Items by keguro

Gukira

• Wrestling Over Bashir

  Posted: September 2, 2010, 12:33 pm by keguro

  As the Kenya media and (so-called) leaders continue to wrestle over “protocol,” they keep losing the plot. For some, not inviting Bashir would have been un-African. Africans are hospitable. We invite all our neighbors to our parties. Even those who have killed and raped our wives. Good old African hospitality! For others, not inviting Bashir [...]

• On Skipping Day One, Part Two

  Posted: September 1, 2010, 4:34 pm by keguro

  Yes, you have fallen behind. I told you not to skip.

• On Skipping the First Day of Class:

  Posted: August 30, 2010, 3:42 pm by keguro

  Don’t. On Skipping the First Week of Class: Really, Don’t.

• Education in Crisis!

  Posted: August 29, 2010, 4:49 pm by keguro

  It is lamentable, that many of our children go to school, from four until they are eight or ten, and sometimes fifteen years of age, and leave school knowing but a little more about the grammar of their language than a horse does about handling a musket–and not a few of them are really so [...]

• Sessions (2 of 10)

  Posted: August 29, 2010, 6:25 am by keguro

  The devil visited me. He lives in my sister’s closet and he was taking his dog for a walk. Shhh. My aunt didn’t see him. She was asleep. His dog is red. People say he has horns, but it’s his dog who has the horns. How silly to confuse the devil with his dog. And [...]

• William Ruto & Ken Mehlman

  Posted: August 27, 2010, 10:03 am by keguro

  In a recent editorial, Minister for Education, Honorable William Ruto, argues, “What is unjust to one citizen is atrocious to the entire country.” The sentiment would be far nobler were it not uttered by a man who tried to secure votes by spreading homophobic panic. As he campaigned against the new Draft Constitution, Ruto claimed [...]

• Academic Checklist

  Posted: August 25, 2010, 1:47 pm by keguro

  Books Ordered: Done Syllabi Completed: 97% Done Assignments Designed: 90% Done Nightmares: Naked First Day: Done Wrong First Day, Empty School: Done Open Zipper: Ongoing Teeth Fall Out of Mouth While Lecturing: Still Waiting Wake Up 19 Again: Unresolved

• Uncommon Respect

  Posted: August 22, 2010, 8:12 pm by keguro

  Karen Hughes has written an article asking those who want to construct the mosque to demonstrate “uncommon respect” and locate it elsewhere. Following her logic, I would like to posit the following as examples of “uncommon respect.” 1. Dear gay people, please show uncommon respect and stop displaying yourselves all over. Don’t force your gayness [...]

• Erykah Badu: The Pornography of National Life

  Posted: August 20, 2010, 5:58 am by keguro

  What characterizes pornography is not its erotic content but its masturbatory privacy.— Michael Bell, 2000 At a moment when we are debating what counts as “hallowed ground,” it might be useful to relocate the scene of the discussion, and Erykah Badu’s recent $500 fine is a great point of departure. Badu was fined for stripping [...]

• A Scheme

  Posted: August 20, 2010, 3:21 am by keguro

  I am here today my friends to tell you That the time is coming When all people, regardless of colour or class, will have           at least one Barry Manilow record. Benjamin Zephaniah, “I Have a Scheme,” (Propa Propaganda, 1996)

• Jamia Mosque

  Posted: August 19, 2010, 3:03 pm by keguro

  Sits in the heart of Nairobi. I grew up around and in the shadow of its architecture. Every day and increasingly, I miss its comforting presence. I miss knowing that Islam sits at the center of my home city. I miss a home city whose architecture reflects its religious diversity. I miss the deep sense [...]

• Un-Writing Fanon

  Posted: August 17, 2010, 9:40 am by keguro

  In “Critical Fanonism,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. argues that Frantz Fanon is a Rorschach blot. Available for any and (almost) all appropriations.  I suspect that interpretation has hit a wall. The Journal of Pan African Studies recently issued a call for papers (cfp) on Fanon. I considered submitting something. Whether it be from the manuscript [...]

• E.W. Blyden and Afro-Modernity

  Posted: August 16, 2010, 2:36 am by keguro

  In the later nineteenth century, Edward Wilmot Blyden (love the name Wilmot!) theorized two routes to Afro-modernity: one through Christianity and the other through Islam. He captured what others later in the century and early in the twentieth would describe as the great struggle for African souls. At that point, it was not clear whether [...]

• It’s Raining Clones

  Posted: August 14, 2010, 6:05 am by keguro

  Following a recent visit to one of DC’s amazing museums—free, and so good, and so good for you—my best friend commented that we must have sounded terribly homophobic. We had set ourselves up in a prime little spot to have a snack (museum prices) and had started tracking the gay couples. All three thousand of [...]

• Take that, Duchamp!

  Posted: August 13, 2010, 7:20 pm by keguro

  The tent, which I carried with the Expedition, has been left at Falaba at the urgent request of the King. When it was erected in his town persons came from all quarters to see it, and the King concluded that it ought to be left in his town as a specimen of British art. – [...]

• What Happened This Summer: An Homage

  Posted: August 12, 2010, 8:07 am by keguro

  I did not visit Cucu. She died last year. And also that other Cucu died. And you know, the other one, me I don’t like her. And I did not climb any trees to pick fruit. Though I spent the summer with fruits and fruit-lovers. I did not fall out of the tree that I [...]

• Premature Reflections on Teaching

  Posted: August 11, 2010, 1:17 pm by keguro

  This fall I teach the Harlem Renaissance and Caribbean Literature, the one ostensibly a nation-based class the other necessarily transnational. To maintain some semblance of sanity, I have restricted the Caribbean class to 20th C. writing and have selected a limited number of authors (Louise Bennett, Nicolas Guillén, Claude McKay, Mayotte Capecia, C.L.R. James, Samuel [...]

• Ngwatilo Mawiyoo, “At Stake”

  Posted: August 2, 2010, 5:21 pm by keguro

  there is no peace that we fight to create. with arms of flesh we must be bound, one to another; no fire, no blade, no tongue nor hate to harm. do not fallen comrades and enemies, newborns desperate, crying the first of arid tears, and that enduring promise of hell (Our creation/ God given/ Devil [...]

• Ngwatilo Mawiyoo, “Two Clocks”

  Posted: August 2, 2010, 4:16 pm by keguro

  Ngwatilo Mawiyoo, “Two Clocks”

• Haki Ya Kuishi

  Posted: July 30, 2010, 12:14 am by keguro

  Ili kuhakisha kwamba una haki ya kuishi —Warembo Ni Yes Warembo Ni Yes, a coalition of Kenyan women activists with the beautifully translated name “beauties are yes” articulate wisely and rightly what is at stake in the political: the right to live—haki ya kuishi. In their support for the Yes campaign, they express their hope [...]

• President Kibaki’s Little Things

  Posted: July 25, 2010, 6:15 pm by keguro

  President Kibaki is fond of little things. In a recent interview with the Sunday Nation over the fast-approaching referendum, he quipped, “In the next few days, we will work hard to make sure that those opposing it over one or two little things change their minds and support us.” The statement seems innocuous enough—for now, [...]

• “I am not, by nature, a ‘D’ student”

  Posted: July 24, 2010, 10:10 am by keguro

  A former student apologized for failing two classes he took with me in the same semester. That he apologized is itself cause for a blog post, but not this one. I am struck, instead, by the grounds of his apology. He apologized because failing is not in his “nature.” It is puzzling this sense that [...]

• Fear & The August 4 Referendum

  Posted: July 23, 2010, 9:50 pm by keguro

  In a timely news segment, Rachel Maddow demonstrates how fear is used as a political strategy. As, in fact, the most successful political strategy. She argues, convincingly, that we tend to think effective political strategies depend on maligning one’s opponents. And that might be wrong. The best strategy (and here I am extrapolating) creates affect-coalitions: [...]

• Storymoja Hay Festival Poetry Competition

  Posted: July 22, 2010, 4:01 pm by keguro

  Storymoja Hay Festival Poetry Competition

• Malawi Dossier: Conversation with Unoma Azuah

  Posted: July 21, 2010, 7:13 am by keguro

  6/4/2010 Keguro, I am interested in this project but the frame is still blurry to me. Do you want my/a response to the arrest or would you want a picture that paints Africans as sensitive to human rights? More clarification would help a great deal. Thanks in anticipation. Unoma Dear Unoma, Thanks for your speedy [...]

• Langston Hughes, “Joy”

  Posted: July 17, 2010, 8:55 pm by keguro

  I went looking for Joy, Slim, dancing Joy, Gay, laughing Joy, Bright-eyed Joy– And I found her Driving the butcher’s cart In the arms of the butcher boy! Such company, such company, As keeps this young nymph, Joy! Langston Hughes, 1926

• Whispers from a Safe Place, Perhaps a Closet

  Posted: July 17, 2010, 6:18 am by keguro

  Despite many years of training myself to write through fear, and to speak anticipating indifference, if not malice, I am, once again, in a too-familiar space: trying to make a case for something dismissed as relatively unimportant, my life. I cannot trust that such a life has any value in the Kenyan space. Those who [...]

• Dissertation-Era Writing

  Posted: July 16, 2010, 9:28 pm by keguro

  Although issues of gender normativity and social respectability run through Afro-diasporic discourse from at least the mid nineteenth century, the genealogical imperative comes into its own at the precise moment when black diaspora studies and black studies in general were being institutionalized in the 1960s and 1970s. The implications of this historical coincidence range far [...]

• Tins

  Posted: July 13, 2010, 9:12 am by keguro

  Tins At the edge of the lip Where the cut meets the fold At the fold of the grain Where the lip tells a yarn Where the seam meets the cut There’s a story of a lip Through the grain of the cut As the story folds a seam And the cut of the grain [...]

• Smashed

  Posted: July 13, 2010, 9:02 am by keguro

  Smashed

• Kenyan Tanka, 9 pm

  Posted: July 13, 2010, 8:53 am by keguro

  Kenyan Tanka, 9 pm

• Half Life

  Posted: July 13, 2010, 8:46 am by keguro

  Half Life Fade to black, charred by definition You were glowing the moment you melted Charcoal incarnated, shadowed by time We curl into ourselves, by instinct, Born to millipede destinies What is light tarnishes, the elders said Photography: Andrew Njoroge Poem: Keguro Macharia

• Malawi Dossier: Introduction

  Posted: July 13, 2010, 7:46 am by keguro

  Africans talk to each other all the time. We have rich, textured conversations on food, fashion, politics, policy, football, rugby, economics, farming, sex, beer, fruit, photography, cockroaches, traffic, shoes, shoelaces, headscarves, lace, beads, sculpture, painting, lions, sunsets, funerals, weddings, affairs, abstinence, ants, ostriches, huts, mansions, heart transplants, religion, witchcraft, and the five secret spices. The [...]

• Rumored

  Posted: July 8, 2010, 2:12 pm by keguro

  The word is that during the upcoming African Union Summit, to be held in Kampala, Uganda, July 19-27, Egypt will propose a special amendment to the idea of human rights. The proposed agenda item: Promotion of Cooperation, Dialogue and Respect for Diversity in the Field of Human Rights. Whispers suggest that “diversity” is a polite [...]

• Because the Dawn Breaks

  Posted: July 7, 2010, 10:21 am by keguro

  We speak because when the rain falls in the mountains the river slowly swells Comes rushing down over boulders across roads crumbling bridges that would hold their power against its force We speak for the same reason that the thunder frightens the child that the lightning startles the tree We do not speak to defy [...]

• What is the Fourth of July to the Alien?

  Posted: July 5, 2010, 5:17 pm by keguro

  Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be                                —Langston Hughes I wake up to Langston Hughes’s insistent “Let America be America again.” A quiet refrain. It won’t let go. It won’t let me be. It insists, nags, irritates, demands. Respond in some way. America the dream. America the [...]

• Fissures

  Posted: July 3, 2010, 6:22 pm by keguro

  “I hate primitiveness . . . Me, go native? Not on your life. I will fight for a free Africa and Asia, not live there.” –George Padmore to Richard Wright, 23 August 1955.

• Bombing Uhuru Park

  Posted: June 28, 2010, 3:59 am by keguro

  A stray thought: at some point in our past, foreign planes bombed freedom fighters. Or, more accurately, they bombed the forests that sheltered freedom fighters. For the moment, let us hold in abeyance the metonymic slide that would read Uhuru Park as the bodies of the dead and injured, the people in Uhuru Park rather [...]

• Untitled

  Posted: June 23, 2010, 12:28 pm by keguro

  Untitled

• Scream

  Posted: June 23, 2010, 12:25 pm by keguro

  Scream

• Seven Images of Blue Sky

  Posted: June 23, 2010, 12:22 pm by keguro

  Seven Images of Blue Sky

• Maputo, Mozambique

  Posted: June 23, 2010, 12:19 pm by keguro

  Maputo, Mozambique

• The Writing on the Screen

  Posted: June 23, 2010, 12:14 pm by keguro

  The Writing on the Screen

• Untitled

  Posted: June 23, 2010, 12:12 pm by keguro

  Untitled I have learned to trust the wisdom of farmers to believe in the meanness of fallows their thick silences broken in stutters and sighs I have learned to trust the wisdom of weeds the patience of butterflies, the promises of pollen © Keguro Macharia Photography: Wambui Mwangi

• Sitalala

  Posted: June 23, 2010, 12:06 pm by keguro

  Sitalala Hata wakinifunga Sitakuwa nikilalala Sitalala sitalala Na wale wako nje Hawakuwa wakilala Hawalali hawalali Sitakuwa nikilala Hawalali hawalali Hatulali hatulali ©Keguro Macharia Photography: Andrew Njoroge

• Baba

  Posted: June 21, 2010, 4:37 am by keguro

  By the time my father died, I had become intimate with his body. Its smells. Its textures. Its failures. Its promises. In the preceding three years, it had become an experiment in sacrality. Purged by medical technology, repaired by African herbalists, anointed by Catholic priests, bathed by our tears, deafened by our prayers. I wonder [...]

• When Men Cry

  Posted: June 19, 2010, 2:45 pm by keguro

  Since I first read it, I have been troubled by a passage from Alex Haley’s Roots. I paraphrase: “Let me tell you, I am a man. I cried like a baby.” Written when he “reaches” the village that connects him to the past, the passage has irritated me. Eve Sedgwick helps me to understand this [...]

• Da Capo al Coda: Steven and Tiwonge

  Posted: June 14, 2010, 5:40 am by keguro

  Belonging Matters. And it matters how we belong. To whom, under what circumstances, with what guarantees, what sets of mutual obligations, what measure of mutual pleasures. It matters where we belong, not simply in a geographical sense but also in terms of how we feel. Belonging is about access, obligation, embedding, the ability to obtain [...]

• August 5, 2010

  Posted: June 11, 2010, 6:54 pm by keguro

  I have been troubled by discussions of the August 4th referendum on the Kenyan constitution. Troubled by the insistence that one must take a position, and vote either yes or no, even when that urging is nuanced. Troubled not because I am invested in some stylish postmodern ambivalence. Troubled because the debate has proceeded along [...]

• Knife-Edge: A Fiction on Africanity

  Posted: June 8, 2010, 2:12 pm by keguro

  One is always being herded into two paddocks. Branded as an African Defender and thus Critic of the West or as an African Detractor and thus Friend of the West. At 20, not knowing the familiar path I was treading, I wrote a paper defending clitoridectomy. The paper was a symptom of anxiety. Not that [...]

• Stephen Derwent Partington, How to Euthanise A Cactus

  Posted: June 8, 2010, 12:16 pm by keguro

  Stephen Derwent Partington’s new book of poems, How to Euthanise a Cactus (Cinnamon Press, 2010; ISBN: 9781907090165), is internationally available to order online at: a) [Cinnamon Press Publisher Website] http://www.cinnamonpress.com/ b) [Welsh Books Council] http://www.gwales.com/intro/ c) [Inpress, UK Arts Council Supported Online Shop] http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk d) [Amazon UK] http://www.amazon.co.uk/ e) or, orderable via your local bookshop [...]

• Being

  Posted: June 7, 2010, 3:51 am by keguro

  Being

• Boy

  Posted: June 7, 2010, 3:50 am by keguro

  Boy This is not about inequality, the constitution, sins of the father, Neocolonialism. The good fortune of one over another fearfully and wonderfully made. This is not about hard work. There is a dirty boy lain outside; temple on concrete, calloused foot stretched out. Someone has parked a car beside him and walked away. ©Ngwatilo [...]

• Purple in My Rear View Mirror

  Posted: June 7, 2010, 3:42 am by keguro

  Purple in My Rear View Mirror

• Jacaranda II

  Posted: June 7, 2010, 3:41 am by keguro

  Jacaranda II

• Aesthetics of Kinship*

  Posted: May 31, 2010, 8:11 pm by keguro

  Obama’s political career coincides, roughly, with the Kenyan government recognizing and attempting to marshal the economic resources of Kenyans abroad. This coincidence enables us to examine how rhetorics of kinship function to secure identification, and to meditate on the function of identification. I will be suggesting that at least two paradigms of identification intersect in [...]

• Forgetting the Moynihan Report

  Posted: May 30, 2010, 3:55 pm by keguro

  I am unsure how James T. Patterson wants his article to be read. And so I will try to be generous. If I can. He writes, [T]oday the Moynihan Report is largely forgotten. Sadly, its predictions about the decline of the black family have proven largely correct. Fortunately, many of its prescriptions remain equally relevant. [...]

• Aging

  Posted: May 29, 2010, 6:16 pm by keguro

  Aging The one the grandchildren called Herbie is blind; called Karanja by the swing when she mutters at dusk to the passing wind. As if she didn’t need the visit. To feel. ‘Ka Gari,’ the old owner to himself, to the swing as if it were the grown up child, who doesn’t visit much. Karanja [...]

• Desire & Discovery

  Posted: May 29, 2010, 10:33 am by keguro

  I You are reading a story that is written to you and you are in Nairobi giving a blowjob to a flabby white tourist who has “diplomatic immunity” and wears a “condom.” Head can be dangerous. He wants a 16 year old and so you lose 10 years. He wants transgression and so you blow [...]

• ‘The Fundis Consider their Handiwork;’

  Posted: May 29, 2010, 6:50 am by keguro

  ‘The Fundis Consider their Handiwork;’ This is the house the worker built, not KANU or the Mission Schools. It’s not the House of Mumbi nor the Palace of Ramogi. It is clearly no manyatta nor a classic Kamba thatch. It’s a Nairobi house, perhaps: strong concrete, scaffold and the labour of the builders who have [...]

• Season of My City

  Posted: May 29, 2010, 6:42 am by keguro

  Season of my City ……..brilliant butterflies hover like perfume….. ©Sitawa Namwalie Photography: Wambui Mwangi

• Feeling Good

  Posted: May 29, 2010, 6:31 am by keguro

  Feeling Good

• Khanga Path

  Posted: May 29, 2010, 6:30 am by keguro

  Khanga Path

• Children Watching

  Posted: May 29, 2010, 6:27 am by keguro

  Children Watching

• Fear

  Posted: May 29, 2010, 6:26 am by keguro

  Fear

• Quandary of the Newly Corrupt

  Posted: May 29, 2010, 6:16 am by keguro

  Quandary of the Newly Corrupt

• My Garden

  Posted: May 29, 2010, 6:14 am by keguro

  My Garden

• Publishing Typos

  Posted: May 25, 2010, 12:53 am by keguro

  From Simon Gikandi’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o: At the end of ["Mugumo"], [Mukami] has found sanctuary under the scared Mugumo tree. Priceless!

• Explaining African Homophobia?

  Posted: May 24, 2010, 11:58 am by keguro

  In a recent article on “African homophobia,” Madeleine Bunting opens with the claim that there is “rightly huge concern and anger in the west at the recent increased homophobia in Africa.” This inauspicious opening leads to a series of claims that purport to explain “African homophobia.” I have no doubt that Ms. Bunting has good [...]

• Asi

  Posted: May 23, 2010, 9:41 pm by keguro

  Asi For Stephen You ask me to trust delicate suspensions Bridges across blindspots To believe in the promise of brass I cling to delicate vines Marvel at sun-dappled whispers Listen for the promise of fugues © Keguro Macharia

• The Dotted Line

  Posted: May 23, 2010, 9:32 pm by keguro

  The Dotted Line The very concepts of homogeneous national cultures, the consensual or contiguous transmission of historical traditions or ‘organic’ ethnic communities…are in a profound process of redefinition – Homi Bhabha If cut, a chef will wear a bright blue plaster for in nature there is no blue food, so if the plaster falls down [...]

• Morph

  Posted: May 23, 2010, 9:27 pm by keguro

  Morph

• Song of Solomon

  Posted: May 23, 2010, 9:26 pm by keguro

  Song of Solomon

• Oath

  Posted: May 23, 2010, 9:25 pm by keguro

  Oath

• Etched Lines

  Posted: May 23, 2010, 9:24 pm by keguro

  Etched Lines

• Mere Indecency: Thoughts on Malawi

  Posted: May 22, 2010, 8:50 am by keguro

  Under Section 156 therefore, the State must establish where mere indecency ends and where gross indecency begins as mere indecency is no offence under Section 156. That is the observation of the Defence. (Criminal Case Number 259 of 2009) Judgment: The two accused persons stand charged with three counts. The first count relates to the [...]

• Aliens V. Immigrants (hasty notes)

  Posted: May 20, 2010, 4:45 pm by keguro

  Let me return to a scene I have written about previously. On an official visit to sort out some legal matter or other, I ran across a Canadian-turned-U.S. citizen. She began by asking if I was an alien. Technically speaking, I am an alien. My legal documents, my tax forms, every official bit of business [...]

• Erosion

  Posted: May 17, 2010, 3:25 pm by keguro

  Erosion

• Haiya

  Posted: May 15, 2010, 3:59 pm by keguro

  Haiya

• Aterere

  Posted: May 15, 2010, 3:58 pm by keguro

  Aterere

• Asi

  Posted: May 15, 2010, 3:56 pm by keguro

  Asi

• Ati

  Posted: May 15, 2010, 3:55 pm by keguro

  Ati

• Exclamations in Still Life

  Posted: May 15, 2010, 3:54 pm by keguro

  Exclamations in Still Life

• Koroga

  Posted: May 15, 2010, 2:57 pm by keguro

  To stir up To stir into To stir around To be stirring An invitation and a provocation. Riddle: what happens when hungry eyes meet starving words? Answer: Another African Story Koroga is another African story, a story of what we see and how we see, of meetings and transformations, of looking and seeing, of seeing [...]

• Storymoja Presents . . .

  Posted: May 10, 2010, 5:19 pm by keguro

  *For those in Kenya Please join Storymoja on a unique and exciting theatrical adventure on Saturday 15th May and Sunday 16th May – a musical stage show, THE MATATU FROM WATAMU DROVE INTO THE SEA. It will be held at the renovated Sarakasi Dome (formerly Shan cinema) on Ngara Road. Parking is free and safe! [...]

• New Ventures in Poetry

  Posted: May 10, 2010, 2:40 pm by keguro

  A good friend leads me into temptation. And I am very weak. So weak that I modified the Lord’s Prayer: not, “lead us not into temptation,” but, “and when I fall into temptation.” Temptation: an ever-waiting manhole. The project: to write poems responding to photographs, fortnightly, from June through September. A poem a fortnight, at [...]

• IDAHO, Africa

  Posted: May 9, 2010, 5:30 pm by keguro

  Homophobia exists in Africa, as does influenza. This comparison is only partly gratuitous as I am interested in scales of virulence. We know that African bees are the deadliest; the sun in Africa is hotter than anywhere else in the world; viruses from Africa are the most malicious; and the simple cold, when caught in [...]

• Re-turns

  Posted: May 8, 2010, 7:18 am by keguro

  As the semester winds down, I begin to re-turn to myself, having gone, ritualistically, “from myself to myself” over the course of the semester. I am interested in these direction-driven spatial metaphors, how they describe both a certain estrangement from self experienced during the semester that is, simultaneously, a re-absorption into the self. We might [...]

• Word of the Day:

  Posted: April 28, 2010, 3:37 pm by keguro

  Heterocetera Used in a sentence. I sat with the three other African women and we exchanged chitchat for 5 1/2 hours about our respective children, about our ex-old men, all very, very heterocetera. –Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

• Desiring African Literature

  Posted: April 27, 2010, 7:40 pm by keguro

  We just completed reading Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Sandchild, an amazing work that I have yet to process in any definitive way. As a post-realist text, it does a great job of undoing many assumptions in the class. I have taught it once in a queer class and this is the second time I am [...]

• Exile and Activism: Dangerous Proximities

  Posted: April 26, 2010, 2:43 am by keguro

  My friend Philo Ikonya is president of PEN Kenya and is currently in exile from Kenya, living in Norway. It feels strange to write this, as though I had traveled back to some Kenyan past from which I am forever escaping. Post-Moi still feels very much like Moi; affective densities do not so easily dissipate, [...]

• Experiments in Pedagogy

  Posted: April 22, 2010, 11:18 pm by keguro

  I have had my students blogging this semester. The goal of the blog was to write away from class, not to replicate what we were saying or even think alongside the books we were reading, unless this happens somewhat organically. The class is not yet done. Neither is the blog. My students have done some [...]

• Queer Africa X

  Posted: April 18, 2010, 7:32 am by keguro

  In A Letter to Mariama Ba, Kenyan scholar and activist Wanjiku Mukabi Kabira presents us with a generous and generative way to reflect on histories and practices of African intimacy. Her generosity manifests itself through a genuine care about and curiosity toward anomalously intimate figures. I present, here, less a reading, and more a show [...]

• Untitled

  Posted: April 18, 2010, 5:15 am by keguro

  You ask about abbreviations if new truncations signal lost vowels authenticating o’s and a’s and i’s We are a much voweled people indifferent to Tarzanic usurpations and tom tom imitations You forget the distinction between u and u * You ask if salt inflames like pepper or mangoes cut like ginger The instinct of noses [...]

• Sometimes,

  Posted: April 16, 2010, 3:07 pm by keguro

  You meet someone whose work inspired you and the person is just as, if not more, inspirational. The brilliant and kind really do exist, and not simply in prepared remarks.

• Genealogies

  Posted: April 15, 2010, 11:42 am by keguro

  Genealogies are strange things, anchored as much by desire as they are rooted in history. They offer less the certainties of affirmation and more the pleasures of convergence, enabling fellow travelers to share tips, forge practices of belonging, find and create new orientations—there is a directedness to genealogies, though it is never uni-directional, and starting [...]

• (unfocused) Academic Rambles

  Posted: April 13, 2010, 1:57 pm by keguro

  (sub-title: stuff asst. professors should probably not blog about) During a recent meeting, administrators at a university that shall not be named complained that Ph.D. students thought “too well of themselves.” They dared to imagine that 6-8 years of graduate education made them “too good” to “work at the Mall or Wal-Mart.” It was time [...]

• Adopt an African Clitoris!

  Posted: March 30, 2010, 4:45 am by keguro

  Link to details here

• Thinking and Writing

  Posted: March 24, 2010, 8:49 am by keguro

  Because I am convinced–I have convinced myself or been convinced somehow–that I think through writing, I have found the past few months difficult as the kind of thinking in which I have been engaged, and am still engaged, has demanded a suspension of writing, at least writing in this space. I do not yet have [...]

• 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 [...]

Blah blah blah

Fish cakes

Alas a fish cake.

Yet more fish cakes

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

The end of the fish cakes