  This weekend, I discovered that a close family friend was forcibly recruited by Mungiki, handed a panga, and ordered to create violence. He managed to escape from Mungiki after a few days.

  What was not offered, and what I could not ask, was what he did, did not do, might have done, might not have done, might have wanted to do, might not have wanted to do.

  These are the stories that no one told me over the phone or email, the stories that are, just now, filtering through as we continue to tally those who are still among us, physically, mentally, spiritually.

  These are the stories that are told sotto-voce, received with a “we were all mad in those days,” and filed away carefully, if we are to maintain the innocence of our friendships. Grateful that those we know survived, there are questions we dare not ask. It’s easier, though not easy, to record strangers’ observations. It’s more difficult to rewrite the histories of attachment and affection we term family and friendship.

  These are also the stories that should give us pause, the ones that should compel us to check self-righteous hubris of the “I would never have done that” variety.

  These are the stories that will come between us and join us, as we fear and protect our own. It is a story that I can tell on this space, where the web of my attachments is too diffuse to yield real knowledge, where it can only be evidence that someone “like me” also “went mad.”

  This is how we must speak of it: someone like me went mad. And in making that judgment, I turn away from one truth to one I can live with.

• Old Dirty Denim and Smelly Sandals

  Posted: August 23, 2008, 11:55 pm by keguro

  
  

  In earlier days, those who returned from abroad were part of an avant-garde of sorts, a misnomer, for they were really simply mainstream foreign fashion in Kenya. From them, we learned about mini-skirts, and 10-inch boots, Goth-light, and the charms of baggy and tight, leather and lace. One of my siblings taught me about asymmetrical skirts when she sported a faux-Madonna look many many years go.

  I have always felt that I disappoint when I travel home. I have tended toward the dowdy and comfortable—my old, torn jeans, my much-used sandals, 50 ct. tees, overalls that an old-time farmer would be ashamed to wear, and jackets that Goodwill would reject. I travel and live to be comfortable, and also, in some sense, to be true to the kind of “aesthetic” that I live, when not engaged in some professional activity. I should note that my visit to the store to buy the obligatory interview suit was one of the most unsettling experiences of my entire adult life. I chose this profession so that I wouldn’t have to suit up, or so I thought.

  I am in the midst of packing up for yet another brief trip home, and as I pack my much-loved smelly sandals, my cheap tees, my Goodwill rejects to face fashion-conscious Nairobi, and those friends who define, in their various successes, the face of forward-looking Kenya, I am anticipating once again unsettling and disappointing, being a certain kind of traveler, dowdy, travel-stained, rumpled, and comfortable.

• Between Blog Posts

  Posted: August 22, 2008, 3:53 am by keguro

  
  

  What happens between blog posts?

  I ask because of Sokari’s latest comment: “Thinking about blogging on something and not doing it is a sure sign of blogger paralysis / disinterest / being blogged out or on the verge of a blogging breakdown.”

  Although part of me agrees with this assessment, another part is interested in the processes of editing and self-censorship, the acts of valuation that determine whether a thought, a response, an opinion, or a theory should be disseminated as a blog post.

  I invoke here one key distinction between writing and speaking: writing allows one to re-consider, to re-think, to re-phrase, to re-frame. Writing allows a much-needed lag. One can choose whether or not to join a conversation, disclose private information, or respond to a harsh critic. One can choose to comment on a post or to send a private email.

  We might also consider the importance of those moments of silence—when blogs cease to exist as constantly updated documents and become records of a certain existence, an “x was here.” How should we respond to or interact with blogs whose authors have died from HIV/AIDS complications or those who are political prisoners? What kind of testimony or witness do those blogs contain? What is their afterlife? Who values them and how?

  At stake is also a question of what a blog post might accomplish for the author and for readers. For instance, despite my reluctance to post on “academic topics,” I have used my blog as a pensieve (thanks HP!). Many ideas in my dissertation first saw light as tentative posts (what is the relationship between race and desire, between belonging and allegiance). I have refined many ideas, used and discarded others, have vacillated stylistically and theoretically.

  I have stepped outside of academic conventions of writing, the citation, the complete argument, the counter-argument, and have practiced more idiosyncratic ways of accumulating and disseminating knowledge, even when I don’t fully know or understand what it is I am trying to say. The semi-academic blog has allowed me to be half-digested and half-digestible, to risk a kind of thinking that my training tells me should not be seen.

  There’s something pleasurable and even magical about first fumblings—Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between continues to fascinate me because of the richness it dares to imagine.

  And there is something intriguing about the unfinished blog (what is a finished blog? What is a complete blog post?).
  * * *

  Perhaps, then, there are not so much arguments that come after the archive as ones that can begin to articulate themselves only after the work of archiving has begun, arguments that can situate themselves, or discover themselves, only in the interstices of the elements assembled here, arguments that can enact themselves as aftereffects of the work of assemblage, arguments, thus, that will find themselves serially disassembled and reassembled as that archive unfolds itself.—Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic

  To think of a blog, a series of blog posts, a blog ring, a blog community, or even thematic blogs as kinds of archive might seem presumptuous. To say that queer blogs or feminist blogs or Kenyan blogs (and self-descriptions are important) constitute an unfolding argument might be to create a false sense of coherence, yet no more false than such self-driven affiliations allow. After all, the blog, more than any other contemporary medium, represents a moment of individuation, a being and becoming idiosyncratic, even while exemplary. (My own blogging tics—parenthetical remarks, fragments, divided sections, switches in syntax and language, are hardly unique.)

  Not to mention the turning of blogs, blogging, blog work into an “assemblage,” a kind of archive makes academic a form and format that ostensibly resists formalization. Yet, we know that archives are not only for academics. We live at a time when we have greater access to archives than ever before because of technology, when we can re-think, re-evaluate knowledge and history in unprecedented ways. We live at a time when, perhaps ironically, Time Life, with its edited histories (“the 100 greatest love songs!”) has become a paradigm for the kinds of histories that we individually and collectively create.

  Events happen. We have become increasingly creative in how we apprehend and disseminate their happening, in how we record and narrate.
  * * *
  What if blogging disinterest and blogging breakdowns are constitutive elements of blogging? How would we think about this?

  I have suggested previously that I consider blog archives to be as important (if not more so) than continually updated content. Of course, new content is vitally important—as any number of politically-oriented blogs prove. But the student in me, the person interested in “story,” also relishes how blogs evolve.

  How does tone change? What events receive continuous coverage? When do authors opt to use images or clips and when do they choose text? What kind of images accompany text and when? (Larry’s recent decision to edit certain images and posts because of his new teaching duties tells a certain story about pedagogy; my own decision, not announced, to be less explicit about sex and to write more expository prose tells yet another story, one about how writing academic prose has changed my own rhythms, the lengths of my sentences, has both clotted and unclotted my prose, knotted and unknotted my ideas.)

  What rhythms guide blog posts?

  Kenya’s recent history changed the tenor of some blogs—many posts opened with “I don’t write about politics, but.” And this “but” is important. What happens when a blog begins when one is a student and continues on to life afterward, when priorities shift? A friend recently completed her degree and is now facing motherhood. As a reader, I am now reading new, unexpected conversations (“I’m worried that following childbirth my vagina might not be as tight”); this is not a conversation that I expected, but it fascinates me.

  Note: I’m headed to a place with spotty online access, so I’m reflecting, in part, on what it means to have blogged in a certain way, as I prepare for what might be a hiatus.
  * * *
  What determines blogging rhythms? What has to be written about? What demands to be let out? What asks to be put aside, mulled over, re-written? How do we think about narrative vs. non-narrative posts? Should all blog posts tell a story or have a point, or can one simply post a picture of a kitten (I like kitten pictures as much as the next person)?

  Finally, to return to Sokari’s provocative question: what determines whether one turns a thought, an idea, a hunch, or a story into a blog post? Perhaps talking about it over the phone scratches that particular itch.

  I have written as many or more blog posts as the ones I’ve posted that will never be published.

  Ultimately, for me, it comes down to writing: what does writing, public, semi-public, or private (for those whose blogs are password protected) accomplish that speaking might not? What do we choose to put down and what do we hold back? How do we value what is already put down (I have confessed, previously, my love for reading through an entire blog’s archives), and how do we value the silences that occur?

  How do blogs evolve? Sokari’s and more recently Ory’s decisions to open up their blogs to other writers tells a fascinating story about how blogs enable communities of writers and readers to forge a shared purpose.

  What about blogs that have no readers? What purpose might they serve for their authors? I retain the idiosyncratic belief that writing accomplishes something, and to think of blogging as writing enables different kinds of conversations about what it is we do when we blog. Not to mention, the process of writing a post like this, somewhat abstract, somewhat introspective (but not titillating) also invites speculation about what it accomplishes. It is, after all, way too long for most online readers and, even to my mind, not very compelling. So what compels me to continue?

  What counts as a writing life? What counts as a semi-public writing life? And, as always, I reflect on what it means to try to create meaning (an argument, a point, a record) about living a certain kind of life as a certain kind of person, to write a kind of record, no matter how ephemeral.

  On this, I return to Melvin Dixon’s wonderful 1992 speech, where he warns about the processes of erasure and censorship that constitute the de-queering eulogy, the citing of accomplishments that re-writes the late night romps with strangers, the queer rhythms of dance and play and pleasure and heartache and sickness and health that comprise queer lives, the daring to think differently (if not live so).

  It is important to record not only how one has lived and loved, but also how one has thought about living and loving.

• Afro-Genealogy: Roots, Rooting, and Rootedness

  Posted: August 21, 2008, 1:29 am by keguro

  
  

  The purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the roots of our identity, but to commit itself to its dissipation. It does not seek to define our unique threshold of emergence, the homeland to which our metaphysicians promise a return; it seeks to make visible all those discontinuities that cross us.
  * * *
  If genealogy in its own right gives rise to questions concerning our native land, native language, or the laws that govern us, its intention is to reveal the heterogeneous systems which, masked by the self, inhibit the formation of any form of identity.

  -Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”

  To root oneself is not the same as rooting around for something: one suggests fixing the other unearthing, both suggest ways of being in the world. One mode stakes a claim, the other claims a stake. Combined, both enact the complicated dance of all genealogical undertakings: to arrive where one might already have been, with each new arrival overwriting any sense of having already been there. One arrives to find that one used to be there, and is not. This, then, is not re-discovery. Time is not so generous as to allow a rewind, despite our technology.

  But to arrive again, like for the first time, is also to find traces of having been there: one feels the strangeness of the tantalizingly distant familiar. This sense might not be the undoing that Foucault seeks—and, in truth, I find myself not very interested in arguing against “identity,” though I have in the past. “Identity” names, misnames, negotiates, and re-negotiates multiple, differently constituted attachments, and we have yet to exhaust how these attachments are and mean.

  This post, though, arises out of another concern: the use of DNA testing to pursue genealogical paths.

  In 1915, W.E.B. Du Bois published The Negro, a short transnational history of blackness that he would later expand in his 1939 Black Folk, Then and Now. Demonstrating Franz Boas’s influence, Du Bois opens with the provocative claim that Africa has always been a place of crossed bloods. He extends Boas’s critique of racial purity in Euro-America and posits that Africa arises from similarly complex crossings across race and ethnicity. Here, what is startling and still to be explained is that Du Bois takes inter-ethnic crossing to be as identity-constituting and identity-fracturing as inter-racial crossing.

  There is much more to be said about this particular conceptual and re-historicizing strategy, especially if we contrast Du Bois’s stance to that of E.W. Blyden and Marcus Garvey, both of whom imposed a model of racial homogeneity onto ethno-diversity, flattening important differences among various African peoples.

  The promise of DNA testing for many Afro-diasporic peoples is that it might reveal where their ancestors may once have lived and loved, have traveled and married. DNA roots—plants and searches.

  To my mind, such research tells us more about movement and travel. It tells a contingent story: at this moment, in this year, this individual was in this place. And in telling such a story it opens up narrative possibilities. How did this person come to be in this place at this particular time? What kind of life situation allowed this person to travel to this place? To live in this place? To love in this place? To be captured in this place?

  Rather than fixing in place, DNA histories might give us insight into the contingent practices of community formation and re-formation: siblings who traveled together and apart to form unique and related family groups; ethno-groupings that are occasional, disrupted, disruptive.

  What might the Afro-diasporic critique of identity (Gilroy, Gates, Carby) offer to continental Africans?

  We might discover ourselves as Africans, more continental, more multi-ethnic, less rooted than we imagine ourselves. As we foreground histories lived as migrants and nomads, traders and hustlers, as bride-kidnappers and husband-exchangers, as polyamorous and poly-ethnic, we enrich what we take be idiosyncratically specific (I am x from y) by enlarging possibilities.

  In such a scenario, Afro-diasporic researches into and complications of identity have much to teach complacent Africans about our own forms of diversity, about the historically situated aspect of how we have come to be specific, and the stories of how we have always been more diverse than we imagine or claim.

  We risk being Legion.

  DNA histories might allow us to root differently, with urgency and care, pleasure and possibility.

• Archives and Arguments I

  Posted: August 20, 2008, 9:06 pm by keguro

  
  

  Perhaps, then, there are not so much arguments that come after the archive as ones that can begin to articulate themselves only after the work of archiving has begun, arguments that can situate themselves, or discover themselves, only in the interstices of the elements assembled here, arguments that can enact themselves as aftereffects of the work of assemblage, arguments, thus, that will find themselves serially disassembled and reassembled as that archive unfolds itself.—Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic

• Kenya’s Best and Brightest

  Posted: August 15, 2008, 3:33 pm by keguro

  
  

  I remain in thrall to the myth that Kenya will be “saved” by its “best and brightest.”

  It is one of the founding myths of our country. The myth comes from that period when one young person’s achievement reflected on an entire village, district, and people, a practice that continues, albeit in modified form, in the published lists of top students. It is a myth that tethers individual achievement to social development, hence we are encouraged to be proud of Kenyans who have attained multiple degrees, though such achievements may be too removed from any quotidian we inhabit.

  I am not saying that we cannot be proud of what we accomplish, but that we need a more measured approach to what we consider the function of the “the best and brightest.”

  It strikes me, for instance, that of the many brilliant students and amazing leaders I knew from top schools, Alliance (both), Kenya High, Strathmore, Lenana (had to throw that in), Kianda, Mangu, add what you will, few, if any, have gone into public service, even fewer dare to venture into politics. Their successes—and they have been many—live, very profitably, within the private sector. In fact, the products of national schools—ostensibly our best and brightest—form the backbone, or at least a prominent vertebrae, of Kenya’s successful, private-based middle-class.

  To say this is not to cast aspersion; after all, with my recently concluded degree, I will also join the ranks of those whose work lives elsewhere—my knowledge circulating more abroad than at home. (I will quickly add that as compared to many of the people I knew, I rank as solidly average—Kenya has some frighteningly brilliant people. I rank nowhere among “the best and the brightest.” I’m simply privileged to be part of their posse.)

  As I have noted in several other posts, this turn away from public service, often accompanied by moves abroad, is more complex than we tend to grant. Many of us left or turned inward because we had to—universities closed too frequently; the socio-cultural climate was toxic; the political air suffocating. And, given my distaste for martyrdom, I remain unconvinced by those who demand that those abroad return home to effect change. (This, too, is part of the myth of “the best and brightest,” that those from “there” can do something those from “here” cannot,” and it’s really quite silly. I have more brilliant Kenyan friends at home than here.)

  I’m rambling.

  I do have two somewhat coherent thoughts.

  One, history has taught us that “the best and brightest” is an almost useless designation. Kenyans are wildly innovative, and the narrow measures we use to judge excellence and support it—school grades, internationally recognizable achievements and qualifications—don’t necessarily translate in public, civic-minded ways.

  Which means, of course, that we need different ways to nurture our disparate, antinomian talents, different ways to discover who we are and what we can do without limiting ourselves to narrow test scores. (This has been happening for a long time; I simply want to mark it.)

  To my mind, we need to get rid of the construction “best and brightest,” designate it an archaic holdover that had a certain historical function that no longer obtains—and those better versed in economics and neoliberalism will have far better explanations than I can muster.

  We need to nurture various forms of excellence and creativity. I can assure the many teachers who punished me that being caned did not improve my math abilities. 2+2 is still 56.

  Instead of continuing to pin our hopes on “the best and the brightest,” whoever those might be, we might pay more or at least equal attention to the interesting, the creative, the strange, the unusual, the ordinary, find ways to nurture a sense of civic-mindedness and public service, provide financial, social, and cultural support to those whose visions and versions of who we are and want to be might not coincide with official government desires, but will direct us in unexpected and profitable ways.

• Political Botox: Old Kenya, New Kenya

  Posted: August 13, 2008, 1:36 am by keguro

  
  

  When my good friend WM first mentioned her idea for Generation Kenya, a celebration and retrospective of the past 45 years, I remarked, partly in jest, that we would have to guard against the relentless botoxing that proclaims 40 the new 30, 50 the new 20, and 60 non-existent. If, on the one hand, we wanted to avoid a narrative of seamless development and maturity (as though aging is ever effortless), we also wanted to avoid freezing time, marking 45 as a new beginning, to avoid the midwife-effect of retrospect and nostalgia.

  Following the lamentable period, Generation Kenya morphed in unexpected ways, turning not into who we had been but who we were becoming, how, at 45, we were dealing with new challenges, forging new relationships, extending relationships of care and caring. Little of this needs to be repeated and, in truth, I admit to a certain weariness regarding the “what went wrong” motif that understands the lamentable period as an unexplainable rupture divorced from the histories that nurtured it.

  But there continues to be an idea that following the lamentable period we live in a new Kenya, a different Kenya. No consensus exists regarding how that difference should be parsed. It’s difficult to name what appears to be a new sensibility, though I write this from a distance and with a jaundiced eye.

  Botox provides an interesting metaphor through which to frame the changes we have at 45.

  Known best as the poison that, in small doses, paralyzes muscles, erasing years and facial experiences, it is also used to control excessive perspiration. In fact, its effects remind one of the endlessly innocent Kenyan politicians, whose continual re-election despite corrupt alliances and disastrous leadership suggest that the Kenyan public is all too willing to accept botox beauty as truth.

  Botox promises to freeze time, to hide the effects of having lived a particular way and having aged through one’s actions. It claims to erase the past but the botox face is so unnatural in its appearance that it makes visible what it seeks to deny: that one has a poisoned face, a mask dipped in toxin.

  I must admit to being skeptical that following the lamentable period we now live in a new Kenya. I am not interested here in repeating a self-defeating, cynical mantra that nothing ever changes—I have some political hope. But I am interested in arresting the narrative that, even now, is being written about living in the “new” Kenya, the post-election Kenya, ostensibly a place changed radically as we discovered facts we wish we hadn’t.

  Post-election Kenya has changed. We are now more aware of how fragile some of our bonds are, even as we are aware of how amazing our alliances are. We have learned—are still learning—how not to take for granted who we assume ourselves to be even as we continue to use old tools to hold on to needed bonds of identification. To take just one example, we have re-discovered the national anthem as a national prayer, as aspiration and inspiration.

  But amidst the changes there remain old alliances, patterns of thinking and living that we should be careful not to overlook. We cannot assume that the lamentable period was a botox injection that has now given us smooth brows, erasing lines of care.

  We cannot, at 45, accept the cosmetic option that some seem to be offering in discussing the “new” Kenya. (The seemingly unlined faces of our politicians as they negotiated deals a few months past continue to give me nightmares.)

  Kenya at 45 has a lined, furrowed brow, and some of the lines will be permanent, as permanent as the scars accompanying our tumultuous birth as a nation. We are not a new Kenya, simply an aging one. And that’s okay.

  Still, I don’t want to end on “that’s okay,” because I think botox is harmful. It freezes what should be displayed, hides what should be seen, un-ages even as it ages into agelessness. It makes visible the act of hiding, creating a dangerous façade.

  We have had enough dangerous facades, and the new Kenya might be yet another one.

  How, then, to think about the ongoing Kenya, Kenya at 45, as a product of Kenya at 1 and 15 and 30?

  As should be apparent, I have no real argument, but I am uneasy, and if nothing else, the past few months have taught me to heed raised hairs at the back of my neck.

• One More Note on Kenyan Education

  Posted: July 27, 2008, 9:48 pm by keguro

  
  

  I have been following, sporadically, the events unfolding in Kenyan secondary schools. I have been following with more interest the various theories attempting to explain “student unrest.” Today’s students, I have learned, lack discipline; have inattentive parents; are overly privileged; lack toughness.

  Whether commentators are sympathetic or not, an ongoing refrain is that “we” who have already been through the system “made it.” It is this claim that concerns me. In praising our “toughness,” our “tenacity,” our “fortitude,” we efface, or at the very least obscure, what might be more useful questions.

  Under what conditions do students succeed? How can we achieve those conditions? How can we maximize those conditions?

  Approaching secondary school as an obstacle course to be completed under harsh conditions is counter-productive. We should not be proud of succeeding “against the odds,” nor should that be what we expect of students today.

  Students have a right to complain that they must study four years worth of education to be competitive in a two-hour exam consisting of, at most, 50 random questions. Those of us who have taken national exams know they are rarely cumulative, often comprise less than a year’s worth of knowledge, and test memory, not native intelligence.

  Students should complain about over-crowded classes, poorly constructed dormitories, harsh prefects and teachers, restricted access to their parents and guardians, and poor nutrition.

  Students should have smaller class sizes. They should have no cause to imagine that their work is gratuitous. They should be able to forge relationships between what they study and how they live. If this means that at least two terms, if not a year, of secondary school is spent pursuing some kind of internship or externship—and I think this is a great idea—then so be it.

  We should not be proud if we ate weevil-flavored beans and undercooked ugali, if we lived on poorly cooked githeri and unpalatable porridge, if we learned to love stale bread and dirty water we called tea. We should not think well of ourselves for “doing well” despite overcrowded classrooms and overly strained teachers. We should not believe that education is about overcoming adversity and beating the odds.

  Under what conditions can students succeed—and I have a generous definition of success that goes beyond merely achieving good grades—and what can be done to maximize those chances?

• Racism: Not Just by Racists

  Posted: July 25, 2008, 9:52 am by keguro

  
  

  We need to question the belief that only “racists” perform racist acts. It is a belief that continues to be used to excuse racist acts. Indeed, the cry that x person is not a racist, is simply “ignorant” or just “misspoke” attempts to mitigate the injury of the racist act.

  How do we begin to parse this?

  In part, the idea of “the racist” seems to defy history—and this is where we must begin. If race is socially constructed, then racism must also be socially constructed. Now, to be sure, the idea of social construction needs more elaboration than I can give. In its glib, irresponsible version, social construction seems to suggest that “things” don’t exist: there’s no “truth” to race or sex or gender or even class. In this irresponsible version, deprivation and oppression can often be attributed to perception (it takes a special type of student to argue that poverty is socially constructed, as one of my special students once did).

  In the version I prefer, and use, social construction directs us to history and historical change. It tells us that racism under slavery is not quite the same as racism after slavery or racism after civil rights. It suggests that the causes of racial animus and antagonism change along with history. But to accept this version also requires that we attend more carefully to how racist acts manifest, and to that slippery place between act and identity.

  We might twist this argument around to this: if a racist act can only be performed by a racist (which is taken as a substantial identity), then act is predicated on identity and thus non-racist individuals (those whose identity is not defined by racism) cannot perform racist acts. This line of reasoning has been used over the past few years to excuse racist acts: “x individual is not a racist (by character) and thus the statement made was not racist.”

  We can state two objections. First, we can return agency to the site of injury by stating that the person against whom the racist act is performed has the authority to term the act racist. We have ceded this position too often, too quickly, been shamed into silence. And it is a position we must reclaim.

  Second objection, and this is where I depart from King: we cannot trust that a person’s character guarantees one’s actions. As an aside, one might note that King’s seeming opposition between color and character, while rhetorically powerful, is theoretically sloppy and historically irresponsible, especially given the complex intertwining between color and character in racial histories.

  “Racist” is not an identity that precedes an act but a temporally unstable designation, one whose temporality is uneven, contingent, sometimes lasting, sometimes fleeting. Some people display racist acts longer than others, for entire lifetimes, others for minutes or seconds. There is a complex algebra (perhaps alchemy) to racism that deserves even more attention than we have dared.

  Understanding the designation “racist” as historically and temporally contingent offers a more flexible, more usable concept than does using it as a kind of ahistorical identity. Simultaneously, returning agency to the bearer of injury, and taking seriously the injured party, offers a more historically responsible mode of identifying racist acts and their effects.

• Notes on Bullies

  Posted: July 24, 2008, 10:49 pm by keguro

  
  

  The figure of the bully in Kenyan schools is both loathed and respected. Those of us who lived under bullies—the under being quite literal as one strategy required younger, weaker students to lie under a bully’s bed—speak with admiration of the more inventive bullies, those who went beyond simply making one wash socks and performed pseudo-scientific experiments. We knew how electricity moved through bodies because we were attached to live wires.

  We learned to enjoy our calluses, to boast of having endured the worst. Those of us who were less bullied were deemed less worthy. In retrospect, the notion that one’s worth relied on one’s ability to endure pain and humiliation should give us pause. We were learning how to relate to power and authority, with submission and resentment, praise and even grace. We were learning that normal social relations consisted of repeated exposure to violence.

  We learned to attach respect to violence, to understand violence as ordinary, not needing comment, essential for daily life. It was a lesson that was reinforced by fevered imaginations of Nyayo House, a place that linked the ruling philosophy to torture, suggesting that the ruling philosophy consisted of torture. In our minds, the elite military General Service Unit (GSU) was the arm of government dedicated to taming recalcitrant university students and political dissidents. Those of us whose primary schools abutted the main universities witnessed university students fleeing through our corridors as the government tried, once again, to beat them into submission.

  There is a complex multi-layered narrative to be told about how the figure of the bully became inextricably bound to education. Bullying became normative and normalizing, creating us as students and citizens.

  It should come as no surprise that one of the first proverbs we learned was “asiyefunza na wazazi hufunzwa na ulimwengu.” Pedagogy and discipline, discipline and violence, discipline as violence, and a world eagerly awaiting to teach.

  The relationship between pedagogy and discipline, pedagogy and violence, extends into all areas of Kenyan thought and action. Even outside of strictly pedagogical settings, we continue to understand living as a mode of pedagogy. The claim, “I learned so much,” uttered after church services, business meetings, and conferences speaks, I think, to the hold that pedagogy as a mode of living has on our collective identity.

  Yet, if the scene of pedagogy is inextricably bound to discipline and violence, and if pedagogy defines, in some substantial way, what it means to be Kenyan, then we have to contend with the centrality of the bully within our national imagination, for this figure mediates, in an important way, how we approach the national everyday.

  Theorizing the centrality of the bully to our self-imagining as a nation requires that we contend with the difficult task of recognizing we rely on and desire this figure. In some perverse way, we need the bully. Our continued encounters with this figure confirm that we belong, that we learn, that we survive, that we are. This is why a gathering of those who were bullied invariably returns to those scenes of humiliation and pedagogy: groups of “old boys” confirm their shared sense of belonging by discussing monsters-turned-teachers and friends.

  If we are to confront the specter of the bully that lies at the heart of who we imagine ourselves to be, memories need to be recalibrated, turned into opportunities for self-critique. We might begin to ask the difficult question of how we learn to love, or at least revere, our submission. Confronting the revered bully means re-thinking how we have become who we claim to be. It means changing the nature of our anecdotes, refusing the uneasy laughter of those who learn to laugh through pain.

• Reported

  Posted: July 8, 2008, 7:07 pm by keguro

  
  

  A: One of my students is from Africa. He speaks African.

  Thoughtful pause

  A: Maybe he speaks South African?

  Thoughtful pause

  A: No, he definitely speaks African, not South African.

• iStop, iLook, iLive

  Posted: July 8, 2008, 5:56 am by keguro

  
  

  This past academic year the buses here started flashing this sign—in addition to their usual “Smile, It’s Sunny!”

  When I move, I will miss buses telling me to smile and live.

• Un-Puzzle Me

  Posted: July 1, 2008, 7:01 am by keguro

  
  

  Before she abandoned the internets for a rich life elsewhere, Mutumia posted a cryptic ad featuring the herbalist Ssenga Biliwa.

  Among the many treatments, Ssenga Biliwa offers to help “Develop those twin towers (flaps) in 2 days.”

  Wise readers, what are “twin towers (flaps)”?

• James Bond: Notes Toward an Argument

  Posted: June 30, 2008, 10:05 pm by keguro

  
  

  I need to step away from Tutuola for a moment—I have 2-3 more posts planned, one on his use of similes—so I thought I’d look at the most protean figure emerging from post-imperial Britain, James Bond. Ian Fleming published the first Bond novel, Casino Royale, in 1953 and the first film, Dr. No, was released in 1962. Translated into Kenyan time, the first novel is published shortly after the emergency is declared in 1952 and the first film released right before independence in 1963 (India 1947, Ghana 1957).

  Framing Bond’s emergence and dissemination within Kenyan histories permits us to ask about its historical function in relation to Britain’s imperial decline. Given Kenya’s not great literacy rates at independence (I have no real numbers, but it seems safe to assume it wasn’t great), the Bond films would have reached wider audiences than the books. In fact, Bond’s flashy gizmo, intrigue-filled world thrills whether or not one understands the actual words spoken by characters. This is key.

  James Bond is one of the most ubiquitous figures across the commonwealth (to use an old, useless designation). Unlike empire, Bond never dies. And his persistence speaks to a fantasy that the imperial masculinity he embodies never dies. Moreover, as a protean, phoenix-like figure, a model of impossible masculinity, Bond represents an unattainable fantasy that affirms every single claim about the superiority of imperial masculinity.

  To understand Bond in this way is to approach a fantasy of post-imperial masculinity as an imperial residue.

  In the non-note version of this reflection, to be pursued one day, I am interested in how the figure of Bond mediates the relationship between Britain and its former colonies while also helping to forge bonds among those former colonies.

• Gay Pride

  Posted: June 28, 2008, 1:24 am by keguro

  
  

  Kai Wright offers a beautiful meditation on why it matters to everyone, not just “the gays.”

  I refuse to argue, for instance, that I didn’t “choose” to be gay. Sure I did, and that’s what’s great about it. Every openly gay person has had to make an active choice to reject shame and embrace his or her own, self-defined sexuality; that’s a step a whole lot of straights could stand to take, too.
  . . .
  Maybe if we gays reclaimed our posts at the frontline of the fight for sexual liberation, we could lead everyone in figuring out how to do that. Then we’d all have happy, proud sex lives that are both disease-free and riotously fun.

  I’ll just note that increasingly I am more interested in thinking about what it means to “choose to be gay,” a notion that, to my mind, is much more radical than we often allow. That for another post.

• The Language of HIV/AIDS

  Posted: June 25, 2008, 11:26 am by keguro

  
  

  Readers of Paula Treichler will recognize the allusion to her groundbreaking work, which examines the discursive construction of HIV/AIDS. I have taken the list below from IRIN/Plus News (via Jeremy’s blog, where I came across it).

  Angola
  Portuguese

  • Pisar pisar na min - Contracting HIV is like having “stepped on a landmine”
  • Bichinho - “Little bug” (the virus)

  Kenya
  Kikuyu, spoken mainly in central Kenya

  • kagunyo - “The worm” (euphemism for HIV)

  Nigeria
  Hausa, spoken mainly in the north

  • Kabari Salama aalaiku - Literally translates as “Excuse me, grave” (reference to AIDS)
  • Tewo Zamani - Translates as the “sickness of this generation” (another reference to AIDS)

  Igbo, spoken mainly in the east

  • Ato nai ise - “Five and three” (5 + 3 = 8, and “eight” sounds like “AIDS”)
  • Oria Obiri na aja ocha - “Sickness that ends in death” (euphemism for AIDS)

  Yoruba, spoken mainly in the west

  • Eedi - “Curse”
  • Arun ti ogbogun - “Sickness without cure”

  Pidgin, the unofficial lingua franca

  • He don carry - “He carries the virus”

  English

  • HIV - He Intends Victory (acronym of HIV and a phrase popular among born-again Christians)

  South Africa
  IsiXhosa and IsiZulu

  • Udlala ilotto - “Playing the lotto” /ubambe ilotto - “won the lotto” (said of someone suspected of being HIV positive; Lotto is the national lottery)
  • Unyathele icable - Contracting HIV is like “stepping on a live wire”

  English

  • House in Vereeniging - (Acronym of HIV; “bought a house in Vereeniging”, a town about 50km south of Johannesburg, refers to someone suspected of being HIV positive)
  • Driving a “Z3″/ “having three kids”/ the “three letters” - All refer to the three letters in the HIV acronym
  • Tracker - If you are suspected of being HIV positive people say God is tracking you, like the popular southern African service that tracks and recovers stolen vehicles

  Tanzania
  KiSwahili

  • amesimamia msumari - “Standing on a nail”; euphemism for being skinny, or being small enough to fit on a nail’s head, referring to AIDS-related weight loss
  • kukanyaga miwaya - Contracting HIV is like “stepping on a live wire”
  • mdudu - “The bug” (refers to HIV)

  Uganda
  English

  • Slim - Euphemism for HIV/AIDS as a result of the associated weight loss; less popular since the advent of ARVs

  Luganda, spoken mainly in the central region

  • Okugwa mubatemu - You have been waylaid by thugs (contracted HIV)

  Zambia
  Nyanja, spoken mainly in the east and the capital, Lusaka

  • Kanayaka - “It has lit up” (refers to a positive reaction from an HIV test)
  • Ka-onde-onde - “Thing that makes you thinner and thinner” (HIV)

  Bemba, spoken mainly in the north and Lusaka

  • Bamalwele ya akashishi - “Those that suffer from the germ” (HIV-positive people)
  • Kaleza - “Razor blade” (Refers to a person being thin as a result of AIDS-related weight loss

  Zimbabwe

  Shona

  • Ari pachirongwa - “He/she is on a (treatment) programme”
  • Akarohwa nematsoti - “He/she has been beaten by thieves”
  • Mukondas - Abbreviation of “mukondombera” (epidemic)
  • Ari kumwa mangai - “He/she is drinking mangai” (mangai is boiled corn seedlings, which represent antiretroviral (ARV) drugs)
  • Akabatwa - “He/she was caught” (received a positive diagnosis)
  • Zvirwere zvemazuvano - “The current diseases” (the HIV epidemic)
  • Akatsika banana - “He/she has stepped on a banana and slipped” (someone who has tested positive and therefore will “fall” or die as a result)
  • Shuramatongo - “A bad omen for relatives”

  English

  • Red card - Like a football player being sent off, life is over
  • Go slow - Taken to mean that he/she is now progressing slowly towards death
  • TB2 - Refers to high rates of HIV and TB co-infection (used to denote AIDS)
  • RVR - Slang for ARVs, adapted from Mitsubishi’s RVR sports utility vehicle
  • John the Baptist - When someone has TB, he/she is said to have been baptised by “John the Baptist”, who has come to announce the coming of HIV
  • FTT - “Failure to thrive” (adapted from the medical phrase, now used to describe HIV-positive children)
  • Boarding pass - Implies that HIV is a boarding pass to death
  • Departure lounge - An HIV-infected person is in the departure lounge awaiting death

• Africa: Still Killing Her Sun

  Posted: June 24, 2008, 8:50 pm by keguro

  
  

  In 1963, Julius Nyerere penned an article with the optimistic title, “The United States of Africa.” He opened with a series of claims that are worth revisiting.

  There is one sense in which African unity already exists. There is a sentiment of ‘African-ness’, a feeling of mutual involvement, which pervades all the political and cultural life on the continent. Nationalist leaders all over Africa feel themselves to be part of a greater movement; they recognize a special responsibility to the political unit in which they happen to belong, but feel personally involved in the triumphs and set-backs of all other African countries. (1)

  I am struck by Nyerere’s evocative phrase, “happen to belong,” a phrase that recognizes the arbitrariness of national boundaries and denaturalizes belonging. Political units are neither organic nor inevitable. They are accidental, strategic.

  It is precisely this “happenstance” aspect of political units that allows Nyerere to formulate an inter-nationalist ethic. To recognize belonging as a historical accident permits us to look beyond our own units, to recognize that, given a nudge here or there, we might be in that political unit, not this.

  To recognize happenstance is to cultivate care. To see oneself in faces across borders.

  I begin with this utopian vision to shield myself from what follows, to modulate the cynicism against which our politics compel us to struggle.

  For better or worse, Africa exists as a political unit. As the (mostly western) press has it, the world has China, India, and Africa. We have tended, since independence, to insist that Africa has individual countries and is a continent. Increasingly, I wonder what we permit by insisting on our uniqueness, by embracing organic definitions of identity and identification, by taking accident for inevitability.

  My title is adapted from Ken Saro-Wiwa’s searing indictment of African politics, “Africa Kills Her Sun.” In the story, he explains, “that’s why they call it the dark continent.”

  A few weeks ago, Wambui Mwangi circulated an essay that reflected on what Kenya would have done to Obama. Briefly, the essay claims Kenya would have destroyed him, as it destroys so many of our strong, beautiful, talented citizens, stealing their dreams and feeding them bitter herbs.

  Her claims continue to disturb me, in part because I don’t want to believe in the dystopic vision she paints of Kenya. Yet, the list of names she offers is convincing, too convincing. Most tragically, perhaps, David Munyakei, without whose testimony the extent of the Goldenberg scandal would never have been discovered. We thanked him by ignoring him. He died like so many of our brave and beautiful, unrecognized.

  We have many unmarked graves.

  Whatever the outcome of Obama’s campaign, it will be tinged, across Africa, with the shame of what we permit, what we sanction by our silence, our inaction.

  Darfur.

  Zimbabwe.

  Mugabe, the tyrant we tolerate because were we to oppose him our own shameful nakedness might be exposed. Africa gave Moi a free pass. Africa gives Mugabe a pass. We seem to have an inexhaustible number of passes for warlords and petty tyrants. I wonder if we believe that our dead bodies will fertilize arid lands, if our legacy to the future will be human-enriched soil.

  With each passing day, the sun is stifled. We kill our sun.

• False Memories

  Posted: June 23, 2008, 8:35 pm by keguro

  
  

  I have a very distinct memory of reading a text or hearing a conversation or receiving instructions that if one walked around the mugumo tree backward seven times, one’s sex would change.

  The sharpness of the instructions is modulated by the fuzziness of the context, a fuzziness that makes me doubt the sharpness of the instructions. That I remember receiving them on the cusp of puberty induces me to believe in a queer ancestral memory, as though I chanced upon rituals secreted in hidden places, in trees, in the grass, in rocks, on the wind.

  I have, in the years since, tried to trace a textual origin for this memory, with no success. That I cannot find a source speaks, I think, not to my abysmal research skills, nor to my admittedly limited access to certain Kenyan sources, but to a necessary myth-making, an attempt to suture histories and traditions, to embed in and extend from there to here, here to there, who I was with who I was becoming.

  This process of constructing what Audre Lorde aptly terms a biomythography explains, in part, the intricate relationship between history and memory, the porous border between fact and fiction, the ability of the imagination to bridge what one is with what one desires.

  Increasingly, I am drawn to thinking more about this bridge between what one is and what one desires. This formulation sounds incomplete, as the more common formulation is “what one is and what one desires to be.” I truncate the common formulation to emphasize how desire creates un-anticipated futures and alliances.

  One desires not just for oneself but also for others. To wish another good is one of the great lessons of Christianity, and one that I carry with me. And the challenge of doing so is recognizing how that wish re-aligns one’s own priorities, re-orients one in unexpected ways. (I am thinking more about orientation these days due to Sara Ahmed’s work.)

  To orient and re-orient is also, to return to my opening, to traverse that fragile boundary between memory and fantasy, myth and reality, to seek in one’s imagined past resources for an unfolding present.

• loose vs. lose

  Posted: June 21, 2008, 9:10 pm by keguro

  
  

  The two are not synonymous verbs. Using them as such is not a stylistic choice. It is simply wrong.

  Posting inspired by this particular gem: “First the chap looses his arm in what must have been a traumatising accident at work.”

  Loose:

  • grant freedom to; free from confinement [syn: free] [ant: confine]
  • turn loose or free from restraint; “let loose mines”; “Loose terrible plagues upon humanity” [syn: unleash]
  • make loose or looser; “loosen the tension on a rope” [syn: loosen] [ant: stiffen]
  • become loose or looser or less tight; “The noose loosened”; “the rope relaxed” [syn: loosen] [ant: stiffen]

  Lose:

  • fail to keep or to maintain; cease to have, either physically or in an abstract sense; “She lost her purse when she left it unattended on her seat” [ant: hold on]
  • fail to win; “We lost the battle but we won the war” [ant: win]
  • suffer the loss of a person through death or removal; “She lost her husband in the war”; “The couple that wanted to adopt the child lost her when the biological parents claimed her”
  • place (something) where one cannot find it again; “I misplaced my eyeglasses” [syn: misplace]
  • miss from one’s possessions; lose sight of; “I’ve lost my glasses again!” [ant: find]
  • allow to go out of sight; “The detective lost the man he was shadowing after he had to stop at a red light” (dictionary.com)

• KenyaImagine

  Posted: June 21, 2008, 8:55 pm by keguro

  
  

  Has a new, very pretty site. If you’re not reading it, you should be.

  Even better, don’t just read, engage in the conversations taking place.

  Not affiliated, not being paid, just think it’s a really great and necessary space that could use more voices and eyes and perspectives.

• On Obama, a Kenyan Perspective

  Posted: June 21, 2008, 9:33 am by keguro

  
  

  By the inimitable Wambui Mwangi. 

• Naked Skulls

  Posted: June 21, 2008, 7:57 am by keguro

  
  

  It should be clear by now that I am slightly obsessed with Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard. Faced with Tutuola, I turn into Mr. Casaubon, convinced that it is the Key to All Mythologies. In big and small ways, at the level of ideas and the level of syntax, Tutuola provides a critique of Afro-modernity that remains unmatched by any Anglophone writer of his generation.

  (I need to manage this Tutuola-addiction.)

  My favorite narrative sequence in The Palm-Wine Drinkard is about the “complete gentleman.” Briefly, a “complete gentleman” visits a market and, while there, attracts the attention of the town beauty, a young woman who has refused to marry because she finds all other men lacking. Infatuated with him, she decides to follow him home, despite his repeated warnings that she should turn back. On the way home, he begins to shed parts of himself, returning his borrowed accoutrements, including clothing, limbs, and skin. Fully denuded, the “complete gentleman” is revealed to be a Skull. He imprisons the young woman in a community of Skulls and renders her dumb by tying a cowrie shell around her neck. The narrator rescues her. Of course.

  The tale of the deceptively beautiful young man is fairly common in African folktales. And it is striking that it’s often men, not women, whose beauty is considered deceptive. One could stage an encounter between urban and rural forms of masculinity here, and, following an East African vein, relate this sequence to that between Lawino and the absent Clementine. Interesting tangent. Will not pursue.

  Two questions: what does it mean that a “complete gentleman” is composed of a series of discrete, borrowed parts? And, what does it mean, especially within Afro-modernity, that the “real gentleman” is a silencing Skull?

  (I should confess that the African fetishization of “the gentleman,” and our point of reference is invariably “the colonial gentleman,” irritates me to no end. That we continue to valorize this figure and aspire to it is really quite silly.)

  In disassembling the “complete gentleman,” Tutuola makes visible the various elements that, cumulatively, create the gentleman, elements that, when disaggregated, function as fetishes, a term that has the same suturing effect as Afro-modernity. It sutures the anthropological-religious element with the psychic-capitalist. (Yes, I know, it’s a lazy formulation.)

  I raise this point regarding the fetish because I am interested in how authors such as Senghor and Kenyatta re-embed certain anthropological-religious concepts back into their “African”/ “primitive” contexts from their abstraction in Marxist and psychoanalytic thought. Tutuola’s Afro-modern approach re-embeds such concepts in their African contexts while also leaving open possibilities for Marxist and psychoanalytic readings. In fact, I think Tutuola makes it impossible for us not to consider this suturing. (My best critics have suggested that I should distinguish between what texts do and what I do with them. I’m still learning. It’s hard for me not to fetishize the text as my Key to All Mythologies.)

  It is no coincidence that Tutuola de-structures the “complete gentleman” following WWII, the experience that transformed the idea of the colonial gentleman for many Africans. As is often acknowledged, African veterans of WWI and WWII acquired radically different understandings of white masculinity. Seeing white men killed in battle, vulnerable to dirt and disease, demystified white masculinity, often materializing what might have been, until then, quite abstract. But this materialization was also accompanied by a realization that white masculinity was an abstraction, a Skull, an idea that even many white men found difficult to realize.

  This is a complex double movement: simultaneously to make concrete what appears abstract while also making abstraction material. And it is one of Tutuola’s signature moves. It is also one of the reasons Tutuola is my drug of choice for thinking through the complexities of Afro-modernity.

  Tutuola does not follow a Senghorian line that opposes European abstraction to African feeling. He offers, instead, a meditation on Afro-modernity as a form of living death, anticipating Paul Gilroy’s provocative idea that Afro-modernity is inextricably bound to terror. This is one of those head-scratching ideas.

  The Skull’s “skullness” represents a form of living death and, through its actions, it traps others into forms of living death (as texter reminded me, slavery works its way through Tutuola’s corpus in any number of ways). It terrorizes the young woman by rendering her dumb and immobile. It needs her to be both, to embody living death for it. (Hegelians will recognize the origin of this formulation.)

  Freud writes that interpretation can continue interminably. There is no natural “finally.” One chooses among arbitrary endings. Here is one.

  Any analysis of Tutuola’s meditation on the “complete gentleman” and the “real gentleman” remains incomplete if it does not account for the young woman’s actions. The easy folktale reading is that she is punished for her pride, for refusing to marry the young men around her. I agree with this familiar interpretation. But we can pursue a “grown-up” reading.

  Unlike in similar folktales, the “complete gentleman or terrible creature” does not pursue the young woman. He does not attempt to seduce her. In fact, he warns her away, but she chooses not to listen. How do we think about her choices? This is where it gets hairy. We could argue that the “complete gentleman” misrepresents himself and, consequently, seduces her by default. But this explanation is unconvincing.

  If Afro-modernity represents a site of terror for the black subject, it also represents a series of decisions on the part of the black subject: to listen, to pursue. Although he approaches this question very differently, Robert Reid-Pharr, in his recent work, asks why we have been unwilling to grant the black subject (my term, not his) this ability to choose. This is not to deny the terror of Afro-modernity. It is, however, to stop making Afro-modern subjects purely re-active, to stop identifying resistance as the privileged signifier of agency within Afro-modernity.

  But now I have wandered far, and I still want to hit that “finally.”

  I am interested in a certain kind of conceptual density. And I often cross over into Skull territory. While Tutuola lends himself to this kind of conceptual play, he also warns about the dangers of pursuing Skullness.

  And it is this final lesson in humility that might be the most useful.

• Tutuola’s Children

  Posted: June 17, 2008, 7:17 am by keguro

  
  

  African novels of the 1950s and 1960s depict children as morally ambiguous characters. Perhaps no other author is as ambivalent about the figure of the child as Amos Tutuola. In The Palm-Wine Drinkard, children are invariably monstrous and rapacious. Instead of looking to adults for protection, children resent living adults, viewing them as embodying a present that forecloses the children’s own futures. In fact, the child represents the most vexing figure in this text.

  Here’s the background: the unnamed protagonist, who dubs himself “Father of gods who could do anything in this world,” rescues his wife-to-be from a disguised monster, “the complete gentleman” (I have a post on that coming up). Three years after this rescue, and their marriage, his wife “conceives” and “bears” a son:

  I noticed that the left hand thumb of my wife was swelling out as if it was a buoy, but it did not pain her. One day, she followed me to the farm in which I was tapping the palm-wine, and to my surprise when the thumb that swelled out touched a palm-tree thorn, the thumb bust out suddenly and there we saw a male child came out of it and at the same time that the child came out from the thumb, he began to talk to us as if he was ten years of age. (31)

  In Tutuola’s text, Afro-modernity is always a process of suturing through approximation—simile is his preferred tool. And here, note how the simile fails to clarify. The comparison between a swollen finger and a buoy (note the charming, if awkward, aural play on “boy”) is hyperbolic, even a little silly. I have yet to read an essay on Tutuola’s use of simile (I have done some research, but nothing exhaustive. But it strikes me that his particular use of simile as inexact and approximate implicitly theorizes the role of the hyphen in Afro-modernity, a continually resistant suturing. In Tutuola, Afro-modernity in Tutuola is always incongruent, slightly off, ill-fitting.

  But on to reproductive thumbs.

  Improper reproductions are not unique in mythology, be it Athena springing from Zeus’s head, or the Kamba springing from a deity’s knee. (It is the Kamba, right?) And if I were inclined to study Yoruba mythology, I might find a home-grown myth that accounts for this particular scene.

  What strikes me about this birth is how and where it takes place: the narrator’s wife is “pricked” by a palm-tree thorn while in the palm-tree farm. In this story, the palm-tree represents the ambivalent nodal point around which community is created, the site of appetite and conviviality. As an enabling midwife, the palm-tree thorn births this child and infects it with insatiable appetite. Of course, the title character is also known as the palm-wine drinkard, so the appetite might be a paternal inheritance.

  We can be less abstract about this: as soon as the child is born, he begins to destroy his parents’ lives. He eats all their food, destroys their neighbors’ property, and sows dissension. Like the many insidious child-figures we have come to love and despise through horror films (nod to Chuckie), this newborn child, “ZURJJIR,” is parasitic; he demands his parents’ care (he wants to be carried, for instance), while also preying on them, and, in fact, starves them through his excesses.

  There is much to be said about this “child.” He is born, in the text’s actual time, after WWII and in the midst of anti-colonial activism. To conceive of such a child as monstrous, devouring, corrupt, and insatiable, filled with terrible power, is, in retrospect, to re-think the birth of nationalism and uhuru, to examine the compromised character of an already suspect Afro-modernity.

  As readers of the text know, as soon as the child begins to exhibit this destructive behavior, his parents scheme to abandon him. They succeed eventually by giving his appetite for pleasure free reign. Although this particular child vanishes from view, the figure of the destructive child recurs throughout the text. In the figure of this child, Tutuola diagnoses a recalcitrant kernel at the heart of nationalist/anti-colonial/post-WWII that continues to bedevil us.

  The figure of the vanished child continues to haunt Tutuola’s text, and is especially present as the narrator and his wife leave Deads’ Town and encounter babies on the road to the town:

  We met about 400 babies on that road who were singing the song of mourning and marching to Deads’ Town at about two o’clock in the mid-night and marching toward the town like soldiers, but these dead babies did not branch into the bush as the adult-deads were doing if they met us, all of them held sticks in their hands. But when we saw that these dead babies did not care to branch for us then we stopped at the side for them to pass peacefully, but instead of that, they started to beat us with the sticks in their hands, then we began to run away inside the bush from these babies, although we did not care about any risk of that bush which might happen to us at night, because these dead babies were the most fearful creatures for us. (102)

  For anyone who has ever wondered, apparently the dead do mourn. We encounter, once again, the idea that a-socialized babies might be the “most fearful creatures”: they do not know, for instance, that they should step aside for the “alives.” And they come armed into death, “like soldiers,” following an instinct to mass and destroy, to follow and eliminate without provocation. This comparison with “soldiers” is one of Tutuola’s most explicit references to the heightened militarization of his time, and is obscene in its reference. (Note, again, the use of simile.)

  One more example.

  When the narrator and his wife “visit” the ironically named Unreturnable Heaven’s Town, the town’s children “whip and stone” them, “spit, make urine and pass excreta” on the narrator and his wife’s heads (62). (This, my future students, is one way to begin creating an argument: trace and analyze a repeated pattern in a text.)

  So, why? Why does Tutuola depict the baby/child as destructive, violent, and even perverse? Why does this child/baby symbolize the impossibility of a future? (This question is revisited, brilliantly, by Liyong in “Lexicographicide” and Saro-Wiwa in “Africa Kills Her Sun.”) There is a question here about the relationship between Afro-modernity and what Judith Halberstam terms “generational time.” How does Afro-modernity complicate an idea of generational time?

  But I want to avoid, for now, the difficult question of Afro-temporality (Mbembe on this) and approach the, arguably, more prosaic and slightly absurd question: what kind of world do we inhabit that a baby’s first reaction to “adult-alives” would be rage? Those of us who remain haunted by images from the post-election violence have, no doubt, thought about this question over the past many months.

  Tutuola’s perverse children are produced at the intersection of geo-political temporalities, as embodiments of an ending war and an ongoing struggle (and the question of whether WWII should be extended to cover the “long” nationalist period in Africa should remain open). They represent a certain recalcitrance embedded at the heart of Afro-modernity (and, here, Beloved comes to mind as an apt comparison). Strikingly, like Beloved, they are full of rage, not simply at individuals, but at the very idea of a history that cannot accommodate them.

  Now, this is incredibly rambling and all over the place. I’m trying to think about specific figures that recur in African fiction while also remaining faithful to Tutuola’s textual irruptions. I end, then, on the thought that these textual irruptions find their most vivid embodiments in the fleshly emergence of the baby-child, the kernel at the heart of a foreclosed Afro-modernity.

• Dear Obama, Good Health is Un-American

  Posted: June 16, 2008, 10:47 pm by keguro

  
  

  One of the most amusing, and distressing, elements of this election cycle has to do with food. Taking the dictum “you are what you eat” to its most absurd, some leading pundits have criticized Obama for daring to be healthy.

  At a time when America is in an “obesity crisis,” critics have said Obama is elitist for daring to eat “green vegetables” instead of processed food. He has been called “out of touch” for trying to stay in shape during a grueling election cycle.

  Eat junk, Obama. Be American.

  Edit: and smoke cigarettes.

• My 1980s

  Posted: June 16, 2008, 7:44 am by keguro

  
  

  Everyone liked Rick Astley and Sinitta, right?

  Forget being gay. This is what I call outing myself.

  To recover my badly damaged cultural capital, I’ll admit to knowing the difference between a fugue and sonata, if that helps.

   

• Casual Homophobia

  Posted: June 14, 2008, 12:35 am by keguro

  
  

  To think about laughter as the vector of cruelty asks something unusual. We tend to think of such a scene as obscene, one of the ultimate manifestations of evil. To laugh at the sight of another’s pain is somehow inhuman. That laugh, that cruel laugh, denies another’s humanity, refuses to acknowledge another’s pain.

  It’s sobering to realize that any study of laughter would be incomplete without considering the function of cruel laughter. In fact, it’s sobering to consider that, to the untrained ear, a sound we might associate with joy and comfort arouses fear and shame.

  Why begin this way? Shouldn’t a post titled “casual homophobia” open with a specific incident, demonstrate it is representative, denounce it, and end with a call for a better world? I like this formula, and have used it quite a few times. But not for this post.

  Unlike many others, I have been fortunate in that my experiences of homophobia have never resulted in physical injury. What has followed me, instead, is the laugh, echoing in its many variations, haunting my every experience of laughing with and laughing at, being laughed with and being laughed at.

  What lingers is the bitter aftertaste of taint.

  And this, I think, is what I mean by “casual,” not simply the for-grantedness of homophobia, but how it taints the quotidian. One develops calluses in strange places.

  Often, the laughter is not directed at me but at people like me, and this is especially true when it takes place in public, normative settings. Live comedy shows are especially reprehensible in this regard. Of course, I am humorless. I’ve yet to understand why misogyny and homophobia should be cause for laughter. And I have no patience with those who defend both.

  Yet, that defense, often in the shallow form of “everyone was insulted, so you weren’t singled out,” is part of the strategy through which homophobia becomes casual. Not simply acceptable, but casual. While “acceptable” bears within it an implicit moral judgment, casual seems more removed from the world of moral judgment, and this is part of what makes casual homophobia so insidious.

  The accusation that one is “humorless” silences critique and shames one into being part of a community that can “take a joke.” As an aside, this is why I find the claim that the number one characteristic individuals seek in their partners is “a sense of humor” to be uninteresting, if not downright silly.

  I have been thinking about cruelty because, unlike hate, which is often linked to homophobia, we seem willing to overlook cruelty. Any number of tv shows have the line, “children can be so cruel,” understood, it seems, as a fact of growing up, not a pattern of behavior that needs to be challenged, questioned, and remedied. In a strange way, where hate is difficult to sanction (and identify as such), cruelty often gets a pass.

  Of course, the idea that one can be cruel depends on understanding the injured party as worthy of recognition, deserving of consideration. I need not rehearse here the many arguments that demonstrate how queering dehumanizes, removing the queer from the domain of the human. And we might argue that the cruel laugh participates in this process by refusing to register the queer feels pain or believing that the queer deserves pain.

  One is presented with a set of impossible choices: laugh along and feel pain, laugh along and don’t feel pain, don’t laugh and feel pain, but never the option not to feel pain.

  And this foreclosed option exemplifies what is most cruel about casual homophobia.

• Watching Track on TV

  Posted: June 14, 2008, 12:28 am by keguro

  
  

  White Guy expected to win a race

  Three black guys beat him

  White commentator: “it’s hard to identify these guys”

  I think that’s called a punch line

• Without Internet (at home)

  Posted: June 14, 2008, 12:27 am by keguro

  
  

  I preface this by saying I live in a great place: every single coffee shop (all 4 of them, okay, maybe 6) offers free internet access, as do all the public libraries. And, of course, I could always go to school, where wireless is available everywhere.

  That said. 90% of my research, bill-paying, news reading, outside world communication takes place online. Not having internet for the past week. Pain. Much Pain. Incredible Pain.

  Time to catch up on news and blogging. Apologies for the flood that *might* ensue.

• My Sistas

  Posted: June 14, 2008, 9:54 pm by keguro

  
  

  Bad Weave or No Weave

  Choose Wisely

• Death in Tutuola

  Posted: June 6, 2008, 12:14 am by keguro

  
  

  But the path does not always lead to the desired location. What is important is where one ends up, the road traveled to get there, the series of experiences in which one is actor and witness, and above all, the role played by the unexpected and the unforeseen.
  —Achilles Mbembe

  It is considered bad form to begin an essay by stating one disagrees with an epigraph that one has chosen. And so, this will be about, and by, indirection, perhaps the only fitting way to discuss Amos Tutuola. What I find compelling about Mbembe’s epigraph is its metaphorical link between history and aesthetics, the real and imagined, captured, most powerfully, in the terms “path” and “actor,” terms to which I might return.

  So, we will follow Tutuola’s narrator as he enters Deads’ Town. We will recall, of course, that during his adventures on the path there, the narrator has resisted dying, insisting that death only makes sense when one enters into it alive. We might claim he enters into death as the undead, and certainly the dead react to his presence with the horror the undead elicit. But while horror films have taught us to regard the undead as the formerly dead, we might consider what happens if they are also the still living. There might be horror in the persistence of life in the face of death, the condition of being obscene (off-scene).

  For now, we will hold in abeyance, in sight and contained, the relationship between being alive and being undead. But also note what is always crucial in this novel, that to see oneself as being both alive and undead is to encounter the always shifting Tutuolian perspective: one is always seeing oneself otherwise, constantly experiencing one’s own strangeness. That the reader also experiences this being made strange stands as one of Tutuola’s lasting achievements.

  Let us be more concrete. On entering the land of the dead, the narrator and his wife meet an unnamed man (the absence of proper names, substituted by descriptions, is one of the peculiar features of Tutuola’s text), who offers them guidance. Following a brief conversation, the narrator and his wife set off to find the dead palm-wine tapster:

  [A]s we turned our back to him (dead man) and were going to the house that he showed us, the whole of them that stood on that place grew annoyed at the same time to see us walking forward or with our face, because they were not walking forward there at all, but this we did not know. (96; Grove Press, 1984)

  This passage will form the point of departure for what follows. But two other quick passages to add quiddity.

  [The tapster] said that [after he died] he spent two years in training and after he had qualified as a full dead man . . . he came to this Deads’ Town. (100)

  [The tapster] told us that both white and black deads were living in the Deads’ town, not a single alive was there at all. Because everything that they were doing there was incorrect to alives and everything that all alives were doing was incorrect to deads too. (100)

  To credit Tutuola’s critics: they have argued that his text critiques colonialism and slavery (ht texter), and the sentiment that racial harmony takes place only in the land of the dead speaks to both histories in this dystopic text. And here I must emphasize the historically situated nature of this text and Tutuola’s experiences in World War II. For Kenyan readers, historical coincidence adds a richer framework: published in 1952, The Palm-Wine Drinkard uncannily captures the experience of the emergency. (I should note here that historical coincidence, to my mind, is always a fun fact, less grounds for an argument.)

  In Deads’ Town, the fully qualified dead walk backwards and are insulted when Tutuola’s characters turn their backs to walk forward. (This, my dear future students would be a terrible topic sentence, as it is descriptive rather than analytical.) Two aspects stand out from this account. One, that in Deads’ Town the backwards walking dead always face each other. What death allows is what Fanon, drawing on Hegel, terms recognition. But it is always a representative facing: each dead person is always facing another dead person—there is something logically impossible about the idea that all the dead can face each other at the same time. (Logic is, of course, mostly suspended in Tutuola.) Another way to articulate this claim is that my recognition of you, my facing you, engenders recognition as a precondition for social being, not, as in Hegel and Fanon, an ideal to be achieved. To turn one’s back on another is to break the ever-proliferating sequence of facing, of recognition. (This idea can be spun multiple ways.)

  Equally crucial, the fact of recognition is bound to mobility. And it refuses the structure of moving forward, development and atavism, that structures colonial modernity. In Deads’ Town, one is always moving forward by moving backward. What is crucial, for Tutuola, is that one never turns one’s back on one’s interlocutor. One risks tripping over roots (as the narrator does) rather than turn away.

  I have recently asked what we owe the dead. And I believe Tutuola offers a remarkable answer when he claims, “everything that all alives were doing was incorrect to deads.” We are, I believe, in the zone of “owing nothing” and thus being perpetually indebted. But this is not, I think, a pessimistic reading, and is also not one that I will pursue right now. The question of the impossible, not merely paradoxical, will occupy what seems to be shaping up as a series of posts on Tutuola.

  Finally, I want to end by returning to the term “actor,” which Mbembe rightly identifies as a key concept in Tutuola. In Tutuola’s multiple worlds, one is always being judged on how one acts. In fact, Tutuola’s narrator is always unmasked when he acts incorrectly. But this is not just about proper etiquette. Especially in Deads’s Town, etiquette is wedded to ethics.

  To “act properly” requires walking backwards, with one’s face turned always toward another.

• Fissures

  Posted: June 3, 2008, 11:19 pm by keguro

  
  

  On May 6, 1979, Audre Lorde wrote a letter to Mary Daly to open a necessary dialogue on the relationship between black women and white women, race and gender. I turn to this letter to try to make sense of the profound frustration and sadness that accompanies a history-making moment in U.S. history, the campaign between Obama and Clinton. It is a sadness that is, I feel, shared by anti-racist feminists. We feel ourselves torn, not about which candidate to support, but about how race and sex have been used to score expensive points, about how race and sex, two categories that, only recently, have learned to speak with and not past each other, now seem to be talking at each other.

  Dear Mary,
  This letter has been delayed because of my grave reluctance to reach out to you, for what I want us to chew upon here is neither easy nor simple. The history of white women who are unable to hear [b]lack women’s words, or to maintain dialogue with us, is long and discouraging. But for me to assume that you will not hear me represents not only history, perhaps, but an old way of relating, sometimes protective and sometimes dysfunctional, which we, as women shaping our future, are in the process of shattering and passing beyond, I hope.*

  Unable to write anything of my own, I have turned to Lorde’s wisdom, her ability to forge alliances through critique, to give some voice to what remains inchoate in my own thinking. As Lorde knew so well, the process of turning feeling into thought and action can be difficult, if not impossible.

  Dear Mary,
  As outsiders, we need each other for support and connection and all the other necessities of living on the borders. But in order to come together we must recognize one another. Yet, I feel that since you have so completely un-recognized me, perhaps I have been in error concerning you and no longer recognize you.

  In this renewed period of la migra, living on the borders makes it dangerous to misrecognize each other. There’s a skill to reading tracks and shadows, distinguishing the trackers from the tracked. And the patterns we fail to recognize may be those that save us. Living on the borders, we read faces and bodies, scents and shadows. And the danger of forgetting what we have learned is a risk we dare not take.

  But we also live in history and the tracks and faces we once knew may no longer suffice. Our skills in shadow-reading become rusty. We risk inhabiting past habits. Those formed before our fragile alliances jostle with those of our fragile alliances.

  It is tempting to misrecognize each other, to hear every rustling on the borders as a threat.

  Dear Mary,
  This letter attempts to break a silence which I had imposed upon myself . . . I had decided never again to speak to white women about racism. I felt it was wasted energy because of destructive guilt and defensiveness, and because whatever I had to say might better be said by white women to one another at far less emotional cost to the speaker, and probably with a better hearing. But I would like not to destroy you in my consciousness, not to have to.

  I invoke this letter to say that the fissure between race and gender is not new but also that attempts at rapprochement are similarly not new. We have been speaking with, at, and to each other for a long time, and we have heard each other, often with great pain, recognizing our mutual misrecognition. I invoke this letter to note the shame of self-revelation. It is easier to be angry and resentful, to be silent and aggressive, than to admit one�