Before she abandoned the internets for a rich life elsewhere, Mutumia posted a cryptic ad featuring the herbalist Ssenga Biliwa.
Among the many treatments, Ssenga Biliwa offers to help “Develop those twin towers (flaps) in 2 days.”
Wise readers, what are “twin towers (flaps)”?
I need to step away from Tutuola for a moment—I have 2-3 more posts planned, one on his use of similes—so I thought I’d look at the most protean figure emerging from post-imperial Britain, James Bond. Ian Fleming published the first Bond novel, Casino Royale, in 1953 and the first film, Dr. No, was released in 1962. Translated into Kenyan time, the first novel is published shortly after the emergency is declared in 1952 and the first film released right before independence in 1963 (India 1947, Ghana 1957).
Framing Bond’s emergence and dissemination within Kenyan histories permits us to ask about its historical function in relation to Britain’s imperial decline. Given Kenya’s not great literacy rates at independence (I have no real numbers, but it seems safe to assume it wasn’t great), the Bond films would have reached wider audiences than the books. In fact, Bond’s flashy gizmo, intrigue-filled world thrills whether or not one understands the actual words spoken by characters. This is key.
James Bond is one of the most ubiquitous figures across the commonwealth (to use an old, useless designation). Unlike empire, Bond never dies. And his persistence speaks to a fantasy that the imperial masculinity he embodies never dies. Moreover, as a protean, phoenix-like figure, a model of impossible masculinity, Bond represents an unattainable fantasy that affirms every single claim about the superiority of imperial masculinity.
To understand Bond in this way is to approach a fantasy of post-imperial masculinity as an imperial residue.
In the non-note version of this reflection, to be pursued one day, I am interested in how the figure of Bond mediates the relationship between Britain and its former colonies while also helping to forge bonds among those former colonies.
Kai Wright offers a beautiful meditation on why it matters to everyone, not just “the gays.”
I refuse to argue, for instance, that I didn’t “choose” to be gay. Sure I did, and that’s what’s great about it. Every openly gay person has had to make an active choice to reject shame and embrace his or her own, self-defined sexuality; that’s a step a whole lot of straights could stand to take, too.
. . .
Maybe if we gays reclaimed our posts at the frontline of the fight for sexual liberation, we could lead everyone in figuring out how to do that. Then we’d all have happy, proud sex lives that are both disease-free and riotously fun.
I’ll just note that increasingly I am more interested in thinking about what it means to “choose to be gay,” a notion that, to my mind, is much more radical than we often allow. That for another post.
Readers of Paula Treichler will recognize the allusion to her groundbreaking work, which examines the discursive construction of HIV/AIDS. I have taken the list below from IRIN/Plus News (via Jeremy’s blog, where I came across it).
Angola
Portuguese
Kenya
Kikuyu, spoken mainly in central Kenya
Nigeria
Hausa, spoken mainly in the north
Igbo, spoken mainly in the east
Yoruba, spoken mainly in the west
Pidgin, the unofficial lingua franca
English
South Africa
IsiXhosa and IsiZulu
English
Tanzania
KiSwahili
Uganda
English
Luganda, spoken mainly in the central region
Zambia
Nyanja, spoken mainly in the east and the capital, Lusaka
Bemba, spoken mainly in the north and Lusaka
Zimbabwe
Shona
English
In 1963, Julius Nyerere penned an article with the optimistic title, “The United States of Africa.” He opened with a series of claims that are worth revisiting.
There is one sense in which African unity already exists. There is a sentiment of ‘African-ness’, a feeling of mutual involvement, which pervades all the political and cultural life on the continent. Nationalist leaders all over Africa feel themselves to be part of a greater movement; they recognize a special responsibility to the political unit in which they happen to belong, but feel personally involved in the triumphs and set-backs of all other African countries. (1)
I am struck by Nyerere’s evocative phrase, “happen to belong,” a phrase that recognizes the arbitrariness of national boundaries and denaturalizes belonging. Political units are neither organic nor inevitable. They are accidental, strategic.
It is precisely this “happenstance” aspect of political units that allows Nyerere to formulate an inter-nationalist ethic. To recognize belonging as a historical accident permits us to look beyond our own units, to recognize that, given a nudge here or there, we might be in that political unit, not this.
To recognize happenstance is to cultivate care. To see oneself in faces across borders.
I begin with this utopian vision to shield myself from what follows, to modulate the cynicism against which our politics compel us to struggle.
For better or worse, Africa exists as a political unit. As the (mostly western) press has it, the world has China, India, and Africa. We have tended, since independence, to insist that Africa has individual countries and is a continent. Increasingly, I wonder what we permit by insisting on our uniqueness, by embracing organic definitions of identity and identification, by taking accident for inevitability.
My title is adapted from Ken Saro-Wiwa’s searing indictment of African politics, “Africa Kills Her Sun.” In the story, he explains, “that’s why they call it the dark continent.”
A few weeks ago, Wambui Mwangi circulated an essay that reflected on what Kenya would have done to Obama. Briefly, the essay claims Kenya would have destroyed him, as it destroys so many of our strong, beautiful, talented citizens, stealing their dreams and feeding them bitter herbs.
Her claims continue to disturb me, in part because I don’t want to believe in the dystopic vision she paints of Kenya. Yet, the list of names she offers is convincing, too convincing. Most tragically, perhaps, David Munyakei, without whose testimony the extent of the Goldenberg scandal would never have been discovered. We thanked him by ignoring him. He died like so many of our brave and beautiful, unrecognized.
We have many unmarked graves.
Whatever the outcome of Obama’s campaign, it will be tinged, across Africa, with the shame of what we permit, what we sanction by our silence, our inaction.
Darfur.
Zimbabwe.
Mugabe, the tyrant we tolerate because were we to oppose him our own shameful nakedness might be exposed. Africa gave Moi a free pass. Africa gives Mugabe a pass. We seem to have an inexhaustible number of passes for warlords and petty tyrants. I wonder if we believe that our dead bodies will fertilize arid lands, if our legacy to the future will be human-enriched soil.
With each passing day, the sun is stifled. We kill our sun.
I have a very distinct memory of reading a text or hearing a conversation or receiving instructions that if one walked around the mugumo tree backward seven times, one’s sex would change.
The sharpness of the instructions is modulated by the fuzziness of the context, a fuzziness that makes me doubt the sharpness of the instructions. That I remember receiving them on the cusp of puberty induces me to believe in a queer ancestral memory, as though I chanced upon rituals secreted in hidden places, in trees, in the grass, in rocks, on the wind.
I have, in the years since, tried to trace a textual origin for this memory, with no success. That I cannot find a source speaks, I think, not to my abysmal research skills, nor to my admittedly limited access to certain Kenyan sources, but to a necessary myth-making, an attempt to suture histories and traditions, to embed in and extend from there to here, here to there, who I was with who I was becoming.
This process of constructing what Audre Lorde aptly terms a biomythography explains, in part, the intricate relationship between history and memory, the porous border between fact and fiction, the ability of the imagination to bridge what one is with what one desires.
Increasingly, I am drawn to thinking more about this bridge between what one is and what one desires. This formulation sounds incomplete, as the more common formulation is “what one is and what one desires to be.” I truncate the common formulation to emphasize how desire creates un-anticipated futures and alliances.
One desires not just for oneself but also for others. To wish another good is one of the great lessons of Christianity, and one that I carry with me. And the challenge of doing so is recognizing how that wish re-aligns one’s own priorities, re-orients one in unexpected ways. (I am thinking more about orientation these days due to Sara Ahmed’s work.)
To orient and re-orient is also, to return to my opening, to traverse that fragile boundary between memory and fantasy, myth and reality, to seek in one’s imagined past resources for an unfolding present.
The two are not synonymous verbs. Using them as such is not a stylistic choice. It is simply wrong.
Posting inspired by this particular gem: “First the chap looses his arm in what must have been a traumatising accident at work.”
Loose:
Lose:
Has a new, very pretty site. If you’re not reading it, you should be.
Even better, don’t just read, engage in the conversations taking place.
Not affiliated, not being paid, just think it’s a really great and necessary space that could use more voices and eyes and perspectives.
By the inimitable Wambui Mwangi.
It should be clear by now that I am slightly obsessed with Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard. Faced with Tutuola, I turn into Mr. Casaubon, convinced that it is the Key to All Mythologies. In big and small ways, at the level of ideas and the level of syntax, Tutuola provides a critique of Afro-modernity that remains unmatched by any Anglophone writer of his generation.
(I need to manage this Tutuola-addiction.)
My favorite narrative sequence in The Palm-Wine Drinkard is about the “complete gentleman.” Briefly, a “complete gentleman” visits a market and, while there, attracts the attention of the town beauty, a young woman who has refused to marry because she finds all other men lacking. Infatuated with him, she decides to follow him home, despite his repeated warnings that she should turn back. On the way home, he begins to shed parts of himself, returning his borrowed accoutrements, including clothing, limbs, and skin. Fully denuded, the “complete gentleman” is revealed to be a Skull. He imprisons the young woman in a community of Skulls and renders her dumb by tying a cowrie shell around her neck. The narrator rescues her. Of course.
The tale of the deceptively beautiful young man is fairly common in African folktales. And it is striking that it’s often men, not women, whose beauty is considered deceptive. One could stage an encounter between urban and rural forms of masculinity here, and, following an East African vein, relate this sequence to that between Lawino and the absent Clementine. Interesting tangent. Will not pursue.
Two questions: what does it mean that a “complete gentleman” is composed of a series of discrete, borrowed parts? And, what does it mean, especially within Afro-modernity, that the “real gentleman” is a silencing Skull?
(I should confess that the African fetishization of “the gentleman,” and our point of reference is invariably “the colonial gentleman,” irritates me to no end. That we continue to valorize this figure and aspire to it is really quite silly.)
In disassembling the “complete gentleman,” Tutuola makes visible the various elements that, cumulatively, create the gentleman, elements that, when disaggregated, function as fetishes, a term that has the same suturing effect as Afro-modernity. It sutures the anthropological-religious element with the psychic-capitalist. (Yes, I know, it’s a lazy formulation.)
I raise this point regarding the fetish because I am interested in how authors such as Senghor and Kenyatta re-embed certain anthropological-religious concepts back into their “African”/ “primitive” contexts from their abstraction in Marxist and psychoanalytic thought. Tutuola’s Afro-modern approach re-embeds such concepts in their African contexts while also leaving open possibilities for Marxist and psychoanalytic readings. In fact, I think Tutuola makes it impossible for us not to consider this suturing. (My best critics have suggested that I should distinguish between what texts do and what I do with them. I’m still learning. It’s hard for me not to fetishize the text as my Key to All Mythologies.)
It is no coincidence that Tutuola de-structures the “complete gentleman” following WWII, the experience that transformed the idea of the colonial gentleman for many Africans. As is often acknowledged, African veterans of WWI and WWII acquired radically different understandings of white masculinity. Seeing white men killed in battle, vulnerable to dirt and disease, demystified white masculinity, often materializing what might have been, until then, quite abstract. But this materialization was also accompanied by a realization that white masculinity was an abstraction, a Skull, an idea that even many white men found difficult to realize.
This is a complex double movement: simultaneously to make concrete what appears abstract while also making abstraction material. And it is one of Tutuola’s signature moves. It is also one of the reasons Tutuola is my drug of choice for thinking through the complexities of Afro-modernity.
Tutuola does not follow a Senghorian line that opposes European abstraction to African feeling. He offers, instead, a meditation on Afro-modernity as a form of living death, anticipating Paul Gilroy’s provocative idea that Afro-modernity is inextricably bound to terror. This is one of those head-scratching ideas.
The Skull’s “skullness” represents a form of living death and, through its actions, it traps others into forms of living death (as texter reminded me, slavery works its way through Tutuola’s corpus in any number of ways). It terrorizes the young woman by rendering her dumb and immobile. It needs her to be both, to embody living death for it. (Hegelians will recognize the origin of this formulation.)
Freud writes that interpretation can continue interminably. There is no natural “finally.” One chooses among arbitrary endings. Here is one.
Any analysis of Tutuola’s meditation on the “complete gentleman” and the “real gentleman” remains incomplete if it does not account for the young woman’s actions. The easy folktale reading is that she is punished for her pride, for refusing to marry the young men around her. I agree with this familiar interpretation. But we can pursue a “grown-up” reading.
Unlike in similar folktales, the “complete gentleman or terrible creature” does not pursue the young woman. He does not attempt to seduce her. In fact, he warns her away, but she chooses not to listen. How do we think about her choices? This is where it gets hairy. We could argue that the “complete gentleman” misrepresents himself and, consequently, seduces her by default. But this explanation is unconvincing.
If Afro-modernity represents a site of terror for the black subject, it also represents a series of decisions on the part of the black subject: to listen, to pursue. Although he approaches this question very differently, Robert Reid-Pharr, in his recent work, asks why we have been unwilling to grant the black subject (my term, not his) this ability to choose. This is not to deny the terror of Afro-modernity. It is, however, to stop making Afro-modern subjects purely re-active, to stop identifying resistance as the privileged signifier of agency within Afro-modernity.
But now I have wandered far, and I still want to hit that “finally.”
I am interested in a certain kind of conceptual density. And I often cross over into Skull territory. While Tutuola lends himself to this kind of conceptual play, he also warns about the dangers of pursuing Skullness.
And it is this final lesson in humility that might be the most useful.
