I am not quite sure what “loving Kenya” entails, though I am told it is a good thing, a noble thing, a thing worth trumpeting. Perhaps the problem is the word “love.” In a world where anything and everything is a love object, shoes, clothing, dogs, food, all of which I love, perhaps country requires a different kind of feeling.

Perhaps, then, I should claim I feel loyal to Kenya. But the only two examples that come to mind suggest dogs and boyfriends. Since I have banned the concept boyfriend from my life-world and have no desire to emulate a dog (especially after watching multiple episodes of Dog Whisperer), then loyalty is probably not the right word.

I might feel loyal if I remembered the words to the loyalty pledge, but I associate their mindless recitation with lies told to a tyrant—We Love You, Baba Moi!

It might be that I have “lost” my loyalty or love or patriotism due to many years spent abroad. It might be that I have become that terrible cliché, the been-to who loses identity in the swirling mists of modernity (dare I confess I barely remember my mother-tongue?).

I have become a qualified citizen, marked by might, may, perhaps, suppose, forever caught in the subjunctive. I am, at best, ambivalent about national belonging, national attachments, and national interests. There is, however, nothing singular or extraordinary to this declaration. As Parselelo Kantai has eloquently described, the national narrative of independence is exclusive and exclusionary.

“Feeling National” is an abstraction few can indulge. Indeed, my most vivid moments of “being national” involve mandatory exams and trips to government offices to confirm my national identity—the ID card, the passport. To claim that one “feels national” at moments of trial and possible punishment is to say something quite terrifying about national attachment, about patriotism.

There is, of course, no one single way to feel national. And I certainly do not claim that my own attachments are filled with the banality of violence and deprivation that others experience. I recognize that psychic ambivalence is a refuge afforded by a certain material and economic distance. But I do not, for that reason, dismiss the psychic as less substantive than the material. I may as well confess that I suffer very little liberal guilt, the self-abnegating shame that would read certain portions of my biography as reasons to don sackcloth and ashes. This, too, is a tedious aspect of feeling national.

And, so, 2007. Yet another occasion to feel national. Or another occasion to defend one’s indifference to patriotism. Or another occasion to reflect on what it means not to feel national.

If nothing else, the ongoing sitcom we call “acting national” offers amusement.