Now I’m Told

A few months ago, I wrote that someone I know must have participated in the post-election violence.

This weekend, I discovered that a close family friend was forcibly recruited by Mungiki, handed a panga, and ordered to create violence. He managed to escape from Mungiki after a few days.

What was not offered, and what I could not ask, was what he did, did not do, might have done, might not have done, might have wanted to do, might not have wanted to do.

These are the stories that no one told me over the phone or email, the stories that are, just now, filtering through as we continue to tally those who are still among us, physically, mentally, spiritually.

These are the stories that are told sotto-voce, received with a “we were all mad in those days,” and filed away carefully, if we are to maintain the innocence of our friendships. Grateful that those we know survived, there are questions we dare not ask. It’s easier, though not easy, to record strangers’ observations. It’s more difficult to rewrite the histories of attachment and affection we term family and friendship.

These are also the stories that should give us pause, the ones that should compel us to check self-righteous hubris of the “I would never have done that” variety.

These are the stories that will come between us and join us, as we fear and protect our own. It is a story that I can tell on this space, where the web of my attachments is too diffuse to yield real knowledge, where it can only be evidence that someone “like me” also “went mad.”

This is how we must speak of it: someone like me went mad. And in making that judgment, I turn away from one truth to one I can live with.

Old Dirty Denim and Smelly Sandals

In earlier days, those who returned from abroad were part of an avant-garde of sorts, a misnomer, for they were really simply mainstream foreign fashion in Kenya. From them, we learned about mini-skirts, and 10-inch boots, Goth-light, and the charms of baggy and tight, leather and lace. One of my siblings taught me about asymmetrical skirts when she sported a faux-Madonna look many many years go.

I have always felt that I disappoint when I travel home. I have tended toward the dowdy and comfortable—my old, torn jeans, my much-used sandals, 50 ct. tees, overalls that an old-time farmer would be ashamed to wear, and jackets that Goodwill would reject. I travel and live to be comfortable, and also, in some sense, to be true to the kind of “aesthetic” that I live, when not engaged in some professional activity. I should note that my visit to the store to buy the obligatory interview suit was one of the most unsettling experiences of my entire adult life. I chose this profession so that I wouldn’t have to suit up, or so I thought.

I am in the midst of packing up for yet another brief trip home, and as I pack my much-loved smelly sandals, my cheap tees, my Goodwill rejects to face fashion-conscious Nairobi, and those friends who define, in their various successes, the face of forward-looking Kenya, I am anticipating once again unsettling and disappointing, being a certain kind of traveler, dowdy, travel-stained, rumpled, and comfortable.

Between Blog Posts

What happens between blog posts?

I ask because of Sokari’s latest comment: “Thinking about blogging on something and not doing it is a sure sign of blogger paralysis / disinterest / being blogged out or on the verge of a blogging breakdown.”

Although part of me agrees with this assessment, another part is interested in the processes of editing and self-censorship, the acts of valuation that determine whether a thought, a response, an opinion, or a theory should be disseminated as a blog post.

I invoke here one key distinction between writing and speaking: writing allows one to re-consider, to re-think, to re-phrase, to re-frame. Writing allows a much-needed lag. One can choose whether or not to join a conversation, disclose private information, or respond to a harsh critic. One can choose to comment on a post or to send a private email.

We might also consider the importance of those moments of silence—when blogs cease to exist as constantly updated documents and become records of a certain existence, an “x was here.” How should we respond to or interact with blogs whose authors have died from HIV/AIDS complications or those who are political prisoners? What kind of testimony or witness do those blogs contain? What is their afterlife? Who values them and how?

At stake is also a question of what a blog post might accomplish for the author and for readers. For instance, despite my reluctance to post on “academic topics,” I have used my blog as a pensieve (thanks HP!). Many ideas in my dissertation first saw light as tentative posts (what is the relationship between race and desire, between belonging and allegiance). I have refined many ideas, used and discarded others, have vacillated stylistically and theoretically.

I have stepped outside of academic conventions of writing, the citation, the complete argument, the counter-argument, and have practiced more idiosyncratic ways of accumulating and disseminating knowledge, even when I don’t fully know or understand what it is I am trying to say. The semi-academic blog has allowed me to be half-digested and half-digestible, to risk a kind of thinking that my training tells me should not be seen.

There’s something pleasurable and even magical about first fumblings—Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between continues to fascinate me because of the richness it dares to imagine.

And there is something intriguing about the unfinished blog (what is a finished blog? What is a complete blog post?).
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Perhaps, then, there are not so much arguments that come after the archive as ones that can begin to articulate themselves only after the work of archiving has begun, arguments that can situate themselves, or discover themselves, only in the interstices of the elements assembled here, arguments that can enact themselves as aftereffects of the work of assemblage, arguments, thus, that will find themselves serially disassembled and reassembled as that archive unfolds itself.—Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic

To think of a blog, a series of blog posts, a blog ring, a blog community, or even thematic blogs as kinds of archive might seem presumptuous. To say that queer blogs or feminist blogs or Kenyan blogs (and self-descriptions are important) constitute an unfolding argument might be to create a false sense of coherence, yet no more false than such self-driven affiliations allow. After all, the blog, more than any other contemporary medium, represents a moment of individuation, a being and becoming idiosyncratic, even while exemplary. (My own blogging tics—parenthetical remarks, fragments, divided sections, switches in syntax and language, are hardly unique.)

Not to mention the turning of blogs, blogging, blog work into an “assemblage,” a kind of archive makes academic a form and format that ostensibly resists formalization. Yet, we know that archives are not only for academics. We live at a time when we have greater access to archives than ever before because of technology, when we can re-think, re-evaluate knowledge and history in unprecedented ways. We live at a time when, perhaps ironically, Time Life, with its edited histories (“the 100 greatest love songs!”) has become a paradigm for the kinds of histories that we individually and collectively create.

Events happen. We have become increasingly creative in how we apprehend and disseminate their happening, in how we record and narrate.
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What if blogging disinterest and blogging breakdowns are constitutive elements of blogging? How would we think about this?

I have suggested previously that I consider blog archives to be as important (if not more so) than continually updated content. Of course, new content is vitally important—as any number of politically-oriented blogs prove. But the student in me, the person interested in “story,” also relishes how blogs evolve.

How does tone change? What events receive continuous coverage? When do authors opt to use images or clips and when do they choose text? What kind of images accompany text and when? (Larry’s recent decision to edit certain images and posts because of his new teaching duties tells a certain story about pedagogy; my own decision, not announced, to be less explicit about sex and to write more expository prose tells yet another story, one about how writing academic prose has changed my own rhythms, the lengths of my sentences, has both clotted and unclotted my prose, knotted and unknotted my ideas.)

What rhythms guide blog posts?

Kenya’s recent history changed the tenor of some blogs—many posts opened with “I don’t write about politics, but.” And this “but” is important. What happens when a blog begins when one is a student and continues on to life afterward, when priorities shift? A friend recently completed her degree and is now facing motherhood. As a reader, I am now reading new, unexpected conversations (“I’m worried that following childbirth my vagina might not be as tight”); this is not a conversation that I expected, but it fascinates me.

Note: I’m headed to a place with spotty online access, so I’m reflecting, in part, on what it means to have blogged in a certain way, as I prepare for what might be a hiatus.
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What determines blogging rhythms? What has to be written about? What demands to be let out? What asks to be put aside, mulled over, re-written? How do we think about narrative vs. non-narrative posts? Should all blog posts tell a story or have a point, or can one simply post a picture of a kitten (I like kitten pictures as much as the next person)?

Finally, to return to Sokari’s provocative question: what determines whether one turns a thought, an idea, a hunch, or a story into a blog post? Perhaps talking about it over the phone scratches that particular itch.

I have written as many or more blog posts as the ones I’ve posted that will never be published.

Ultimately, for me, it comes down to writing: what does writing, public, semi-public, or private (for those whose blogs are password protected) accomplish that speaking might not? What do we choose to put down and what do we hold back? How do we value what is already put down (I have confessed, previously, my love for reading through an entire blog’s archives), and how do we value the silences that occur?

How do blogs evolve? Sokari’s and more recently Ory’s decisions to open up their blogs to other writers tells a fascinating story about how blogs enable communities of writers and readers to forge a shared purpose.

What about blogs that have no readers? What purpose might they serve for their authors? I retain the idiosyncratic belief that writing accomplishes something, and to think of blogging as writing enables different kinds of conversations about what it is we do when we blog. Not to mention, the process of writing a post like this, somewhat abstract, somewhat introspective (but not titillating) also invites speculation about what it accomplishes. It is, after all, way too long for most online readers and, even to my mind, not very compelling. So what compels me to continue?

What counts as a writing life? What counts as a semi-public writing life? And, as always, I reflect on what it means to try to create meaning (an argument, a point, a record) about living a certain kind of life as a certain kind of person, to write a kind of record, no matter how ephemeral.

On this, I return to Melvin Dixon’s wonderful 1992 speech, where he warns about the processes of erasure and censorship that constitute the de-queering eulogy, the citing of accomplishments that re-writes the late night romps with strangers, the queer rhythms of dance and play and pleasure and heartache and sickness and health that comprise queer lives, the daring to think differently (if not live so).

It is important to record not only how one has lived and loved, but also how one has thought about living and loving.

Afro-Genealogy: Roots, Rooting, and Rootedness

The purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the roots of our identity, but to commit itself to its dissipation. It does not seek to define our unique threshold of emergence, the homeland to which our metaphysicians promise a return; it seeks to make visible all those discontinuities that cross us.
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If genealogy in its own right gives rise to questions concerning our native land, native language, or the laws that govern us, its intention is to reveal the heterogeneous systems which, masked by the self, inhibit the formation of any form of identity.

-Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”

To root oneself is not the same as rooting around for something: one suggests fixing the other unearthing, both suggest ways of being in the world. One mode stakes a claim, the other claims a stake. Combined, both enact the complicated dance of all genealogical undertakings: to arrive where one might already have been, with each new arrival overwriting any sense of having already been there. One arrives to find that one used to be there, and is not. This, then, is not re-discovery. Time is not so generous as to allow a rewind, despite our technology.

But to arrive again, like for the first time, is also to find traces of having been there: one feels the strangeness of the tantalizingly distant familiar. This sense might not be the undoing that Foucault seeks—and, in truth, I find myself not very interested in arguing against “identity,” though I have in the past. “Identity” names, misnames, negotiates, and re-negotiates multiple, differently constituted attachments, and we have yet to exhaust how these attachments are and mean.

This post, though, arises out of another concern: the use of DNA testing to pursue genealogical paths.

In 1915, W.E.B. Du Bois published The Negro, a short transnational history of blackness that he would later expand in his 1939 Black Folk, Then and Now. Demonstrating Franz Boas’s influence, Du Bois opens with the provocative claim that Africa has always been a place of crossed bloods. He extends Boas’s critique of racial purity in Euro-America and posits that Africa arises from similarly complex crossings across race and ethnicity. Here, what is startling and still to be explained is that Du Bois takes inter-ethnic crossing to be as identity-constituting and identity-fracturing as inter-racial crossing.

There is much more to be said about this particular conceptual and re-historicizing strategy, especially if we contrast Du Bois’s stance to that of E.W. Blyden and Marcus Garvey, both of whom imposed a model of racial homogeneity onto ethno-diversity, flattening important differences among various African peoples.

The promise of DNA testing for many Afro-diasporic peoples is that it might reveal where their ancestors may once have lived and loved, have traveled and married. DNA roots—plants and searches.

To my mind, such research tells us more about movement and travel. It tells a contingent story: at this moment, in this year, this individual was in this place. And in telling such a story it opens up narrative possibilities. How did this person come to be in this place at this particular time? What kind of life situation allowed this person to travel to this place? To live in this place? To love in this place? To be captured in this place?

Rather than fixing in place, DNA histories might give us insight into the contingent practices of community formation and re-formation: siblings who traveled together and apart to form unique and related family groups; ethno-groupings that are occasional, disrupted, disruptive.

What might the Afro-diasporic critique of identity (Gilroy, Gates, Carby) offer to continental Africans?

We might discover ourselves as Africans, more continental, more multi-ethnic, less rooted than we imagine ourselves. As we foreground histories lived as migrants and nomads, traders and hustlers, as bride-kidnappers and husband-exchangers, as polyamorous and poly-ethnic, we enrich what we take be idiosyncratically specific (I am x from y) by enlarging possibilities.

In such a scenario, Afro-diasporic researches into and complications of identity have much to teach complacent Africans about our own forms of diversity, about the historically situated aspect of how we have come to be specific, and the stories of how we have always been more diverse than we imagine or claim.

We risk being Legion.

DNA histories might allow us to root differently, with urgency and care, pleasure and possibility.

Archives and Arguments I

Perhaps, then, there are not so much arguments that come after the archive as ones that can begin to articulate themselves only after the work of archiving has begun, arguments that can situate themselves, or discover themselves, only in the interstices of the elements assembled here, arguments that can enact themselves as aftereffects of the work of assemblage, arguments, thus, that will find themselves serially disassembled and reassembled as that archive unfolds itself.—Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic

Kenya’s Best and Brightest

I remain in thrall to the myth that Kenya will be “saved” by its “best and brightest.”

It is one of the founding myths of our country. The myth comes from that period when one young person’s achievement reflected on an entire village, district, and people, a practice that continues, albeit in modified form, in the published lists of top students. It is a myth that tethers individual achievement to social development, hence we are encouraged to be proud of Kenyans who have attained multiple degrees, though such achievements may be too removed from any quotidian we inhabit.

I am not saying that we cannot be proud of what we accomplish, but that we need a more measured approach to what we consider the function of the “the best and brightest.”

It strikes me, for instance, that of the many brilliant students and amazing leaders I knew from top schools, Alliance (both), Kenya High, Strathmore, Lenana (had to throw that in), Kianda, Mangu, add what you will, few, if any, have gone into public service, even fewer dare to venture into politics. Their successes—and they have been many—live, very profitably, within the private sector. In fact, the products of national schools—ostensibly our best and brightest—form the backbone, or at least a prominent vertebrae, of Kenya’s successful, private-based middle-class.

To say this is not to cast aspersion; after all, with my recently concluded degree, I will also join the ranks of those whose work lives elsewhere—my knowledge circulating more abroad than at home. (I will quickly add that as compared to many of the people I knew, I rank as solidly average—Kenya has some frighteningly brilliant people. I rank nowhere among “the best and the brightest.” I’m simply privileged to be part of their posse.)

As I have noted in several other posts, this turn away from public service, often accompanied by moves abroad, is more complex than we tend to grant. Many of us left or turned inward because we had to—universities closed too frequently; the socio-cultural climate was toxic; the political air suffocating. And, given my distaste for martyrdom, I remain unconvinced by those who demand that those abroad return home to effect change. (This, too, is part of the myth of “the best and brightest,” that those from “there” can do something those from “here” cannot,” and it’s really quite silly. I have more brilliant Kenyan friends at home than here.)

I’m rambling.

I do have two somewhat coherent thoughts.

One, history has taught us that “the best and brightest” is an almost useless designation. Kenyans are wildly innovative, and the narrow measures we use to judge excellence and support it—school grades, internationally recognizable achievements and qualifications—don’t necessarily translate in public, civic-minded ways.

Which means, of course, that we need different ways to nurture our disparate, antinomian talents, different ways to discover who we are and what we can do without limiting ourselves to narrow test scores. (This has been happening for a long time; I simply want to mark it.)

To my mind, we need to get rid of the construction “best and brightest,” designate it an archaic holdover that had a certain historical function that no longer obtains—and those better versed in economics and neoliberalism will have far better explanations than I can muster.

We need to nurture various forms of excellence and creativity. I can assure the many teachers who punished me that being caned did not improve my math abilities. 2+2 is still 56.

Instead of continuing to pin our hopes on “the best and the brightest,” whoever those might be, we might pay more or at least equal attention to the interesting, the creative, the strange, the unusual, the ordinary, find ways to nurture a sense of civic-mindedness and public service, provide financial, social, and cultural support to those whose visions and versions of who we are and want to be might not coincide with official government desires, but will direct us in unexpected and profitable ways.

Political Botox: Old Kenya, New Kenya

When my good friend WM first mentioned her idea for Generation Kenya, a celebration and retrospective of the past 45 years, I remarked, partly in jest, that we would have to guard against the relentless botoxing that proclaims 40 the new 30, 50 the new 20, and 60 non-existent. If, on the one hand, we wanted to avoid a narrative of seamless development and maturity (as though aging is ever effortless), we also wanted to avoid freezing time, marking 45 as a new beginning, to avoid the midwife-effect of retrospect and nostalgia.

Following the lamentable period, Generation Kenya morphed in unexpected ways, turning not into who we had been but who we were becoming, how, at 45, we were dealing with new challenges, forging new relationships, extending relationships of care and caring. Little of this needs to be repeated and, in truth, I admit to a certain weariness regarding the “what went wrong” motif that understands the lamentable period as an unexplainable rupture divorced from the histories that nurtured it.

But there continues to be an idea that following the lamentable period we live in a new Kenya, a different Kenya. No consensus exists regarding how that difference should be parsed. It’s difficult to name what appears to be a new sensibility, though I write this from a distance and with a jaundiced eye.

Botox provides an interesting metaphor through which to frame the changes we have at 45.

Known best as the poison that, in small doses, paralyzes muscles, erasing years and facial experiences, it is also used to control excessive perspiration. In fact, its effects remind one of the endlessly innocent Kenyan politicians, whose continual re-election despite corrupt alliances and disastrous leadership suggest that the Kenyan public is all too willing to accept botox beauty as truth.

Botox promises to freeze time, to hide the effects of having lived a particular way and having aged through one’s actions. It claims to erase the past but the botox face is so unnatural in its appearance that it makes visible what it seeks to deny: that one has a poisoned face, a mask dipped in toxin.

I must admit to being skeptical that following the lamentable period we now live in a new Kenya. I am not interested here in repeating a self-defeating, cynical mantra that nothing ever changes—I have some political hope. But I am interested in arresting the narrative that, even now, is being written about living in the “new” Kenya, the post-election Kenya, ostensibly a place changed radically as we discovered facts we wish we hadn’t.

Post-election Kenya has changed. We are now more aware of how fragile some of our bonds are, even as we are aware of how amazing our alliances are. We have learned—are still learning—how not to take for granted who we assume ourselves to be even as we continue to use old tools to hold on to needed bonds of identification. To take just one example, we have re-discovered the national anthem as a national prayer, as aspiration and inspiration.

But amidst the changes there remain old alliances, patterns of thinking and living that we should be careful not to overlook. We cannot assume that the lamentable period was a botox injection that has now given us smooth brows, erasing lines of care.

We cannot, at 45, accept the cosmetic option that some seem to be offering in discussing the “new” Kenya. (The seemingly unlined faces of our politicians as they negotiated deals a few months past continue to give me nightmares.)

Kenya at 45 has a lined, furrowed brow, and some of the lines will be permanent, as permanent as the scars accompanying our tumultuous birth as a nation. We are not a new Kenya, simply an aging one. And that’s okay.

Still, I don’t want to end on “that’s okay,” because I think botox is harmful. It freezes what should be displayed, hides what should be seen, un-ages even as it ages into agelessness. It makes visible the act of hiding, creating a dangerous façade.

We have had enough dangerous facades, and the new Kenya might be yet another one.

How, then, to think about the ongoing Kenya, Kenya at 45, as a product of Kenya at 1 and 15 and 30?

As should be apparent, I have no real argument, but I am uneasy, and if nothing else, the past few months have taught me to heed raised hairs at the back of my neck.