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
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 face of an ape, the roar of a lion and the strength of a buffalo: but he was also the most cowardly creature you could ever come across. Looking at him or listening to him as he threatened you, you could feel like kneeling and begging him to spare you: but those of us who understood him knew that he was quite easy to deal with. To get him off your back, you only needed to give him a blow in the face or bend down as if to pick up a weapon. When you straightened up, he would be gone.
* * *
A pansy passed nearby as we were talking. He was short, fat brown with even, white teeth. He was handsome, all right, this queer. He moved sexily in front of us, with slow calculated steps as if intending to impress us. The calves of his legs were fat and smooth, his whole body well washed and smeared with a sweet-smelling toilet soap, which could only be afforded by prison tycoons. He had protruding buttocks, which trembled with every step. A hyena would have followed him for miles expecting them to drop at any moment so that it could eat them.
* * *
A Kenyan classic, complete with tales about queer prison gangs and all!
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 those “classics” by Conrad and Twain. Instead, I’m thinking of a book like Dixon’s The Clansman.
These are odd questions, engendered by an online discussion in which it was suggested (good old eliminate agent!) that certain texts were published as racist texts. That “were” caught me. If they were published as racist texts—to enable certain political, social, cultural goals—what are they now? Are they still racist? And how do we teach them, if we do?
If certain goals are no longer possible—it is unlikely Jim Crow will return, though time is fickle—then what does a book like The Clansman communicate? In part, this is a question of persistence and re-deployment (the military metaphor is appropriate). It is also a question of how “new” racisms emerge and function.
What is “new” about them is precisely the contexts in which they emerge, but also how their “newness” remains invisible under guidelines and paradigms designed to detect and correct for “old” racisms. Thus, for instance, the persistent notion that racism is a white/black issue has made it difficult to make visible other kinds of social relations. But now I’m venturing too far from my original questions.
When we claim that a text “was” racist, we mean something about the kind of labor the text was supposed to perform within a particular place and time. It cannot be a transhistorical claim.
Yet, we are always faced with the problem of what Williams termed the residual, no matter how attenuated.
Within the classroom, part of this residual has to deal with students’ affect. How does one engage with those who agree with Thomas, for instance, that cross-racial contact is a bad idea? How does one engage with those who love the genre and novel (as I do) and feel guilty for doing so, because they think it implicates them in its racism? How does one engage with those who refuse to engage with the novel because it is wounding to read its descriptions? (Here, the subtle point that disengagement is also a form of engagement has little traction.)
There are other dangers: for instance, some students may use racist texts as divining rods, to fault those who don’t agree with them. And few classroom encounters are as uncomfortable as trying to adjudicate the “you’re racist” accusations.
In which case, why teach racist texts? Why teach racism as emanating from specific historical points and having specifically historical functions? Why risk a kind of pedagogy that, to be frank, many would disagree with on ideological, formal, and political grounds? Dixon may be fun, but it’s hardly Henry James. And why spend two weeks on Dixon instead of two weeks on Du Bois? (It’s nice to imagine that one can teach everything. We pick and choose.)
I don’t want to put myself in the awkward position of “defending” racist texts, even as I acknowledge that choosing to teach a racist text expresses a certain kind of defense: the syllabus is a mini-canon, and to canonize, even in that limited form, is to value.
I am interested in thinking about what it means to continue to risk pedagogy. I’m interested in how we bend and stretch as teachers and thinkers, even as we anticipate teaching our students to bend and stretch.
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 she trained them as burglars, cat burglars. It grew into a gang of outstanding ruthlessness. It is a Lesbian organization which now calls itself “The Cement Mixers”.
Ian Fleming, Goldfinger (1959)
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 can remember. They are, in part, inter-generational and inter-regional. My Kiambu-living aunt has most often been the one to remind me that “this is Kenya,” usually when we are in Nairobi.
That she reminds me makes me wonder what it means to forget where one is. What is it to forget the space-time that one inhabits? Not the past, not the “was,” but the “is,” and how does such forgetting enable the “is” to morph into the “will be”? What does forgetting the “is” mean for memory and history?
I am not thinking, here, of forgetting traumatic events—though I continue to wonder if there can be such a thing as the trauma of the quotidian, and believe there is. Instead, I am wondering about the ongoing forgetting that demands constant reminding. The ongoing “forgetting” (that might not be the right word) that we mean to correct when we insist on hereness and nowness.
And what is it to insist on hereness and nowness, to continually nudge others into the present we occupy? What anxieties about living in time and on time, about sharing space, compel our constant need to affirm that we are in synchronous time-space?
How do we live with those who are out of sync? How do we live when we are out of sync?
*
Hereness and nowness rarely coincide. The more extended the not-here, the more difficult to occupy the-now.
A banal example.
One listens to conversations with a gracious, slightly confused smile, unable to follow cause and effect, stone throw and ripple, and, when proffered, explanations rarely capture the urgency of the now and then. From a different now, one finds it difficult to understand why this particular now should matter or be interesting.
To ask such questions when one is off-time and off-place suggests something about the urgencies of our own quotidian. Of course, we also construct intimacy as hereness, an extending nowness. And so to be in the same place and time is to envision the extension of that being. A banal explanation for why we return to places where we first “felt.”
*
I remain troubled by the intimacies that structure hereness and nowness, the demand that one be in time and on time, the invocations of those who are fully present, as expected.
To be fully present is to aka nyumba, to set up one’s house, to affirm one’s commitment to a place, to a history, to a trajectory.
The word “plot” recurs too often to be accidental.
It used to mean “something to do.” Now it means somewhere for living to occur, histories to be created, futures to unfold. It has become a repository of time and place, of hereness and nowness. Plots make forgetting difficult, insist that one remember. Childhood meanings blend into adult tongues.
Stutters break time. And, in the interval, nowness is anticipated.
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 of work produced in this studio.
The studio offers 12 passport photos for Kshs 150, Kshs 200 gets you 8 done express, within 5 minutes.
Although other kinds of photography take place here, the studio is dedicated to passport photographs. It is definitely not Studio One, across the street, from where our obligatory family portrait emanated in another time.
I wonder about the promise of the passport photograph, and how it functions as a tool of social mobility—a mobility that may be diagonal, vertical, horizontal, the only promise being that movement will happen.
I wonder, even more, about the promise of Obama’s face in this particular studio. It is repeated at least 6 times, twice on the calendars that hang on the wall, as though to suggest we are now in Obama time, or that the passport might change time and destiny.
This narrative is suggested by an ad in the paper: Obama’s face looks out from an ad that promises to help one get a green card to the U.S. Apply now and become Obama, or so it seems.
I have suggested, previously, that Obama represents the myth of Stato, a confirmation of unconfirmed stories. After all, we only have the word of the summer bunnies and the winter bunnies that they are “doing well,” little proof. And we know plenty of stories about those who disappear into the ether of foreignness. Whose faces, unlike Obama’s, cannot be displayed as emblems of success, the kind of success premised on “anything is better than here.”
And so we line up here to take our passport photographs taken. It is a hopeful gesture, an indication that we continue to believe in the futures Obama embodies.
*
The other photographs are official, issued from the U.S. image-makers, and they also tell a certain kind of story, create a certain kind of dream to which one might aspire.
This story is more ambivalent.
One part of it is about the kind of institution this studio aspires to become, an institution in which images are created that circulate around the world, an institution that takes photographs of important people. And one sees, in some of the faces here, an aspiration to be one of those whose image will circulate.
A darker narrative is about going to the place where such images have been created. It is a narrative about the passport photograph joining to the passport and enabling travel to a different kind of image-space.
I am struck, most, by the multiple Obama calendars on the wall. A passport ensures, it seems, not only access to a different space, but also access to a different time.
It is a time that lives in the difference between the 12 photographs, promised within an hour, delivered in two, and the 8 photographs, promised within 5 minutes, delivered within 10.
*
The studio also has photographs of Kibaki and Raila. They sit across the room from the Obama wall, in a recessed shelf. They also represent a time-space, a kind of poa, time will wait, space will accommodate. They are accommodated and take up space.
Kibaki and Raila do not represent the promise of the passport photograph. The forms of movement associated with them are de-linked, paradoxically, from mobility for others. One cannot aspire to be a Kibaki or Raila, and while becoming Obama seems more difficult, it is also, paradoxically, easier to dream about.
Kenyan photo studios have always been aspirational spaces. We lined up to pose as the families we wanted to be. Lovers posed in magazine-learned contortions, convinced that standing just-so ensured a just-so future.
One of the photographs on the wall represents one of these just-so futures: Barack, Michelle, and their daughters, posed as the family passports enable.
There are no pictures of a Kenyan family on the Obama wall. No counter-narrative offered, and it registers as blankness. Instead, the Kenyan test shots feature employees of the studio, each standing alone, each against a generic black or blue backdrop.
And each one threatening to fade into a background that will not allow movement.
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 up a rating system. An hour of talk time yields three complete sentences and an avalanche of interrogatives. We abandon pardon for what. Learn to be telegraphic.
I miss the luxury of complete sentences.
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 the promise of fresh paint and strange voices.
But you know I have a leaky memory, and it is not the crispness of then I seek, but the pieces of me I left behind: a coin, chewed gum, string from my ever-fraying sweaters.
*
And the other places, where so much is invested.
What is the fear of the overly known?
I have not yet learned not to fear disappointment, and I marvel at those who have. One approaches promises with trepidation. It is only untried youth that believes “you will have so much fun,” and I have already confessed my distaste for “fun.”
One cannot anticipate fascination, nor can one predict what will become enshrined.
*
You laugh at my love for street benches and brightly colored doors, my faith in the healing power of spring grass and fresh cement. And you wonder if I shall stop returning to you.
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. Over the course of a few weeks, we learn the unfolding shapes of family trees: the marriages, the deaths, the divorces, the come-we-stays, the never-should-have-beens. We learn about those who are “doing well” and those who are doing “not so well,” and about those who are passed over in silence. We learn, as always, about what counts as achievement, and learn how we have both measured up and failed.
These narratives are also about expectations. More than once, my mother has mentioned that a daughter of a friend has “bought a plot” and intends to “build a house.” It will be mentioned again during my stay, a subtle infection calculated to produce certain results.
This repeated narrative is part of the ordinariness of return. The first time after a long time, one is allowed to be eccentric. The fact of being home takes precedence over much else. After that, others desire to shape one’s life. One must don protective layers.
One learns to manage meetings and encounters. To devote time to those who share one’s interests and passions, to ensure that accidental meetings with former friends never blossom into extended “remember when” sessions, to take political and ideological temperatures and gird one’s loins when necessary. To say no and never show up. To cultivate what feeds one. This last is the only way the ordinary can be so and remain pleasant.
*
I return with a toothache and metaphors. Disrupted sleep patterns and a mostly empty bottle of Advil.
For the past few weeks, I have been following a discussion on H-Africa on what drugs to take when traveling to Africa, more specifically Ghana. When I arrive at the airport. I receive a document that indicates I have come from a country with Swine Flu.
Malaria vs. Swine Flu.
One is a worldwide epidemic.
*
Returns grate.
We return as much to reconnect as to remind ourselves why we stay away. I return to find the avocado trees in full bloom, the house full of green goodness, and awaken to a diminished appetite. The freshest, most organic food I have had in a while, and I do not desire it. In some corner of the universe, a wicked god laughs.
Returns produce writing. Travel produces writing. Yet, not the lovingly created narratives that Binyavanga writes, developed from plunging into life in all its thickness. I envy him this. Instead, I dip my toes in nearby pools and scan for signs of life and infection. I monitor the color of my toenails, and boil chlorinated tap water. I return to find metaphors, and do not have the skill or patience to parse them.
*
I return to terms like mũhĩrĩga and itega and ngurario and kũrashia, to declarations from a dying generation about Ũgĩkũyũ and anxieties from my generation about doing things “right.” A cousin married abroad returns to marry here. Talks must be held, gifts exchanged, animals killed. I relish the ceremonial aspects of it—I’m a fag, after all—though I cheerfully refuse to attend any part of it.
Old allergens embrace me and my sneezes change timbre, sound more “at home.”
Black pepper comforts me
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 certain kind of Kenyan.
It is worth dwelling, for a moment, on the comparison between prisoners and rehabilitated street children, the targets of sodomy, for both might be said to occupy similar positions in one kind of social imagination. They are, for better or worse, neglected and negligible populations, populations whose value lies in their invisibility. Nairobi prides itself on “clearing away” street children, for instance.
What does it mean that neglected and negligible populations must be defended against sodomy? What does it mean that marginalized populations, those that occupy the edge of the social must be defended against sodomy, in parliament no less? How might we read this securing of borders against invasion?
What happens to sodomy in the absence of any pro-sodomy discourse? Who will defend sodomy?
*
In his rich, and probably dated, glossary of prison terms, Maina wa Kĩnyattĩ offers the following definitions:
Mende/Mfiraji/Shoga/Nding’oing’o: All refer to those prisoners who sodomize other prisoners. “Mende” is probably the most popular and accepted name. A rich “mende” has a host of concubines. He feeds them, supplies them with cigarettes and provides them with security which is needed in prison. Those “mende”who are not rich rape other prisoners. Literally, “mende” means a cockroach and “nding’oing’o”means a beetle which feeds on human excrement. “Mfiraji” or “shoga” means a faggot or homosexual.
Kumkula/Kũmũrĩa: Means to sodomize another prisoner. Literally, “kula” or “kũrĩa” means to eat.
Kũhũra Mai/ Gũtindĩka Mai: To have anal sex, literally, “kũhũra mai” means to beat shit with penis and “ngũtindĩka mai” means to push shit with penis.
I have yet to think through these definitions, which are only one part of the rich homo-discourse in Kĩnyattĩ’s work. For now, only to note how rich the tonal shades of these descriptions. And to suggest that it might be possible to find interesting, ambivalent descriptions of sodomy in Kenya.
*
But does sodomy need to be defended? By whom and for what reason? (Elsewhere, I have noted why it is important to discuss sodomy, not homosexuality.)
*
To judge sodomy as guilty or proclaim its innocence misses the rich textures, shades, colors, and variations of sodomy. I write this aware of the rich way the term sodomy has functioned in history, to describe all non-reproductive sex acts. But I also write it in the context of the limited understandings that continually find sodomy guilty in Kenya.
We try sodomy without saying anything about trying sodomy.
I continue to believe that Kenyan discourses on sodomy are impoverished and truncated. Since we already know what “it” is we need not detail, see, talk about, discuss, debate “it” nor can we countenance any alternate stances, any differing viewpoints. And our fledgling queer rights activists are not yet convinced that erotic lives and practices are worth defending—to do so might be to compromise the emphasis on rights and dignity, and yet not to do so risks losing what is specifically queer.
Queer is bodily.
As long as we Kenyan queers remain silent and bashful about sodomy, we continue to enable the kind of framing in which sodomy is something to be tried and found either guilty and innocent. In this case, always guilty.
*
What other ways might there be to frame and re-frame sodomy?
I return, as always, to Foucault’s invocation of bodies and pleasures. And I think about some of the effects of queer pornography on queer politics. Not simply pornography as titillation, but as a way to make visible and palpable what can be done and imagined with the body, as a way to make evident bodies and pleasures in all their ambivalent varieties. I continue to invoke ambivalence because we feel in complex ways about what we do: feeling “good” might not necessarily be the point.
I am not suggesting that multiplying discourses on sodomy will provide a new trial in which sodomy will be found innocent. (I am not convinced that innocent sodomy is any fun.) I am suggesting that multiplying discourses on sodomy, saying more about how “it” is less singular than imagined, more richly textured than envisioned may provide us with more interesting terrain than we now occupy.
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