Re-Queer: Do You Kiss?

A quick dip into my favorite archives—personal ads—reminds me of one of the strange quirks of casual gay sex that I find absolutely intriguing: the oh-so-important question of whether one kisses.

As one soon finds out, the question makes the difference between a hook-up or not. Those who demand kisses within a 15 minute b/j seek some kind of confirmation, as though kissing confers what Hegel (routed via Fanon) terms recognition. The kiss would seem to punctuate an encounter that so often relies on breaking out of time and grammar.

Equally baffling are those who want “raw loads” but do not kiss. (Apparently my blog comes up if you search for “raw loads.” What on earth have I been writing?) We are in strange, though not uncharted territory. Let us recall that Freud likens analingus to hetero-intercourse/fellatio—it’s not quite clear in the English translation and I have no German.

Freud writes, “The use of the mouth as a sexual organ is regarded as a perversion if the lips (or tongue) of one person are brought into contact with the genitals of another, but not if the mucous membranes of the lips of both of them come together. This exception is the point of contact with what is normal” (Three Essays 17).

Note, of course, the wonderful use of the passive voice: regarded by whom?

We might turn Freud to queer purposes—this is redundant, of course—and ask whether those who insist on kissing in the beginning, middle, or end of some random encounter might be trying to maintain a “point of contact with what is normal.” The cheating husband, the traveling trucker, the hetero-boyfriend, all of whom use the queer’s orifices, might need a return to what is familiar, the kiss.

“Normal” may have little to do with gender, as I’ve presented it, and may instead have a more philosophical, even ethical, bearing. It has been many years since I read Levinas and I have since lost the nuances of his discussion regarding the face. I invoke him here as a half-remembered citation, less so an argument.

Might the kiss have as its task, then, the claim, “I am more than, I am also?” Yet, we know that the position of the supplement is akin to the thread that enables one to unravel a sweater. “I am more than, I am also” becomes “and so I cannot be,” at least if one follows one train of thinking.

“Kissing,” writes Adam Phillips, “may be our most furtive, our most reticent sexual act, the mouth’s elegy to itself” (100). Yet it maintains a cultural sanction—“you kiss so well”—whose value remains inestimable.

We might ask, taking raw loads as a guiding metaphor, whether kissing bestows or takes away life. Yes, the prince awakens the poisoned—and poisonous—princess. But aren’t evil witches always “plotting for kisses,” to borrow Phillips’s apt phrase?

To ask this is to tread in the realm of the absurd, where the 17 minute trick assumes a certain psychic structure: cause my little death and resurrect me by kissing. Those who do not kiss—and I confess to being one of them—may be said to toy with necrophilia, to extend the realm of “little death” and to reject the promise of the redemptive kiss.

Even this is a mischaracterization, for those who don’t kiss tricks often have others they kiss, including other tricks. The question might then be what makes some people kissable and not others? A question that is quite distinct from what makes some people fuckable. These are deep questions.

* * *
I mentioned to a friend that my writing over the past few months had been distinctly un-queer. This writing might be taken as an attempt to stake an uncertain position in an impossible identity.

Why Silence Matters

Kenyans have a long and inglorious national tradition of silencing each other. Discussions and debates end when one’s interlocutor slinks off debased, humiliated, and rightly trumped.

I have recently had the rather interesting experience of participating in an online discussion. It quickly made me realize that I have no stomach for the style of discussion that is deemed acceptable. Were I a braver creature, I would withdraw the particular piece of writing I submitted (was actually solicited to submit).

Much can be said about what I wrote, when I wrote it, and why I wrote it. At present, that is not a discussion I am willing to have, certainly not within the atmosphere that has been created around it.

What troubles me the most is a style of discussion that is so aggressive, so intent to win at all costs that it actually fails to be productive. What troubles me is a form of discussion whose ultimate goal, it seems to me, is less to engage with the difficult foreignness of an author’s ideas, and more to score points (I’m not sure what the prize is).

What troubles me, most of all, is a form of discussion whose ultimate, if unintended, consequence, is to cause participants, such as me, to withdraw to their own little spaces and write posts like this one.

Now, I might certainly be accused of attacking my interlocutors from a distance, from the safety of my own space where I can monitor and delete comments. I may also be accused of being too sensitive, running away because I know my ideas are both dangerous and indefensible. I might also be accused of being intellectually impoverished, withdrawing into silence because I know I cannot match myself against truly intelligent people. These may all be true. But I am, quite frankly, uninterested in engaging any of them.

What troubles me is that we fail to make the connection between the violence of our debates and the violence we claim to abhor, as though we still believe in that old tale about sticks and stones.

Most of all, I am troubled by the implicit assumption that winning debates by silencing each other is worth it.

On this matter, I have no more to say.

Dear Barack Obama:

Please tell us about:

The Black Church
The Black School
Black Fashion
Black Food
Black Butter
Black Shoes
Black Books
Black Movies
Black Movie Stars
Black TV
Black Music
Black Blackness
Black Itself-in-Itself
Black For-Itself
Black For-Others
Black Hair
Black Poems
Black Songs
Black Basketball
Black Football
Black Diplomacy
Black Sex
Black Sex
Black Sex
Black Sex
Black Women
Black Sex
Black Men
Black Sex
Black Disease
Black Sex

Sincerely,

Clueless Talking Heads, aka Chris Matthews

Do You Still Ejoy Ugali?

I continue to marvel at this question, asked of every traveled-abroad, lived-elsewhere Kenyan upon returning home. It is, of course, a question designed to detect the least bit of pretension. After all, ugali is the most basic Kenyan food, a food designed to be eaten with hands.

The naïve returnee who dares to disavow this deliberately undelicate food announces his (I use the pronoun deliberately) deracination. He has failed the test and tongues may now wag about how “even as a child” and “his mother was right to be worried” and “these ones of today,” statements all the more absurd because they come from his peers.

Perhaps what I find most fascinating is the naïve belief that all ugali is the same, or even close.

• My primary school cafeteria served something that approximated approximation. Depending on the day of the week, a deep cut into the rubbery mass yielded an even more rubbery inside or uncooked flour.

• My high school cafeteria served ugali that was so terrible, I suffered psychic pain and had to go see doctors who told me, over the course of two years, that nothing was wrong with me. Still, I stayed awake all night writhing in pain.

• My mother gave up cooking shortly after I was born. Having taken care of the ones who preceded me, she preferred to watch Dallas. I grew up on stories of the “time when mom used to cook great food!” Yes, I feel abandoned. Why do you think I read Freud?

• My brother makes what, I have been told, is some of the best ugali around. I am too traumatized to try it.

• And, finally, most of my experiences eating ugali elsewhere have often been disappointing.

In truth, my Kenyan food is NOT ugali. It is chapati.

How is it that a taste for ugali, one of the most capricious foods, capricious in its difficult simplicity, marks a kind of authentic return, or what I term a desire to be truly Kenyan?

To the heart of the matter: to ask the returnee whether he still likes ugali presumes that he liked ugali before he left. I did not and I do not.

As for my love for polenta, well, that’s a whole other issue.

Tired of Race?

So am I.

But I’m not sure we’re tired of the same thing.

I want to believe that silence means what you think it means. See, I’m polite. I’m not even trying to read your mind.

* * *
What does it mean to be “tired of race”?

Does it have something to do with working at race? Does race demand a certain kind of labor? If so, what are the aspects of that labor? What does it pay? Do we ever get time off? Or, might race be caught in a perpetual Hegelian struggle between master and slave?

I often claim that I work on race. Since I am currently in minor Hegelian mode, I wonder if “working on race” is similar to the slave’s work on “the thing.” As Hegel explains, the master appropriates the slave’s labor, embodied in “the thing,” to substantiate his own subjectivity. At the same time the slave comes to consciousness by recognizing the fact of his (alienated, Marx) labor as embodied in “the thing.” Here, I lack nuance and real Hegelians may correct me.

But I return to this scene to ask what it means that racial minorities are often asked to “work on race,” to produce “race” as an object, a “thing,” that can then be appropriated by others. And, further, that the “fact” of their labor is often lost or minimized through the various ways that “the thing,” let’s call it race, becomes available for use: rejection, denigration, engagement, disengagement. Thus, even to say that “black people talk about race too much” entails using “the thing” to create a position as a subject “outside race.”

Simply put, the claim by majority subjects that they are “tired of race” appropriates and negates the labor of minority subjects that has made discourses of race available for use and analysis.

* * *
Yet, the fact of labor on race by minority subjects is often negated by the pleasure imputed to them by majority subjects. Talking about race and racial injustice is understood not as psychic, ideological, and physical labor, but as petty gossip: “those people just like to complain.”

How can minority subjects explain the fatigue of psychic pain? How do they explain that recounting acts of racism forces them to re-live painful, humiliating, and soul-destroying moments? How can they explain the labor of race?

How can minority subjects interrupt national narratives by making visible their elisions? It is tiring to keep pointing out that each invocation of the founding fathers requires an attention to slavery; that the so-called nostalgia for the 1950s needs us to recognize the lack of racial parity; that the so-called beauty of the British Empire depended on the dehumanization of black and brown bodies.

It’s tiring to be the only black student in a class who notices that the Sociology textbook, the Philosophy selections, the History textbook, the Poetry and Fiction selections, the Political Science offerings, in 2008, may often say nothing about race. It’s tiring to demand supplements, correctives to history, to make a stand, to insist on the presence of what Paul Gilroy terms a “counter-culture” to modernity.

The negation one risks in not making a stand is even more unbearable.

* * *
To be sure, there’s a discussion to be had about the labor of being in the “majority,” a discussion that complicates the seeming facticity (ugly word) of whiteness and focuses, instead, on the work it takes to be white. For now, I want to mark—and defer—that discussion, using instead, the shorthand of citation: David Roediger, Eric Lott, Mason Stokes, Matthew Frye Jacobson.

National Disavowal

A few days ago, President Kibaki told the Post-Election Victims (PEV as opposed to IDP) that they should return home. According to him, the violence, and the bad feelings that engendered it, ended the moment he and Prime Minister Elect, Raila Odinga, signed a power-sharing agreement. History, for our leaders, is written in ink, not in blood.

As continuing reports indicate, the violence is not in the past. It continues. Why, then, this blindness on the part of our leaders? And why are we willing to believe in it? Macharia Gaitho, for instance, has written of Kenya’s “bright new future,” seemingly unwilling to deal with its ongoing, murky now.

This strategic disavowal is not unique in Kenya’s history. In fact, disavowal is a national habit. I take the term disavowal from psychoanalysis, where it refers to seeing something only to reject having seen it. As Kenya’s so-called leaders look at pictures of PEV and receive reports of ongoing violence, they insist that everything is all right.

This habit of seeing by not seeing is deeply ingrained within a political system caught up in personality squabbles and ethnic partisanship. I hazard if one were to look through parliamentary records for the past two decades, we might find little on issues of ethnic and religious conflicts in, for instance, North Eastern; little-to-nothing on the problems of landless populations, known ignominiously as “squatters”; little-to-nothing on the problems of urban poverty, except perhaps in complaints about “street children” and crime.

To be fair, I have not read through these reports, so I might be wrong. However, I do know that we have had very little systematic and systemic efforts to address the banality of ideological and material violence in Kenya.

In a grotesque parody of The Sound of Music, I often imagine our so-called leaders signing in perfect harmony: “how do you solve a problem like our country”?

As I have argued elsewhere, part of the problem is that we have not yet learned how to think of ourselves as citizens. This, for instance, is why I have reservations about the initiative that says “Kenya is my tribe.” While it seeks to overcome ethnic strife, it still subordinates the legal obligations, responsibilities, and rights we have as citizens to the notion of tribe, with its associations of kinship, lineage, and tradition. We privilege the ostensible intimacy of “tribe” over the-still undervalued concept of citizen.

I do not claim that a closer attention to the notion of citizen would “fix” the ideological problems we inhabit nor address the banality of violence. However, it might begin to change the terms of our national conversation in ways I can only imagine.

For now, it seems to me that the most urgent question we can address might be how to refuse the disavowal that makes certain kinds of violence banal—usually against women, rural citizens, and the poor. How do we rip away the veils of complacency and the myth of being happy from our national psyche? How do we resist the desire to embrace a normality predicated on disavowal?

Blog Posts that Should Be Written (by someone else)

1. Men in Tights (and the men who heart them)
2. Love Soured in an African Pot
3. Kenyan Phalluses: Flywhisks, Rungus, and Golf Clubs
4. Small-town Buses
5. Greyhound v. Amtrak
6. Greyhound v. American Airlines
7. Amtrak v. American Airlines
8. Walking v. American Airlines
9. Repetition and Pathology
10. Fanon’s Penis (this has been done; just want more)
11. Men’s Shoes: The Absence of Variety
12. Men in Boots (and the queers who heart them)
13. My Shameful Crush on Kenny Chesney’s jean-clad Body
14. Bland Hotness: Mario Lopez
15. Hot Sex, and Diseases that Burn
16. Maize or Corn
17. Why I hate Ugali
18. Why I hate Githeri
19. Queer Africans & The Academy (or Keguro’s life)
20. The Truth: New Shocking Revelations by Mutumia
21. Wakiri the Wag: Why He Matters

**While these categories are idiosyncratically my own, I take the idea of lists and listings from Gay Prof. He’s on my blogroll. I’m too lazy to link. Check him out. Multiple meanings intended.

Nothing to Lose

What might it mean to have “something” to lose? If this question seems silly, indulge its silliness for a moment, for I want to suggest that it might tell us something important about how we understand the relationships among ownership, attachment, and identification. If I fail to accomplish such an ambitious agenda, excuse that as well. Writing in this abbreviated medium necessitates the constant use of ellipses.

The initial question springs from what has been a constant tic, or refrain, in the media and on blogs, that the young men (and one would suppose old men, too) who “perpetrated” the grossest attacks had “nothing to lose.” They are, we presume, jobless, have no material property worth “any value,” and, supposedly, lack the sense of attachment to place or people that might halt their attacks. Having “nothing to lose,” they do not understand “what it means to lose.” Something about this formulation nags me.

It might be the idea that “something” is necessarily material, which means it has a price tag. In this logic, those without cars cannot know what it means to own a car. They do not value the labor that goes into acquiring the car, owning a car, operating a car. They cannot appreciate that petrol is expensive, waxing takes times, and changing tires is arduous. Not having experienced the material processes of owning a car, they have no basis for comparison. As such, they can stone a car with impunity. This idea we can quickly dispense with, for it is precisely because those without cars understand the value attached to a car that they choose to attack it. In fact, by attacking the car, the attackers affirm its value.

But what if “something” is less material and more emotional? In this scenario, those who attack others’ property and kill others lack a capacity for sympathy, the morality and ethics that would make them good citizens or, perhaps, simply good company. Lacking a capacity for feeling toward others, those who attack do not lose what we like to term, euphemistically, their “humanity.” They are, to use old poststructuralist cant, always already monsters, dehumanized. Lacking the capacity for attachment, those with “nothing to lose” are always already lost.

However, to assume that “those with nothing to lose” have never had “anything to lose,” be it material or emotional, has the inadvertent (though deliberate) effect of removing “them” from history and historical processes. If “those with nothing to lose” have never had “anything to lose,” then we with “everything to lose” or “something to lose” become the normative subjects of history (or the state and nation) and, this is the crucial point, need not account for or consider how those with “nothing to lose” became the ones with “nothing to lose.”

In a more simplified way: how do we restore potential and “something” to the young men with “nothing to lose” so that we can understand their condition as inextricably bound to ours, not aberrant, not opposed, but, more precisely, proximate and intimate. What have these young men lost? What do they have to lose? And how might it be important?

Here’s the more complex and, arguably, difficult question: in claiming that the young men have “nothing to lose” do we implicitly indict ourselves as the ones who “took everything,” leaving “nothing” for them to lose?

The question is difficult because it traverses the material and emotional, and refuses to grant us the innocence of victimhood or the moral shock of the middle-class. We would like to think, for instance, that unequal distribution of wealth is solely attributable to our so-called leaders. Asked about social inequity, we point quickly and readily to “those who steal.” We “ordinary” Kenyans, and I would like to put pressure on that ordinary, “struggle” to survive. Now, I do not mean to minimize the forms of economic erosion that have made ordinary, once sustainable lives occasions for struggle. But I would like to complicate the notion that our gains are independent of others’ losses.

In terms of the emotional, which is really more my forte, I am interested in how the idea of the “normal” Kenyan, the one with “something to lose,” is predicated on certain foundational ideas of what it means to have and to nurture attachments, and how those attachments, which are often taken to be natural, are actually deeply embedded in material conditions. For instance, accounts of domestic and family violence among poor (and I don’t mean working class, I mean poor) populations are often depicted as perversions of humanity. We, in our middle-class morality, wonder how “anyone could dare” to “do that” to “a child,” “a wife,” “a woman.” What remains unexamined is to what extent these forms of familial attachment are, to cite Hortense Spillers, not natural, but cultivated under specific material circumstances. To say this is not to claim any sort of deterministic relationship between class and forms of familial attachment. It is to suggest, however, that forms of familial attachment emerge within material circumstances.

Rather than claim, then, that certain young men have “nothing to lose,” we might begin to ask how we started believing that they had “nothing to lose?” In claiming they have “nothing to lose,” how do we devalue what they both “have to lose” and are in the process of losing? How, in other words, do we complicate the state-sanctioned narratives that would distinguish between the “good citizen,” the “mwananchi,” the one with “something to lose,” and the “bastard” child who lives only to destroy?

Racism and Intention

As always, Fanon puts it best:

To speak pidgin to a Negro makes him angry, because he himself is a pidgin-nigger-talker. But I will be told, there is no wish, no intention to anger him. I grant this; but it is just this absence of wish, this lack of interest, this indifference, this automatic manner of classifying him, imprisoning him, primitivizing him, decivilizing him, that makes him angry. (Black Skin, White Masks 32)

Pissed Off

For once, just once, I would like Kenyan leaders to surprise me. I would like to see them approach politics as service, not power-grabbing or, as the new euphemism has it, power-sharing.

In the coming days, others will have much more informed things to say about Muthaura’s statement (I just misspelled it as Mutharau), about the ridiculous demands that we expand the executive, about the real lack of concern demonstrated toward the IDP population—or should we simply call them victims of political cupidity?—about the absurd position that we shall continue “as we were.”

For now, I am angry. Very angry.

**As serendipity would have it, on the kbw aggregator, Ory’s post precedes mine. Taken together our titles read, “excuse me while I gag after bitter herbs.” This was not planned.