“the choir sang beautifully”

I return to the news that a family friend—an intimate fixture—has been brutally murdered. An obituary meets me on my first night home, and my mother attempts to narrate the murder again and again, only for me to reply that I must be seated to hear this news properly. The details are simple, the account short, the background and context elusive, the “why” unanswerable.” Returns often feel like collections of obituaries as one seeks news of the no-longer-here one assumed would be permanent intimate fixtures. Returns are always forms of accounting, practices of counting who is not here, who is newly here, of learning how to ask after people, delicate dances one negotiates.

One learns to ask, “how is . . .”, carefully, haltingly.
*
An early encounter with funerals—my grandfather’s at seven, my father’s at fourteen—leaves me incapable of handling death and its rituals: the gathering to offer sympathy, the funeral service, the funeral. And my escape to the U.S. meant that it was been possible to evade these practices of intimacy, requirements of sociality.

I return as friends’ parents die, as relatives die, as demands for mutual obligation increase, still unable to attend these rituals. Still unable to know what one says. Still unable to show up.
*
Over the years, my mother has offered information about deaths and funerals with, “the choir sang beautifully.” This comment is not restricted to those occasions. Rather, it’s central to how she engages religion and ritual: “the choir sang beautifully.”

I am yet to understand this repetition, to understand what it is saying, what it means, how it functions. I know, now, that it is more than what I have been hearing. As I listen to it, I now hear

respect was paid
love was shown
care was enacted
beauty is possible

This is not “beauty is possible in the face of tragedy,” at least I don’t think so. Instead, it’s about how one engages with the collective-making work of deaths and funerals, about the necessary affirmations one seeks in attending funeral services.

It is also about the inexpressible.

How does one talk about loss? What is the language of mourning? What memories does one want to have of how a life has been lived? How does one want to be haunted?
*
To figure haunting as beautiful singing is to create a final memory, a fitting memory, a necessary memory. To speak of singing rather than tears is not to avoid tears, but to register the making of funeral rites.
*
I write this from my mother’s dining room, next to the living room where, more than twenty years later, I still hear echoes of voices raised to mourn my grandfather and my father. What remains is less a particular song or tune; I long-ago forgot the rote funeral sermons, the obligatory eulogies, the performances of grief (though never my aunt’s cry-red eyes).

Instead, I remember voices raised in song.
*
And I hold on to the memory of the friend who died as a beautiful song. For what joy she brought to our collective lives.

Practicing Ethnicity

How did circumcision become the singular event—the conditio sine qua non, to use Kenyatta’s terms—through which Gikuyu gender and personhood was figured?

To write about Gikuyu practices in Kenya’s new post-ethnic ethnonationalism is to risk not only complicity—the condition all intellectual work—but, more egregiously, to consolidate post-ethnic ethnonationalism as the horizon of discourse, the thing that one/that we can never get past

If intent matters, I’m trying to unsettle by re-framing

Given the role circumcision plays in Kenyan histories and politics, I want to provide alternate sets of possibilities for how it emerged as the singular event that bestows political personhood, especially given how this personhood functions within what Wambui Mwangi has recently described as Gikuyu patriarchal politics in Kenya’s ethno-nation.

Professor Mwangi notes that Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Agikuyu did not so much describe Gikuyu identity as produce it. Along similar lines, my current writing project—the unending chapter—examines how and why Kenyatta fabricated Gikuyu identity. I am especially interested in how he figured gender and sexuality as the foundations for identity, a process that helped to stabilize Gikuyuness itself.

Historians of the Gikuyu—Godfrey Muriuki, John Lonsdale, Tabitha Kanogo, Luise White, Derek Peterson—have argued that, as with groups such as the Luo and the Luhya, the people now known as Gikuyu consolidated as such during Kenya’s colonial modernity. Practices of trade and experiences of domination and resistance produced collectivization in the late nineteenth century. Prior to this period, Gikuyu-ness was relatively porous

The historical narrative is murky, produced as a set of desires termed ethnographic history: the question, “what is a Kikuyu,” produces an answer, descriptions of social practices trapped in note-like observations, circulated as administrative reports, brief scholarly articles, thick books, factions we still use

Jean Davison’s wonderful co-authored book with the women of Mutira—a series of interviews with rural women—restores a dynamic sense of Gikuyu-ness as ongoing ritual practices. Gikuyu-ness was ongoing work and working—a working on self and community—that was as pleasurable as it was precarious

not precarious in the sense that one could “lose” one’s embedding; rather, one’s embedding needed constant affirmation. One writer on the Gikuyu complains about their seemingly endless list of thahu (proscriptions), each of which demanded some kind of cleansing ritual. I suspect a better reading of thahu would focus on how its inevitability produced ethnicity as a constant engagement with rituals of collectivity; thahu might be read as a demand for intimacy

Colonial modernity rearranged Gikuyu practices of sociality. Shifts in labor practices, the growth and spread of urban centers, and the introduction of residential missions and schools interrupted the rituals of self-care and community surveillance that had anchored embedding. Elspeth Huxley’s Red Strangers vividly illustrates how colonial modernity deracinated young Gikuyu men. In the novel, young men return from World War I in a near-catatonic state. Their fellow villagers discover that these young men served as porters in the war, where they were forced to carry dead bodies, thus incurring thahu. Distanced from communities who could purify, and thus, re-integrate them, and compelled to repeatedly bear dead bodies, the thahu compounded, so much so that the young men felt they incarnated thahu and had been fully deracinated.

I digress – on a path I might take one day, thinking about death in colonial modernity and the peculiar and particular rituals of intimacy around death

I have been focusing on how young urbanized/educated men—who were not necessarily the same, but formed an alliance I have yet to see described properly—attempted to manage colonial modernity’s disruptions. The well-trodden, much-told story of the late 1920s and early 1930s circumcision controversy around women’s bodies, framed as Christians vs. Traditionalists or colonial government vs. an alliance of conservative elders and educated young men, has rarely been written about as a strategy by urbanized young men to produce a singular event that would confirm ethno-gender.

By elevating circumcision to the singular event that conferred personhood as ethno-gender, confirming one as an appropriately gendered Gikuyu, young urbanized men found a way to re-think Gikuyu-ness, to manage its demands, to exploit the possibilities of colonial modernity. Simultaneously, these young men who were effectively wards of urban women, who had negotiated urbanity much more successfully, used the circumcision controversy to transform women into men’s wards: as needing protection from colonial intrusion, on the one hand, and being denied full personhood if excluded from circumcision rituals, on the other.
*
Making circumcision the singular event through which stable ethno-gender was conferred allowed missionaries to fabricate mission-based circumcision events that carried the same weight as those in Gikuyu communities. Indeed, the turning of circumcision into the doorway to ethnic personhood made Gikuyu-ness less inclusive and less dynamic, less based on mutual obligation and surveillance, even as it was predicated on this. Indeed, to stretch an analogy: circumcision became similar to the colonial government’s mandatory identity requirements, a kipande system that favored all men, and especially urban men.
*
Because the urban is so strategically absent from Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya, and because scholars invested in ethnicity have so often figured ethnicity as bound to the rural, it has been difficult to read how Kenyatta’s work caters to urban-based young men by stabilizing ethno-gender. Kenyatta fabricates circumcision as the singular event that bestows full ethno-personhood, minimizing, if not erasing, the entire assemblage of practices that made Gikuyuness an ongoing practice of self and communal care.
*
All possible and alternate narratives create their own foreclosures, their own impossibilities, their own exclusions, and I feel those exclusions weighing heavily on this writing. Much of what I’ve written here feels like it will seem improbable; while all of it is grounded in historical research, this writing is still speculative, more in the realm of “theory.” It abstracts from many messy contexts to produce a kind of story that hinges on a notion of “change” or “transformation.” This is a convenient fiction, for lives and experiences and feelings always exceed whatever paradigms we use to apprehend them.

There is something not quite right about this writing. Something even wrong and perhaps dangerous. But I can’t tell what it is right now. I hope it does not damage as it travels.

& with ordinariness

The blandness of my mind frightened me to the point of screaming.
- “Whispering Trees”

“Whispering Trees” builds as a series of repetitions:

I did not wake up in heaven as I had anticipated (for I certainly had not thought I was bound for hell, even though I had not been a saint). Instead, I woke up in a huge, seemingly infinite universe of darkness. I sensed nothing except that everything was hollow. I could discern nothing except being conscious, but, even then, I could not remember my name.

Notice not only the repeated “I,” a recurring feature of the story, and one that insists on itself, but also the repeated sensations: “I did not wake up”; “instead I woke up”; “I sensed nothing”; “I could discern nothing.”

This feature recurs so often that it might be described as the dominant strategy of the entire story: repetitions with slight variations. For instance,

It came back suddenly, my consciousness. The first thing I discerned was not the alluring light of the angels, for I could see nothing. Nor was it the heavenly melody of their songs: I couldn’t hear anything either. Instead, I perceived a smell, a sharp, distinct smell that my nose had known well while I had been alive. It was then that I realised that I could not be in heaven. Heaven could not smell so awful. But it took me a quarter of an eternity to recognise the smell of antiseptic in the air.

Here, “it came back suddenly, my consciousness”; “the first thing I discerned”; “I could see nothing; “I couldn’t hear anything”; “instead I perceived”; and on it goes until the final sentence where “senses meet,” if you will: “it took me a quarter of an hour to recognise the smell of antiseptic in the air.”

One might argue that this slow accretion of details, the movement from assertion to negation to (at times) reconciliation paces the story. I experience it as I do Steve Reich, whose work I now love, but had to learn to love. A demand that one pay attention to the slow unfolding, the slow act of perception, the “awakening, if you will.” One might describe this as a “slow start,” as some movies start slowly and persist in languor.

Whereas the first three paragraphs pace themselves at the level of the slight variation, the tiny shift, the little nudge (notice how I mime the story), the fourth announces its arrival: “it happened”; “I struggled”; “like a thunderbolt”; “excruciating pain”; “mangled like a ferocious beast”; “ignited my memory”; “challenged my mind”; “suddenly”; “falling into an abyss.” The change in pace is dramatic, announced, an alarm bell, a loud drum, the visitor whose arrival is announced by an announcement from an announcer.

This accumulation of detail threatens to overwhelm the key part of the paragraph: “I heard her humming a heavenly melody. Even in my death, in a realm I was yet to understand, Faulata’s voice was quite distinct. She hummed a poignant tune that did magic to my mind.” (I must confess, I find myself reading this story as an editor-writer more than as a reader, and I keep wishing I could hand the writer Charles Baxter’s The Art of Subtext.)

This fourth paragraph feels leaden, anxious, an anxiety communicated by the insistence on immediacy, as though the story needed to change pace as fast as possible. What might have happened if it lingered on the slow unfolding of sensation, on suspending what can be known, if it tarried in uncertainty? And because I’ve been focusing on sound recently, I wonder what would happen if sound—as repetition, as exposition, as method—was allowed to shape the movement of event, the development of character, more insistently.

The shift to the visual register as where knowing takes place—“Then I saw a picture of” and “Then I saw a picture of”—risks conflating the narrator’s mother with the “men in black” who rob the speaker. One might read this construction as the narrator’s mother gives him life while the “men in black” take a kind of living away. Again, we are still in the formal structure of assertion and negation. And still the slow accretion of detail. Except now it’s punctuated with sharp breaks, quick and often jerky movements that interrupt the slowness.

I enjoyed the pidgin and wished there had been more: its brief appearance seems to mark “local color” and so doesn’t quite work to depict the lifeworld or even brief encounter it’s supposed to mark. I appreciate the musing on its authenticity, even as years of trying to figure out vernacular in McKay and Dunbar have taught me to respect the difficulties of writing any kind of oral-heard speech: one is writing by ear and tongue, and spelling becomes difficult. (I’m only three pages into the story.)
*
The story changes once the narrator, Salim, discovers he is in hospital. The slow accumulation of detail through sensation is replaced by a too-rapid exposition: the bodily injuries are described clinically: “I had two fractures on my right leg, one on my left arm and three broken ribs.” One wonders whether any pain or discomfort is experienced. Similarly, the shape of the narrator’s family, or, rather, its attrition, is described mechanically:

Abba, my father, had already been dead for long; my elder brother, Kabir, had passed on just over a year before; and now Ummi was gone. All I had left was Jamila, my teenage sister. My other two female siblings were married.”

One wishes for some restraint—and some EDITING! Surely, it makes more sense to end with “All I had left.” The addition of “My other two female siblings” is gratuitous.

Rather than a kind of mechanical exposition that passes too rapidly, as in this passage,

I developed a phobia for eating in front of people. I felt as if they were looking at me, shaking their heads in pity. I hated being the object of their pity. I would rather have had them laugh at me. But each time I imagined them laughing at me, I got angry and would fume. Besides, my pride would not let me eat in front of them because the exercise was tasking. I had to feel the food, like a child learning how to eat. So, when there were guests around, which was always the case, I would refuse to eat.

One wishes for an illustrative passage, rich detail, an encounter that would dramatize what is, now, told. And if “show, don’t tell,” is poor writing advice, as some claim, it’s still what I want to say.
*
The “bad” paper always takes more time to grade than the “good” one; the poorly-written and badly-argued critical book takes longer to read than the good one, though not as long as the excellent, dense one. And this is, in part, a function of training. I still read fiction as I do poetry, because I’ve never really learned “how” to read fiction. I find many formal strategies for reading fiction too taxonomic, too distant from the text. I want to find and inhabit a text’s crevices.

A simple way to describe this story: it moves from an intense focus on the self, intense narcissism—hence the proliferating and insistent “I”—toward a state of grace, of being not-for-self but for-others. It could be described as a long wail that hiccups as such wailing often does and, at the end, discovers “service” as the significance of life.”

The elation I felt at seeing all these troubled souls liberated remains the most magnificent feeling I have ever felt. To see people in anguish and give them comfort, to free minds bound by desire, anger or guilt, to guide souls that are lost to their destinies, to reconcile souls alienated by misunderstandings — that is my life and purpose. It is what gives me joy.

It could be described as a story about finding joy. But a story that gives little joy in the search-and-rescue effort. (This whole post might be described as a search-and-rescue effort.)

Matthew recently described most Caine-nominated stories as realist and didactic. And while this story seems to reach for a little bit of the fantastic, it’s never willing to trust in the power of the imagination, to indulge in fantasy a little more.

It feels rude to write that I wanted more, and more better.

I did.

I do.

departures:arrivals

Water is the first thing in my imagination.
– Dionne Brand
He has to take most of his men away from here in chains, 6 men chained together by the neck, because they desert before starting
– Francis Hall

Before I learned to love the sparseness of acacia trees, my memory was green. Before I embraced a savanna aesthetic.

I have been thinking about land and soil
about the green that grounds me
trying to write away from land hunger
from claims to belonging
learning
from water imaginations
(how land can
dissolve)

Acacias are sparse, sparing, inhabiting a form I would come to relish, the single line on a page, the hardness that, initially, seems so fragile (and, was it
that they gave me

water hunger,
but not
the memory of water

I wonder if we who
can no longer write of home
inhabit
departure:arrival
in all our geographies

What is return to not-home?

police procedurals teach me that anti-social people do not put anything on their walls. After I learn this, I refuse to hang anything on my walls. I need the

s p a c e
*
Green is the color of my true.love’s.hair.

Touch me, touch me,
Little cool grass fingers,
Elusive, delicate grass fingers. – Angelina Weld Grimké
*
One could write about the varieties of green, but I crave its repetitions, not its variations. I don’t want green to have three hundred names. I want it to persist.

Am I attached to its inevitable loss?

Is green the color of melancholia?
*
Q: What have you been doing?
a: I have been learning how not to arrive.

The thing is that I think Blacks in the Diaspora carry the Door of No Return in our senses. It is a passport which, after boarding the plane, we are unable to make disappear by tearing it up and throwing it into the toilet. We arrive with its coat of arms, its love know, its streamers, its bugle, its emblems attesting to our impossible origins.
– Dionne Brand

(we used to laugh at those who affected accents, how much more
those who have learned to claim
slavery’s deracination)

or
how I learn
to figure myself
as
diasporic

*
to figure oneself as diasporic: to be figured as diasporic

figuration is grounding abstraction: a thing to think with, a thing to be about and around, perhaps the only possible grounding
*
I am trying to narrate a happening, a presenting that can never be fully apprehensible, as with all presentings.

the diasporic presented with deracination.
*

How do we read these complicated juxtapositions of belonging and not belonging, belonging and intrabelonging.
– Dionne Brand

To be black in the diaspora might be to ask questions that never need a question mark.
*

soil
soiled
soilness

one extends into belonging (and dissolution)
*
Wambui tells me about making soil better, healthier, richer: a soil imagination based on care and practice.

a soil imagination the black diasporic can inhabit:

the labor diaspora can un/do
*
I have been asking deracination to un/do, to/do, to make (poiesis) a green imagination possible.

When you embark on a journey, you have already arrived. The world you are going to is already in your head. You have already walked in it, eaten in it; you have already made friends; a lover is already waiting. – Dionne Brand

I continue to borrow words, not yet sure what words can suffice to name this remembered longing for green.

what one remembers
what one longs to remember
how one remembers
how one longs to remember
how one longs
even for longing

*
And they punished him for being still alive.
- Edmond Jabès
*
the unfamiliarity of a now-refurbished childhood home

the unfamiliarity that we call a childhood home.
*
And the poetry of return:

At the end of daybreak

Beat it, I said to him, you cop, you lousy pig, beat it, I detest the flunkies of order and the cockchafers of hope. Beat it, evil grigri, you bedbug of a petty monk. Then I turned toward paradises lost for him and his kin, calmer than the face of a woman telling lies, and there, rocked by the flux of a never exhausted thought I nourished the wind, I unlaced the monsters and heard rise, from the other side of disaster, a river of turtledoves and savanna clover which I carry forever in my depths height-deep as the twentieth floor of the most arrogant houses and as a guard against the putrefying force of crepuscular surroundings, surveyed night and day by a cursed venereal sun. (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land)

The accumulations of the years that burn,
White forge-like fires within my haunted brain (“America in Retrospect”)

To arrive at dawn on a world where you have departed nighttime (or day-time—no matter) from some spot on that same world is to enter a welter of possibilities. (Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand)

Rushing headlong
into new silence
your face
dips on my horizon
the name of a cherished dream
riding my anchor
one sweet season
to cast off
on another voyage (“Smelling the Wind”)

*
Echoes taste of here-not-here. New views from familiar windows. (tea tastes familiar, with a hint of spice, but musty: my mother’s spices have always stayed too long; I come to throw away spices, grind new flavors into possibility
*
the billboards look larger
the roads feel smoother
green shades into echoes of itself
*
If I now write of terroir, I mean the shape of banana leaves, the tender bruises of mouth-rich avocado

splitting & misrecognition

The African been-to novel was a short-lived phenomenon. Here’s the quick and dirty:

From the late 1950s through the early 1970s, African authors including Wole Soyinka, Tayeb Salih, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, and Yambo Ouologuem produced a sub-genre known as been-to novels. In their most paradigmatic form, been-to novels feature a brilliant male student who travels to Europe or the U.S. with the aim of returning to his home country to help build the post-independent nation. The designation been-to, from which the sub-genre takes its name, encapsulates this process of travel: he has been to a foreign country and returned. However, the instrumental purpose of the journey abroad, to acquire skills and education, conflicts with the cultural and psychological experiences of travel. In an inversion of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, been-to novels depict what happens when, as Frantz Fanon puts it, “the Negro” comes into “contact” with “white civilization.”

The been-to novel is primarily about interiority; it might, in fact, be the most modernist African novel because of this focus on interiority. Because we understand the been-to as an intellectual, we are more willing to spend time on this figure, and by “we,” I mean those of us who read literature more than casually. It also helps that Salih’s Season of Migration to the North is an iconic African novel (and also so gorgeous) as many other been-to novels are out of print (The Interpreters, Fragments, Bound to Violence—though newly available in a collection edited by Christopher Wise).

It’s easy to value the been-to novel and particular been-to stories in that vicious way that canonization and genre value certain works: I am inclined to value works about African intellectuals, African students, African modernist characters, precisely because my training inclines me to view these works as valuable.

Something interesting happens when I’m presented with a story that falls outside the been-to paradigm, where the character is, well, not exceptional. This is the problem of reading Pede Hollist’s “Foreign Aid.” How does one read a kind of character that one has not encountered before? Or, rather, how does one value a kind of character one has encountered as a foil to the exceptional been-to?

As with the been-to novel, “Foreign Aid” is marked by silences:

“Two marriages, one to a White woman, and three child-support payments later, Logan, in his early forties, emerged from inner-city America—documented, potbellied, and with an American twang.”

What is an “American twang”? What kind of “twang” does one get in/from/around “inner-city America.” Why is “inner-city” America present as the thing that does not need to be represented? Of course, the been-to story has always been about what is not told, about a return from what cannot be spoken. Balogun/Logan has “two failed marriages” and has “faced tribulations” (notice the biblical language, as with “Miracle”) but these remain unspoken, as erased as his before-American Twang mode of speech.

This is, in many ways, a story that erases itself as it proceeds.

At the immigration station, he presented his passport to a uniformed officer who peered at each page like a diviner deciphering his kola nuts. Logan exhaled and tapped his fingers against his thigh.

“Yellow book!”

Logan tossed it on the counter. The officer eyed him as would a father an impertinent child, grabbed the book, and scrutinized it with the intensity of a diviner puzzled by the message of his kola nuts. Logan’s fingers tapped his thigh and his chest heaved.

“I’m from the States, bro?”

“Whether you are from America or from a septic tank, the laws of Sierra Leone say you must have the correct vaccinations.” The officer slammed his stamp into both booklets and shoved them to the edge of the counter.

“Next.” He looked past Logan.

As he stood by the conveyor belt at baggage claim, Logan recognized that the encounter had offered him a lesson, but fatigue and watching suitcases pop out of the luggage chute at the speed of childbirth aborted the little inclination he had for reflection.

“Correct Vaccinations”: an introduction of now-forgotten, attenuated, diminished antibodies into a system that has since forgotten what it used to know, or might have. What is it to have a “correct vaccination” when one returns to the country of one’s birth? What must one be protected from? What must be re-introduced to re-turn Logan to Balogun? This impossible return.

Indeed, Balogun/Logan’s encounters are precisely about his failed return; following an encounter that makes explicit the relationship between the haves and the have-nots, he tells his father: “I don’t live here, Pops.” When his father tells him, “This is not America,” he replies, ““That’s not the point, Pops. . . .” And, in fact, Balogun/Logan insists, “we do things differently in America.” Who is this “we”? What is this entity called “America”?

A rather imprecise count suggests that the name Balogun appears under 15 times in the story while the name Logan appears over 60 times. This small detail might suggest the extent to which he has not left “America,” but this “America” remains fuzzy, undeveloped, a place of fantasy-cliché, an unreality that presents itself as “Foreign Aid.”

That Logan is tone deaf and arrogant is unsurprising; this, after all, characterizes “Foreign Aid,” but also speaks, I think, to a kind of remittance economy fantasy that believes “giving” or “sending money” is doing good, all the while remaining indifferent to how local economies work.

I find myself stuck, though, because the inner cities from which Balogun claims to have graduated are densely packed local economies, anchored by the circulation of favors and promises and hopes and fears that Balogun encounters in central Freetown (notice, of course, the implicit comparison between “inner cities” and “central Freetown”). The tough pose that he adopts as his mark of graduation, the tone deafness to the local he re-enters, the foolish arrogance he demonstrates (for someone who had once wanted to be an economist, he really does not know how to think about the multiple economies around him), all of these suggest that he has been unlearning everything. That, like the money he accumulates to give away, and gives away too fast, there is little he retains that can allow him to navigate the lifeworlds he visits.

Were I more patiently Derridean, I might trace the doubled signatures that close this story: Tima/Tina and Balogun/Logan, the way Tima/Tina reminds Balogun/Logan that he is Balogun/Logan, that his misrecognition is recognized for the doubled/misrecognition that it is, and that his acts of doubling are not specifically or even necessarily primarily a mark of his American-ness, but, in fact, a shared condition, an ongoing splitting and shuttling between selves and lifeworlds inhabited even by young women who don’t seem to have such an option.

I kept wanting the U.S. to be more than background in this story. I’d have liked a richer engagement with Baltimore’s rich life and textured local economies. And while I enjoy the splitting and proximity of Balogun/Logan, I would have liked to see this splitting be more formally interesting. (And, here, I echo Matthew’s desire to see more formally innovative writing represented as African. Perhaps we need an anthology or special issue of a journal on formally innovative African writing?)

Also, what Aaron blogged. What Kola blogged. What Veronica blogged. What Scott blogged. What Kate blogged. What Beverly blogged.

Peace and Justice for PEV Victims

Who are the victims of Kenya’s Post-election violence (PEV)? And what would it mean to secure “justice” for them? What would “justice” look like, feel like, taste like, sound like? The farther away we’ve moved from the PEV, the more distant these questions have become. Justice, we have learned, has something to do with the law and legal arguments and lawyers’ abilities to argue and counter-argue. Justice, we have learned, is about the time of the argument—collecting evidence, verifying it, evaluating witnesses, intimidating them, diplomatic negotiations, diplomatic failures, winning elections, losing elections, blaming victims, victimizing blame. Justice, it seems, has very little to do with people to whom specific things happened.

As with 9/11, in which every U.S. resident, citizen or not, was deemed injured and subsequently recruited to participated in the surveillance state—if you see something, say something—the PEV has been used to recruit Kenyans as infinitely vulnerable, woundable subjects, whose task is to build armor, or, more precisely, don Kevlar vests that prevent such wounding. In the years since the PEV, those of us who experienced the violence from a distance have been made proximal through exhibitions and stories, traumatized by our second-hand experiences. While I do not want to minimize the labor of witness and exhibition, I wonder what happens when we claim a trauma equal to those who witnessed their loved ones killed in brutal ways.

What does it mean to claim we are all victims of the PEV?

Even those accused of aiding and abetting the violence, the ICC 3, describe themselves as political victims of the violence. They merit as much prayer—with anointing oil—as those whose families and friends died under brutal conditions. The pain of the political class is always much more significant than the wananchi’s. And in an even more recent twist, we are told that the real victims are, variously, African sovereignty, African dignity, Kenya, and Kenyan masculinity.
*
News arrives that 93 witnesses for the ICC have withdrawn from the case. That is, 93 victims of PEV violence have withdrawn. Their reported statement is heartbreaking:

“The utterances of the prosecution against our government threatens the process of national healing and reconciliation. Our peaceful coexistence as a community is much more important.”

Is “our government” the same as “Our . . . community”? And what does it mean to understand oneself as an obstruction to “national healing and reconciliation”? It’s worth remembering that PEV victims have been actively constructed as undeserving criminals for the past few years: lazy, unmotivated, liars, and cheats. The burst of sympathy and goodwill from early 2008 has been transformed to disgust and contempt. We have been taught to regard PEV victims as irritants who are holding us back, as incarnating a “bad time” that was a “little mistake” when “passions were inflamed.”

And we have been told that anything is worth doing (silencing, suppressing, repressing, arresting, disappearing) to maintain peace. At a moment when peace increasingly means not irritating those in power.

ethnicity in the shadow of race

Two moments:

As those of an Antillean, our observations and conclusions are valid only for the French Antilles—at least regarding the black man on his home territory. A study needs to be made to explain the differences between Antilleans and Africans. One day perhaps we shall conduct such a study. Perhaps it will no longer be necessary, in which case we can but have reason for applause. (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks)

For what, at bottom, distinguished the Americans from the Negroes who surrounded us, men from Nigeria, Senegal, Barbados, Martinique—so many names for so many disciplines—was the banal and abruptly quite overwhelming fact that we had been born in a society, which, in a way quite inconceivable for Africans, and no longer real for Europeans, was open, and, in a sense, which has nothing to do with justice or injustice, was free. It was a society, in short, in which nothing was fixed and we had therefore been born to a greater number of possibilities, wretched as a these possibilities seemed at the instant of our birth. (Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name)

How does someone trained through race—focusing especially on the U.S. and the Caribbean—think about ethnicity? I have been trying to figure out the knottiness that ethnicity presents for race-training, even given the portability of “difference.” By portability, I mean how difference is often figured along similar sense-based apprehensions. Even with slight variations, alien-ness is understood as unassimilable or corrupting, and often both.

One need only think of the peculiar way “smell” demarcates difference.
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From here, it has been easier to forget how ethnicity proliferates difference; being African in the U.S. requires a particular forgetting of how bodies speak, losing a certain fluency in names and features, geographies and genealogies. After many years, I still cannot hear the slight variations that I am told mark geography in the U.S. I have not yet learned how to hear them.

Following Kenneth Burke, one might call this trained incapacity. If I am no longer fluent in Kenyan difference, I can still bluff.
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Difference multiplies.
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One might say that the practices of Kenyan ethnicity are much too diffuse to be accounted for by Afro-diasporic, which is to say, racialized logics of difference. But thinking through colonial modernity requires re-orienting one’s genealogies. Thinking, for instance, of how slave-making difference subtends African-Kenyan ethnicity.
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But this is not the same as saying that race, as framed in the U.S. and in the Caribbean, provides the template for the ethnic-production of colonial modernity. Textures matter. It is to say that one cannot abstract ethnic-production from the difference race and racialization make in colonial modernity.
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I’m thinking about this race-ethnicity suture as I work through Kenyatta’s writing which uses “people” and “nation” and “tribe” and “race” to embed the Gikuyu within colonial modernity. In turning to Kenyatta after the Afro-Jamaican Claude McKay, I’m having to re-tool, re-frame, re-encounter terms that look the same and even taste the same, but have different effects.
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Ethnicity in Kenya is not the same as ethnicity in the U.S. This seems like a banal point, but it’s one worth making.

Were I more Sedgwickian, that sentence might have read: ethnicity in Kenya is not the same as ethnicity in the U.S., but a comparative project must reckon with their relative weights. Which is to say, one should not assume that the weight of one trumps the weight of the other, even though the globalization of terror’s visual logic drives us to privilege the U.S. eye.

One might write this as: what it means to look Somali in Amsterdam, Baltimore, and Nairobi.
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“The African” recurs in McKay, Baldwin, and Fanon as strange. Cullen sings it right:

Here no bodies sleek and wet,
Dripping mingled rain and sweat,
Tread the savage measures of
Jungle boys and girls in love.

“Here no” recurs as the place from which McKay, Baldwin, and Fanon write.

I come to “here no” from a “there no.” Seduced and bewildered by Cullen’s images of fantasy-Africa. (And the failure to ever sound from “here no”)
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One hears the Americanized African—these terms must be used—sustain Americanization for only so long. A word slips out, a facial expression, a trace of that “there no” that provokes the eternal question: “where are you from”?
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One might put the matter this way: to think about ethnicity through race as currently constituted in the U.S. requires cultural translation. Simultaneously, one cannot think of ethnicity without the racial production of difference termed colonial modernity.

How these times “touch” might be the core of an ongoing project.
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The tradition I invoke—Cullen, Baldwin, Fanon, to which we might add Pauline Hopkins and Gwendolyn Bennett—reads Africa as fabulation. From Tavia Nyong’o, I learn to think of fabulation as a kind of faction (fact-fiction), an ongoing making of space-place-time (geo-history) and of producing collectivities anchored in such fabulation. Ashis Nandy might call this necessary myth-making.

Reading through this factioning (factionalizing? fabulating?) taught me how to ask questions about ethnicity and its fabulation, a labor that, as I discovered, Kenyan historians had undertaken since at least the early 70s.
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Myth is tenacious and also profitable, as it creates and sustains and expands alliances.

To think about ethnicity:race requires navigating the various interweaving strands of “privilege,” as Mehul Gohil reminds me.
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This might be biographical—never autobiographical. A question of how to read a there archive from a here archive. A way to think about diaspora and colonial modernity, about the global life of the afterlife of slavery.

It is also, as I continue to discover, about the resistance posed by objects (echoes of Fred Moten here). About the thinking created as one tries to see around corners, to unjungle eroded landscapes and diverted waterways. To think about the ongoing work of faction.
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The sustained attention one pays to an object as it emerges, takes shape, eludes apprehension, slides away, moves closer, seduces.
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I’m trying to see around the corner to a thought that keeps sliding away.