Babel

Every so often I feel a sense of historical wrongness. I shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t understand me.

Were I to confess, you would deem my feelings appropriate. You would understand what you perceive as my sense of being wronged. But that’s not it.

I have yet to explain my constant, if intermittent, sense of surprise. Strangers speak in familiar tongues. Is it appropriate to mourn Babel?

* * *
It is important to register that the specific form of historical wrongness I am trying to register here is distinctly 21st century; it is not an attempt to recover pre-national, racial pasts. If compelled, I might describe it as my discomfort with familiarity, or the intimacy forged by familiarity. That understanding another’s tongue might be more, rather than less, cause for misunderstanding: what kills a desire for the social.

I am in thrall to the myth of a quieter, pre-Babel world.

* * *
Once, trying to compliment me, you said I felt too much, too intensely. Your eyes were tender, your face soft. According to the script, it was supposed to be a moment of shared vulnerability.

Then, and now, I couldn’t tell you how disappointed I felt. I might have forgiven the denuded cliché. I was less willing to forgive your inability, even comfort, in feeling less intensely.

Are these the sorts of secrets we keep to maintain intimacy?

* * *
To claim I’m in search of mystery would be to deny the opacity I must grant you to remain, or try to be, ethical.

But your windows keep unfogging, your pores opening, your secret places leaking. You are pleased that we seem to be growing closer. How do I explain the disgust I once found so compelling as a part of who we are has turned against us?

I am, to put it baldly, tired.

* * *
You once asked why I had no family pictures in my apartment. In tv-produced knowledge, you said it meant that I didn’t value my family. We laughed.

You treasure pictures of us, all the more because you know I despise being made spectral—confirmed always as loss. Pictures are melancholic objects.

It is not that I have no use for “remember when.” Maybe I do. It might be, as you claim, that I prefer the yet-to-be to the has-been.

I remind you that my people build their huts above ground and did not believe in foundations.

* * *
Yet I return to you compulsively, like an animal to its droppings. The Koala’s young eats its mother’s droppings to develop immunity against the poisonous plants on which it later feeds. Our relationship might be much like this.

Break (Nyayo Milk)

I want to make a number of inflated claims, useful despite—or because of—their inflation. If nothing else, they may prove interesting, or provocative.

1
My generation of Kenyans entered into the material world of politics through milk. I know little of the actual legal machinations, but in my fuzzy memory, the narrative goes something like this: at a certain point, the government provided free cartons of milk to all primary school children. It was acclaimed, at the time, as one of baba Moi’s achievements, evidence that he cared about the nation’s children, about the future.

2
Consuming milk became a deeply ideological process, marked by ethnic and class politics in ways that continue to resound. The milk, it was claimed, had been laced with hormones, designed to stimulate premature development; it was a form of ideological poison, others said. Moi was plotting against the Gikuyu through milk.

We did not just consume milk. In so doing, we confirmed or affirmed our allegiances, multiple and conflicting though they were.

3
We designed strategies for disposing of the milk. The toilets were crammed with full packages, the garbage cans leaked white. We identified students who loved milk and generously shared our own packages. We stuffed our bags with leaky packages, only to throw them away at home.

We were learning to be subversive, though we would not have termed it that.

4
While the memory of what we believed remains quite clear, the source of those beliefs remains vague. In those years when the most reliable whispers seemed to come from the shadows, asking for verification seemed irrelevant.

5
To ask about the question of milk consumption in Kenya’s primary schools through the 1980s is to ask how children come to be political agents, how they understand material signifiers as politically significant, as markers of allegiance, keeping solidarity with their families and friends. But also to understand the ambivalence created by complicity. What, for instance, did it mean that some teachers insisted we consume the milk? How did facial expressions convey our limited agency? What did we think about those who consumed their milk eagerly, even hungrily? What did it mean that those who hated Nyayo milk eagerly consumed KCC milk, as though the two were not distributed by the same company? (Were they? Memory fails.)

6
We might phrase this issue another way and ask what it means that the most significant material practice that all school-going Kenyans of a certain age participated in was drinking milk. Were we being nurtured? Or permanently infantilized?

7
I want to change register here, become slightly more academic.

Might it be possible to read these experiences of milk consumption as fights over competing definitions and practices of parenting? In drinking Baba Moi’s milk, were we being taught to esteem the national father over our biological parents? And what kind of lesson was this?

How, that is, did consuming milk become an ideological struggle over various kinds of kinship: ethnic or multi-ethnic over national? Or private, biological over public, ideological? And how successful was this lesson? What were we learning about the national deployment of kinship tropes?

One might venture an answer by noting that after “mzee” and “baba,” our current president is Emilio.

8
And because it’s what I do, I want to register the queer resonances of Moi’s milk. There is, to be sure, something quite perverse (perhaps perversely delicious) in the image of the nation’s father (breast)feeding a nation of children.

Other connotations are quite illegal.

9
I have suggested to a friend that our collective stories about Nyayo milk might make a fascinating project.

That work remains to be done.

Break (Pornography)

Larry has a post up on pornography. I have been wanting to engage with him for some time (note to self: nothing you write will sound quite right). But I am saving all my fully-formed sentences and paragraphs and (one hopes) arguments for the dissertation right now. So, I offer only a few fragments in hopes of an encounter.

* * *
Toward the end of his post, Larry points to possible future topics including the (inferior?) quality of gay porn vs. straight porn. Before his escape into “real life,” Bernard (who Larry should remember) had a long, informative email about the financial aspect of creating black gay porn. (I realize how useless this statement may seem, how incestuous, but I’m in the world of porn, where Onan reigns.)

But the unqualified question of “quality” also raises questions about what we want when we watch porn. In strikes me, that, quite often, we want the encounters we see to be “magical,” to convey pleasure, to hide aspects of “labor.” While we may want to see vigorous action, high energy, sweaty brows and shifting muscles, we are reluctant to see scars, to see evidence of editing, to recognize the bored faces and tired performances of workers who are paid to elicit desire. (Indeed, the awkward performances of many younger actors can be a huge turn-off *ahem* cocodorm, as can the overly stylized, bland rituals of Bel Ami and Falcon twinks.)

We want to see professionals (and, a quick scan at xtube comments will reveal a vast appreciation for them). If not professionals, we want to see youth awakening to its possibilities. We want, I think, a certain kind of romance. We have, I think, less tolerance for bodies that seem to be old and worn out (even when young); we heckle at glazed eyes and limp dicks, seeing them as symptoms of personal failure as opposed to conditions produced, perhaps demanded, by the nature of pornography as labor.

There is much more to be written here. I simply want to note how the question of quality, in addition to being financial, also has to do with our expectations about sex work, and, quite often, our unwillingness to think of sex as work.

* * *
I think that the issues of cross-identification in pornography might be a little more complex than Larry grants. When watching gangbangs, where white women are targets of black men, for instance, the sites of allegiances and attachments, the acts that elicit our desire and attention, might be multiple and shifting. It is not simply the case that a black male viewer in such a scenario necessarily identifies with the black men.

Indeed, one common argument made by “gay recruiters” (straight-seducers?) is that many so-called straight men seem more interested in watching male performers than women, and not merely in a comparative his implement is x size way; see Mutumia. This interest is touted by straight-seducers as evidence of latent gay tendencies. I have no intention in adjudicating in what seems to be a faulty argument, but I do think it raises interesting questions about how pornography scrambles, orders, and re-orders modes of identification. No doubt performance scholars would have a lot more to say about the way pornography functions.

This shifting site of identifications (here, I’m thinking psychically and much less politically, insofar as the two can be separated) is one of the reasons porn can be such a complex phenomenon to analyze. To use the handy language of gaydom, no matter one’s own preferences, one might be seduced by watching another person’s experience. “Tops” might enjoy watching and even identify with “bottoms.” People who may disdain kissing in the real world might be incredibly turned on by it in a movie; people who claim not to experience cross-racial or inter-racial desire might find their fantasies populated with all sorts of border crossings.

Now, I am not claiming that experiencing such modes of identification and cross-identification necessarily speaks the “truth” of one’s desire. That is, I am not claiming that when gay men watch heterosexual porn they express a desire to be heterosexual, or even, as Larry would put it, to be in the position ostensibly occupied by heterosexual men. In part, I think this reading of identification and cross-identification is complicated by the temporality of porn: the shifting clips and multiple angles; the way, for instance, in a 15 minute scene, 2 minutes might be really hot, the rest unremarkable. Or, how in a gangbang, only one performer out of, say, five, may elicit interest. How, that is, the segmented aspects of pornographic action demand an attention to fragmented, multiple sites of identification.

* * *
The taste for a particular kind of porn does raise questions about one’s desires and kinds of identifications. Swept up by the pre-condom nostalgia, for instance, I have a fondness for movies of a certain era. Turned off by the vapid models of hairless wax that pass for “attractive” and “desirable” in much commercial gay porn, I find the amateur antics available on xtube, featuring “real people,” to be much more interesting.

But every so often I break out of what I like to try what I might like or find curious or interesting or fascinating—various kinds of fetish porn have their appeal. I found myself intrigued by foot worship recently. (Now, given that I come from a place where many people walk around barefoot, foot worship is, to say the least, quite bewildering; it would be akin to playing with dry concrete.)

And this, I think, is one valuable way to think about how porn functions as an index of ever-capricious, ever-changing desire. (Didn’t we have a plan to start a Gikuyu-themed porn company, Mutumia?)

* * *
Porn complicates all kinds of politics.

When we adopt a “save the women” attitude, we refuse to recognize the legitimacy of sex work. At the same time, we must acknowledge that most porn actors are not unionized, have crap benefits, and are vastly exploited. (Sounds a lot like Wal-mart.) We cannot claim a special place for pornography within struggles over labor. If we claim it is more inherently exploitative because it involves bodies, we dematerialize many other forms of embodied labor. I’m sure a lot has been written on this. So I move on.

I am uncomfortable with any kind of political stand or position that would seek to discipline the work of fantasy and desire. Despite many “convincing” arguments, Law and Order has yet to convince me that the unconscious is an instruction manual. Does watching porn and enjoying it compromise any politics (not just feminism) that believes in the worth of all people? To answer that would require unpacking the various meanings attached to sexual play and, for those of us who embrace the term queer, to explain our resistance to modes of social discipline.

Is watching people have sex any different from watching people eating or walking or riding bicycles? Those of us who study race and gender and class and ethnicity and nationality might think, for instance, about the “pornography” of identity categories, the nakedness of difference.

Yet, I use pornography advisedly, for I do think there’s something incredibly powerful about our (relatively recent) turn to the metaphorics of pornography to speak of the vulnerabilities, privations, and pleasures of contemporary life. (Given how few of us actually experience “orgasms,” the expression “orgasmic” owes more to porn than “real life.” Yeah, I said it!)

* * *
IF you’ve been patient enough to read this (my loyal readership of 1), reward yourself. Go play on www.xtube.com

Indifference Now, a thought experiment

I don’t have this (note the absent referent) fully worked out. Were I to attempt cleverness, I might claim that it can only exist as unfinished, denuded, a strange pairing that, nonetheless, makes a certain kind of sense. Yet with a strange persistence, strange in that the form it takes belies persistence. One presses an ache, relishing the pleasure of relief and the comfort of the ache. To feel alive might be a form of aching (not longing, and this distinction is important).

One ventures, then, into a kind of writing that enacts (it is hoped) a certain way of feeling, of being in the world—to question the fact of being as valuable, in that overly self-conscious way we might term modern or middle-class. To this, I have no real answers.

Many years ago, Leo Bersani asked us to think about the value of powerlessness. Then, and now, it remains a powerful provocation, precisely because it seems so unthinkable. It was also remarkably timely and prescient, at a time (in the later 80s) when agency seemed so fraught. In his lovely Love’s Instruments, Melvin Dixon captures the spirit of that time (even now, perhaps) when the need to act emanates from failing bodies, the urgency of ever-weakening physiologies. I still have to think through the complex relationship between testimony and agency, witness and action. (And even this deferral is part of this, shall we call it suspension.)

It has been many years since I’ve written about agency. People act. I take this as banal, even uninteresting. I am more reluctant now to ascribe meaning to such actions, or, at least, to inflate meaning in a way that distorts such action. I hasten to add that recognizing the fact of agency will always have a certain urgency, even as I question our need to conflate the conceptual and political notion of agency with any and every incident of action. But this, too, is another discussion about the perverted ways in which we think about choice and action, and our refusal to recognize their often impoverished if not bankrupt nature.

It is too possible, I think, for agency to be conflated with re-action (hence, I think, the contested term “post-colonial,” and the terrifyingly reductive notion of “writing back to empire”). I am much more interested in moments of parallel acting, not intersection.

I was recently reminded of Bersani’s work when reading Laurent Berlant’s essay “Starved,” in the latest issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly. She is interested in a certain notion of “stuckness” that characterizes the present. It is a now marked by an eroded subjectivity, one constantly undergoing attrition. As a bad student of agriculture, I tend to confuse attrition with erosion. Both, unless I’m wrong, describe wearing away over time, though erosion might be more sudden (long rains). (There might yet be a point here.) I have yet to process what it means to occupy an eroding subjectivity, which is not the same thing as a failing body, it must be said, yet is not wholly unrelated.

All of this is a preamble.

For the past few years, I have been fascinated by indifference and apathy. Both make me uncomfortable—so, of course, they are incredibly appealing. Now, I think of both less as occupying the realm of the apolitical than as embedded within the realm of the political.

But I want to take a step back from a previous position where I identified both as forms of violence. While I do think violence is a remarkably capacious category, I am not quite sure indifference and apathy always qualify as forms of violence. I do think they are more often a part of our everyday lives than we care to admit. Indeed, only a crippling self-consciousness would completely erase both. I write, of course, about that carapace of the everyday.

Increasingly, I have turned to thinking about indifference, not as a calculated response, but a way of doing that refuses to recognize the imperative to respond. I have toyed with the idea for a while, especially as a way to question what I consider the excesses of (post)colonial scholars. I think the question of indifference becomes even more pressing when we consider the realm of intimacy (a term I find more useful than sexuality). Intimate practices have no singular relation to systems of power and, quite often, seem indifferent to them.

It would be irresponsible, or conceptually careless, to identify this indifference as a form of resistance, for such a (frequent) move refuses to imagine the specific ways indifference need not be read as re-active. Indeed, indifference often confounds its historical moment, detached as it seems from the very conditions that enable it. But it strikes me that understanding the value of indifference might be very similar to understanding the value of powerlessness. Here, of course, the term “value” troubles the ideas of powerlessness and indifference but that’s another discussion.

I am trying, albeit circuitously, to understand the banality of indifference in a way that does not conflate it with the pose of aestheticism. To begin, that is, from the scene of my great grandmother’s garden, not the trail of Wilde’s cigarette. To note, also, the danger and impossibility of such thinking, especially in prose that feels strained, overly-anxious, marked repeatedly by markers, stops, a sense of “urgency” at odds with its topic.

There is, I would argue, finally, a strange temporality to indifference, to the extent that it is recognizable only within a specific moment precisely by its refusal to live in the moment and thus, paradoxically, to inhabit fully the moment. Here, I use “refusal” wrongly, but this might be the conceptual mistake that thinking about indifference demands. Is indifference linked to an attrition in subjectivity? Is it a sort of contemporary and necessary numbness that enables, may perhaps even be foundational to the social? Is it related to but irreducible to attrition? If related to attrition, might indifference be a symptom of the now, a sign of what some might term privatization? How to distinguish between a form of indifference that might be symptomatic and one that insists on its ahistoricitiy? (That this insistence on ahistoricity might itself be symptomatic is another issue.)

Of course, indifference rarely if ever insists on anything. Its strange charm lies precisely in its flatness, its doing without considering. Yet, such flatness, from one perspective, does not indicate an absence of richness. And it is the richness of indifference that draws me in.

Ethnicity Now, or the endlessly dying tribe

In the late nineteenth- and early-twentieth century, individuals we would now term anthropologists embraced a perverted form of social Darwinism. Looking around at so-called primitive communities, they announced that such groups were heading toward extinction and were living archives, prehistoric ancestors of modern people. For instance, W.S. Routledge and his wife wrote about the Gikuyu as a “prehistoric people.”

While the context is very different, I am reminded of this threat of extinction every time I consider my history of ethnicity. As long as I can remember, discussions of ethnicity in Kenya, especially in urban areas, have been marked with a profound anxiety: younger generations no longer speak their languages, no longer embrace their values, no longer know who they are. Simultaneously, the language of ethnic belonging and allegiance supposedly shapes, perhaps even overdetermines, our politics. We “vote,” the newspapers claim, by “tribe.”

We who might claim to be deracinated are thus encouraged—and here I misuse the word “encourage” as a placeholder for the psychic and social work of ideology, catachrestically, that is—to affirm our ever-receding sense of belonging through our votes. In voting the right way, we regain a measure of what we are always losing—and have perhaps even lost. It is no coincidence that I slip into the language of fantasy here, for no other language so aptly captures the slippery way in which belonging functions, as a property we never quite grasp, something imprecise that we desire. (Here, I am reminded of the way certain forms of kissing articulate a demand that is never quite met, hence their slightly rapacious quality. The analogy might make sense.)

For the past few years, I have drawn on my training in a psychoanalytically inflected queer theory to consider the question of ethnicity and belonging more broadly. The concept of desire has seemed incredibly fruitful in thinking about the incoherent ways belonging functions and fails, with that failure being inherent to its functioning. It is, in fact, the failure of ethnicity that subtends its use in political discourse.

For many years, those of us who were born or lived in Nairobi had problems getting identity cards. If we claimed to be from Nairobi, we were told that was not possible. Home was where our fathers came from. It was a claim affirmed in classrooms where teachers asked us to write about “home,” about our parents, about kinship in terms that confirmed the teachers’ sense of ethnic particularity and peculiarity. Ethnicity became a moral imperative in stories that warned of deracinated individuals who incurred ancestral curses and personal failures. Losing one’s ethnicity was the eighth deadly sin. Perhaps it remains so.

I am cautiously optimistic that ethnicity and national belonging need not be antagonistic. In fact, given that most of Kenya’s population lives in rural areas where the pull of ethnicity may be stronger, I believe that we must be more responsible in thinking about the relationship between the two. It is here I depart from thinkers who would dispense with identity categories altogether, embracing a universalism-cum-cosmopolitanism that I find seductive but suspect. (Of course, seduction in literary discourse is always suspect. That, too, is another discussion.)

I have been thinking about ethnicity, tribe, and becoming national as I work my way through Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between. Originally drafted in 1961, it was eventually published in 1965. To my knowledge, no scholar has compared the two versions (assuming the 1961 still exists in some yet untapped archive). The dates are important, as I believe the move from a pre- to post-independent novel brought with it a host of important questions. While the novel remained firmly rooted in the 1930s (when most of the action takes place), the protagonist, Waiyaki, struggles with the idea of becoming national, regional, living within and yet “beyond” ethnicity. He struggles to reconcile ethnic belonging with a nascent national consciousness forged through education.

While he never comes to any conclusion—and is, in fact, killed because of the questions he raises—he anticipates what, to my mind, has been one of the most compelling political issues of the post-independent period: how to reconcile ethnic and national belonging.

To raise this question—and the specter of Waiyaki’s death—is to recognize how the contemporary idea of nation is haunted by the specter of ethnicity, as a bloody, howling, restless ghost. Though, perhaps, we might consider ethnicity to be the haunting undead. Material, visceral, inescapable. To understand this spectral ethnicity as essential to national imaginings, however, is not to concede that this might be the only or necessarily the most interesting way of imagining ethnicity. (Here, I state “the obvious,” but it needs to be stated.)

There is much to be said about the distinction between having and wanting ethnicity, being and acting national, desiring and living post-ethnicity and post-nationality; about, that is, the many inventive ways in which travels abroad, to cities, to neighboring towns and villages have transformed the stories we tell about ourselves and our lives; about the new forms of storytelling we have acquired, are shaping, have started to imagine; about the bodies, lives, and identities shaped and transformed by our stories. (I am, I must confess, much more interested in these narrative possibilities than the much-vaunted economic growth.)

I am a terrible geographer, but I will venture to end on a term whose multiple possibilities enliven me: orientation. To use a queer, been-to sense of dis-orientation to think through ethnicity and nationality as forms of pleasurable turning (here, imagine the child’s delight in spinning around in circles—and the loss of such as one ages).