Author and text (bonus points for publication year):
“Metal on concrete jars my drink lobes.”
** Since I need writing time, I will pull a Larry and hold off on posting until I get a response for this ID.
Archive for February, 2008
As the talks in plush rooms continue to continue, with old snags reappearing and new ones being created, I must confess that I continue to lose confidence in our so-called leaders. Were the delays a result of negotiations that would transform the country by, at the very least, outlining the terms for a new constitution and, more practically, creating necessary plans to cope with the IDP population and planning for the anticipated drought, I might be on board. From where I sit, they have little to do with Kenya and a lot to do with the various cults of personality.
While I am convinced that a Kibaki presidency will be good for Kibaki, and I am equally convinced that a Raila presidency will be good for Raila, I am yet to be convinced that either one will be good for Kenya.
We will, I suspect, be stuck with leaders who mistake the fact of their power for the welfare of the country. We will be stuck with leaders who believe their personalities can and should unite the country. We will be stuck with leaders who, having sacrificed many lives in their quest for leadership, will continue to sacrifice many more in their quest to remain leaders.
Perhaps the most absurd aspect of our future leadership is that, no matter what compromise is achieved, it will have been confirmed, if it was ever in doubt, that we live in an oligarchy. What is tragic at the moment is that we have been pinning our hopes on a process that concentrates power in the hands of a few individuals, no matter their “plans” for devolution of power. I’ll believe that when I see it.
I am yet to be inspired by either one, yet to be convinced that either one stands for the kind of change we need and want. I am yet to be convinced that either Kibaki or Raila is post-tribal, post-ethnic, and pro-Kenya, pro-wananchi.
I want to be convinced. I want to believe. I want to join the program.
But it seems the program has not been printed, the printer ran out of ink, someone forgot to order paper, the text was found to be plagiarized, and the invited speaker has laryngitis. This is what more savvy minds than mine call a “cartoon.”
I am especially concerned by the macho, masculine posturing that has reminded us, all too palpably, that Kenyan politics is a tennis match between patriarchs. If we thought that the days of “mzee” and “baba” were gone, we have been told to think again. Our new patriarchs may not adopt titles, but they are all man all the time. The pissing contest has left us all stained.
In the next few days or weeks or months, we will have leaders, to be sure. Whether they are the leaders we want, the ones we deserve, or even ones we can respect remains to be seen.
Keguro Macharia is a member of the Concerned Kenyan Writers.
It’s so difficult these days to get visas in to Britain, and America. But in those days of the slave trade, it was so easy. You didn’t need one. Passage was free, but deadly. (Kole Omotoso, The Edifice, 1971)
In response to On Sodomy (oh the glorious wordplay I’m resisting), mothufare asked a series of questions I’d like to take up, insofar as I can.
I wrote: “I am not as concerned with the individual bodies concerned, victim and victimizer, as much as I am concerned with the production of sodomy as a particular kind of discourse with particular, negative connotations.”
He asked: What about the concept of disgust? What about the ideas about the body, boundaries, health? House arrangements? Body aesthetics? Hierarchies? If we talk of metonymy, what of mis/translations? Irony?
To recap, I had suggested that the absence of affirmative discussions of sodomy in Kenya meant that when mentioned in the media, sodomy could only have negative connotations. Given the incidents of male rape associated with the post-election violence, I had hypothesized that these narratives would now dominate any mentions of sodomy, with the possible effect that queer activism might be irreparably hobbled.
Mothufare’s questions complicate the narrative I tried to construct by implicitly suggesting that sodomy, even when done consensually and with pleasure, is not necessarily affirmative. Indeed, quite often the pleasure of sodomy arises from its close relationship with disgust, the transgression of boundaries and rules, even before we enter into “kink.” I certainly think of rimming as an act whose pleasure (for the rimmer) is tied, in some way, with an often unacknowledged notion of disgust. Modesty forbids certain disclosures. But suffice to say, I know of what I speak.
Influential thinkers like Leo Bersani and Tim Dean have argued that sodomy is fundamentally about breaking the body’s boundaries, fragmenting a sense of coherence and integrity. In this reading, sodomy functions quite differently from romanticized notions of heterosexual sex, notions that emphasize wholeness, togetherness, and intimacy. Now, to be clear, I want to emphasize the term romanticized, because I certainly believe that heterosexual sex can have the same effect of breaking the body’s boundaries. I should note here that I am NOT discussing rape.
To the extent that sodomy, at least for Bersani and Dean, represents the act par excellence that shatters the ego’s boundaries, it has consequences for how we think about health and house (and I think the two need to be put together, as mothufare has them). I am unclear as to what “house arrangements” means, so I will put off responding until I get some clarification.
On the question of body aesthetics, I will defer to my compatriot, Larry Lyons, who has been thinking deeply, with great charm, honesty, and grace, about body aesthetics.
Instead, I will jump to metonymy and mis/translation as crucial ways for us to think about sodomy in the African context in general and the Kenyan context in particular. For the non-English majors, metonymy is the formal term we use when a part stands for a whole. Yes, I know, the puns and implied puns keep coming. Take, for instance, to continue the bad pun, calling someone an asshole. In this particular example, which, I admit, I use when teaching poetry, the asshole, a part of a person, stands in for the entire person. Of course, to get technical, this example of metonymy is more properly known as synecdoche. But let’s save that for when you take a poetry class. So, now we know that, on we go.
In the Kenyan context, sodomy has often been constructed based on broad-based generalizations: one sodomite has AIDS therefore all sodomites have AIDS. (Here, I use sodomite instead of homosexual not only to be provocative, but also to complicate the distinction between homosexual and heterosexual. Medical folks and activists use men-having-sex-with-men. I will note that the last anecdote I heard involved some poor sodomite watching his lover get married to a woman.)
But, back to mis/translations and the problem of sodomy. In a quite fundamental way, all cultural interactions, the basis for sociality, are based on translation. Indeed, we might say that the current (not sure what to call it) in Kenya is based on some profound mis/translations. Translation is not simply a matter of substituting one word for another. (John Keene, who translates wonderful poetry and prose, would have a much smarter way to talk about this.) Instead, translation is also about the weight of language and the values of a culture. At this juncture, I must cite Fanon: “To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization” (Black Skins, White Masks 17-8).
Surely, you don’t need me to make the bad pun again? Those “boys” who went to a certain kind of school will remember what it meant to “assume the position,” but we must now queer it and add “to support the weight.” (Yes, there’s a smile as I write this.)
Sodomy, then, enters into African languages in a very specific way: predominantly through missionaries. It comes attached with all kinds of weight. Those first pioneers who mastered “a certain syntax” took on not just the language, but the assumptions of that language, even when they might have been unclear about the referent. Here, of course, the problem of mis/translation: scholars have noted that many Kenyans do not know what “homosexuality” means, but they are disgusted by it all the same. This is what it means, in part, to “assume a culture.”
And the question about the affect of translation and cultural transmission also needs to be considered. If you make a certain kind of face when using a certain word, you teach your listeners to create certain kinds of associations. Certainly, the first time I heard about “sodomy” was in standard 4, when one of our teachers made a “certain” kind of face and warned us against European men in toilets. I may not have known what she meant then—this has since been remedied—but the affect was enough to let me know what she was discussing was distasteful, “not to be discussed among Christians.”
And, finally, the question of or problem of irony. I am a bit baffled about the relationship between sodomy and irony. There must be one, right? Mothufare, when you come calling again, please clarify the question.
I have given hopelessly incomplete answers, in part because each one deserves a very long book, and also, in part, because I have little interest in becoming an “authority” on sodomy in Kenya (yes, I know, laugh away). I am interested, as always, in continuing conversations.
To less patient readers. I am in dense academic writing mode and it’s almost impossible to switch into readable blog prose.
On the other hand, should you experience any troubles reading me, practice close reading techniques: slow down, savor not just the meaning but the sensuality of language, understand that, unless I’m blogging about the terrible, terrible, terrible elections and their aftermath, I often write with a smile in my prose.
Look for the smile.
If all else fails, load up on your intoxicant of choice (chocolate, coffee, wine) and pretend that I am equally drunk, and that we bear no responsibilities for what we say and how we say it.
Ory has the best post ever! (Read the comments)
If you’re Kenyan of a certain generation, you’ll relish it.
If you’re not Kenyan, you’ll receive a fine education about our education system.
Fresh Violence! Fresh Violence! Come Get Your Fresh Violence!
What do we mean when we speak of “fresh outbreaks of violence?” How are these distinct from “stale outbreaks of violence” or “new outbreaks of violence?”
Are “fresh” outbreaks similar to the “fresh” fruit and vegetables sold at our esteemed markets or do they resemble the “fresh” produce sold in grocery stores? Does fresh, in this context, have the strange valence attached to “fresh” cheese (of the cheddar, not mozzarella variety)? Is this “fresh” akin to a “fresh outbreak” of acne on a teenager’s face? Does “fresh” have the connotation of bold and audacious as in the slang reference to a certain kind of person as “fresh?” Is it something to do with attraction and desire?
More cynically, is it that “fresh” outbreaks are newsworthy while old, ongoing moments of violence are not (witness the virtual dearth of news about Iraq)?
To write of Fresh Violence is to acknowledge a deep crisis in our ability to clot, scar, and heal.
We have what, in medical terms, might be termed a double whammy: we continue to bleed because our national blood lacks appropriate clotting agents and the medication prescribed for this condition creates deadly clots, a condition known as thrombosis. I am no doctor, but my father died from this double whammy, so I have some idea of what I speak.
He had a condition known as Deep Venous Thrombosis (DVT), in which a clot typically forms in one of the extremities and if not detected in time, travels along the circulatory system and may lead to a collapsed lung, may destroy your heart, and really will kill you. As I’ve subsequently discovered, detected early, DVT is remarkably treatable.
A little more about my father, and then back to the nation. He was a medical stereotype: a man who refused to take his health seriously and a doctor who believed in his ability to treat himself, until, alas, he couldn’t breathe and his face was an ashen-gray color. Have you ever seen a black man with a gray face? It is not a pretty sight. He insisted on treating himself with pills for malaria instead of getting the right diagnosis. In general, we might not speak badly of the dead. But I am still to forgive him for his idiotic lapses in judgment.
Kenya has been a symptomatic place for a long time. A walk down one of Nairobi’s busy streets tells, or at least used to tell, a heartbreaking story: women, with infants in tow begging for money; children with feces as weapons extorting money; rapacious crowds waiting to hear cries of “thief” so they can enact “mob justice”; scores of young men sitting, just sitting, with expressions of quiet desperation; street preachers who always have an audience no matter the time of day; posters advertising healing and miracles and salvation.
We have lived with and ignored the banality of violence for so long, convinced we only need take anti-malaria pills, that we are shocked by our gray faces and collapsing lungs, amazed that our heart no longer beats with strength and vigor.
We marvel, now, at each new symptom, having learned to take perverse pleasure in the spectacle of our failing bodies. We risk, I think, the pleasure of the hypochondriac, who delights in each new symptom.
To be clear, I am not claiming that we should not pay attention to new urgencies and emergencies as they arise. Even if we wished, we cannot avoid new sites of wounding. They hurt.
But we might also pay attention to what lingers, what persists, become more responsible in how we interpret the signs of our times. I close, then, with one such symptom: the desire for miracles.
When I left Nairobi, the streets were littered with posters for healing crusades. If one believed them, we were a country awash with miracles. In what I take as a profound moment of blindness, we patted ourselves on the back and proudly declared we were a VERY Christian country. Not just Christian. But VERY Christian. Look at our streets, we said, we are so Christian that you cannot turn a corner without seeing the word Christian. But it was not just Christian. It was Christians who believed in miracles, who claimed to see visions and talk in heavenly languages. Indeed, we proclaimed with much confidence that we lived at the edge of time: the young men were seeing visions and the women perceiving signs.
We have been eschatological for as long as I can remember.
Putting aside any theological debates, what strikes me, in retrospect, was not the air of devotion around such events, but the frantic, desperate longing for a miracle: for life to change, for worries to cease, for jobs and money to come, for prohibitively expensive medical conditions to be cleared, for faith to compensate for lack of qualifications, for faith to overcome the culture of corruption that closed so many doors. Faith, at these events, was a code word for a kind of life made impossible by the State, by the doors closed by globalization, by the absence of proper connections.
We were willing to see and embrace our Christianity and less willing to see the culture of violence it masked.
Everyone wanted miracles: the haves because it excused them from taking responsibility and the have-nots because they had such limited choices. None of this information is news.
Yet, to reframe it in the context of the last few months is to recognize a crucial symptom, not deeply hidden, but visible, obvious, ridiculously so.
Several people have commented, rightly I think, that we live in a culture of violence. It is only when violence is spectacle, fresh, that we notice and comment on it. We might, rather, continue to probe what we mean by “culture of violence,” start taking action and responsibility, break the pacts of custom and tradition that protect gender and domestic violence, hold perpetrators of mob violence responsible for their actions, pursue economic strategies designed not simply to “stop” corruption, but to create conditions for economic justice.
We might create conditions in which we can heal, even, and especially, with scars.
Nairobi is never silent.
It thrives on stories, peppered, salted, charred, broiled, natural, synthetic, and otherwise. We are a people addicted to stories. This explains the success of Dallas and Falcon Crest, from my youth, and the national passion for Mexican soaps.
Cutting across differences of age and gender, region and belief, shows like Esmeralda found a welcome home and an eager audience, created new ways of talking, not simply new topics of conversation. The more the intrigue, the greater the cliff-hanger, the more we loved it and craved it.
In retrospect, we were addicted in a mostly narcissistic way to our own modes of narrative and drama. Dallas and Esmeralda were less fascinating for the cultural differences they displayed than for their recognizability: we knew these men and women, these families with their squabbles and intrigues, their passions and disappointments, their quirky faults and, at times, boundless enthusiasms.
On some level, the fiction they represented mirrored the fiction we inhabited.
* * *
I use fiction, here, in a sloppy way, as a metaphor for something we might term the “unverifiable.”
* * *
All Kenyans are artists. And the first art we master is the art of gossip.
Even before the advent of the “super-fast” internets and cells, gossip traveled at an alarming speed, cutting across classes and genders, races and ethnicities, spicing up meals and brokering business deals. Even as children, we “knew” which leading figure had a mistress, where she lived, and the diseases they shared. We “knew” the color of furniture owned by the second wife of a philandering minister.
As children of repressive regimes, we understood, if only unconsciously, that gossip was a needed currency, especially when the wrong (right) words on paper led to a stay at the government’s pleasure, where one experienced the indignity of the footprint. We learned to read raised eyebrows and meaningful gestures, to speak in forked tongues.
If gossip was our first art, metaphor was our first language.
* * *
In many ways, Kenya is a country founded at the intersection of the verifiable and the unverifiable.
Over the past year, for instance, the “leaked” documents alleging mischief everywhere, from government offices to the Nation scandals, to secret deals hatched between religious leaders and political figures, have fed our appetite for what might be termed, paradoxically, unverified truth.
And here, I am tempted to speculate that Kenyans, unlike Americans, do not believe the “truth” will “set us free,” but we do think it might be very entertaining.
More recently, of course, the faultline between the verifiable and the unverifiable has turned into a deep crevice, and we balance on a precarious edge from which whispers have the power to create tragedy.
We cannot not listen. Too much depends on this. We can listen with care and a measure of skepticism, though not a skepticism that would be detrimental, if not fatal. We can be watchful without, one hopes, giving in to the paranoia that makes life unlivable.
What is at stake here extends beyond the play of verifiable versus unverifiable. We are at the torn seams of the livable and the unlivable, and the stitching is not pretty. We are, in places, pinned in position, awaiting the careful hands that might allow us to emerge clothed, but such stitches have the force of sutures without anesthesia. We are, to extend the metaphor, in the awkward and unwise position of being stitched as we stand in place, and the boundary between cloth and body no longer obtains.
I ask metaphor, here, to do a work for which I find myself unfit.
I have not cried in many years. Perhaps, I think, since my too-tall boyfriend of 2 weeks dumped me because of my excessive libido. I was young. It was summer. I was listening to the blues.
Because of my obdurate ducts—to be clear, I still cry at the end of books and movies, never for “real-life” events—I have found myself struggling, over the years, to register the psychic weight of loss and pain, to understand how we might speak about pain without tears, loss without creased faces. How to attend funerals with decorative hankies.
In the sea of blog posts, newspaper and journal articles, and poems that have spoken about tears, those who can’t stop crying, those who have cried for the first time, those whose tears make palpable their grief, I have found myself wondering if it might be possible to speak without a catch in my throat, to attend virtual funerals with an unexpressive face, or a slight smile. Might this register as a form of betrayal of “national feeling” watered by tears.
Without my teary contributions, can I claim to water the tree of national unity?
At a moment when palpable demonstrations of grief and anger punctuate national discussions, can I still admit to ambivalence and detachment without being accused of betrayal due to my “geographical distance?”
Might feeling be irreducible to tears, frowns, and grimaces?
To ask such questions is to return to the uneasy encounter between blackness and psychoanalysis, between, in this case, Africanness and trauma. Those of us who study such ideas have not done very well in making a case for the inexpressible and the undemonstrative. We are, I think, much too bound to our histories of professional mourners, histories where we share grief in palpable ways: red eyes affirm belonging. We have histories of making culpable those who do not exhibit appropriate grief. Smile at a funeral and you are accused of ill-will toward the dead, of being a malicious witch.
I smile at funerals. I laughed during my father’s.
This is not to say I do not experience grief. And there’s a longer conversation to be had, at another time, about the role of masculinity in structuring grief. It is to ask, on one level, about the role of formal aesthetic practices in creating, reporting, and registering notions of loss and trauma. It is to note, as I have elsewhere, the function of repetition and hyperbole, the roles of fragmentation and dissolution, the precise use of legal and political language, the slippage from “reason” to “emotion” in “objective arguments. To ask about the role of “academic” writing, satire, humor, and expressive inexpressivity (the silence maintained on many blogs that, nonetheless, speaks volumes).
I am not trying, here, to foreground what and how I study, but, rather, to map, if only tentatively, the array of ways we have all been engaging with the limits of language and the boundaries of feeling—we might even say the way feeling unbinds.
On yet another level, I am trying to understand why, quite apart from practical reasons, it has been difficult to write and now it seems easier. Is it that the talks of mediation have removed a certain psychic barrier? Or, more troubling, that the reports of violence have become more banal, something that happens “elsewhere.” And here, I have to confess, I suffer from the Nairobian arrogance that Kenya is Nairobi.
I do not want what might register as a lack of expression to be understood as complicity in the banality of violence. That I do not cry or have red eyes should not be read as a symptom of my indifference. I think, traumatized though we might be, we are in a good place, insofar as we have begun (really have continued what smaller groups have been doing) to register that there is no such thing as banal violence. It spreads. It spills. It morphs. The economic violence (and it must be termed as such) visited on young people converted, much like energy does, into a different kind of violence, compelling us to recognize, if we dare, how the banal can too-quickly turn into the gory, the opening frame of a pastoral scene into the chaos of an Okri novel.
One more symptom: at my best, and for this kind of writing, I rarely make full arguments or bother to make transitions in thinking or writing. Here, and in the past few months, I have been both more and less structured, sometimes deliberately, often not so. This form of writing, issues of quality aside, can only have emerged now (readers of Williams and Jameson will recognize this formulation). To read this as a symptom of the present is not to make the leap that words can be tears, but that style and form themselves may register losses that my conscious mind may never be able to reconcile with a place I once lived and people I once knew.
A lot of worship takes place in bathhouses. Flesh is broken, eaten, shared. Faith is affirmed, doubt banished, ecstasy achieved.
A bathhouse is, in many ways, the high temple for a certain kind of queer. Like the famed temple of David-Solomon fame, it takes time to construct, the right builder, the right kind of faith. Like that famed temple, it is also a precarious structure, more present in imagination and memory than in fact.
Is it a problem that I turn to the temple to understand the bathhouse?
* * *
I have, on occasion, asked my students what lessons we might learn from prostitutes.
Increasingly, I am struck by the obsolescence of this question given primetime porn.
Increasingly, I am struck by the necessity of this question given primetime porn.
* * *
One of my deep-rooted fantasies involves being singled out by a revivalist preacher while sitting in Uhuru Park. I envision him rebuking me for lusting after his body.
* * *
The lesson of the bathhouse: beware dis-ease
* * *
I find it difficult to write of the bathhouse as a site of moral teaching, perhaps because of the multiple connotations I attack to morality: bred into the bone multiple years of CRE and government repression. Obedience. Humility. Discipline.
* * *
It is only within the last few years that I have, with the aid of wonderful mentors, started to think positively about intellectual humility, humility not as the soul-crushing submission to convention, but as a social lubricant.
If you dare, here you might trace blacklight evidence.
* * *
It is too easy to fall into a certain cliché: wash me clean
Lessons of the fall: don’t stand next to trees
* * *
Are you in?
Or
Are you out?
* * *
I have often wondered about the significance of white hand-towels as signifiers of desire.
* * *
Poppers?
* * *
“I like people like you”
“You look all innocent”
“And then you get wild”
* * *
In my fantasies, I am not your fantasy.
* * *
Once, while bumping into strangers, he felt a familiar sensation.
Recent Comments