09.08.08

Attachment is more palpable here.

In the past week, I have been “uncle,” “daddy?” “daddy!” “my small brother,” “kehinganda,” “my friend from high school,” “my former chapel prefect,” and someone trying to keep a diary, unable to distinguish between the wheat and the chaff.

I have become a lint brush, each encounter with the social yet another occasion to be marked. Each shift in language marks me, each change in accent, and more people seem relaxed when I am with my niece, familiar because familial.

I am bearded.

It is queer here.

I’m not sure how one negotiates attachment and allegiance.
* * *

Loyalty Pledge

I pledge my loyalty to the President and the Nation of Kenya;
My readiness and duty to defend the flag of our Republic
My devotion to the words of our National Anthem;
My life, strength and service to the task of nation building
In the living spirit embodied in our national motto ‘HARAMBEE’ and;
Perpetuated in the NYAYO Philosophy of PEACE, LOVE and UNITY”

I copy this from my niece’s school diary. As I write it down, it comes back—my leaky memory struggling against nine years of indoctrination. I last said this pledge in primary school, in 1989, when multi-party politics seemed a dream attached to dissidents, and our president was firmly ensconced as patriarch.

From this distance, it seems remarkably strange that we stopped affirming this collective vision at the moment when we had the chance to become national.

Why at the moment I entered a “national school” was the pledge abandoned? What kinds of solidarities was the pledge unable to foster? Or, what had it already accomplished that could now be deployed?

Listening to those around me, I realize how thoroughly such indoctrination took hold. It seems telling that the figure of the president deserves our first allegiance. It is this, I suspect, that led us to believe that Kibaki and Raila held the keys to our unsettled peace.

Or, we were tired.

There is a longer, more intricate narrative about childhood development, Kenya’s political history, and figurative language.

Briefly, the abstraction figured in “the president” blossomed in a million conversations, pitting the sitting president against the first president against those we believed should have been president. It is no coincidence that this deliberately figurative language of allegiance was abandoned in high school, when we began to learn about figurative language.

Metaphor becomes dangerous when one learns about metaphoricity.

Metaphoricity pits allegiance against attachment.
My President against The President.
My Nation against The Nation.

In retrospect, part of Moi’s genius was to weld the two, to appear so constantly and consistently in the media—we almost knew when he went to the bathroom—that the slide between “my” and “the” was arrested: we schoolchildren waved his flags and drank his milk.

To arrest metaphoricity and hold it captive in Nyayo House.
* * *
I continue to struggle with the Pokomo lullaby whose tune we adapted and transformed into a national anthem.

That it was a lullaby feeds into my ongoing narrative, adapted from Lauren Berlant, about infantile citizenship. That it takes the form of a prayer feeds into another narrative about the ambivalent function of religion and religious discourse in Kenyan history and politics.

I tremble when I remember what we permitted, or could not protest, because Moi went to church and was a professed Christian.

Would it make sense to say we had been lulled to sleep?

Since the PEV, the anthem has gained new significance, I am told, become an oft-repeated prayer

O God of all creation
Bless this our land and nation
Justice be our shield and defender
May we dwell in unity, peace, and liberty
Plenty be found within our borders.

I’m struck by how passive it seems—to be fair, the following two stanzas seem less passive. But we sing the full anthem rarely. Instead, we repeat this prayer, this mantra, this lullaby.

What is our role under this theistic contract? Is this why we panic when self-anointed prophets tell us “God has turned his face away from Kenya”? Is this why believing in some form of religion or other is a national pastime, why there is so much pressure in high schools to be for or against religion?
* * *
Dressed in her church garb, my mother tells me the words are “so beautiful.”

I remind myself that she was there the first time they were sung. We have a different historical relationship to these words, different affective reactions. After the turmoil of colonialism, how refreshing this lullaby must have seemed.

And part of me understands its appeal after the PEV. Still I continue to resist what it seems to demand.

That old word with which I have so many problems, “agency,” dogs me.

09.07.08

I remain unsettled, but not haunted. Startled by the house’s new eccentricities, the sound of the fridge turning on, the roof stretching, the water pressure in the taps.

Each new thing reminds me that while the trappings may look similar—the dried mustard carpet that screamed “boy” to my parents, and became mine—the house has settled in new ways, and I have yet to understand its new rhythms.

There is a sense of anticipation, but it is not mine, and after a few days, I realize I cannot be here, not like this, that I am more comfortable with stories than relatives, that I have been engaged in a 7 year divorce, and this feels like an awkward trip to a once-familiar home filled with other people’s livings and lovings.

There are new patterns of talking, dominated by children and marriages, and parents, whose short declarative sentences, “do this, let’s go, come here” and constant interrogatives, “do you want to eat? Are you hungry? What do you want to do?” seem much too familiar, and though not directed at me, hang in the air, linger and flavor the ways in which we talk to each other, through proxies: “may I borrow your child?”

The trees have acquired more rings, the plants now reach through my bedroom window, there are new stains on the carpet, and I find the bathroom commode both too high and too narrow.

My much-expanded body is closer to the walls and, though fully grown when I left, I feel taller—perhaps I have grown taller, perhaps we never stop growing.

I have to reason with mattresses and seats that have become accustomed to other bodies, to move into spaces made comfortable by others’ morphologies, and it’s curious to see which pieces of furniture decline to cooperate. My mother’s new couches will not yield, and every time I try to sit on them they slant this way and that, push my legs into awkward positions, have no give, tell me, as only couches can, that they are not for me.

A beautiful rosemary bush grows outside my window.

Today, I will pick avocados.