Queer: Again (Bathrooms)

On any given night, so the story goes, the bushes outside Carnivore function as gardens of earthly delight. My sister (who does not read this blog, for which I am quite grateful), has mentioned intimate encounters in close quarters. Euphemism for bathroom sex. I am indulging in the childish “you do it too” argument so beloved by those who believe the term “hypocrite” carries more weight than it does. I find it inadequate. And infantilizing. And moralistic. Not to mention, it denies complexity and often refuses to accept change: one is always judged by a history one may no longer embrace.

Larry Craig, a congressman from Idaho, was caught trying to solicit sex in an airport bathroom by an undercover cop. Much has been made over his status as a conservative republican and his well-publicized opposition to homosexuality. I will not belabor the point, merely point out that many happy racists are quite comfortable having sex with—or raping—groups they consider sub-human. The illogic of desire is such that it circumvents political posturing.

I am more interested in what we call the “discourse” generated by the event—the ways in which various constituencies are positioning themselves and, indeed, understanding themselves. First, in a move that seems familiar from sexology, we have the “this is what gay men do” accounts that explain how “cottaging” really works. Blow by blow (pun intended) descriptions of how a typical encounter might occur, accompanied by some psychological speculations: it’s the thrill of the forbidden; it’s a sign of pathology; it’s related to the psychology of the closet. Take your pick. Explaining gay men to everyone else. Tedious.

Next, we have the tedious “good gay” and “bad gay” arguments. Good gays are largely proclaiming their opposition to “bathroom sex,” claiming that bathrooms are “dirty,” “nasty,” “uncomfortable,” “undignified,” worrying about what such actions “say about homosexuals.” Our “good name” is “sullied” when “irresponsible” thrill-chasers indulge in public displays of affection. (I have stored in my mind a long rant about the meaning of “public affection” across the sexuality line. What might “closeted” heterosexuality look like? Why might it be difficult, if not impossible, to imagine?)

Of course, part of what remains unspoken, though always implicit, is that all gay sex is “bathroom sex.” Space—the spaces of the body and the spaces bodies occupy—collapse in claims that “gays are okay; except they have public, bathroom sex.” Denouncements of the spaces in which “gays,” or my favorite new phrasing “the gays,” have sex cannot be absolutely separated from denouncements of “the gays.”

Part of what remains interesting for me are the ways we seem unable, at least in popular discussions, to think more imaginatively about sex and space. The ways, that is, space is the background in which sex might take place, but adds nothing to the encounter. Such that, given the option between a lavishly appointed apartment and a public bathroom, one would choose the apartment. We might think, instead, of how an encounter may start in one space and move to the other, a movement between and within spaces, that is.

It’s important to pay attention to the way politics and sex are coming together in this encounter, if only so we can register the ways hetero/homonormativity become complicit—we denounce hypocrisy even as we denounce deviant homosexuality. The gays learn, once again, that we are acceptable in our asexual, closeted (as private, if out) selves, but not in any way that disrupts the sanctity of normative space—even when that space is the bathroom.

Yet another take

I spent many years failing Geography. Given a map, I could identify Lake Turkana (looks like a worm), Lake Victoria (borders Kenya and Uganda), and the Indian Ocean (it’s big). Everything else looked like dots and squiggles. Still does.

For that reason, I am reluctant to laugh at anyone else’s gaffes. On the other hand, this young lady’s mistake is not based on geography, but on an idea that knowledge production is fundamentally linked to consumption.

U.S. Americans who cannot find the country on a map cannot do so because they do not own maps. Absurd as it seems, she simply applies the same logic that marks education, all the way from the super-elite kindergartens through the multiple test-training programs: educational attainment, or knowledge more broadly, is a commodity. We know what we buy.

See Kym Platt’s take.

Slippery Slopes

From the venerable Wikipedia (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy lacks an entry):

In debate or rhetoric, the slippery slope is an argument for the likelihood of one event or trend given another. It suggests that an action will initiate a chain of events culminating in an undesirable event later. The argument is sometimes referred to as the thin end of the wedge or the camel’s nose.

It should come as no surprise that the slippery slope is the fallacy most commonly employed when it comes to sex, just as metonymy is sexuality’s rhetorical figure. Examples are legion, linking both slippery slope and metonymy. We might think, for example, of the language of anatomy (still used today). Penis and vagina size (and structure) were often understood as measures of sexual appetite and political ability. Edward Gibbon’s shadow continues to haunt contemporary politics, especially his claim that decadence and depravity are both evidence of and directly related to the decline of the Roman empire. (Edward Gibbon: required reading for those who want to run empires and control sexuality. Not because he’s right, but because it can justify repression.)

Of course, it does not help that “slippery slope,” or when in plural form, “slippery slopes,” sounds, looks, and feels pornographic—the sexy sibilants, smooth liquids, climactic plosives. We legislate sound.

In more familiar accounts, slippery slope arguments form the core to what we might term sex panic accounts. If we introduce sex education in schools then children will experiment with sex. If you masturbate you will eventually become a homosexual. If you are homosexual you will eventually become a pedophile. If you masturbate (for women) you will become infertile. If you masturbate, your genitals will fall off. (Let’s pay attention to the foundational role of masturbation. See Thomas Laqueur.)

In what came to be called the Sex Wars (ongoing), based on the relationship between feminism and pornography and feminism and lesbian s/m (or just s/m in general—here the names Catherine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, Gayle Rubin, Pat(rick) Califia, and the useful anthology Sex Wars by Lisa Duggan and Nan Hunter), slopes were so slippery as to be liquid. One’s pleasure and participation in pornography and s/m was understood as support for patriarchy. At least one useful consequence of these debates (though not wholly attributable to them) has been that we now appreciate the complex relationship among politics and pleasure, morphology and ideology. But I deviate from my porn-logic. (I am nothing if not a deviator. Ugly word but deviant flows down slopes much too easily.)

I do have a point: why is it that sex and sexuality lend themselves so easily to this particular fallacy? Why is it so easy to imagine that one sex act can destroy a kingdom? Why don’t we attach the same meanings to, say, food and eating? Of course, Foucault provides a way to answer this question. One on which it is difficult to improve.

To my mind, the slippery slope logic attached to sex has become one of, if not the, dominant way in which certain political discussions function. If the Left has its way, all hell will break loose. If the Right has its way, we will all soon inhabit Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. There is, to many political discussions, a barely hidden hysterical edge, a slide toward unreason. The extent to which these overwrought performances might be attributed, in part, to their televised and broadcast settings is yet another matter.

Now, I am inclined to laugh at slippery slope utterances, even when they induce fear, terror, and panic. And they do. But what if we were to take them as seriously as their advocates?

What if, for example, we accept that civilization depends on the length of women’s skirts?

More interesting to me, how might we begin to understand the psychic effects of slippery slope logic on the ways we live and think? Because it seems to me that while we might dismiss “absurd” positions, we might dismiss Right and Left “extremism,” we might laugh because we “know better,” we still remain in thrall to the seduction of slippery slope logic. We chuckle at inane pronouncements even as we master the art of identifying “suspicious” looking people; we agree most anything goes, even as we shield our children from gays and lesbians (see public schools); we understand that masturbation is harmless, even as we pathologize those “caught in the act.”

Put another way, even when we recognize the problem of the slippery slope, we remain arrested by its suggestive “what if?”

Cooking with Bullets

I know two facts about my grandfather: he used to be a cook and he had a bullet lodged in his body. He was a taciturn man, given to short replies, using grunts to converse, seemingly displeased with the course of his life. Yet, given he had two wives and twelve children, that my aunts, uncles, and cousins rank among some of the most beautiful and charming people I know, I suspect he may have had hidden depths.

His occupation as a cook was not uncommon for Gikuyu men. Ads enticing would-be settlers to the colonies praised the ready supply of cheap, malleable labor. On the ground reports from early settlers and visitors, William Routledge, Elspeth Huxley, and Richard Meinertzhagen, for instance, emphasized the availability of Gikuyu labor. Gikuyu men, as Carolyn Martin Shaw claims, were considered neuter, unlike the virile Maasai. As such, they were considered ideal household servants, posing no threat to white women.

Given the relative absence of land—my limited knowledge tells me my grandfather did not come from wealth—a position as a cook, working in a town or city, supporting a family in the countryside, would have seemed an attractive, or at least reasonable proposition. He embodied, quite literally, a newly made colonial subject. He belongs to the first generation of men whose encounters with colonialism offered new ways of being gendered.

What was it like to grow up with one set of gendered expectations only to encounter a world in which they no longer made sense or, in some cases, were no longer possible? How did one negotiate the values attached to gendered practices as they changed, when earning capacity, for example, competed against cattle raids? Or in more familiar terms, money came against muscles? How did one manage the transition from cook in the city to polygamous husband in the country? (As an aside, these questions are central to my dissertation.) Here, it might be worth noting that Okonkwo’s tragedy is nothing if not about his struggle to define gendered identity in a changing world. And this also applies to his grandson Obi in No Longer at Ease.

In recent years, I have wondered about my grandfather’s profession, about the link between cooking and bullets. Of course, the association makes sense given the role house servants played in the Mau Mau war. Cooks and houseboys often provided access to settlers’ houses, many times taking the lead in brutal attacks. Such acts were probably a complex blend of nationalist sentiments—volitional and coerced—and gendered rage. Ferdinand Oyono’s Houseboy is the classic text of gendered ambivalence and frustration. It is also my choice for a novel to be read alongside Things Fall Apart.

Was my grandfather shot by colonial guards or anti-colonial forces? Was his bullet, to over-simplify the matter, the mark of a coward or a hero? Now, I have no investment in the terms “coward” and “hero.” I consider them to be dangerous fictions. On the other hand, I am interested in how they circulate and provide social legibility. I am especially interested in how they provide us with a language through which to understand the relationship between gender and belonging. Both terms have a distinct relation to nationalist histories, one that follows them no matter where they are deployed. Rescuing cats from trees builds nations. But I stray.

Had I the patience, I would trace more carefully, or at least more imaginatively, the flights in and out of masculinity marked by the confluence of cooking and bullets. I might outline how masculinity and ethnicity, colonial and postcolonial identities can be embedded in the flesh. (Of course, I really just want MMK to reinforce and build on my shaky foundations.) I might begin trying to map the transition from having a thorn in the flesh to having a bullet in the flesh, from being a thorn in the flesh to being a bullet in the flesh.

To think about how these supplements and irritants, natural and man-made, gendered suppositories, one might say, form an essential part of the queer histories I have tried to imagine and claim, histories of unstable masculinities, ambivalent belonging, contested spaces. To think, too, about how these histories of en-fleshment function, even when denuded of verbs.

Ultimately, I am interested in the uneven transmission (my director’s term) of masculinities, the competing modes of practicing gender that continue to shape African masculinities.

Grandmothers (and other fictions)

My great grandmother was a wizened old crone, shaped like a pretzel, senile beyond belief, barely coherent or, it seemed at times, sentient. My all-too-brief encounters with her, perhaps once or twice before she died, were awkward and embarrassing, me supposed to feel something, the pull of blood, the unreserved love we have for strangers who are part of our lineage, and experiencing, instead, indifference and disgust.

Within the familiar languages of kinship, such admissions are unacceptable. Should be kept private or, if shared, done so with close family members. If we dislike our relatives, we should have proper reasons—abuse, indifference, neglect—not idiosyncratic reactions based on aesthetics. But it strikes me that the demand we love and respect kin simply because they are kin is just as idiosyncratic.

I am interested in moments when familial affect is supposed to provide a point of empathy. “Just like grandma used to make,” the commercials intone. I am especially interested in moments when this expected empathy fails. (As an aside, I can declare with absolute certainty that my cucu was never a “grandma.”)

One should not pick on grandma. I will.

I have been thinking about my reaction to my great grandmother to imagine how the familial relations we consider benign if not benevolent may be absolutely terrifying for others. Our own psychic and ideological investments in those relations may blind us to the terrifying potential they hold for others.

Now, of course, none of this is new. It is, say, the difference between a loving father and a raging homophobe—perspective is key. Only, I think something different happens when the objects of horror—terror, to use an overused word—may be relations defined, often if not always, by their pleasant associations. Put otherwise, the thought that my gwaci-roasting grandmother may be an object of absolute, irrational horror goes against everything (to use a cliché) I have ever imagined about my personal and family history.

Indeed, the anti-racist, anti-colonial, feminist and queer languages I have learned tell me that such irrational horror “others” my grandmother, refuses to imbue her with the “humanity” (here defined as the potential for goodness) that she “deserves.” While I am on board with the political aim of such arguments, I want a more textured way of thinking about the horror of the quotidian—the ugly baby, to give a for instance—as a way of being in the world.

What happens, that is, if instead of understanding our worlds and histories as benign potentialities of goodness, we see them as occasions for terror? Of course, this question lies at the heart of Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” though her reflections turn inward. It is less the impossibility of community or empathy that interests me—though that has its intellectual rewards—more what might be termed the scabs and scars of the social.

A sense of self-preservation—and, to be honest, fear—prevents me from naming the many occasions and emblems of benign “good” that might lead to another person’s terror-horror. Not to mention, I believe such occasions are both too numerous and irrational to be enumerated. To understand such moments (and events) as constitutive of the quotidian might be useful for re-thinking our claims that we understand the universal appeal of the benign and lovable.

To understand, that is, that the very people, objects, institutions, relationships that we consider to represent, not the best, but most ordinary, may not be perceived as such by others. And, at the same time, to resist our urge to pathologize or demonize those who, in current political parlance “do not share our values.” Also recognizing, and this is key, that the inability to share values—to find “grandma” lovable, for instance—need not be the occasion for violence. In language I have used before, it seems necessary to imagine the uses of indifference and disgust as essential and useful elements of the worlds we inhabit—especially in the inadvertent frottage we term “living together.”

Cut or Uncut?

At the risk of anachronism, and the worst kind of uninformed politics, it might be worth attempting an experiment about the meaning of African morphologies. An article in the Daily Nation, provocatively opens,

American foreign aid will soon shift to an unlikely aspect of Kenyan culture — male circumcision.

Nearly Sh350 million out of the Sh25 billion which the United States gives Kenya to fight Aids will now be used to make circumcision more widely available to men.

The dramatic twist in the Bush administration’s financial support is driven by recent studies in Kenya and elsewhere which show that circumcised men are far less likely to contract the virus that causes Aids.

A senior official with the US Agency for International Development told the Washington Post that funding for the male cut will amount at first to only a few hundred thousand dollars a year, but will become “an important part” of the American anti-Aids programme in Africa in the coming years.

I have thought about male circumcision for some time—in the context of the Luo/Gikuyu leadership divide, in terms of the rural/urban creations of Nairobi masculinities, in the important, if incomplete, shifts from riversides to hospitals. Much of this still remains to be written, though Kenyan historians have mapped the ethno-national creation of contemporary masculinities.

I am more interested, though, in how African morphologies continue to be an object of fascination for the west. Any student of Kenyan history knows about the complex politics of circumcision, from how debates over women’s bodies led to the creation of independent schools (here, the language of fgm may be appropriate, but I wonder how much women’s welfare lay at the center of these debates, or whether they were, in fact, struggles between men—religion vs. tradition, shall we say) to how missionaries attempted to sanitize circumcision rituals.

While the more familiar colonial language of sexology may be absent from recent scientific assessments—no speculation over penis length of thickness, for example, no salacious porno-reports—I remain startled that studies about circumcising Africans are prominently displayed in western media. Although the report I cite above comes from a Kenyan daily, news about circumcising Africans made the front page of the online edition of the New York Times a few months ago.

To be sure, the news is couched in a more advanced, life-saving science, yet it still remains incredibly invasive. The language of cut/uncut, familiar from my ventures in gay cruising, becomes an opportunity to speak about African sexuality. On the one hand, I support any and all life-saving measures. On the other hand, I think about the coercive measures—funding opportunities—that ignore any and all possible cultural and traditional attitudes toward circumcision. Of course, the specter of castration is never far.

Here would be my uninformed question: at the opening of the 21st Century, why are African penises front-page and policy-driving objects of western fascination? Is there not something absurd at the spectacle of men lining up to have their penises observed (“cut, one extra dollar, uncut, sorry, no more money”)? To be sure, I have ventured an absurd, idiosyncratic take on the bind between science and policy, the affair between African morphologies and U.S. interests. Here, of course, it is not simply that Africans may have to choose between saving their lives and altering their bodies, though that concern is primary, but about the ongoing way African morphologies continue to function in the “new,” but oh-so-familiar idioms of western science.

Plaid Skirts and Ruby Shoes

At seven, I dressed in my sister’s plaid skirt. It was red and black and clashed terribly with the multi-colored bangles that jangled on my arms and the faux-straw hat I donned in imitation of the English children who populated my literary imagination. It was not the first nor the last time I would wear my sisters’ clothes.

It was the first—and only—time that I would be captured, even celebrated, transgressing gender. My father took a perverse delight in his dressed-up son and soon I was modeling for him, if only for a brief half hour. If, on the one hand, those pictures imagined a nascent queer sensibility, they also became occasions for training in masculinity. Less than two years after, I had learned to be ashamed of the photographs, to forget my delight in the occasion, to cringe when my father mentioned them.

I burned those early photographs.

I still tried on my mother’s wedding dress. My sister’s asymmetrical mini-skirt. Used my mother’s astringent. Borrowed her wigs to act in school plays. Practiced walking in heels. Shaped my nails to drag-queen perfection.

Perhaps even at this early period I was attuned to the difference between performing and fixing identity. I felt that certain forms of history could be used to shame and discipline gender. What began as an adventure in gender turned, all too quickly, into a lesson about gender.

I have yet to identify the moment when excitement turned into shame. In truth, there is probably no single moment, more an accumulation of language and acts, the loud “sissy,” the ongoing description of gender performance all ending with “like a girl.” At the time, of course, I had no real way to talk about how simile (or performance) undoes claims to authentic identity.

What strikes me about this story now is the shame that still accompanies its telling. I have narrated multiple versions of growing up queer, but this one strikes a little too close to home, accompanying the shame that I take to be constitutive of queer identity, one created by heterosexual and homosexual communities.

Of course, to my mind, the claim that queers should “get over shame” and “embrace pride” loses the ambivalent and often painful richness on which we can continually draw.

* * *

I hated black Bata lace-up shoes. I hated their shape, the hard, wooden heel. I hated that they were required school wear. Most of all, I hated that most everyone I knew owned a similar pair. I also resented them because I never learned how to lace up shoes properly. I invented a system of loops and knots that passes but lacks the elaborate choreography that seems to come so naturally to others.

In that tribute to bourgeois attainment and postcolonial history, the family portrait, my Vaseline-bright face stares blandly into the camera, my right thumb casually tucked into my blue jeans, the plaid shirt completing my faux-American look. And, of course, my maroon moccasins.

I adored those shoes.

They clashed with everything I wore. And they were the first pair of shoes I remember loving. As with all passions, it was irrational, glorious, and all-too short, victim to an inevitable growth spurt. Later, when I discovered that women used to tint their feet red to indicate their sexual availability, the shoes took on yet another layer of meaning.

I remember my love for those shoes, not simply because the family portrait will not let me forget, but also because they taught me how to love shoes. I spent my childhood running around barefoot, convinced that shoes were evil, strange torture devices unsuited to my life and activities. My distaste for shoes competed with my dislike of long pants. I wanted to live a barefoot life in shorts. (I lost my love for shorts in yet another wave of shame.)

By the time I came to love shoes, I had outgrown my sister’s plaid skirt. In a moment of pseudo-repression, I could dismiss their shared color palette as coincidence. At the time, I had no way of describing coincidence as queer.

We might read these stories in bastardized psycho-sexual terms: gender differentiation perverted by a pseudo-fetish. Moments of normative development arrested and hyper-stimulated. How material objects come to embody antinomian desire. I am more interested in reading them alongside other queer (my term) bloggers engaged in similar projects of narrating their pasts and presents. Larry, Gay Prof, and Oso Raro, for instance, remind me that queers not only inhabit but (re)create their worlds.

Many of my gendered performance exist in shadowy memories, as titles on indifferent certificates naming me “best woman” or “best actress,” in the laughter of cruel children, in gay attempts to masculinize me, but mostly in the words I have learned to write, erase, and re-write.

To coincidence I would add revision as a queer strategy, not just for writing, but, more importantly, for living. Understanding the need to burn old images only to return to them. Accepting the messiness of ashes, the broken knots of memory, the fragile alliances of virtual spaces.

graduates . com

It strikes me as rather ironic that a site ostensibly built on the (shaky) foundation of education should feature such as this:

“hi guyz… wonna know what ave been upto? lets hook up.”

Come We Stay

Before my language became more “sophisticated,” before, that is, I used words like “partners” and “lovers” and “significant others,” before I tried to “queer” such terms, I knew of the intimate arrangements known as “come we stay.”

(I have used up my quota of quotation marks.)

I like the phrase “come we stay” or “come, we stay,” because of the range of intimate and domestic arrangements it allows. Although used to describe heterosexual relationships that were publicly recognized but not official (dowry hadn’t been paid, legal documents had not been filed), these arrangements said nothing about the scope of intimacies defined. To my mind, their extra-legal status (though dangerous in matters of, say, child support) coupled with their social recognition, astutely combined traditional ideas of intimacy, where social recognition was privileged over State recognition; implicitly critiqued the State’s power to legislate intimacy; and functioned as forms of intimate innovation tied to culture and economics. It is no coincidence that the very a-grammatical “come we stay” attempts to mimic the speech (and it is said in a very particular way) of speakers who also use the phrase “play sex.” It lacks, we might claim, a certain rhetorical sophistication, even as it re-forms language to suit context.

Apart from the many ideological and theoretical reasons I like the phrase, I simply also like how casual it sounds. I am a fan of the simple beckoning gesture coupled with the many possibilities it offers (its resemblance to the pastoral poem “come stay with me and be my love” is purely coincidental, but also remarkably suggestive, if one were to pursue the point). By no means is this arrangement unusual—it runs through the “yard” fiction of C.L.R. James and Roger Mais, for instance.

It would be a mistake to erase the class-specific aspect of this phrase—and practice. I am still enough of a Freudian to believe in the transcontinental “sickness” of the middle-class. Of course, I am also taken by the romance of imagining a “come we stay” arrangement that does not include movers and security deposits. Arrangements where a wheelbarrow and bag suffice. Needless to say, such arrangements require a certain spatial proximity—or an ability to follow a trail of crumbs. “Come we stay.”

I also like the awkwardness of the phrase, its inability to describe the terms of the relationship. Now, to be sure, Foucault teaches us that heterosexual relations are so sanctioned that they need not disclose their specificities—they don’t need scrutiny. (In part, this already-known sanction explains the “transgression” of celebrity sex tapes.) But I queer this relationship to reclaim the value of inscrutability, a theme to which I keep returning and on which I shall end.

A friend has a new book coming out that assesses the value of anonymity to twentieth-century queer cultures. Much of what I know, I have learned from his work. For me, the value of inscrutability lies in the possibilities it affords. What cannot—indeed, need not—be named or managed, what, I think, is captured by “come we stay” can only be described as the richness of intimacy in the life worlds we inhabit and those we have yet to create.

Say What You Mean: Or, How to Abandon Linearity

It never becomes a conversation. I am always aphasic.

The demand is overly familiar: say what you mean. Say it clearly. And the response is equally familiar. You made it up. It’s in your head. Irrelevant. You have imbibed foreign poison.

If one has to make up a word to describe a condition then the word has no truth-value, no material referent.

Or, more familiarly: stop complaining. Recommend a solution.

Error! Invalid Code! Syntax Not Recognized!

Recommend a solution!

It often seems as though the only linearity allowed is the familiar: tell a story that reminds us all about the importance of family. Express outrage at slow service, bad service, corruption, a world that does not serve at your pleasure. Tell an uplifting tale of overcoming odds, triumphing against adversity, learning always learning. Framed within such parameters, even the most unsettling narratives can be incorporated if not assimilated into the already-known.

Attempting to be “non-linear” does not, of course, offer an alternative to the problem that frames the linear/non-linear binary. I remain seduced by possibility.

Over the past few years, I have been interested in how to think about indifference (though the term itself is catachrestic). About the importance of losing the double consciousness that haunts contemporary cultures of resistance. (Double consciousness, it seems, cannot be detached from resistance; that problem for another time.) Not, I would hasten to add, the indifference that is symptomatic of acute self-consciousness, what might be termed worldliness or sophistication or even, if we dare, cosmopolitanism. No, instead the blank stare of a man chewing on a blade of grass while looking into the horizon.

I have no desire to re-romanticize this ubiquitous image. (Google Africa images.) I am fascinated, however, by the narrative it refuses to tell: the far-seeing eyes, the abstracted expression, the arrested moment. Out of time, the image disengages from the tales we desire of challenge and resistance, from the hyper self-consciousness “we” carry as a symptom of the political. (The irony of writing about the value of indifference as a strategy does not escape me.)

What kind of demand might indifference make? I ask the question only half facetiously, aware that the language of demand draws one back into the problems of “linear” narrative and political “solutions”—the always unheard and forever irrational. I am drawn to the fractured moments of living that might be found in indifference. Fractured insofar as they refuse to justify themselves within legal, moral, social, and spiritual frameworks we inhabit. It is less the obscene (off-stage) that interests me here, nor the easily incorporated “alternative” that too often merely seems reactive. It is, for lack of a better term, the innovative or inscrutable.

To end on a less abstract note: when I teach Amos Tutuola’s Palm-wine Drinkard, I ask students to confront a text that seems indifferent to their demands: it says nothing about an Africa they hope to learn about, adds little to their ego-positions, offers no moral or ethical lesson. It offers, that is, nothing that is readily available to be consumed. Indifferent to their demands, it demands they engage with indifference. Their task, I tell them, is to imagine a way to forge a relationship beyond their usual parameters. This is not simply feeding history or anthropology or some version of contemporary culture, but learning how to imagine a shared social ground.

Such might be termed the paradoxical demand of indifference.