Queer: Again (After Teju)

From here, the scene of desire seems ever-more distant, pushed further by words that speak of healing as they break me. Because, ultimately, my desire is tainted by the traces on which it rests. This is about the scene, or better, the image of desire. To ask the question of what image can elicit desire: one must ask permission from the gatekeepers, or crawl through a hole in the thorny fence.

In his seminal, revised essay on Robert Mapplethorpe’s black nudes, Kobena Mercer admits the necessity of ambivalence. On the one hand, one can excoriate the white photographer who embodies black men (as opposed to en-fleshing, as Spillers has it). History seems to repeat in the gloriously decapitated images of black muscle, in the faces devoid of all history but that of the desiring viewer. In this vein, the argument seems predictable, if well written. It becomes innovative as Mercer argues for the value of representation and, in the aftermath of AIDS, the need for archives.

AIDS erased histories of desirable bodies, and we forget how much beauty it destroyed. Mapplethorpe restores, in some small way, this history of desire, elicited then and now. For a brief moment, I allow myself the fantasy of synecdoche. Sometimes I need it. It is here, from this history of ambivalent desire that I return to 100 years ago.

Postcolonial histories of imperial photography are notoriously unfriendly to theories of desire. Colonial subjects, we are told, were dehumanized, objectified, rendered knowable through the technologies of the image. Gleaming black bodies were fetishized, became actors in a Fanonian fantasy, “rape me, Negro!” In critiquing these histories of objectification, we ostensibly restore dignity, history, subjectivity, or fantasized story to these images. Refusing to read them as desirable objects, we perform an act of reparation.

Against this reparative act, no matter how generous it may be, I would posit the need for a queer reading strategy. A break into autobiography.

I began to question postcolonial readings of images in the context of queer desire. As a response to invisibility, queer activists offered their varied bodies, fat, thin, muscular, disabled, clothed, nude, pierced, tattooed, as objects to be desired. No matter the ambivalence, if not hostility, this strategy might elicit, it has still been a powerful way to re-imagine social proscriptions and to insist on the validity of queer desire, and the queering of desire. (An aside: I am increasingly disenchanted with descriptions such as body-fascism, a phrase that seems as belligerent as femi-nazi.)

From this context of queer reclamation, it was disorienting to shift to a postcolonial focus where I was taught to police my desire, to grant subjectivity to colonial subjects by disavowing desire. Here, of course, there is a larger question of how to understand the relationship between desire and subjectivity. Certainly, granting desire need not create subjectivity or history. But I also have a more general problem with some historical claims that we can grant subjectivity to dead people if we talk about them with respect. I’m not sure the dead and rotted need or want dignity. But that’s another conversation.

To be nativist for a moment: I was being taught to desire Euro-American men, white and black, taught that the west was the locus and should be the focus of my desire. At the same time, I was learning that men like me, with my features, my body, my distribution of fat, my knees and elbows and lips, these men were distant objects of racist fascination and desire. To desire them was to be complicit in colonial desire. (I avoid here the thorny arguments about the ambivalence of colonial desire, but I cite Stoler and Malek and Young.)

How, then, to introduce the need for desire into postcolonial encounters with colonial image? This is, I believe, a queer project. It happens on various online forums where pictures of traditional African men are presented as objects of desire. It has yet, I think, to be registered as an academic project. (Whether it needs to be registered as such is yet another question. Academia frequently lags behind the space and encounter of desire, necessarily so.)

This, then, is my encounter with the image. Nowhere near Teju’s inviting complexity. But, I hope, quite in the spirit of conversation.

After Fanon: African Privilege

Three recent posts on slavery and the politics of apology have me thinking about African privilege, and the African misappropriation of Fanon. It is no secret that Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks may be considered the unofficial bible of the “arrived” African. Certainly, I have been seduced by Fanon’s description of what it means to be black, to attain an awareness of my body as identity on arrival to the west. Fanon is not wrong. But he needs to be read carefully.

In his introduction to Black Skin, White Masks, he issues a warning that the text may not be generally applicable. “Many Negroes,” he claims, “will not find themselves here.” He repeats this claim later toward the end of the conclusion when he warns that his conclusions and case studies are more applicable to the Negro from Martinique and should probably not be applied to the Negro from Africa. Undoubtedly, we could complicate this model and suggest, for example, that the recent flood of African students and immigrants (recent being the last 30 years) into the west has tended to make the experiences of psychic isolation and phenomenological recognition more widespread than he had at first imagined. Although, to this point, I would add Chinua Achebe’s observation that not everyone develops a been-to complex. Many Africans traffic through the west quite happily.

Even here, he anticipates us. For he tells us that originally he had planned to write about the Negro from Martinique only to discover that being a Negro supercedes place of origin. Fair enough. But. But. But.

We in America, who Teju aptly terms American-Africans (though some of us resist the label and insist we are here on temporary visas. Temporary it may be, but I’ve been here 11 years!), need to be careful in adopting Fanon wholesale. Slavery in America should and must give us pause. It should also make us aware of how we exercise African privilege, and we do.

I know, for example, that my voice over the phone elicits little suspicion, especially when I go a little anglo, as I am wont. I know, for example, that visibly tense white professionals relax when I begin speaking, when they mark me as African, not African American, as exempt from certain histories of guilt and shame and culpability and complicity. Not only do I know these facts; I manipulate them as much as possible. I have learned, of course, the necessary ways to speak about inter-black relations, claiming, as I often do, that on the street no one can tell my place of origin. This claim might be true. But I often experience the psychic satisfaction of knowing that I can, given time, shape and revise interaction courtesy of my background and history. Even racists will grant me a measure of respect: I have been able to leave the tree and can walk upright. Grudgingly given, but there it is.

An injudicious use of Fanon erases my sense of privilege, letting me claim a victimhood quite unique to the French context, and mostly inapplicable to America. I cannot forget that white students are comforted when they hear me because I am ostensibly objective, untainted by the poison of racism. African privilege mediates many of my interactions.

By no means am I claiming to be exempt from racism or a crushing sense of isolation and alienation; these Fanon understood quite well, as did his fellow been-to authors. These I do experience. Privilege exacts its price in intra- and inter-racial interactions. To say this, however, is not to efface my exercise of privilege.

But what then? Here is where I become more than a little confused. Acknowledging privilege often seems a futile gesture. It does not erase the fact of privilege, much less how it may be exercised. To move outside myself for a second: when we tell white males to acknowledge their privilege, what exactly do we want? Surely it’s not a call for them to go about in blackface. Nor can it be a call for them to be endlessly apologetic, a move that re-centers them as both subjects and objects of attention. For all the ways one might acknowledge and try not to exercise privilege, there are always a variety of ways one needs to manage one’s world, where every little advantage helps. This might be called the demand of living in the now.

Disavowing privilege might be impossible. Again I ask, what then?

**My Swahili is laughably bad, but the first blog post regards black-on-black slavery. I am a fan because it features what I take to be a necessary African conversation taking place in an African language. Call me nativist.

Desiring Kindness

Elsewhere, I have written about how Chris awakened something in me. James Baldwin’s description of ecstasy comes close, that place where the spiritual bleeds into the erotic. Of the poets I love, Essex Hemphill best captures this particular magic. Recently, I have realized how much more I owe Chris.

He was the first to teach me about the relationship between desire and style, about how stylization could shape and direct desire. By no means was he conventionally attractive, but he was compelling. He had, to use several clichés, a sense of inner strength, conviction that elicited response. Even when unsure, he commanded disciples.

One reading might be that I was drawn to his masculinity, that which I had been told and I perceived was most lacking in me. If it was masculinity, and here readers of Hemphill will understand my citation, it was a masculinity wrapped in tenderness, so different from the models I would later encounter that strutted and bragged and taunted and bored.

Over the last few years, as I have aged, though many dismiss my sense of aging, I have been trying to understand some of the myths that circulate about desire and love. In particular, I am fascinated to see my own desires changing. Where once I may have ranked brilliance as the primary quality in a partner (I use the dreaded word!), now I think of gentleness; where a certain sharp wit was essential, I must admit I’m more interested in kindness. In part, this might be because I find these qualities lacking in myself (again with lack), and thus desire them all the more.

A more generous reading would be that I have been lucky enough to meet and be surrounded by kind, gentle, and generous individuals, many of whom have helped to smooth my life, to provide respite and pleasure even when I have been recalcitrant and grumpy.

I think a lot about what it might mean to adopt kindness as a sort of style. Not in the casual ways we think about trends and fashion, rather, here a pun, in the sense of self-fashioning. What the bible might refer to as putting on the armor of faith I would read as learning to be vulnerable otherwise.

For months I have been struggling to write about kindness. Here, I have begun to approach the topic, though with none of the fluency I desire. And I wonder at my inability to be fluent, to imagine and practice kindness. The wonder is not simply intellectual. Rather, it might be considered a certain crisis: what forms of politics have I learned, embraced, and practiced that make kindness seem so unattainable? Why, in discussions of ethics and morality, sometimes heated, many more fluently written, has kindness felt so thin?

I’m still not sure what it might mean to desire kindness much less practice it. I do hope that the question continues to disturb me.

Dear Amazon:

Dear Amazon.com:

Thank you for noting I purchased Ms. Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun.

Ms. Fauset is, I believe, writhing in agony due to your recommendations for further reading: Thug Matrimony, Bitch Reloaded, Every Thug Needs a Lady, and Forever a Hustler’s Wife.

Though I am not a catholic, and neither was she, I will light a candle and hope her spirit can be appeased.

Best,

Keguro

#7

He had forgotten how to smile or become ashamed. His expensive third-world teeth were barely first-world free clinic. And he was still trying to understand the need they felt to stretch their lips and term it a smile. It was, he concluded, in the same league as what his sister termed clapiatis. Americans, she proclaimed, suffer from clapiatis. They clap all the time, for anything and everything. Perhaps she was stingy with applause. But he did notice an endless sense of self-congratulation.

He was more familiar with shame. It was, he supposed, another cultural difference. Here, shame was something terrible. One was supposed to be proud all the time. Proud to be black. Proud to be gay. Proud to be fat. Proud to be married. Proud to buy. Proud to own. Proud to live. Proud to die. Proud. Proud. Proud.

He wanted a little more shame.

Pride, he thought, was so often linked to indifference. It was armor against engagement. Shame, on the other hand, was a relationship of care. Shame embedded one in community. Pride distanced one from the social. No wonder they liked to play in small bumper cars.

Experts claimed that foreign students suffered because they prized self-effacement. They had to learn how to be bold and aggressive, how to speak up and ask for what they wanted. They had to go on a diet of Oprah and Dr. Phil: assertiveness training for the privileged. Taken as a game, the injunctions could be amusing.

He had given up trying to communicate his sense of the world, taken up the label of eccentric. It was less tiring. But he believed in civility and readily participated in conversation.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia is another name for one’s sense of loss at the thought that one has sadly gone along happily overlooking something, who knows what.

Lyn Hejinian

582544

All my legal documents bear a defunct number. Somewhere—here time must be spatialized—somewhere in the 11 years since I left Nairobi the family phone number fractured into multiple mobile numbers. Every few months I ask for them and just as promptly lose them. They lack history, my imprint, a shared sense of belonging that, somehow, constitutes us as a family, that made the house into a home.

Even though the house has a new number—digital, my sister tells me—I am loathe to imprint it on my documents. It lacks the extended, rambling confessions of my youth, the stolen, expensive calls to siblings abroad, my father’s arbitrary and rarely enforced rules about appropriate calling times, the late night emergency calls that defined his profession. It has all the intimacy of a trick’s never-to-be-used number.

To place it on my documents would be an admission of my absence, an acknowledgment that I no longer have a room in what has become a house.

There are, of course, other attachments.

582 defined a place quite unlike 581. They were new. We were old. They were emerging and wealthy. We were established and akin to the boring English middle-class we replaced and emulated, often without irony. 581 were cosmopolitan. We were rooted, careful to travel upcountry ever so often to reassure ourselves that our psychic displacements were more imagined than real. 581 seemed, from that long-ago perspective, more anxious and less ambivalent. They wanted entrée into private clubs and multi-million deals. And they mocked, with their indifference, our been-to mentality.

582, to use a cliché, was a social passport, recognizable to those who were supposed to know, meaningless to those who did not count.

But these illusions fade as I recall the multiple unreciprocated calls I made, the endless afternoons of frustration that revealed the thinness of my social life. School friends who lived elsewhere had, it seemed to me, vast social networks of which I knew nothing. Their conversations carried from school to home, from class period to weekend. It felt unfamiliar.

While they spoke of outings, the casualness of meeting for roast maize or a game of marbles, I told stories of movies I had watched, inventing as I went along. I had discovered reading, but it was an eccentricity not to be shared in a world where action garnered attention.

Once, perhaps recognizing my loneliness, my mother allowed me to have a sleep-over at my best friend’s house. I termed him my best friend. Insisted he was. Now, I think he tolerated me and was kind. I may be ungenerous. The experiment was never repeated, though we continued to talk over the years, he becoming a man with a deep voice and heterosexual lust. And I waiting on corners for strange men to call me attractive.

582544 is, of course, the number my legal documents bear in case of emergency. Were something to happen to me, the call from here to there, this life to that life, would vanish into the ether. There is something appropriate about this. It would be possible to spin a narrative about Africa’s inefficient telephones, the corruption of third-world telecommunications. Knowing people would exchange anecdotes about how rural Africans steal telephone cables to adorn their houses and their bodies. At such a moment, 582544 would become a metaphor for African inefficiency—mine for failing to update the number, the number for failing to work.

It has been easier to mourn dying relatives than it is to mourn this number. I am struck by the simple phrase “your number is up,” the end of waiting and the beginning of being numbered and, ultimately, numberless.

#6

Like my mother, I wake up early. This sentence used to make sense. Increasingly, medical studies tell me that I don’t get enough sleep, that I need at least eight hours, that time is guaranteed in pills. I am struck by the idea that being unlike my mother might be as simple as taking a pill. Tired of hearing about my insomnia, friends urge me to take a pill or, at the very least, visit a doctor to find a solution. It all sounds a bit dangerous.

I have always taken a delicious satisfaction in knowing that if I could not be myself, I could at least be like my mother. Once, a rich man was asked why he did not have plastic surgery to correct the very ugly mole that covered half his chin. He replied, “I love my mother.”

But I am not sentimental. I like the distance of being like my mother. It proves that I am not yet her. I fear, also, that should I sleep through the night, my body might rebel and I might turn into her.

I’m Not a Racist

Perhaps one of our more enduring fantasies is that we can make this call. There is, we believe—and certain social sciences use—a checklist. If one scores in the 90 percentile, or perhaps 95, then one is not a racist.

We can trace the belief to a certain sense of self: the coherent, fully agential individual so prized in American culture; the individual who can “do anything,” “be anything,” “take control,” “be fully in charge.”

It sounds good.

While we might be able to follow certain rules of civility, ultimately, we cannot judge ourselves as racist or non-racist.

It is difficult, for instance, to account for or even recognize unconscious structures of racism. Here, I mean to suggest the Freudian unconscious recovered by Lacan, that which is inaccessible to us. This narrative is suggested in The Psychoanalysis of Race. Even if one does not buy this psychoanalytic approach, one must concede that racism is less an identity, as the declaration “I’m not a racist” would seem to imply, and more a series of social interactions that are open to interpretation: quite often interactions over which we have no control.

I am mostly unconvinced that “we are all racists” a claim that seems both inflated and flaccid. I do believe we are often the least qualified to judge the effects of our words and actions on others. We are ill-equipped to judge affective injury, especially when it concerns strangers.

For the racist act is often that strange thing: an interaction between strangers. It is often an experience of injury that both parties cannot control. Often, this lack of control is skewed as a matter of perception, a refusal to acknowledge injury, which is, paradoxically and ironically, the result of belief in a coherent, fully agential individual.

Here the claim: You (the coherent, fully agential individual) perceived the act as racist; You (the coherent, fully agential individual) imputed meaning where it did not lie; You (the coherent, fully agential individual) are responsible for the injury you claim to experience. At this moment, I (the coherent, fully agential individual) am compelled to experience the shame and embarrassment (often translated as anger) that comes from not being a coherent, fully agential individual (“I don’t know why I let it get to me”).

Better minds than mine have far better explanations and arguments. For me, simply the observation: we may be the least qualified to judge whether or not our acts are racist. That decision lies with the stranger.

#5

Wanjiku is the only one who talks to me, mostly about her “ruffer.” Once, he had names and attributes, quirks and ethnicities. But modern women, she assures me, don’t need those “old-fashioned” things. She is very interested in fashion and eagerly copies the neighborhood girls. She fascinates me because she is indiscriminate—men, shoes, ruffers, dresses. All are acceptable and desirable. Not that she is a slut. On the contrary. She practices hospitality.

She knows I keep notes of our sessions, my impressions. Every few days she asks me to recount my latest musings. She listens, with little comprehension it seems, but with an avid eagerness for sound, voice. These are the only times I talk to her.