Items by keguro

Gukira

• Anglophone African Literature

  Posted: February 16, 2010, 2:49 pm by keguro

  Is Anglophone African Literature foreign literature? What makes literature “foreign”? And how does the designation “African” function? I ask this, in part, as a response to reading Dan Edelstein’s article, in which he asks, “Why do we still partition the literary canon according to nationalist traditions? Is this really the most intellectually satisfying and authentic [...]

• “Overproduction” of PhDs

  Posted: February 12, 2010, 3:43 pm by keguro

  I am trying to find some logical way to misunderstand what appears to be a bad joke at this stage of our collective history. While I understand, or am trying to, the institutional and structural changes taking place in the academy, I cannot wrap my head around the following dumbed-down statement. We are over-educating too many [...]

• Questions

  Posted: February 11, 2010, 10:20 am by keguro

  I have entered what I would like to think is a semi-productive hibernation period, when questions bubble, answers are few, and some interesting stuff happens. Here are three interrelated questions I am pursuing. 1. Did harambee kill unionization? And, if so, is it central to Kenya’s neoliberal history? 2. How does the changing image of the Kenyan abroad [...]

• Telling?

  Posted: January 30, 2010, 9:25 pm by keguro

  A chance remark catches my eye. On what the Kenyan media term a “miracle” deal on the draft constitution, Charity Ngilu comments, “If we failed, the people would take over like they did in early 2008.” She is right, the government “failed” in 2008. But, it seems, the government also “failed” to “control” the people. It [...]

• More Notes on Queer Africa: Toward an Intellectual Project

  Posted: January 11, 2010, 8:03 am by keguro

  I sketch, here, a series of notes, a number of interlinked ideas arising from the conjunction, or frottage, of two ongoing projects. It thinks through the “figure” of the homosexual within non-U.S. and non-European locations. Through Foucault, we have learned to think of the “emergence” or “appearance” of “the homosexual” or homosexual-like figures as central [...]

• xyz sexual minority orientation studies

  Posted: January 8, 2010, 2:30 pm by keguro

  A stray comment on an article in the NYT prods, not quite enough to grate.. The article itself replays a long-standing debate on the relevance of higher education, in general, and of the liberal arts, in particular. In such debates, and they are persistent, versions of gender studies and minority studies are always the worst [...]

• Post-Humor, or Without Evidence

  Posted: January 2, 2010, 7:02 am by keguro

  I have no evidence to support this claim. And it might already have been made. By several others in a range of forums. But one “returns” to blogging in dribs and drabs, a word here and there, a stray thought caught as it heads to “delete permanently.” And might be rescued. And “theorized” (humanists, someone [...]

• Ongoing Obsessions in African American Studies

  Posted: December 30, 2009, 1:31 pm by keguro

  I rarely blog about “the profession.” Make that, I have blogged rarely over the past few months. Yet, two sessions attended yesterday stay with me. One, I reference obliquely, the other I want to note here. Around 2004 or so, the exact date eludes me, a loose collective of schools in the Midwest started what [...]

• Afterlife of Exuberance

  Posted: December 30, 2009, 1:25 pm by keguro

  A session at the MLA has me thinking about the afterlife of exuberance, about how easy it has been (or seemed to be) to attach the person and actions of Obama to feelings and acts occasioned by his election, in part, but in no way reducible to his person or personality. In this prematurely post-Obama [...]

• Complex and Contradictory

  Posted: December 16, 2009, 2:45 am by keguro

  I am tired of reading that x is “complex and contradictory.” This is not an argument worth reading. It is barely an argument. It is a tic. It should be eliminated from all academic writing. But I still have to wade through that 1980s and 1990s stuff that states x is “complex and contradictory.” Ack! [...]

• Graduate Student Strike at U of Illinois, UC

  Posted: November 16, 2009, 5:32 pm by keguro

  Information Sheet The GEO represents 2,600 TAs and GAs on campus, providing help against grievances of sexual harassment, racial discrimination, sexual orientation harassment, and other types of harassment, discrimination, preferential treatment, overwork, and other types of exploitation. The GEO is one of the largest higher education union locals in the United States. (You can find [...]

• Queer Paresthesia

  Posted: October 27, 2009, 10:15 am by keguro

  A question in the Sunday Nation asks whether “Kenyans” have a “right” to “condemn the gay couple.” As phrased, the question posits “Kenyan-ness” as a relation to “rights,” to “morality,” and to “gay-ness.” I say relation, but perhaps the better word is “attitude.” To be Kenyan is to have an “attitude,” an “opinion,” an “orientation” [...]

• Fantasy Basketball

  Posted: October 24, 2009, 2:23 am by keguro

  According to my best friend, my best heterosexual friend, my idea of fantasy basketball is not quite what it is. Apparently most of the action does NOT take place in locker rooms.

• X Tourism

  Posted: September 25, 2009, 4:24 am by keguro

  For many of us, slum tourism represents a step back in our relation to mostly European and North American white tourists. We worry that the black bodies on display in our slums are akin to the wild animals that adorn the tourist souvenirs we sell. We worry, even more, that those who visit slums will [...]

• On Caster Semenya

  Posted: September 20, 2009, 12:00 am by keguro

  It is difficult to write on Caster Semenya. It is difficult because it participates in an ongoing spectacularization that, at this time, could probably not have been handled better. I write this not simply to be perverse, to go against the many people who have claimed it could have been handled better, but because I [...]

• Color

  Posted: September 16, 2009, 2:10 am by keguro

  The real color of the African is really purple and nothing else. Pauline Hopkins, 1905

• Purity

  Posted: September 15, 2009, 10:54 pm by keguro

  Unless we conquer our present vices they will conquer us: we are diseased, we are developing criminal tendencies, and an alarmingly large percentage of our men and women are sexually impure. W.E.B. Du Bois, 1897

• On History

  Posted: September 13, 2009, 7:55 pm by keguro

  It is true we are too busy making history, and have been for some years past, to be able to write history yet, or to understand and interpret it. Anna Julia Cooper, 1892 Beyond the common duties peculiar to woman’s sphere, the colored woman must have an intimate knowledge of every question that agitates the councils of [...]

• Dear Spam

  Posted: September 13, 2009, 6:34 pm by keguro

  I like you. At your best, you are inventive. At your worst, provocative. And while I am happy to read you and indulge in our dl love, let’s keep it dl. No need to be brazen about what we do off the page.

• On Politics

  Posted: September 7, 2009, 12:01 am by keguro

  And yet politics, and surely American politics, is hardly a school for great minds. Sharpening rather than deepening, it develops the faculty of taking advantage of present emergencies rather than the insight to distinguish between the true and the false, the lasting and the ephemeral advantage. Anna Julia Cooper, “Status of Woman in America” (1892) [...]

• Return to Sender

  Posted: August 20, 2009, 7:57 pm by keguro

  I return to the city where a thousand years ago, a friend announced his new-found love for Asian men, bought a wok, and learned how to make crispy tofu. He also met a young man, who subsequently moved in with him; consulted an expensive immigration lawyer on the young man’s behalf; discovered the young man [...]

• Mutahi’s Nightmares

  Posted: August 17, 2009, 6:19 pm by keguro

  Another nightmare would follow. A Korean homosexual midget was raping him. The man had walked through the wall and he stood there stroking his goatee. And there he was shrunk with fright . . . the Korean came closer, his eyes becoming more and more bloodshot . . . his face became menacing . . [...]

• Love Story

  Posted: August 17, 2009, 3:37 am by keguro

  How did you two lovebirds meet? I responded to his 419 letter. It was love at first lie.

• Leaving

  Posted: August 8, 2009, 9:04 am by keguro

  I am always leaving. Half-eaten avocados tan. Ibis cede hard-won ground to bully crows. Indecision rusts. It is too exposed. Red dust waits to erase untaken steps. We speak of full emptiness, hysterical pregnancies, camouflaged promises. In the morning, the baby snakes will be waiting. * Home has become difficult to feel. An acquired taste for jaded palates and [...]

• Perfect & Jood

  Posted: August 8, 2009, 9:01 am by keguro

  I return to learn that E. Lynn Harris has died. An outdated email message finally acquired from an account that was inaccessible from Nairobi. And so this return feels like other returns to other places, in which death notices serve as welcome mats. I have not read Harris’s novels in over ten years, and my [...]

• Break Up

  Posted: July 12, 2009, 11:00 am by keguro

  Dear . . ., You have begun to annoy me. You are everywhere. You are indiscriminate. You allow yourself to be used too much and too often. . . ., when we started this journey I loved your coyness, your knowingness, your wink-nudge-titter as much as I loved your cluelessness, your endless shrug, those tiny spaces [...]

• Obama in Ghana

  Posted: July 10, 2009, 12:36 am by keguro

  Obama’s trip to Ghana raises fascinating questions about diaspora as a mode of affiliation, about the kinds of choosing we must undertake to forge connections across histories, and also about the kinds of histories we make available as sites for identification. Ghana is, of course, one of the prime centers for such affiliations, if for [...]

• Un-Blogging

  Posted: July 9, 2009, 11:12 pm by keguro

  I have been trying very hard not to blog about Kenyan politics, Michael Jackson, James Bond, Agatha Christie, trash romance, cilantro and rosemary, the weather, ongoing research projects, visits to the archive, queer politics, queer sex, queer celibacy, hot daddies, Kenyan condoms, avocadoes, shades of brown, flowers and gardens, anti-intellectualism, Kenyan education, U.S. education, “the” [...]

• femiplan?

  Posted: July 3, 2009, 9:00 pm by keguro

  Dear Kenyan Heterosexuals, Please explain the difference between femiplan family planning condoms for men and “regular” condoms? What is the femiplan secret? Will it hurt gay men? Sincerely, Confused Queer

• Currently Reading: My Life in Prison

  Posted: July 3, 2009, 2:51 pm by keguro

  Salim Abdullah had been in that damn place [Mathare Hospital] for so long that he had forgotten the difference between a man and a woman. In his life, I guess, he had laid more men than women. If you did not know how to handle him, you could land in his trap. He had the [...]

• “Was” Racist

  Posted: July 2, 2009, 11:08 am by keguro

  What is the shelf-life of a racist text? Is there a point when it ceases to be racist? If there is such a point, how is it related to pedagogy? I am not, here, thinking of those texts whose racism has to be explained because it’s subtle or incidental. Nor am I really thinking of [...]

• Currently Reading: Goldfinger

  Posted: June 30, 2009, 11:12 am by keguro

  Who is this Pussy Galore from Harlem? ‘She is the only woman who runs a gang in America. It is a gang of women. . . . She is entirely reliable. She was a trapeze artist. She had a team. It was called “Pussy Galore and her Abrocats”. . . . The team was unsuccessful so [...]

• Stutters Break Time

  Posted: June 30, 2009, 9:38 am by keguro

  I am engaged in yet another conversation in which my interlocutor looks at me patiently, pityingly, and gently tells me that “this is Kenya.” I snap back that it doesn’t have to be. My interlocutor offers what can only be described as the woiye expression. I have been having these conversations for as long as I [...]

• Candid Obama

  Posted: June 26, 2009, 11:22 am by keguro

  Two candid shots of Obama stand out on the Obama wall. Both shots feature him seemingly unscripted, his suit crumpled, his face turned away from the camera. This is Obama at home in public. They are good shots, clear shots, evidence of solid, if unimaginative, photographic work. They are, in fact, evidence of the kind [...]

• Long Distance

  Posted: June 26, 2009, 8:46 am by keguro

  Your voice echoes and I ask you to repeat. Distance ghosts and prolongs haunting. We are always hanging up and re-dialing, looking for sunny spots where voices are less reedy, mis-timing the interval of a sentence. We are always breaking up. You are convinced that the right phone card will solve the problem, and have set [...]

• Shrines

  Posted: June 25, 2009, 9:30 am by keguro

  You mentioned, once, a trip you took in time. A childhood place where you hoped to find a long-ago laugh. Sound dissipates, and while yesterday’s waves linger in new configurations, happiness is not always waiting. I remember this as I review the list of places I shall not—because I cannot—return. One weighs the molding impress against [...]

• Ordinary Returns

  Posted: June 21, 2009, 10:13 pm by keguro

  Like my U.S.-born friends, I can finally write about the ordinariness of holidays, of traveling to see “the family.” It is not that everything is familiar, more that I can handle the unfamiliarity with greater ease, even when it is my own unfamiliarity. Returns “home” are invariably ethnographic, especially for those of us who travel infrequently. [...]

• Trying Sodomy

  Posted: June 21, 2009, 7:47 am by keguro

  Sodomy is always presumed guilty in Kenya. Last year, we discovered that sodomy debauches prisoners and this year we are discovering that sodomy debauches young street children. That it has similar effects on what are presumably two unlike populations speaks to its power as a corrupting force. In both instances, the discourse on sodomy produces a [...]

• Budgeting for Sodomy

  Posted: June 20, 2009, 9:23 am by keguro

  The news is discussing the budget and sodomy. It seems oddly appropriate.

• Hetero-Kenya

  Posted: June 19, 2009, 6:24 am by keguro

  He was the kind of guy every guy wanted to suck off. He inspired fantasies of teabagging. His ass inspired fantasies of rimming. * I have been thinking of ways to make evident everyday heteronormativity as an expectation linked to desire. Initially, I wrote, “he was the kind of guy every guy wanted to fuck,” but that was too easy. [...]

• Sounding African

  Posted: June 19, 2009, 6:05 am by keguro

  On the plane, a white man who lives in Maryland tells me that I don’t sound African. He is vaguely disappointed, and comments that I must have lived abroad for a long time. When he tells me that he has been to Tanzania I cut off that line of conversation. I don’t do comparative Africa [...]

• Alien vs. Immigrant

  Posted: June 12, 2009, 5:56 pm by keguro

  She asks if I’m an alien. For a moment, I am rendered silent. We are looking at a legal form, so the question has a context. Still, it is not a question that one is asked regularly. I mention that it is a strange question, and she replies that she was once an alien. She prefers [...]

• Returns

  Posted: June 10, 2009, 10:10 am by keguro

  Let’s begin with a much-rehearsed scene: the first visa interview when one is a student. Q: And what are your plans when you complete your degree? A: I will come home to help build my country. The answer is required, and is uttered, sometimes, with sincerity. This performance has been going on for as long as I can [...]

• Becoming Black

  Posted: June 9, 2009, 4:42 pm by keguro

  I have promised for some years to write about becoming black in the States. It is about another way of becoming ordinary, or experiencing a different kind of ordinariness. It is about the thingness of blackness, the hypervisibility of invisibility. And is such a banal story that its telling, its unfolding might be better passed [...]

• Playing Sex & Safe Sex

  Posted: June 4, 2009, 6:05 am by keguro

  The phrase “playing sex” lives at the junctions of class, age, geography, and education. My parents’ generation—those rural to urban pioneers, provincial to cosmopolitan mediators, history makers and consumers—use it. It is also a phrase found among domestic workers, rural to urban migrants, younger children. It conveys the difficulty of translating across life-worlds: from rural [...]

• Notes on Teaching

  Posted: May 31, 2009, 1:30 am by keguro

  It is always a risk to teach what one loves. Often, I choose to teach works I like but do not love, or authors I prefer, but do not adore. It is one of the great privileges of my chosen craft that I can introduce my students to those with whom I’ve had longstanding, if [...]

• The politics of outing

  Posted: May 19, 2009, 6:32 am by keguro

  Recent news that Kenyans are being outed online has me thinking about outing as context, and how one comes to occupy the political. Within the context of outing, one’s individual wishes and political stance are subsumed by another narrative. One is positioned as a homosexual, hailed as such, and must respond within the structure so [...]

• blowjobs for beginners

  Posted: May 18, 2009, 4:17 pm by keguro

  She approaches the bus stop dressed in her missionary best. A sweet-looking woman, grandmotherly—though not all grandmothers are benign, and she is not. She is slightly self-effacing, almost shy. As she reaches into her appropriately black purse, she seems to be struggling. No doubt, a wise doctor would diagnose social anxiety disorder and medicate her. [...]

• Scared of Intimacy

  Posted: May 16, 2009, 7:26 pm by keguro

  Assume, for a moment, that pop psychology mantras tell cultural truths. In this instance: men are afraid of intimacy. If one studies the politics of intimacy, especially those intimacies that arise from propinquity, it becomes difficult to understand how anyone can be unafraid of intimacy. In this instance, perhaps “men” have it right. It is intriguing, [...]

• Kenyan Masculinity

  Posted: May 10, 2009, 8:45 pm by keguro

  I am eager to burn this threadbare masculinity, this perpetual black suit I have outgrown. —Essex Hemphill Mutahi Ngunyi fascinates me, about as much as he infuriates me. He is a provocative thinker with, I am told, a loyal fan base. A friend tells me that “people read him” and “respond to him,” even “take him seriously.” And it is [...]

• Off-Desire

  Posted: May 9, 2009, 10:24 pm by keguro

  What is off-desire? Is it like off-white? What is it to have lost that thing that one was never sure one had? To ask this question is to begin to trace a history of desire. It is to ask what it means to desire and to lose it, or to lose some aspect of it, which might [...]

• Time

  Posted: May 3, 2009, 7:46 am by keguro

  Time to write an academic journal article, not including research: 3 months Time from submission to print: 6 months to 2 years Time to write a blog post, including research: 1 hour Time from submission to print: 1 minute

• Hauntings

  Posted: May 3, 2009, 7:40 am by keguro

  My father played piano. It was haunted. His eyes would be intent on the page, never looking down at his hands, his feet on the pedals, keeping strict time, his face studious, never smiling. His pleasure came from getting it right. He loved to play Für Elise. Never once did he vary the tempo or alter [...]

• End of Semester Reading: Names, Topics, Meltdown

  Posted: May 2, 2009, 11:48 pm by keguro

  Names: Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie, Thomas Holt, Diana Paton, Kamau Brathwaite, Jayne Krentz, Mary Balogh, Amanda Quick, Maryse Condé, Topics: James Bond, Miss Marple, Jamaican slavery, Jamaican freedom, Jamaican punishment, rip-my-bodice, heaving bosoms, paranormal romance, colonialism, postcolonialism, harems, trash romance, heteronormativity, heteronormaphilia (mine!)–topics is a capacious category Meltdown: my poor students are being inundated with how [...]

• Hello, New Addition to the Tech-Harem!

  Posted: May 2, 2009, 5:15 pm by keguro

  I was forced to buy a netbook because the good people in Nairobi have hungry eyes and I did not like how they looked at my macbook. He has two big brothers: white macbook: Basil I black macbook: Basil II What shall I name him, this child from a different plan(e)t? A Kenyan name? Because he’ll be coming on my [...]

• Defending Human Rights

  Posted: May 1, 2009, 8:23 am by keguro

  Over the past few months, I have found myself in the strange position of defending human rights activists to leftist/progressive Kenyans. It is a strange position because it feels so out-of-fashion, so out-of-date, so yesterday. And it indicates that yesterday’s poison lingers in our collective bloodstream. I get ahead of myself. Let me choose an [...]

• Similes in Tutuola

  Posted: April 27, 2009, 1:39 am by keguro

  Amos Tutuola’s similes in Palm-Wine Drinkard “hyphen” Afro-modernity, suturing differentially experienced time-spaces. Similes are about the potential of proximity, designed to invoke a sensation, a memory, an experience, a history that can be drawn out, elicited, invoked to create a shared framework. Their task is to make strangeness proximate, if not familiar. And this labor [...]

• The Tragedy of Bantu Mwaura

  Posted: April 27, 2009, 6:08 pm by keguro

  Update: Shailja Patel has details on memorial/funeral arrangements Breaking news that Bantu Mwaura has been found dead. Bantu was a human rights activist and university lecturer. He received his Ph.D. in performance studies from New York University. He was a poet and had published in English, Gikuyu, and Kiswahili, and was also a thespian, director, and storyteller. I [...]

• Women in Love

  Posted: April 26, 2009, 2:29 am by keguro

  We were two girls, one brown one white. Loved each other, from Kenya to England. We held hands on an East London street. All hell broke loose. —Shailja Patel, “Two Girls” Frame One A few weeks ago, two lesbian friends celebrated 25 years together. Yesterday, on the metro, a young lesbian couple cuddled together. Frame Two At the African Literature Association conference, a speaker insisted that [...]

• Sitting in Fire

  Posted: April 24, 2009, 3:26 pm by keguro

  We survived Kenyatta We survived Moi We might survive Kibaki Will we survive ourselves? —Anonymous An old man sits inside flames as they lick at his body. They kiss, suck, gulp, swallow, eat him alive, and he does not move. He does not scream. He sits inside them. Resigned. Impotent. He does not resist. This is not a metaphor. The old man [...]

• Jambo Bwana: Obama as Tourist-Guest

  Posted: April 22, 2009, 8:26 pm by keguro

  Jambo Jambo bwana Habari gani? Mzuri sana Wageni mwakaribishwa Kenya yetu Hakuna matata In January 2009, members of the Concerned Kenyan Writers collective (CKW) learned that the Boys Choir of Kenya had been invited to perform for Barack Obama’s inauguration, and were going to perform “Jambo Bwana.” Outrage erupted, with one member of CKW terming the song an example of Kenyan “minstrelsy.” “Jambo [...]

• Elegies: Eve Sedgwick Through Gary Fisher

  Posted: April 20, 2009, 9:36 pm by keguro

  As the tributes to Eve Sedgwick’s life and work are written and proliferate, let me register her ongoing impact on my life. Between Men was one of the first 3 queer books I ever read, as a sophomore. I did not understand a word but it stayed with me. And I stayed with it. And [...]

• Provinces of Queer Radicalism

  Posted: April 19, 2009, 7:20 pm by keguro

  It has been many years since I passed that stretch of road from Githunguri to Nairobi that is suffused with the smell of coffee plants at nighttime, a sweet smell of shit, death, decay, and acid. At night coffee plants release carbon dioxide, and it is not pretty. It is, in fact, one of the [...]

• Solid Gold

  Posted: April 15, 2009, 3:55 am by keguro

  There are two kinds of people: Those who loved the Solid Gold Dancers And the rest

• Un-loving Kenya

  Posted: April 14, 2009, 6:27 am by keguro

  At first I wanted to write a different kind of opening, to begin with a confession. Language interrupted. Instead of thinking about my love for Kenya, or its absence, I started thinking about Kenya’s love for me, or its absence. And this gets hairy. I do not feel Kenya loves me and I certainly don’t feel love [...]

• Snippets

  Posted: April 11, 2009, 10:31 pm by keguro

  My still-in-progress weekend labor. Tell me what I was smoking when I decided that two conference papers was “totally doable, oh, yes, no problem!” (So what if I’m 95% done with one and 88% done with the other? It’s still crazy!) Anyhow. Paper One Crucially, intimate life, and especially marriage, functions as a temporal anchor that survives the [...]

• Cathecting on Obama

  Posted: April 11, 2009, 7:35 am by keguro

  During Barack Obama’s campaign, in June 2008, Dr. Wambui Mwangi published a provocative article in the East African. She opened with the confession that it was “difficult to join in the jubilation about Senator Barack Obama,” explaining, “my impulse to celebrate keeps deflating on the idea that the best thing that happened to little Barack [...]

• Teabagging

  Posted: April 10, 2009, 1:12 am by keguro

  Rachel Maddow: you are a marvel. “Who wouldn’t want to teabag John McCain?” “We are teabaggers, and you’re not.” “Fiscal teabags”

• Milking Black Bull: 11 Black Gay Poets

  Posted: April 10, 2009, 3:29 pm by keguro

  If you don’t affirm your own existence Nobody else will. —Thomas Grimes Milking Black Bull was conceived by Assotto Saint, edited by Vega Press, and published in 1995. It is dedicated to the memory of Melvin Dixon, Roy Gonsalves, Don Reid, Marlon Riggs, Craig Reynold, and Umar Hassan, the last being one of the featured poets. In his [...]

• National Poetry Month

  Posted: April 6, 2009, 12:25 am by keguro

  John is posting wonderful selections–they remind me that poetry matters and creates affective communities. I’ve been trying to figure out how to recognize the month, whether to post poems, reviews of black gay poetry (because we need them!), or some kind of criticism. This is undecided. But I did want to have something in place. Here [...]

• No Comment

  Posted: April 4, 2009, 7:42 am by keguro

  The poster in the metro shows a little black boy with a bashful smile, his father in the background. The boy’s smile invites us to smile back, his eyes welcome us into his world. I am struck by his beauty, but also the sense that this boy is MY “boy next door.” The text reads: One [...]

• Caption Contest

  Posted: April 1, 2009, 12:02 am by keguro

  at Verbal Privilege C’mon Kenyans–you can do this!

• DC Queer Studies Conference

  Posted: April 1, 2009, 10:47 pm by keguro

  The DC Queer Studies Symposium A Two-Day Conference at the University of Maryland April 17-18, 2009, College Park, MD Free and open to the public Visit our website here. For those of you who attended last year’s inaugural symposium, this year’s will be similar but even more grand. We have a full two-day schedule this time around. Friday, April 17 begins [...]

• Different Angers: English and Kiswahili

  Posted: April 1, 2009, 6:15 pm by keguro

  Ngugi wa Thiong’o tells an eloquent, painful story, in English, about learning English. In school, students who spoke in Gikuyu would be forced to wear signs around their necks that proclaimed “I am a donkey,” a punishment for breaking English-only codes. Speaking African languages, in Ngugi’s generation, became associated with animality. As his essays and [...]

• Kenya’s Marriage Bill

  Posted: March 30, 2009, 2:47 am by keguro

  In a recent article, Judy Thongori advises Kenyans to read and understand the Marriage Bill, which was introduced into parliament in 2007. As she rightly notes, “Marriage affects all of us at one time in life, whether it is our marriages, our parents’ marriages, or those of our children.” This bill, Thingorip continues, will be [...]

• Quarrel in Ian Fleming’s Dr. No

  Posted: March 29, 2009, 10:47 am by keguro

  Quarrel is the central-peripheral black male figure in Ian Fleming’s Dr. No (book 1958, film 1962). Dr. No was the first James Bond book turned into a film, though it was the sixth novel in the Bond series. In preparing for a conference, I read the novel and watched the film, and I am struck [...]

• Queer Fluids

  Posted: March 27, 2009, 7:55 pm by keguro

  I want to slide through the social and its edges tear skin and hair. Razor smiles in rainbow pins. To move, as in a book on fluids, in containers. Tight razor smiles Unheimlich Delicately disgusted in sweat showers. Blood.Spit.Semen.Sweat. I am increasingly baffled by claims that queerness is about fluidity. We might contest the genealogy of queerness, but let us remember it is [...]

• Call for Submissions: None on Record

  Posted: March 26, 2009, 5:13 am by keguro

  None on Record: Stories of Queer Africa Edited by: Notisha Massaquoi & Selly Thiam WE are collecting stories of Africans from the continent and within the diasporic communities that identify as queer, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (QLGBT). One of our biggest challenges as QLGBT Africans globally is forced invisibility. Human rights violations in many countries [...]

• Dear Professor

  Posted: March 25, 2009, 1:50 pm by keguro

  Please clarify whether the quiz based on the book we were supposed to buy that we are supposed to be reading right now is based on the book we were supposed to buy and that we are supposed to be reading right now. Thank you, Eight-weeks into the semester student

• Echo-Maker

  Posted: March 24, 2009, 12:46 pm by keguro

  You asked for a bite-into-it story But my necrotic skin would not yield And your touch remained outside me Your eyes accused men-like-me chitin-dressed, kin to narcissus echo-makers What I said What you heard Pumice-words graze newly soft places * echo-maker echo-maker make me a word * We lack etymology Men like us Neologisms elude us We dine on the afters Word-shimmers Image-glimmers Sutures © Keguro Macharia, 2009

• Currently Reading

  Posted: March 19, 2009, 5:41 pm by keguro

  Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004). Reginald Shepherd, Some are Drowning (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994). David William Cohen and E.S. Atieno Odhiambo, Burying SM: The Politics of Knowledge and the Sociology of Power in Africa (London: James Currey, 1992). Claude McKay, Banana Bottom (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1933). Bethwell A. Ogot, History [...]

• Snippets

  Posted: March 18, 2009, 2:53 am by keguro

  Timeless Shuttling between here and (t)here, time stops. A passing comment. Timeless: Attached to whiteness, to the notion of the classic. Timeless: Attached to non-whiteness, atavistic, not in time. How to think about these two, these two moments that are so saturated with time that we deem them “timeless.” What is that point of saturation that can only [...]

• Casual Homophobia, again

  Posted: March 14, 2009, 10:56 pm by keguro

  “Where’s that faggot?” the black saleswoman asks, looking for a sales associate. Why do such moments still reduce me to enraged silence, stump me, leave me shocked, violated into silence? What is that trigger that is so easily pressed? Why can’t I respond to casual homophobia? Is it because it is always like a trick punch? [...]

• Obama’s Sediments

  Posted: March 13, 2009, 1:51 pm by keguro

  Obama’s Kenyan ancestry was noted throughout the course of his campaign. He was African American, we learned, not African American. He did not emerge “up from slavery” and thus he was presumably free from the ongoing wounding (as potential) that is the peculiar legacy of those Africans whose histories are directly embedded in U.S.-based slavery. Indeed, [...]

• Meet the New Dissidents: Activists

  Posted: March 12, 2009, 8:19 pm by keguro

  Children growing up in Moi’s Kenya knew their basic words: cat, dog, man, woman, dissident. A dissident was a “bad man or woman” who “did not love Kenya” and wanted to do “bad things” that might give “baba Moi” pain. Dissidents were un-Kenyan. In fact, the label dissident was applied indiscriminately, and strategically so, to anyone [...]

• Missing Moi?

  Posted: March 9, 2009, 7:55 pm by keguro

  In her wonderful poem, “A Gifted Almost-Fifty,” Sitawa Namwalie mourns the “angry young poetry” she could not write “at twenty.” She could not write this poetry because the “political regime,” under Moi, “did not tolerate vocalization.” When he left, “poetry erupted, spewing on its own, brimming.” And those of us who have been privileged to [...]

• #4

  Posted: March 9, 2009, 4:57 am by keguro

  He dances as he walks. Stops. Right foot forward, heel raised, syncopated two count. And speaks in ejaculatory bursts, a foreign language, perhaps the secret one shared by ghosts and madmen.

• #3

  Posted: March 9, 2009, 4:56 am by keguro

  He walks ten meters, picks up a dry leaf, and shreds it. He picks up another one and starts shredding it as he walks back to his original position. And sits.

• Listen to Us

  Posted: March 8, 2009, 1:17 pm by keguro

  Raila Odinga and Martha Karua are outraged. They have made speeches and written statements. They claim to share our frustration. Here’s my advice. Stop talking. Stop issuing statements. Stop making speeches. Listen to us. Don’t show up in helicopters or in an entourage or in fancy cars. Don’t show up with the press. Don’t show up with [...]

• The Kenya I Want

  Posted: March 7, 2009, 5:24 pm by keguro

  A year ago, I was sending emails to friends and family to ask if they were okay. If they were safe. Today, I’m sending emails to new friends and activists asking them if they are okay and urging them to take care of themselves. In the Kenya I want, these emails would be unnecessary because I would [...]

• Obama Essay, Ongoing

  Posted: March 6, 2009, 6:13 pm by keguro

  I have been invited to contribute an essay on Obama to the journal Qualitative Sociology. The essay is due at the beginning of next year, and will reflect on the first year of Obama’s presidency. My role is to comment on Obama in relation to Kenya, though not exclusively. In the spirit of Aaron’s latest postings [...]

• Fireflies in Dark Times

  Posted: March 6, 2009, 1:30 pm by keguro

  I note, with great delight, the increasing number of gay and lesbian blogs on KBW and online! Diary of a Gay Kenyan Single Gay Life in Kenya Wilde Yearnings Shogeek The longstanding Rants and Raves of a Kenyan Gay Man I feel like a proud mama–though I had nothing to do with these being set up. Do let me know if I’ve left [...]

• Human Rights Activists Assassinated

  Posted: March 6, 2009, 11:56 am by keguro

  On March 5, 2009, two leading human rights defenders, Mr. Oscar Kamau King’ara and Mr. John Paul Oulu (also known as GPO), both of Oscar Foundation, were executed in cold blood by a group of men in two vehicles. The two were driving to meet Mr. Kamanda Mucheke of the Kenya National Commission on Human [...]

• From Philo Ikonya, President of PEN Kenya

  Posted: March 5, 2009, 11:42 am by keguro

  Michela Wrong’s book on John Githongo and Kenyan politics, It’s Our Turn to Eat, which was recently published, is not being stocked in Kenyan bookstores for fear of government reprisal. Following is a message from Philo Ikonya, president of PEN Kenya. * * * Dear All, I am sharing this in order to seek advice, opinions, ideas of [...]

• “The Center Cannot Hold”

  Posted: March 4, 2009, 12:02 pm by keguro

  Amos Wako has recently stated that he will not resign following a devastating report that claims he embodies impunity. Wako follows a well-paved highway trod by many Kenyan politicians. Over the past seven years of multi-party rule, several politicians and public servants have told us that they will not resign, no matter their alleged crimes [...]

• Bodies that Materialize

  Posted: March 1, 2009, 5:57 am by keguro

  The front flap of Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter contains two items. The first, a $6 tag The second, a name: Michael Accompanied by an address: 2901 3rd Ave, Suite 400 Somewhere in Seattle, where my body materialized.

• Current Obsession

  Posted: February 28, 2009, 3:54 pm by keguro

  To the Harbormaster I wanted to be sure to reach you; though my ship was on the way it got caught in some moorings. I am always tying up and then deciding to depart. In storms and at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide around my fathomless arms, I am unable to understand the forms of my vanity or I am [...]

• The Black President

  Posted: February 28, 2009, 3:45 pm by keguro

  A brief survey of the media, mainstream and non-mainstream, which is mostly populated by white reporters (hello, Salon!) reveals an interesting, if not unanticipated, trend. Daily, through a series of rhetorical tics, we are reminded that Obama is black. David Brooks, for instance, writes with the anguished despair of the white male conservative, comparing Obama to [...]

• Seismosis

  Posted: February 27, 2009, 12:28 pm by keguro

  Seismosis Text: John Keene Drawings: Christopher Stackhouse Seismosis is a difficult text. Difficult because it insists that we attend to the hyphen that sutures word-image, not a gap but a pulling. Written language asserts its visuality while, contrapuntally, image foregrounds its textuality. The figure of the hyphen is apt, for it threatens to cut in half what it sutures: [...]

• Re-Thinking Displaced Kenyans

  Posted: February 23, 2009, 5:05 am by keguro

  An important shift has taken place in how we think about Displaced Kenyans. As their ongoing presence in unsafe, makeshift camps rife with disease and sexual violence continues to embarrass our national leaders, our leaders are experiencing compassion fatigue. Displaced Kenyans are increasingly portrayed as stubborn children who resist the government’s resettlement schemes. Once objects [...]

Blah blah blah

Fish cakes

Alas a fish cake.

Yet more fish cakes

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

The end of the fish cakes