Notes on Tutuola

I have been promising a post on Tutuola for some time. However, I am still in that peculiar state of exhaustion that follows the completion of a multi-year intellectual project.

So, instead, a kind of promissory note.

Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard suffers the paradoxical fate of being, at once, deeply historicized and through that process, being dehistoricized. As noted elsewhere, its form and language are mapped onto a developmental logic that denies Africans coevalness. This is so well known it needs no repeating.

To my mind, no other text in the early African canon so vividly renders the affective and ideological ruptures of Afro-modernity. What is striking about Tutuola’s biography, for me, is less his education and the “semi-educated” status of his prose; instead, I begin with his service in World War II. One might attempt a kind of bio-historical reading that notes the representation of bodies and communities in his text: inverted and fragmented, destructive and destroyed, foreign and unrecognizable.

Bodies are turned inside out, values transvalued, life and death cheapened and transcended. The text is full of indeterminate descriptions, “things,” “something”; brims over with similes, a plethora of “like” that, rather than clarifying, diffuse meaning. I am not claiming Tutuola’s text as “postmodern,” which, to my mind, would be irresponsible. Instead, I am struck by how it pursues what might be termed a death drive, a certain compulsion toward a nihilistic non-future.

Take, for instance, the monstrous progeny of the narrator and his wife. Almost as soon as he is born, he becomes a burden, a grotesque load that consumes too much, a gaping maw—and the narrator and his wife expend considerable effort trying to destroy their child, the potential of a future. Note, also, that the recurring images of children are, inevitably, bound to death and destruction, they are the undead, the have-been, and the never-to-be.

At the end of the novel, the narrator returns to a dying home, replenishes it for a while, only to destroy it altogether.

How does this persistent undoing at the level of language (syntax, semantics, tropology) and social formations (family, community, village, ethnicity) express the affective and conceptual deracination of Afro-modernity? Might such a reading, if fleshed out, actually offer us a deeper, richer way to engage with Tutuola’s work?

As I said, notes, not an argument. Though a discussion I’d dearly love to have with those who study African literature.

Thoughts on the Perfect Syllabus

I return to teaching in the Fall after a year’s absence (I last taught Summer 2007). It has been, I am glad to say, a productive year. Dissertation done. Job in hand. Ideas ever-percolating. And I am itching to get back into the give and take of the classroom.

I like teaching. Actually, I might even love teaching. (Qualifed because of the “l” word, not the “t” one.)

To give a short preview of the process. Book orders are typically due in the preceding semester, which means I do a pre-read. When I teach poetry, this means sifting through/reading through multiple anthologies and poetry books, the difficult task of deciding whether or how many full-length collections to teach. Love them. Don’t do enough of them. Yet. Deciding on the novels—I do a 70/30, 70% I’ve read previously and maybe taught, the rest I either have not read (with contemporary work) or, more likely, with a historical field, have not taught.

Having decided, and sent in the order (which I have), comes the “first” read. The first read works best over summer. Right now I’m going through books I ordered. I have a broad theme for the Fall, but I want to see what I can isolate in each individual work. This is not “the point” I want students to get, but the point of departure. Read done, themes and aesthetic points semi-identified. Summer mostly done.

Then semester, where I read the work once again to prepare for class. Depending on what I’m teaching, the reading differs. If a poem, then multiple reads, 3-5 times at least. And not quick skims. If an essay, at least 2 reads (I’m teaching “The Intentional Fallacy” and have started my third detailed read.) If a section of a novel, usually one close read—if a short section, maybe 2. This reading of a primary text does not account, of course, for reading secondary texts of history, general criticism, and specific secondary criticism (so, reading on Harlem Renaissance history, gender in the HR, and specific essays on Claude McKay’s “Harlem Dancer,” for instance). (This is one response to the question, but what do professors do?)

I get into trouble with the 70/30 thing, as do all instructors. I mean, surely, one has to teach all of Charles Chesnutt and Pauline Hopkins, right? One can’t really “get” Claude McKay without all the novels, the poetry, the essays, and the autobiographies, right? It’s surely a crime to teach Thiong’o without including all his early work, most of his middle work, and all his later work, right? Nella Larsen, Everything. Zora Neale Hurston, everything. (There’s a theme here: I do African and Afro-diasporic work.)

As for so-called theory: early Foucault without late Foucault is a crime, as is early Freud without late Freud, early Fanon without late Fanon, you get the theme.

In many ways, of course, a syllabus is a kind of (auto)biography. One wants to tell a kind of story of one’s development, no matter how reconstructed. And it’s important to note here that the story is always being re-told. In my case, I would have to start with feminism, move through Afro-Am studies, get to LGBT studies, jump to queer studies, hop on to postcolonialism. But this seems too much like a mishmash—ideas change, perspectives develop, one discovers, in graduate school, what one had missed in undergrad—the encounter with Hegel and Lacan, Copjec and Rose, an engagement with post-Marxist thought, a new introduction to Kenneth Burke, a renewed love for some (perhaps never abandoned) New Critical methods, in my case, a more prolonged encounter with sexology and Anthropology, African Studies, and black diaspora studies, always the sense that one’s field is in a very exciting state of flux, and one keeps constructing contingent anchors while swimming in the stream.

There has been no linear line in my thought, though my journey through literature has been fairly traditional—“Wayfarer” through Language poetry. Some of this, of course, has to do with how schools and departments are organized. Much of it I owe to a solid liberal arts background.

So, the perfect syllabus.

One wants to balance coverage with representation, to give a sense of aesthetic range and diversity, but also to give an idea of literary and cultural history. One wants to assign the books that “changed” one’s life, or at least one’s mind. One wants to give students what Kenneth Burke termed “equipment for living.”

One wants to keep a sense of perspective: this, for some if not most students, will be one class among many others, and many times, not even the most important or interesting class.

One, of course, also has to account for institutional requirements: how does this class enable future classes, not only in your discipline or field, but also in other classes or fields. I cannot overestimate, for instance, how much my classes in the Renaissance have shaped my thinking about the black diaspora. Nor can I discount how a very pleasurable semester of going over select poems line by line, word by word, enabled me to read difficult, complex thinkers across multiple fields, though most science still eludes me. And I’m yet to measure how classes in history and anthropology have shaped my approaches to literature.

Then, of course, just day-to-day things: does the class have a compelling narrative, a story of how ideas work or themes develop. Does it balance the “hard” really hard stuff (I’ll be teaching about lynching, for instance) with the pleasurable (Their Eyes were Watching God)? Does it offer students familiar narratives (agency, empowerment) alongside difficult ones (complicity)? Does it let students experience themselves learning (and this, I have to say, is really difficult)? But does it also give them “something to grow on?” Does it inspire intellectual curiosity? (And, I have to note, this happens in all sorts of unexpected ways. For instance, I read a lot of race and sexuality-based theory when taking a-theoretical classes, because I wanted a different kind of narrative).

Others, I am sure, have much more elaborate ways to discuss how they construct their classes.

All this, and more, given about 8 novels, maybe 10 poems, about 4-6 essays, and about 11 weeks of teaching. Semester is 15 weeks, but have to account for the book that might be cut because of time, working on papers and assignments, grading, tweaking, re-tweaking, student presentations. You get the point.

Each “perfect” syllabus always begins, for me, with everything I would want to teach. In an African Fiction class, for instance, student-run magazines and Onitsha market publications (two concurrent, very interesting forms) to Kwani? and Chimurenga to blogs. One winnows and cuts and winnows some more.

One develops different classes: African Magazines; Short African Fiction; Modern African Fiction; Contemporary African Fiction; East African Fiction; Francophone Fiction; African Poetry; South African Poetry. You get the gist. Of course, part of the pleasure of this process is that one gets to study, in some depth, a work one might not have encountered before. Juxtaposing certain works provides startling moments of insights.

Of course, one can never plan for the narrative that develops in the class, especially if one teaches a discussion-based class. And I always teach discussion-based classes. One cannot anticipate the deeply philosophical student who, one day, mentions some concept you’ve never heard of, but one that opens up new vistas; one cannot anticipate the engineering majors who, in all my classes, transform literary methodology, forging, unwittingly, new inter-disciplinary methods of reading; one cannot anticipate the student who has read everything about astronomy and astrology and does incredible things with Donne. One cannot anticipate the student who works in a grocery store and does wonderful things to Ginsberg’s “Supermarket in California.” One cannot anticipate what happens when you bring all these different individuals and histories and experiences into a room and begin talking.

And, I have to say, this moment of talking to and with each other is one of the main reasons I teach. I’m happy when students learn and absorb and use what I teach. I’m glad when they find it useful or enlightening or both.

I’m thrilled when they learn that they can and do produce knowledge.

And, ultimately, this is my aim in all my classes. For me, the perfect syllabus gets students to the point where they are both capable of and excited about their ability to produce knowledge.

Agree to Disagree

Back in the good old days when all (or most) of the leaders in congress were white men, they would debate quite vigorously on the floor, jabbing ferociously at one another, and then, afterwards, would have a drink together and, perhaps, play golf. This, I have been told, is gentlemanly behavior.

It is also, I believe, the only way that agreeing to disagree makes sense: when both parties are more or less equal in status.

A few years ago, in the midst of yet another conversation about rights and sexuality (I may be a broken record, but the damned record player is broke!), I was offered the option of agreeing to disagree. I declined. At the time, I knew I was uncomfortable about the option but I had no clear way to express my disagreement. I have a little more clarity now.

I return to that previous conversation because it ended, at least for me, when I asked the question: “do you believe you are more equal than I am?” It was a clumsily phrased and, in retrospect, awkwardly phrased question. But it got to the heart of what was at stake.

It’s tempting to agree to disagree. It’s tempting because your opponent seemingly grants you the same rhetorical authority without, in fact, conceding your position is valid. The trick: I allow you to have an idea, a position, to exist in the same world as I do. But I need not concede that we are equal or deserve the same rights. And, in fact, to grant your position changes nothing about mine. Within the realm of the political, this strategy has real consequences.

This point was brought home to me in the little encounter between John McCain and Ellen. In response to her (unusually) well-reasoned defense of gay marriage, McCain (who needs a nickname, McShame? But I like shame too much. Ideas anyone?) McCain said, “let’s agree to disagree.”

Yet, I’m not sure what he conceded, if anything. He’s white, male, married, in fact, multiply married, which must mean he REALLY believes in marriage, and is campaigning to be president of the United States. He wields real-world power in a way that Ellen, for all her popularity, does not. Within this context, agreeing to disagree means accepting your place in that section, not this one, as Ellen eloquently put it.

This is not to say that all instances of this particular rhetorical formulation are as insidious; as a teacher and critic, I recognize its strategic usefulness, especially as a quite stubborn teacher and critic. (Stubborn and slow to concede, but I take both as virtues.)

It is, however, (my pronouns are all over the place) to begin or continue thinking about the implications of what appears to be a relatively benign and even respectful way to conduct a discussion. Let’s agree to disagree.

Fanon and Homophobia

Sokari asked:

On a more serious note how do we address the possibility that Fanon or Malcolm X were / might have been homophobic – surely we need to be thinking about both in the context of their time? For example are white people on the whole less racist, straight people less homophobic today than 40 years ago? And if so (I could answer yes and no to both questions – which confuses me). I remember British activist Peter Tatchel writing a few years back in the Guardian that MX was possibly gay which shook me not because he might have been gay but because his gayness would be used to discredit and undermine everything he stood for which was quite frightening.

Fanon has often been accused of being homophobic based on his 1952 Black Skins, White Masks, a text based primarily on his experiences in Martinique, Algeria (during WWII), and France. His statements on homosexuality are as shaped by these historical experiences as they are by his training as a psychiatrist, at a time when psychiatry was more overtly hostile to homosexuals. My task here is not to reconstruct these histories (and I still believe a full accounting of homosexuality within a transnational Francophone circuit still needs to be written—or translated into English; or I need to read it if it exists).

The concern I share with Sokari has to do with the cultural and political weight we continue to assign important figures because of their attitudes toward homosexuality. Hostility toward homosexuality often elicits praise while advocacy for, let alone practice of, diminishes one’s cultural authority. In Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch, Dwight McBride points out that even known queers such as James Baldwin “heterosexualize” (not the same as closeting) themselves to gain cultural approbation.

Conversely, as she notes, revelations of or innuendos about culturally significant figures continue to elicit strong resistance (Shakespeare, Lincoln, Langston Hughes, to take 3 prime examples). (Yes, I know the sentence is incomplete.)

So, the question is why? Why should revelations about one’s perceived homo-acts affect one’s historical reputation? I should admit, here, that I find the argument that homophobia is a mask for repressed homosexuality to be unconvincing. And I find the ostensibly liberal-cum-conservative position that identities don’t matter to be disingenuous.

Was Fanon homophobic and what does that mean for queers of color? There are no easy answers. To use Obama’s locution, I can no more disown Fanon than I can my close friends (who lovingly believe I’m going to hell).

I find it fruitless to comb through his texts or his life to find evidence that he was or wasn’t homophobic. My tolerance for masochism goes only so far, and my safety word comes to my lips too readily.

The problem of valuing/devaluing black leaders and artists because of their presumed homosexuality (always after the fact, since they are always already heterosexual) is more difficult to negotiate. It means dealing with two historically simultaneous instances of homophobia: one presumed to belong to a historical actor (Fanon, Kenyatta, Malcolm X) and the other from contemporary critics who value that homophobia and, in so doing, advance their own homophobia.

This matters.

From my perspective, it matters especially to queers of color, who must often attempt to balance their ethno-racial political and social attachments with their gender-sexual political and social attachments. (I wanted to use the word allegiance, but do not quite like the sense of obligation it presumes. After wrestling with critics elsewhere, I must concede, I am uncomfortable with some of its overtones. Blogs allow self-indulgent asides.)

Ultimately, I’m interested in what might be termed a shield effect or a historical alibi that goes something like this: “if x historical figure, whose politics I embrace, was homophobic, it’s because that figure understood something profound about the implications of homo-acts and homo-desires for politics. Consequently, I must embrace a similar homophobia.” (Racism is less acceptable on this front, though Hitler has his defenders and followers; sexism, as the HRC backlash demonstrates, is much more acceptable.)

This problem is compounded when we deal with Fanon who, in my book at least, was a certifiable genius. Given how smart he was, how prescient about the shape of post-independence politics in Africa, how compelling he remains, might he have been right “to be” homophobic? And does attending to history allow “us” to “excuse” him?

I don’t know. I have theories and interpretations (in my other life), but I honestly have no idea.

There is a broader question here about what values we can and should adapt and adopt from our political predecessors, how we can account for their histories and contextualize our own, how we use them or distort them to articulate our historical stances, and, perhaps most important, how we can be responsible to history and to the present by really paying attention to both.

This is, finally, the challenge of reading Fanon.

Killing Our Witches

11 women and men were murdered in western Kenya because they were suspected of witchcraft. According to reports, most of them were over 70 and at least 8 were women. I am having problems processing this information.

The figure of the witch exists in many communities in Kenya, and this figure is, more often than not, the ambivalent object of respect and revulsion. But I am not interested in the ethnography of this figure.

Instead, I am interested in what witches and their counterparts, prophets, represent. I am thinking, here, of Thiong’o’s The River Between, and the tragic history it tells of prophets who were ignored and dismissed as crazy. I am also thinking, to indulge ethno-history for a moment, of the Gikuyu belief that introverted individuals were witches, that those who dared to think or dream or express themselves differently had to be destroyed.

It might seem counterintuitive if not silly to align witches, prophets, intellectuals, artists, and queers, but this kind of clustering allows me to imagine what might be at stake.

Witches are often accused of wishing ill on their societies, of re-forming those societies, imagining them differently. For some, the act of imagining society differently is akin to wishing it ill.

Yet an unwillingness to envision if not support bone-deep changes impoverishes who we are and who we can be.

Amnesty & Responsibility

Tell your God to convert
Me to the faith of the indifferent,
The faith of those
Who will never listen until
They are shaken with blows.
—Everett Standa, “I Speak for the Bush”

Those who know Standa’s poem in full will rightly consider it to be an odd choice as a point of departure. The full poem, after all, privileges the “bush” against “civilization,” praising the old ways, what some revere as moral tradition, against the perversity of the modern. It sets up precisely the kind of oppositions that I tend to oppose.

Yet.

This poem has stayed with me over the years. It was, in retrospect, one of the first poems that made class differences palpable. And, in the aftermath of the class-ethnic-generational violence in Kenya, at a time when, unfortunately, some in our political class have seemed to re-consolidate, to re-congeal with impurities, irrevocably tainted by their participation and silence, the poem seems even more relevant, but also, sadly, too optimistic.

For the poem imagines a kind of empathetic citizenship, in which blows on one body might resonate on another—this might be what we mean by body politic. It invokes, as well, the tradition of violent revolution that compels political change. Whether the political change of leadership translates into ideological and socio-cultural change is one of Africa’s ongoing problems.

It is a problem worth considering as we face what will be a major generation shift in political leadership over the next 10-15 years.

More immediately, Kenyan leaders are debating whether they should grant amnesty to the “youths” who perpetuated the post-election violence. The matter is touchy, especially given claims (supported by some evidence) that some of the very same political leaders provoked, supported, or, at the very least, benefited from the post-election violence. Shouldn’t those leaders also be held responsible? Shouldn’t a truly reformed politics develop a strategy to hold all those who circulated and participated in hate speech, in specious arguments (and I have been accused of such), as responsible in some way?

The recent lynching of 11 women and men in the western part of Kenya complicates the scenario I am trying to sketch. It offers eloquent, if tragic, testimony to the culture of violence that has, itself, been granted amnesty for too long, a culture that believes domestic violence and corporal punishments are not simply just but necessary ways to create disciplined populations, families, citizens.

It is a culture that documents, in shocking detail, acts of mob justice, but neither blames nor punishes these perpetrators of public violence.

Over the past year, I have become increasingly convinced that we must document all forms of violence (as Ushahidi have started); we must forge connections between the most banal and the most extreme acts of violence; we must be willing to refuse claims for cultural, regional, and historical specificity that justify violence.

We must deny our cultures innocence and our histories amnesty.

Pleasurable Vice

An article in the Standard informs us that “Sodomy” is “rife in prisons.” It opens with the startling observation that the director of Health Services in charge of the Prison Department “has admitted that homosexuality is rife in prisons.”

He laments the presence of the “anti-social” “vice” and argues that such “practices” can be combated through “discussion.” (Someone needs to lend him a copy of Foucault. Like, seriously.)

The vice is, of course, responsible for the spread of AIDS. And, worse, “Some prisoners pick the vice in prison and continue with it when freed.”

Broken Record Begin:

I have argued elsewhere on this blog that the historical and socio-cultural contexts through which we discuss sodomy-homosexuality (and I suture both for now) in Kenya shape how we approach it, in casual and institutional ways.

What remains fuzzy in the article, and therefore analytically interesting, is the implicit association between sodomy-homosexuality and the prison as an anti-social space. If, that is, the prison contains anti-social individuals and those same individuals practice homosexuality-sodomy (changing it up), then, at least implicitly, homosexuality-sodomy becomes anti-social because of its sociogenesis. It comes from an anti-social space and is thus anti-social.

There is a certain logic to this argument, if we are willing to go there. I am on a theoretical level, but not on any practical note. (Zackie Achmat has the BEST essay ever written on good prison sex in Africa.)

I do not have the brain space at the moment, but I want to bookmark the implicit synonyms that shape how we read the article: sodomy is equivalent to homosexuality is an anti-social vice. None of these are historically synonymous nor are they inevitably joined. The joining happens in the article.

Will “discussion” fix the problem?

Given how the “discussion” is always already skewed against sodomy-homosexuality, this “discussion” is really about the best way to exorcise this “vice.”

R.S.V.P.: I will not be attending the exorcism

“I Don’t Get It”

Asymptote: A line which approaches nearer and nearer to a given curve, but does not meet it within a finite distance. (OED)

My dear friend Kibe spent many hours trying to explain geometry to me. I understood, in the abstract, that the sum of certain angles added up to 180°, and that, sometimes, those angles were in odd positions. There was a relation between, say, the line that extended out of a triangle and the angles within the triangle. (If you just winced, you are experiencing Kibe’s pain.)

Geometry requires magic.

No doubt, my sense that this most precise of disciplines consists of magic offends, but I want to hold on to it for now. I want to hold on the sense that it’s difficult, almost impossible, for some of us, perhaps all of us, to understand certain things.

Geometry is one thing, my inability to understand it another, but I have been thinking about what it means to “get” something, to “feel” something.

We often fault those who “fail” at what we consider “empathy.” We believe they do so out of some fundamental “wrongness” or “willfulness” and that if they just learned enough, heard enough, experienced enough, they might be convinced about the rightness or justice of a cause.

What if they just don’t “get” it? And what if their not getting it is actually foundational, not anomalous, to our political lives? What if our not getting it is essential to the political lives we lead and choose?

To begin from this position goes against the view that one’s reasoned position can and should convince others; that politics takes place on rational grounds.

And we come, finally, to the asymptote.

In my very non-mathematical way, it represents a gap that one must jump for congruence to emerge. In another one of my languages, it might be called a leap of faith. Were I to steal from Obama and, by inference, Jeremiah Wright, it might be the audacity of hope.

What if not getting it is central to political life in a more fundamental way than we have imagined? What if the political invitation is not that we should get it or feel it, is not fundamentally empathetic or rational? What if it is predicated, instead, on a leap of faith, a willingness to risk, even without knowing what it is we risk?

Politics as a gamble. Perhaps.

I am not sure I’m totally convinced by this idea, but I have been trying to work around the idea that people I know and love and trust don’t “get” the politics I support: race-based, feminist, queer. And I am reluctant to attach a bunch of “ists” to these people, mostly because I am stubborn.

But I also want to take more seriously defenses of those who say “odious” things and are then defended: x is not racist or sexist or homophobic. This requires a slight detour. As I’ve written before, the injured person feels pain: the driver of a truck that hits a pedestrian cannot say whether or not the pedestrian experiences pain. The “ist” statement has to be judged from the position of the addressee, not the intent of the speaker.

However, what if individuals just “don’t get it”? And should we rely on them to “get it” to prove something about them or about ourselves? And, here, let’s not forget the psychic satisfaction “we” get from being in the right.

What if we recognize that politics, or activism, might not rely on shared values or demonstrating the right kind of empathy? What if we acknowledge the seriousness, the scary, stuff-of-nightmare risk that we ask of each other? What if, to choose an issue close to home, GLBT activists did not dismiss the anti-gay marriage stance as hate, but engaged with the bone-deep fear it provokes?

This is not to say we abandon “getting it.” If so, then all pedagogues would be out of work—and I like my job, thank you very much. It is to say we recognize what we ask when we urge people who “don’t” or “can’t” get it to, somehow, get it.

This is why I like the idea of the asymptote as a model for collaborative world-making. In truth, I might simply have written about metaphor, since it similarly relies on the lack of congruence. But I like the idea of almost getting there, but not quite, a hopeful position that believes, ultimately, that people are good (WM has de-cynicised me), that they desire good for others.

To desire a shared good means asking for a collective leap, a jump across the political asymptote.