Queer Paresthesia

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” toward “gay-ness.” Not simply gayness, of course, but “gay couples” who choose to get married, gay couples “from” Kenya. This “from” is important, because it posits a kind of severed relationship (even though, we learn, one of the couple “built his parents” a house). To “be from” and to “be of” are quite distinct, or at least not the same thing. And this question, phrased as it is, makes that distinction meaningful.

We are told, in the article, that the men “are of Kenyan origin.” It remains unclear whether either or both still hold Kenyan passports, still claim Kenyan citizenship. This fuzziness over where the men “belong” is crucial to the process of deracinating them, uprooting them on the basis of sexuality. On the one side “Kenyans” who may or may not have “the right” to “condemn” the couple and on the other hand the couple whose Kenyan-ness is fuzzy, whose sexuality makes their Kenyan-ness fuzzy, indistinct, unclear.

We have, in this instance, an excellent example of how sexuality is used to scission different modes of belonging based on performances of intimacy. It is not simply that these men are “gay,” but that they flaunt that gayness abroad and through a wedding, that they perform their gayness, that it leaks out and touches those who know them and are related to them.

Too, the shame that the couple is composed of “Kenyans.” Another article mentions that one partner in the couple had a previous husband, a white man, a European, a non-Kenyan. And this relationship gets a pass. Why this is so I will let others parse. But when two Kenyans, two black Kenyans, and, dare I add, two black Kenyans from the same ethnic group perform gayness, then much is at stake, too much.

The crisis provoked requires that distinctions be made between the performing couple and Kenyan-ness, that Kenyan-ness become a position from which judgment can be passed on the performing gay couple.

This is not, I hasten to add, a claim that “Kenyans are homophobic,” but a claim that Kenyan-ness today (and temporality is very important) is being produced as a relation to sexual practices, as an orientation toward, as a set of attitudes. By no means are these attitudes and orientations uniform, of course. But they do agglutinate in certain ways.

I note, for instance, that few, indeed, almost none of those commenting on the question “out” themselves. That the question is phrased to prevent such “outing” might be a strategy or a mistake; whichever it is, it has the unfortunate effect of allowing “Kenyans” to write for or against the gay couple, without ever putting the signifier “Kenya” into crisis. Citizenship and belonging are managed, affirmed. We bleed into each other’s wounds, and clot together.

In clotting together, we affirm that we have a “right” as wounded individuals—those wounded by homophobia and homophilia—to pronounce upon “the” gay couple. The clotted, agglutinated mass that is Kenyan-ness becomes so and remains so as it proclaims something about the “gay couple” who are detached from the mass, surgically excised by the cruelty of syntax.

In this context, “right” becomes detached from the human rights framework within which queer Kenyan activists would like to frame this debate. The “right to condemn.” Where does this “right” come from? Who bestows it? Where is it practiced? And by whom? These questions are not incidental, for they suggest that the question is not, properly speaking, a legal one, not one accounted for by the laws that ostensibly bind us together as citizens, It is, rather, a question of which injuries we count as sufficient cause to create our own laws, our own methods of acting. I gesture obliquely, and without subtlety, to the rule of mob justice, the “right to condemn.”

How, given the cruelty of syntax, can one claim affiliation with this “gay couple,” these deracinated Kenyans, “of Kenyan origin”? How, in other words, might one have to de-form language itself, un-do the logic of grammar to make a claim, to stake a position, to choose a mode of belonging not offered by the original question?

One can, of course, choose to stand outside the question, to forgo “Kenyan-ness” and answer whether “Kenyans” have a “right” to “condemn” this group. To speak, that is, in a foreign tongue, from a foreign position, to become an exile in language and affect to speak “at home” and “to home.” To be in such a position is, of course, to be impossible: the deracinated can have no claim to “home,” let alone a “right” to speak “at home.”

And those “at home” can always claim that telephone lines are unclear, letters not delivered, telegrams stolen, emails censored, that “nothing” comes through. And that what “comes through” is indecipherable, written in an “alien” tongue, the inarticulate rantings of those who have forgotten how to speak and do so in alien accents.

What rights can the inarticulate, the deracinated, the alien claim? And in what space can these claims be made and before what body? These questions continue to trouble me. Yet they are not the most important. I am missing something more fundamental—that I cannot yet see it or name it must be described as a symptom, perhaps the necessary paresthesia of the un-homed.

What is the position of those who cannot agglutinate, who cannot clot into an ongoing woundedness termed “Kenyan-ness”? What happens to stray blood drops that fall on dirty pavements during rainstorms? To those whose blood can never be accepted for transfusion? To those whose modes of affiliation fracture under the weight of a deracinating “Kenyan-ness” and an equally deracinating “gayness”? What modes of affiliation remain available and need to be created?

I end with the cruelty of syntax because it feels easier to manage than other kinds of cruelties.

Fantasy Basketball

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

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 perform an inevitable act of metonymy, and take those slum dwellers as representatives of the true Africa, an Africa whose truth is confirmed on CNN and BBC, the Travel Channel and Discover. We worry, in fact, that we will be tarred with the same brush as those who live in slums. And the precariousness of our middle-class positions, precarious because of our histories and ethnicities if not our finances, will not tolerate such threats.

But this is old. It has been said before. And I am interested, now, in what our critiques of slum tourism enable and mask.

Slum tourism is only one of many hyphenated (silently) tourisms. These include eco-tourism, sex tourism, wild life tourism, marine tourism, and various kinds of archeological tourisms. Each of these comes with its own complex ideological baggage. For instance, wild life tourism is represented by big game hunters and conservationists—those who kill Africa’s animals and those who save them, not least from Africans. And as scholarship on tourism has noted, it is an industry whose rapacious underbelly helps to sustain its façade of respectability. Indeed, a brief look at the ostensibly authentic bare-breasted girls that fill our tourist curios shops tells an ideological truth about what we are selling. Quiet as it’s kept.

Because tourism, in all its hyphenated guises, is such a huge income generator, it has been easier, or at least more expedient, to critique various forms of hyphenated tourisms than to critique tourism as a whole. And, given our truncated approaches toward tourism, some advanced as official national discourses, it has been convenient to distinguish colonial-era tourism, including that immortalized by Hollywood and practiced by figures like Teddy Roosevelt, from post-independent-era tourism.

Certainly, cheaper, budget-friendly tourist packages have somewhat changed the complexion of tourism, and we have as many carpenters and barbers, if not factory workers, visiting as we do bankers, doctors, and lawyers. And these multi-class tourisms have major implications for how we understand post-independence tourisms.

But just as our literary artists and philosophers have cautioned that we should not understand post-independence politics as radically different from colonial-era politics, so, too, we should not understand post-independence-era tourism as being radically different from colonial-era tourism. Radical—this is the right word, pointing to roots.

To suggest that there are overlaps between these two tourist temporalities is not to suggest that they are identical. It is to suggest, in a very imprecise way, how certain economic and cultural interdependencies (not pure dependencies) shape the interaction between Kenya and its tourists. It is also to suggest how these interdependencies create discursive possibilities and impossibilities: we may critique sex tourism or slum tourism, for instance, but we critique them as degraded forms of tourism, not as representing tourism in its entirety.

This is useful fiction from which we all benefit.
*
This ramble started with a question about how to understand contemporary race relations between Kenya and its visitors, and predominantly those visitors from former imperial powers. The usual canon of thinkers on colonialism and its legacies seemed inadequate, even dated, part of what I like to call independence-era intellectuals.

Was there, I wondered, a way of thinking about race relations anchored in tourism that was historically distinct from that emerging from colonialism? While we should continue to trace colonialism’s legacies, it seems shortsighted not to engage with other forms of socio-cultural making that cannot be attributed to colonialism.

For those of us born from the late 1960s onward, our dominant engagement with race has been through tourism, not colonialism.

However, because of the elaborate structures of interdependencies tourism needs and creates, we have been relatively muted, unable to stage the same critiques (structurally and affectively) of tourism that prior generations had with colonialism.

There is a lot at stake in how we engage with tourism, of course. To complain about tourism, is to mark oneself as provincial, even xenophobic, and perhaps worse, anti-development. (To be anti-development in Kenya is akin to treason.) We who pride ourselves on our internationalism and hospitality frame tourism as cosmopolitanism, as a kind of necessary, even ethical exchange.

In rushing to avoid provincialism and to practice cosmopolitanism, though, we posit oppositions that have, as one consequence, a studied muteness.

By no means am I suggesting that some of us have not thought about tourism or how it structures race differently than colonialism. I am suggesting that part of the structure of tourism, as an exchange between Kenya and its visitors, is a certain critical silence, an unwillingness to name and critique this contemporary form of race- and world-making.
*
I have been trying to figure out, albeit circuitously, why critiques of slum tourism and sex tourism feel so inadequate, so, to use an old word, genteel. I remain fascinated by how hyphenating tourism creates different discursive possibilities and moral and ethical frameworks.

On a more banal note, I am trying to understand the tourist instinct that seems so ingrained in Kenyans: when abroad, we are constantly inviting others to visit, inviting others to be tourists. Our invitations are affectively and ideologically different from those of our hosts who invite us for Thanksgiving or Passover.

Why do we turn into tourist ambassadors?

To answer this why might be one necessary step in understanding tourism’s ideological impact on us and our visitors.

On Caster Semenya

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 think it exposes real fissures among the communities to which, for better or worse, I belong to and study—what that particular combination produces continues to be a source of personal anxiety and intellectual excitement.

Arguably, those who can best speak to Semenya’s situation are queer scholars. Yet, this group might also be the least suitable, and this due to issues of race, nationality, and history. What does it mean when predominantly non-Africa based scholars who work on gender and sexuality speak to an African cause? We already have some answers from the many battles over reproductive health—and this includes those who still believe that such efforts are genocidal, those who believe to plan a family is to kill a people. And we know, as well, the tense relationship that continues to obtain between so-called Western Feminists and so-called African Feminists, or Gender Activists. Culture and Values collide. I bracket this for now.

To speak of Semenya from the position of a queer activist is, of course, to queer Semenya within a very particular context—which is not to say that Semenya has not already been queered in many ways, by those who insist on and contest gender normalcy. Semenya is as queered by those who insist on her gender normativity—she is a woman, her grandmother insists—as by those who insist on hir gender non-normativity—she is not a woman, others contend.

Insisting on Semenya’s woman-ness pits tradition-culture and an alternative-scientific viewpoint (science here simply as knowledge) against medical science gender certifying technologies—that these are certifying rather than authenticating or verifying must be kept in mind. And here the gender activist Africanist inhabits an overly loud history that protests gender certification. This is not a comfortable position.

Insisting on Semenya’s gender non-normativity engages the truth-claims of medical certifying technologies as they engage with scholars and activists who have continued to wrestle with the histories of such truth claims, and the sotto voce medical procedures that have tried to privilege culture over science in the name of science—a science that refuses to admit intersexuality as anything more than a correctible pathology.
*
The first time I cracked open a book called Bantu Gynecology it fell to a picture of a “hermaphrodite.” Were I to construct a fiction from that moment, it would say that I became aware that bantu-ness had something to do with sexual morphology, that there was something both dramatic about that morphology and that something traumatic happened to those who, like me, dared to look at it. 8 or 9 is a little late for the primal scene, but this must surely count as one of mine.

No doubt, the headless picture (Man in Polyester Suit has nothing on this) was intended to illustrate a condition, but its very headlessness had a metonymic effect, one heightened by dressing codes. The picture made me uncomfortable, made me wonder if it told a truth about sex, a truth about me, about my own gender non-normativity. It made me wonder about the truth of bantu sex, a truth that was medically certified.

Because my scholarly work has focused predominantly on North America, at least when it comes to questions of morphology, I have been able to avoid the bantu-ness of sex, until now.

As self indulgent as such an awkward confession is, it might help to frame my ongoing attempts to engage Semenya.
*
Under what conditions would the Intersex Society of North America or the United Kingdom Intersex Society be able to make a difference in Semenya’s life? These are big questions, though not necessarily the right ones.

Under what conditions would South African queer activist be able to make a difference in Semenya’s life?

Under what conditions would black South African queer activists be able to make a difference in Semenya’s life?

The questions can be multiplied, but the form remains the same.

It is striking that the month-long coverage of this case has not engaged with scholars and activists who work on intersexuality. At least there has been nothing that I have seen. It is striking and saddening because it hides from view the affective communities that Semenya might need most, or not at all.
*
It is this push-pull that makes Semenya impossible to talk about.

Internationalized without being cosmopolitan. Gender troubled without being properly gendered. And, now, if we are to believe reports, negotiating a life made impossible.

This is the question that troubles me: what would it take to make Semenya’s life livable? How does one chart a map back from impossibility?
*
What does it mean to defend Semenya? How does one defend gender? How does one protect it? How will Semenya’s story circulate and with what effects, especially for those with non-normative modes of expressing gender in Africa?
*
I mention one more fissure: between feminist and queer readers of Semenya.

I am not sure what it means to defend Semenya: from what or from whom and to what end? While Semenya might be our millennial anti-Hottentot Venus, as I have described to friends, it is not yet clear to me how Semenya benefits in that iconic position. It is more clear how feminists and queer activists can frame necessary conversations around morphology, expression, nation, and so on.

To use Semenya to illustrate the policing of women’s bodies and lives is necessary. But I wonder to what extent “woman” might become reified in a way that might be antithetical to some queer activism.

To use Semenya to illustrate how bodies and gender are policed and queered is necessary. But I wonder to what extent queer acts of affiliation make Semenya’s life less, rather than more, livable.

To use Semenya as a jumping off point to discuss intersex issues is necessary, not least to avoid reifying women and privileging gender undecidability. Here, we are asked to think seriously about the intersection of biology and culture, about livability in all its messy complication.

And it is this, finally, that concerns me: what is livability for Semenya? What is a rich life, a possible life, a good life?

Color

The real color of the African is really purple and nothing else.

Pauline Hopkins, 1905

Purity

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

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 the world; she must understand the solution of problems that involve the alteration of the boundaries of countries, and which make and unmake governments.

Pauline Hopkins, 1902

Dear Spam

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

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

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 was cheating on him—and also didn’t really want to have sex with him.

I also return to the city that taught me about the racialization of desire, or what Dwight McBride terms the marketplace of desire. And it is this intersection of these two returns that drives this narration.

My friend had been disappointed in love and lust several times by other white men who did not deem him attractive enough, though many enjoyed his penis at 3 am, when no one else was watching, or late afternoons, when no one else had to know. His turn to Asian men seemed, at the time, to be a kind of reaction, a turn to somewhere where the laws of taboo and transgression, foreignness and assimilation, might give him an edge. I should mention he was particularly attracted to foreign-born, heavily-accented Asian men.

I could speculate further—mention my own tangled and deviant desires around accents and silence—but let me move on.

I have returned to the city where I first read Richard Bruce Nugent in the anthology Shade. I remember liking “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” and then not liking it. Even now, two consecutive readings of the story rarely elicit the same pleasure, and, in fact, toggle between pleasure and un-pleasure.

In an interview, Nugent claims that he had tried to “howyoudoing” black men in DC and Harlem, and been rebuffed. He then turned his attention to Latin men who welcomed him.

What might it mean to “direct” interest? (I hesitate to use the term desire.)

To some extent, of course, I’m asking a rather silly question. Our “interest” is always being directed and shaped. We are constantly being told who and what deserves interest. I am always intrigued by the “newly gay” who, almost invariably, go through a phase of learning and practicing a vocabulary of “interest.” Many never move beyond this initial vocabulary. But then 60 year old heterosexual men are still chasing after 18 year old cheerleaders. Interest anchors.

Interest anchors and orients: this club, not that; this street, not that; this restaurant, not that; this hobby, this sport, this cologne, one can add.

In some sense, I merely repeat knowledge about how and where communities form, how and where they are cultivated, and by whom. To that, I want to unfix the category of home (with all its connotations) and think, not instead but besides it, about places of interest that anchor and orient, the not-homes and can’t-be-homes in which we, nonetheless, find ourselves living and moving and choosing.
*
Returns are about un-fixing, with each prior space becoming a potential site for return. Each not-home becoming familiar—the train station or airport that consoles.

I am fascinated by those with clearly defined spaces: home/not-home; play/not-play; work/not-work. Spaces without leaks or cracks or seepage.
*
I return to the city that forced language to bend, made me a soundscape tourist, a word contortionist, a bewildered navigator. Where anyone meant someone, and someone was elsewhere. Made my relationship to language belated, as I asked children the distinction between sun and son, run and ran, where sound became more important than context, and words dropped out of sentences. Hearing by phonics.

A directed hearing. An interested hearing. Where native-born girls could not understand my non-native English, heavily accented with Rex Harrison’s Audrey Hepburn, and I wanted to mutter “tuppence.”

This city that first taught me poetry in the elegant play between Verdana and Lucida. And the meaning of spaces. And the possible impossibility of naming “that” feeling. It is also that city that taught me, imperfectly, about interest.
*
Many years after I first leave, a chance encounter with a random stranger, once met, never experienced, and his confession of desire, were it not for “my roommate’s appetites.” I remember him vaguely, wonder how he remembers me—though not how he remembers the roommate’s appetites, and think about the interest that sent me elsewhere.
*
I leave tomorrow, return to another city whose residents cultivated my interest—Nugent, Essex, GDJ—a city dominated by their ambivalence then, one I imbibed and indulge, albeit with interest.