Telling?

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 failed to “rule” the people; it failed to maintain power “over” the people.

Arguably, we need look no further to understand what might be at stake in the constitution-making process. And this, as always, worries me.

More Notes on Queer Africa: Toward an Intellectual Project

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 to histories and theories of sexuality. Such a figure, as it appears on stage, in pseudo-science, in private diaries, in court records and other textual locations, offers an entry point that is so powerful, so necessary, that, arguably, a “queer history” is not possible without this figure. And here, I might simply be saying that glbt studies continue to provide the conceptual grounding for queer studies, even where queer studies might claim to move “beyond” (in the Bhabha sense) the more identity-proximal lgbt studies. (Identity-proximal is truer to the complex project of lgbt studies rather than identity-bound, which tends to be reductive when not condescending.)

The “figure” of the homosexual is a problem in what I think of, perhaps prematurely, as African queer studies. It is a problem, most often, because its figural status sediments too readily, becomes too-easily grasped in histories and ethnographies that extend the spatial claim “we are everywhere” into speculative temporalities: we “were” or, more precisely, “have been” everywhere. This speculation traffics under a certain homo-sense: of course, same-sex attraction must have existed at all times, at all places, in specific ways. Though, the caveat, while homosexual acts have existed, they did not traffic under the “name” homosexual.

We can thus, in a conceptual ruse, make plural both homosexualities that are “not quite” and histories that are “like.” (“Ruses” are necessary historical and conceptual tools, and in using the term, I invoke Hurston’s “lying,” a trickster’s rhetorical strategy.)

In other versions of this writing, I have expressed my distrust of the claim that imperialism brought homophobia, not homosexuality. I suspect that the reverse might be true, that homophobia precedes homosexuality, but this requires a kind of thinking beyond this current experiment.

My goal is not to dismiss “the” homosexual from queer African studies, but to be more deliberate about using its figural status, that is, to be more attuned to the act of cultural translation required to “use” this figure in African studies.

Doing so requires a few space-clearing gestures.

The first involves re-thinking the use of anthropological studies.

Within lgbti African studies, the figure of the homosexual has most frequently been approached in functionalist terms. Homosexuals and homosexual-like figures are “accepted” and even “revered” in certain traditional communities. They are both integrated into and integral to the lifeworlds so studies, fulfilling useful social and cultural roles, be it as spiritual leaders and advisers or as alternate social couplings, supplemental to other hetero-formations.

A thread holding together what are, admittedly, a wide range of studies is that various kinds of homo-like acts and identities thrived and even flourished in pre-colonial Africa. And, further, that many of these survive, albeit in altered ways, in the present. Such histories are resources for contemporary individuals and movements.

These studies are useful.

But.

I find myself asking how the insights from a “paranoid” version of queer studies might enable a different kind of approach, in which we might track how strategies of producing properly gendered and sexualized African subjects also queered other kinds of Africans.

Such information is available in the same ethnographies we mine for homo-evidence.

Let me offer a for instance.

Ethnographies and ethno-philosophy have consistently stressed the importance of “family” and “community” to Africans. They have also emphasized the non-place of the anomalous “loner,” a figure described as evil in some of this work. The loner is the “poisoner,” one whose very existence threatens the social.

The kind of queer history I am envisioning might trace the history of the “unattached” in African ethno-histories. It might focus less on those successfully embedded within African life and customs and think through those made anomalous by invented traditions and ritual practices.

This task is about specters, figures who haunt histories that exclude them, and so it is difficult but not impossible to write. It is also a necessary history as NGO-funded African activists embrace and are coerced (in ever so subtle ways) into the politics of homonormativity. There is something to be said here about how social conservatism functions in progressive African organizations to foreclose a more radical politics. This is not yet an argument I can make, as I feel its foundations, though deeply felt, are too precarious to withstand scrutiny.

In part, I am thinking of how to write a history of shadows. That this might be the task of a deeply materialist queer African history still remains to be thought and written. As speculative as this sounds, I must underscore its urgency. It is a project for now, for us.

xyz sexual minority orientation studies

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 exemplifications of “what’s wrong with the academy.” And I tend to get defensive, or at least to try to explain what it is I teach, albeit without giving everything

This coming semester, I teach a class called “Queer Conceptions of Race,” a class that, arguably, has no “real world” value. The most general description I can provide for the class, indeed for all my classes, is that we read widely, in a range of genres, and through a scope of tonal registers. As we move from feminist theory through queer memoir, detour through histories of pseudo-science and meditations on rural and urban space, engage with bombastic manifestos and libidinal erotica, we trace the series of debates and passions that enable and traverse multiple kinds of attachments, affiliations, and allegiances. For this U.S.-focused class, we explore the conditions that allow for diverse kinds of belonging, ranging from citizenship to kinship to friendship. We delve into the social worlds that enable these forms of belonging, think through the ideological and emotions complications of multiple affiliations, trouble and become troubled by the claims made on us by our readings, and by the kinds of unexpected demands that affiliation places on us.

At the end, we might emerge a little more troubled, a little more uncertain, a whole lot better read, and much stronger thinkers. I am less invested in producing students with “strong” opinions and, I confess, I have not the magic that creates better people. Were I to describe what I hope to accomplish, it would be to have students whose minds can bend and stretch, who, given almost any scenario, can weigh its possible implications, who dare to think into the future.

We undertake a kind of labor that makes visible, for instance, the sex-gender politics that subtends the linking of terrorism and underwear. A politics that has a persistent history. And we trace, when we can, the recursive, intertwining of race-gender-sex. How it is, for instance, that race-sex-gender typing, be it positive or not, is historically and conceptually mobile, often forging unexpected affiliations. We complicate, as well, such mobilities by thinking of how class and region (two of the strongest variables) complicate such affiliations.

When successful, we learn not only how to negotiate the personal, the historical, and the conceptual, but also how to weave the three in unexpected, pleasurable ways.

When unsuccessful, we ask why it is that our emotions, our affiliations, our attachments, and our desires remain stubbornly inimical to thinking, to articulation, why, that is, we can’t simply engage in screaming and crying as modes of intellectual exchange. This, too, has value. We need to understand modes of critique and resistance that are irreducible to elegant or clunky phrases.

This particular class, and my particular way of teaching it, is, no doubt, a somewhat nightmare scenario for those who believe education is about job training, a lamentable phrase that has emerged from Obama’s mouth much too much for my taste.

There are modes of equipping students for living that have nothing to do with “job training.”

There is, of course, a broader argument to be made here about what it means to engage in humanistic training, in a holistic model of humanistic study. We humanists have yet to articulate why the off-beat, the idiosyncratic, the irrational, and the plain weird live on our syllabuses—and the traditional claims for “aesthetic excellence” are, to my mind, frequently inadequate.

“xyz sexual minority orientation studies” is intellectually and emotionally demanding, frequently uncomfortable, and its rewards seem few and far in between—though, as some students note, I can be entertaining. We dare to take seriously what others dismiss and ridicule.

Post-Humor, or Without Evidence

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 writes, misuse the term “theory,” and should not use it; I value the humanities for valuing misuse).
*
One way to characterize the post-ness of post-feminism, post-race, post-postcolonial, post-x might be to look at the return of the joke. You know the one, the one that proves one’s post-ness. One dare not be upset or insulted, because it “is a joke,” and the refusal or unwillingness to accept the “joke-ness” of the joke marks one as anti-post, or not-yet-post, as belated, somehow not-yet-with-it. As, to use a persistent term, anti-modern.

There is a trick here, a temporal trick.

The anti-modern is the one who registers offense, who dares to use the “old” language of hurt, of insult, who dares to cause a stink–the woman who dares to claim “date rape” in an age of liberation, the queer who dares not to enjoy “friendly” homophobic jokes, the poc who is still pc.

In this schema (I freely admit to misusing the term “modern” and “anti-modern,” which might be better rendered as “post” and “not-yet-post,” yet the persistent use of the term “modern” in a range of contexts suggests it might, in fact, be the most apt, capacious framework for this kind of thinking) the “modern” is closely aligned with the “transcendent,” which is often, but not always, an alibi for the a-historical.

Thus, to be more concrete, the “modern” can mine the entire repertoire of “jokes” about niggers and fags and bitches while insisting on occupying the space-time of post-ness. And the overly anxious target, desiring to assert modernity, dare not respond. Or, more realistically (though this is speculative) understands that much is at stake when the response is not a weak grin. To share in a joke, after all, is to assert a shared spatio-temporal framework, to prove that one is “present” and “here.”

And the anxiety of modernness is a profound anxiety over “hereness”–one dwells at the edge of the cut, one desires to be acclaimed an innovator, or to be stylish dissonance. Yet, this anxiety can never be ennui, never disinterestedness, never boredom. To be post requires the practice of laughing, just not for everyone.
*
Yet the persistence, the long life of “the joke” that transcends time, raises even more interesting questions about how such jokes bend around time. And it’s worth thinking about the persistence of misogyny, racism, homophobia and so on in their upgraded fashion, their new configurations. Their targets remain the same, their modes of manifestation not-so-much, except, I would hazard, in the long-lived joke.

How do resurrected jokes, or vampiric jokes, to be more precise, talk to us about the necessary now that still must be brought into being?

I remain obsessed with the joke, in part because I am not much given to laughter, avoid it when I can, and mark my allegiances and affiliations through the occasional, very occasional laugh.

Ongoing Obsessions in African American Studies

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 was hoped to be an annual conference on New Directions in African American Studies, at least I believe this was the title. How, exactly, a paper on nude Kenyan men fit into that paradigm is a whole other story. Perhaps it was new directions in black studies. Yes, I note the uppercase/lowercase distinction and dismiss it as arbitrary.

Yesterday, I attended a session on New Directions in African American Studies. And was somewhat stunned. Now, to be sure, my relationship to African American studies has always been oblique, a matter of forging affiliations, negotiating intellectual and affective waves: my blackness allowing me partial entry into a “we” and “our” that is immediately at risk. I have taken the occasion of that risk to re-ground my relationship to the field. I have asked and continue to ask questions based on my own shifting, unstable grounds—in a recently taught class, I stressed the outward movement, spatially, of the Harlem Renaissance; the internal conflicts, conceptually, of the Renaissance; and the temporal moments of heterochronicity made visible by the entwined concerns of immigration and heterofuturity. Little heard terms in my conceptual vocabulary: passing, vernacular, community. Even less heard terms “we” and “our.”

I chronicle, here, briefly and elliptically, not merely a need to be perverse and anti-canonical, though both impulses drive me, but the intellectual and affective labor engaged in mapping a field whose contours look different from my position, one in which the labor of diaspora—as a forging together—is the driving force. The question that compels me is this: under what circumstances and through what strategies have blacks across the diaspora understood themselves to be intimately connected? The Renaissance provides one moment, one instance, when diverse strategies coalesce to produce shifting, contingent, networks of alliances and affiliations. Whether or not these translate into a “movement” I leave for others to debate.

As I stood in a packed room—I am only half-joking when I claim that it was in the ghetto of the Marriott—listening to ideas fly about the future of African American studies, I was struck by what seemed to be two distinct, if interrelated ideas, that, had we time, I would have liked to see made more explicit. The first, a question of what we study, the second, a question of how we study. It was easier to address the first, and multiple people spoke about the role of speculative fiction, popular fiction, new and emerging poetries, old and yet to-be recovered work. It was deeply felt that we still have a lot to read, research, discover, find out: that the body of work we study continues to expand in new and interesting ways.

The second, a question of how we study, seemed harder to grasp, as it always is. I heard ideas about thinking of African American literature as always comparative—marked by geographical and other differences. We were asked to think about the multi-linguality of African American literatures—a place where comparative vernacular and dialect studies might prove useful and helpful, as one of my graduate students points out. Sharon Holland asked us to think about the ongoing work of black queer studies in tracing the forgetting of the black female body in queer studies more broadly, a metonym, I take, for a broader will to forget and erase blackness, or, if I hear her correctly, to restrict the work of blackness as a conceptual lever. There is, and here I draw from Sandra Soto, a will to footnote colored difference, to let it stand, to halt its conceptual motion, dismiss its conceptual motion, or altogether erase its conceptual motion. There are black people—treacle scholarship, sticky and goopy. Much more to be said here.

One question stays with me following the session. Someone asked: what are we afraid of?

It stays with me because of the will to collectivity that shaped the session. The invocations of “we” and “our” were numerous; the common-sense, Schuylerian claim that if you scratch far enough back, color emerges too-readily accepted. And it felt as though we needed to return to the late 80s and early 90s, when the common-sense notion of the “we” and “our” was troubled, not least by the Afro-diasporic Hazel Carby. I longed for Michelle Wright, scheduled to be there yet not able to make it, to speak of how Afro-European studies re-shape the African American project. Sharon Holland mentioned how an Afro-Native approach has us re-think the histories and practices of racialization. And it seems to be a good time to say that the hyphen is “where it’s at.” Perhaps.

That the hyphen should remain a particular, ongoing concern of African American studies seems obvious. Yet the will to forget the hyphen is, to me, one of the central features of African American studies.

My particular interests in how one “becomes” black in America, one that takes immigration and diaspora as starting points, routing the historically distant through the historically proximal, not diaspora and then immigration, but, rather, immigration and then diaspora, offers one way to think about the hyphen, to keep it necessary and vital, to remember that black collectivity is always forged, always a matter of strategic alliance, even when a matter of historical accident and necessity.

These are less “new directions,” I admit, than ongoing obsessions.

I find myself less interested in “new directions” than in old obsessions. What are the taken-for-granteds in AA studies that we need to re-think, re-work? What are the foundations whose necessarily hasty constructions we can now re-examine? How can we pressure the “we” and “our” we inhabit (the construction is difficult) to make explicit the lines of alliance and affiliations worth fostering, worth preserving? How might our movements across space and time re-shape the objects of our study and our methods of study?

These are not questions to be answered easily. Objects of study often demand their own methods of study, and it is difficult to understand how those translate across to other objects of study, to trace the cross-fertilizations, cross-hatchings, that produce innovations in the field. Put otherwise, it is easier to speak of assembling more and more objects than it is to specify how they will be studied, even, of course, as the act of defining such objects speaks, in one way, to how the objects will be studied.

So I leave the session with more questions than answers, not sure if AA studies has “a direction” or a meeting point where multiple directions will coalesce. And I leave with a sense that we remain haunted by other questions, ongoing obsessions we would prefer to leave buried in the late 80s and early 90s.

Afterlife of Exuberance

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 age (Marlon Ross reminds me how premature it is, though it also seems belated), it has been easy to mistake that post-ness as a past-ness, and to believe or remain silent in the face of those whose election-year cynicisms seem all too justified.

To speak of hope now seems silly, an after-effect of some drug with a startling and embarrassingly long half-life, as though one has continued to celebrate bingeing long after the food has rotted, the party ended. And those still donning party hats must surely be deemed to be suffering from misplaced faith. Over the past year, it has been easier to listen to and agree with the homeless man from Sri Lanka who, on the eve of inauguration, proclaimed, “Fuck Obama. He has nothing to teach me about hope.”

I am reminded that cynicism is easy. That it is comfortable. That it is wise-making. And that it forges collectives quite like nothing else. I am reminded, too, of the toxic affect of such collectives, how collective despair renders us immobile, and that political and social strategies hatched in and driven by the pollution of negativity, a seemingly necessary byproduct of real-world engagement, leave one angry, headachy. And like the child soldier in African fiction, co-opted into a fight that has no reason, or end.

It might well be that the time for hope is done. That it names the wrong kind of feeling, that it served its purpose. But to say that might simply mean that we need different kinds of languages to name and describe what Lisa Duggan so memorably termed the “ecstasy of collective engagement.”

Yes We Can lives in the acts and words of thousands upon thousands of students across the U.S. and Europe whose words and actions have affirmed the importance of collective action. That these actions precede the age of Obama is important to note—graduate student activism at my own alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, existed successfully well before Obama became a name in Illinois. That these actions have been marked in significant ways by the age of Obama, be it only by a slight shift in timbre, an affective nudge, a semi-tonal emphasis, this also has to be noted.

Put otherwise: forms of collective action pre-exist Obama and will continue to exist long after him. His “moment,” be that November 2008, January 2009, can only be understood as his tangentially. To speak of the politics of hope, of the positive affect of collective engagement, of the necessary belief in change as always mediated by, and thus, somehow, indistinguishable from his person would be to limit, in serious ways, the energies that survive and thrive now.

That we must also underscore that “moment” as an important place-time in which diverse constituencies contributed and thus multiplied their collective energies must also be noted. It strikes me as very important, too important to forget or diminish, that many of us said and believed that politics mattered. That politics was not something done by politicians, elsewhere, for someone else, but a coming together, an us-forming, a we-acting.

“The ecstasy of collective engagement” captures elegantly the us-forming, we-acting energies that remain ours to claim, to act on, the after-lives rich with potential, tapped, but not drained, and, in some cases, still remaining to be tapped.

I write this less to salvage something that has been lost, something some would say has never been there, but to attempt to navigate around corners whose labyrinthine designs make it impossible to detect just when I have rounded a corner. And, I must admit, it has seemed easier, this year, to wait for the Minotaur. To yawn as it approaches and submit to its indifference—to be collateral damage as it searches for virgins. I suspect the metaphor-parable might have some meaning. I lack the energy to parse it.

For me, what remains so powerful about the Obama moment is that us-forming, we-acting energy and potential. It was the coming together of diverse constituencies, the acting in concert, an acting in the belief that history could be made that remains so powerful.

I spent the last few months of 2008 in Kenya, returning to the U.S. in the early part of 2009. Obama’s election was a salve to the Kenyan psyche, allowing us to believe, if only briefly, that somewhere, in some part of the world, elections could function as they should.

To some extent, it is true that our exaggerated claims for Obama’s Kenyan-ness, Luo-ness, African-ness, made it more difficult for us to see, to understand, to appreciate the lessons of the us-forming, we-acting collectives that made his moment possible. In abstracting him from the contingent collectives that made his election possible, we missed, in part, the us-forming, we-acting successes. And, of course, our own tragic experiences in which such collectives fractured along class, regional, and ethnic lines in early 2008, made it easier for us to distrust and dismiss contingent collectivity, to rely, instead, on older vocabularies and practices of alliance.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see why abstracting Obama from the us-forming, we-acting collectives made sense, and also to see why it was the wrong, or, at least, the most partial strategy. Abstracting Obama from the us-forming, we-acting collectives, those engaged in the ecstasies of collective engagement, has made it easy to take his post-election actions as affirmations that negative affect, political skepticism wins. And in ongoing, necessary battles over his person and policies, it has been easy to forget what we most need to remember: that the us-forming, we-acting contingent coalitions that made possible his moment precede and survive him.

As the year ends, this is where I want to return. To those us-forming, we-acting contingent coalitions driven by the ecstasy of collective engagement. To those seemingly abstract, unreal and deeply felt moments when we believed that history could not, dared not, be indifferent to our hopes and actions.

Complex and Contradictory

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

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 more info at the GEO website)

1. Tuition waivers

Putting language in the contract to protect tution waivers will cost the university $0. All TAs signed contracts that granted them tuition waivers. Without this, many TAs would have chosen to go to another school that offers tuition waivers for graduate students–around 90% of programs in the US grant tuition waivers to graduate students. It is unjust for the administration to refuse to protect this stipulation in the middle of our degree programs.

2. Minimum salary and University cost of living

Current minimum 50% salary: $13, 430

University’s estimated cost of living in C-U: $16,086

3. Administrator salaries

President, B. Joseph White $450,000 (pg. 42) (President Obama’s salary is only $400,000)

Chancellor, Richard Herman $395, 500 (pg. 126)

Interim Provost, Robert Easter $254, 095 (pg. 6)

Together, just these 3 people make $1,099, 595 (enough to pay 81 TAs for the whole year)

Increasing the minimum 50% TA salary: $2.6 million or 0.7% of the university budget. (This is less than 1%.)

4. Admissions Scandal

The former Chancellor diverted $450,000 of discretionary funds to provide jobs and scholarships for politically well-connected but undeserving applicants. Another $400,000 went to the attorneys who represented the University before the Governor’s investigative committee found the ethical violations.

* Combined with administrator salaries = $1,949,595 (pay for 145 TAs for the whole year)
* This is only $650,000 short of the $2.6 million needed meet the GEO’s requests.

5. When Campus Revenues Rose

When campus revenues rose by 7% in FY 2009, only 0.8% ($2.7 million) went to undergraduate instruction. Meanwhile, the Chief Information Officer’s budget rose by 10.9 percent ($1.6 million), and the Division of Intercollegiate Athletics budget increased 6.2 percent ($4.1 million).

6. Undergraduate Tuition Waivers revoked

In the Spring Semester, Chemistry will revoke 100 Undergraduate TA tution waivers. Click here to show your support for them.

7. State of Illinois monies

State of Illinois monies only make up 5% of the university’s entire budget–so this cannot be used as a reason to claim the university is in dire financial straits. If the university is in dire economic straits, it is because the Administration has mis-allocated funds to a failing Global campus initiative, a failing Industrial Park, and in inflated Administrative salaries.

—————-

Please call the chair of the Board of Trustees and Interim Provost Easter to voice your support for the GEO–The University of Illinois belongs to its students–not it’s administrators.

WHERE TO CALL
Interim Provost Easter: (217) 244-4545
Christopher Kennedy: (312) 527-7890 extension 7890

WHAT TO SAY (It’s useful if you can put your message in your own words, but the following provides a basic template for you to use. This text suggests leaving a message, but if you can talk directly with these men, even better. Remember, what’s most important is that the message of support for the GEO position be communicated to administrators.)

You cannot be penalized by the administration for voicing your opinion. You are their bosses. You and the taxpayers of Illinois pay their salaries.

Hello, my name is __________. I’m an undergraduate of the University of Illinois, and I’d like to leave a message for [Provost Easter/Mr Kennedy.]

I want to urge the administration to reach a fair agreement with the Graduate Employees Organization, and ensure that graduate employees, who teach a quarter of classes at the University, receive a living wage. This is vital to maintaining the quality of education at the U of I.

Thank you.

*This information sheet is lifted, copied, and plagiarized from the Graduate Student website.

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.