I wonder if the gecko hiding behind the poster in my room gets enough food. I’d like to say this is an elaborate metaphor for something grand. Really, it’s simply what happens when my brain is tired.
Perhaps I should go entice insects to my room so the gecko doesn’t starve. But he looks like a healthy fellow.
I wonder if this is how politicians think about us.
It remains amazing, amusing, and heart-breaking to me that most of the articles published on colonial intimacy and especially colonial homosexuality focus on white men. With apologies, of course, because the archives don’t really have “native” voices and it would be presumptuous on the part of mostly white historians and theoreticians to imagine what “it must have been like” for a black or brown person. Indeed, Robert Aldrich’s mis-titled book should really be called “white men abroad,” not Colonialism and Homosexuality, a title which presupposes, I had naively assumed, that black and brown names and bodies and desires might feature.
Except, of course, we “know” that black and brown people felt “exploited” and “victimized” and “othered.” Did they/we experience passion and desire? Were they/we overwhelmed with longing? Did they/we have complex inner lives?
*we should put a moratorium on scholars who write about colonialism without substantive discussions of black and brown peoples who were always more than colonized, and who had names and ages and could walk and talk and even think and negotiate; if one wants to write about the trauma of white colonizers, then the subtitle should always be “the trauma of white colonizers,” not “colonialism and x”*
My frustration with such studies—and they are legion—is one reason why the groundbreaking anthology Black Queer Studies, which I am staring at right now (which five books will you carry to Kenya? I’ll take thirty!) frustrates me so much. Even in its pages, the African queer remains a thought to be thought by someone else, by the “African who dares.” And when Africa is invoked by similar works it is as the site of confirmation—look! Even there we were queer!
It is impolitic to be writing this, though I am fairly confident that my 3 readers will not destroy my career. (Will you? Please don’t!)
I will not venture here into how the sites where knowledge about colonialism is produced shape the racial dynamics of such knowledge, its reception and dissemination; its presumed and assumed interlocutors. Others can tackle these still very critical issues. I find myself reading and re-reading the body of work produced in the 1970s and 1980s in the still nascent field of postcolonial studies, and marveling, not at how far we have come, but at the inches we have moved since then, inches, and so I find myself amazed by those who proclaim postcolonial critique moribund.
*
In part, I am thinking about this because I am reading a bunch of articles that bear such a close resemblance to the ethno-pornography of the 19th and early 20th centuries that I find myself quite amazed. At times it’s difficult to understand whether I’m reading scholarly studies or ads for sexual tourism: Morans Do it Better!
Now, this presents a quandary. I study sexuality. I teach sexuality. I write about sexuality. Why, then, do I feel so uncomfortable reading about Morans’ sexual techniques? One scholarly way to put this is that during such moments I am trying to negotiate what is queer and what is postcolonial.
Even as I attempt to think past the Afro-Victorianism that has plagued African and postcolonial studies, I remain wary of the salacious writers, researchers, editors, and knowledge consumers who read about black and brown sexuality as much for titillation as for knowledge. And titillation IS a problem when the object of knowledge, or presumed subjects, are not considered readers of knowledge or actors about such knowledge. It is a problem when the “lovemaking techniques” or, better yet, the “sexual strategies” of (insert African group) become the object of tender, extended, loving descriptions without any acknowledgment whatsoever about the ethics of such documentation—really, ethics is just a big word for saying without any acknowledgment whatsoever of Africanist and postcolonial critiques about such scholarly endeavors.
I would not censor such studies. I think they are valuable. But if they are to construct their objects of knowledge as subjects in the world, then they have to speak with us and to us, have to consider how we engage the forms of knowledge produced about us, but seemingly never for us.
It seems fundamental and elementary: Africans read knowledge produced about Africa. It might not be a bad thing if non-African scholars writing on African bodies and intimacies acknowledged this.
The Waki Report consistently uses the term “cosmopolitan” to describe multi-ethnic communities. For instance, in describing Nakuru district, the report states that it “remains one of Kenya’s most cosmopolitan where most of Kenya’s ethnic communities are found” (98). What is the labor of the term “cosmopolitan” here? What does this particular appropriation of the term mean? How does this usage intersect with and interrupt other uses of the term cosmopolitan, many of which are based on inter-national rather than intra-national movement?
Certainly, this intra- and inter- distinction need not hold. Afro-diasporic writers of the late nineteenth century at least through the late 1920s used the term “cosmopolitan” to re-fashion discourses of miscegenation and also, we might argue, to assert their inter-intra heritages. In Contending Forces and Of One Blood, for instance, Pauline Hopkins traces the inter-intra formation of Afro-diasporic blackness, providing, at the same time, a biological model for cosmopolitanism (and it’s important that it’s not hybridity she theorizes and advocates, but cosmopolitanism—why this is so remains to be explained).
What might be termed bio-cosmopolitanism becomes one of Georgia Douglas Johnson’s signature moves as she re-frames and re-values national blackness. (The article on this is still in process.)
Is it possible to envision, conceive of, theorize something called bio-cosmopolitanism? What happens to the body in discourses of cosmopolitanism? What are the intimate presumptions of cosmopolitanism, for to be “at home in the world” or, in some formulations, to be “un-homed in the world” is a kind of intimate negotiation that involves fashioning and re-fashioning the world, stretching and molding the meanings of home, home-liness, and un-homed.
*
And so back to Nakuru district, this site of Kenya cosmopolitanism. I’m not yet sure if cosmopolitanism just is or whether it has to be set in motion; whether or not it is conscious; if all multi-neighborhoods or regions can be or should be considered “cosmopolitan.” Yet, I admit, these questions arise from my own particular contexts in which I think more often about inter- and intra- and multi- and wrestle with how these formations-formulations intersect with internationalism, globalization, cosmopolitanism, and similar terms.
I’m not sure I have a handle on cosmopolitanism—am not sure if there is a way to get a handle on it. I continue to wonder whether there’s such a thing as African cosmopolitanism that would be related to and yet not reducible to Afro-cosmopolitanism. Is there a cosmopolitanism that operates out of a different knowledge economy than the clichés of cosmopolitanism would presume?
One way to read Nakuru’s cosmopolitan status—which, in the Report, is based on the African residents not the Euro-American tourists—is to think about what it means to take African ethnicity seriously, as worthy of consideration as race or religion in other contexts, to challenge the lamentable assumption that ethnic difference is reducible to petty squabbles among siblings. To think through ethnicity, not around it, as so many of us are wont.
*
There are other meanings of cosmopolitanism, as Derrida reminds us. And these interest me much more within an African context. Cosmopolitanism as a space of refuge—a city that offers refuge—and cosmopolitanism as a hospitable space.
This latter description interests me very much given that we Kenyans are famed for our hospitality—the truth status of this claim no longer troubles me that much. Is this what we mean when we term Nakuru cosmopolitan? That it is a hospitable place of refuge? And is this what we lost during the PEV?
Was the PEV the loss of cosmopolitanism?
*
You see, I have not yet moved from January 2008. I don’t understand what happened. And it’s not a matter of facts—I have read analysis after analysis, report after report and I still don’t understand. I would like to say evil exists and move on. But this is inadequate.
This is the question: what made people like me erase their histories of conviviality and rape and torture and kill each other? What turned cosmopolitan districts like Nakuru into ethno-genocidal zones? Is there a structural weakness to Kenyan cosmopolitanism, to the presumed social contracts that anchor and secure it?
For the past 10 months, I have been a blind man touching the elephant’s many parts, and I’m still to discover what I’m touching, holding, feeling. I have been told by many people that to do so is a privilege, for life continues, and we must act: wake up, go to work, return home, go out, come back, buy, sell, come back.
But every time I try to move, I touch yet another part of the elephant. So I keep asking myself what it is that I am touching and how it compares to what I have touched before.
Skin may have memory, but mine remains stubbornly amnesiac.
How to understand the deliberate madness, that awesome blend of rational irrationality that erases histories of conviviality? How does one crawl into the skin of people like me and what price must one pay to do so?
*
People like me.
The simile forges a relationship—and I do treat it as a simile. It forges a relationship because speaking from the distance of horror fueled by the fear of taint produces a certain stance in the world, a distancing that for all its rightness—and it’s so appealing to stand on the side of right—orders the world in a way I’m not comfortable occupying.
*
I have just finished reading a powerful, forthcoming article on suffering and justice that focuses on the State’s role in providing justice, ensuring justice has a voice. I was moved to tears, to awe, stunned into silence. This article is, in some measure, a response to my own vacillations around the problem of justice.
I asked,
How to distinguish between the foundation one stands on and the window one shoots through.
*
I have a problem distinguishing the merely guilty from the truly guilty, the guilty from the very guilty, thinking about how to apportion responsibility. When do our ethnocentric conversations become dangerous? At what point do circulating and disseminating stereotypes turn poisonous? What conversation triggers what action?
Perhaps my interlocutors are right and I’m simply waffling around language, creating elaborate metaphors when the issues of right and wrong, justice and injustice are much clearer, more precise.
The Waki Report is clear: We Must Punish Impunity.
Why, then, do I tremble when I hear politicians and civil society leaders chanting “to the full extent of the law”? Why do I worry that our long and inglorious history of unjust justice taints what we might even conceive of as justice? Why do I fear that resentment and revenge have already tainted justice, overwhelmed its capacity to continue building a necessary us? Why do I wonder whether justice administered is self-consciousness denied, self-awareness blinded, questions left unanswered, rot left slumbering?
I don’t have answers.
But we cannot, must not believe that the many reports produced have answered all our questions. We cannot, must not believe that implementing these reports’ recommendations will suffice to fix what ails us. We cannot, must not believe that the kind of self-conscious analyses we need will arise after justice has been served.
*
What then?
I began with a discussion of cosmopolitanism and I return to it now.
None of the reports—the KHRC Reports, Kriegler, Waki—offer a vision of the futures we can inhabit and create. This is not their task. It is our task.
We have to ask who we want to be—not take for granted that we are and will continue to be. We need to move past the belief that our essential innocence and inherent goodness will be enough to stave off what has ailed us in the past. We need to decide how the forms of justice we administer will shape us and form us. We need to decide how our forms of justice will restore and re-create Kenyan cosmopolitanism.
When did “if” start?
There are many tales of the one week mzungu (owm).
Because time is various in Africa, one week can be 7 days, 5 days, or 2 days.
In fact, the Daily Nation had a diary a few weeks ago from a owm. She came, saw the slums, dressed in a khanga, and in her diary she writes she became “an African woman.”
Or, you can see it on tv, on those country swap games. A man comes with his family, spends three hours with some very rural community, goes through some elaborate made-for-tv ritual and proclaims himself to be an elder in the community.
But these, these are minor examples.
My favorite genre of the owm is the EXPERT. Having spent three hours on a matatu, she can expound on transport in Africa; or, having spent two hours at Maasai Market, he can lecture on African art (African, not Kenyan).
Owm believes that being present, no matter the duration, makes one an expert on Africans, so easily known, so little to discover. Thus, one owm who had been here about 6 days announced that we have “no free time” and “no middle class.”
Shocking!
So, we packed up our bags after the meeting and went to Kileleshwa, Spring Valley, Westlands, and Loresho, where there is no middle class. We then watched TV, went for movies, played outside, attended art galleries and poetry readings, went to bars and clubs, read books and newspapers, and lamented the absence of free time.
Some of us react with rage at the owm, most of us with indifference. I do little justice here to what really should be a series.
What is your owm story?
PREAMBLE: Among the many problems of a rant is that it condenses many related and unrelated items. And, really, by now I should know better. While I do want to complicate the info-driven read-in-one-glance internet approach, it really is too much to expect others to read my mind. So in a more schematic fashion, here is what I’m trying to think through in discussing Kenyan exceptionalism.
NATIONAL CHARACTER—It remains startling to me that Kenyans, despite their many differences, really do believe we have a national character. Composed partly of tourist clichés we believe (warm, friendly, loving, hospitable); religious ideas we promulgate (meek, patient, and definitely longsuffering); and political ideologies we inhabit (cooperative—hence harambee, and patient). We have a well-developed sense of what it means to be Kenyan.
To use the language of my primary school teachers, we really do believe in the bad apple theory. Citizens, wananchi, are good apples. Within the good apples, there are a few bad apples that can infect the good. While my theoretical side quivers in delight at what is quite a complex theory of contact or frottage—apples rubbing against each other—my more cynical, practical side objects to this theory of the vulnerable, perpetually innocent citizen.
BAD IS IDIOPATHIC—Despite burning up with multiple fevers, we always suffer from idiopathic ailments (thank you House!). Idiopathic—without any known cause. There are never any structural or historical explanations that will suffice. Indeed, we blame witchcraft, demon possession, greed, or plain evil. Absent from such discussions, as so many others note, is a deeply contextual, richly textual historical approach that would begin to account for how we came to be where we are. Once again, the myth of national character comes to our aid, for we are, through our goodness, also immuno-suppressed.
WE HAVE TRUST ISSUES—While we may not trust the government, and have real problems with the judiciary, we also rely on them. (Long abbreviated discussion of ideology and hegemony.) Thus, we turn to them for guidance even while we point fingers at their blindness.
WE HAVE A TAINTED NOTION OF JUSTICE—We have yet to work out what justice is, how it functions, and which group has the moral authority to administer it. Despite what is becoming a refrain—people were paid—we have to consider that those who carried pangas considered themselves to have a just cause.
WE HAVE SKIRMISHES, NOT WARS—We have been debating whether we had ethnic cleansing, a pseudo-genocide (whatever that is), or, as Kibaki put it, “a little mistake.” In part, this debate reflects how we consider ourselves in relation to other countries. We are not Rwanda, Somalia, or Sudan. We have the unique capacity to trivialize death and suffering, even as we cry “never again!” As the Waki Report notes, “the post-election violence . . . was but an episode in a trend of institutionalization of violence in Kenya over the years” (viii).
ABSOLUTION WORKS—I want to avoid using the notion of scapegoating and absolution is not quite the right word. It is that we believe in plucking out diseased eyes and amputating sinning hands. We believe that blood does not flow through the body and thus we can remove afflicted parts and we will be fine. This is one reason we have been so eager to know the contents of the “envelope” even as we ignore our complicity and culpability.
THE REAL RUPTURE IS YET TO HAPPEN—This frightens me the most and I am not sure how widespread this belief is. Two members of CKW have expressed their belief that we are headed for a real rupture, a real break that will re-organize the social. I remain skeptical that such a rupture will happen or that it will happen as we anticipate. If there is worse to come, there is no guarantee that we will have a more just society afterwards (Animal Farm, Handmaid’s Tale).
It should be obvious that I don’t have a handle on any of these. I’m still trying to think about them.
I worry that what has turned into a debate about whether or not to implement the Waki Report (seriously, why do we debate implementing reports we’ve commissioned?) will make irrelevant or sweep under the rug some really vital, important issues.
I continue to ask what we owe the dead.
I’m not sure “justice” as it is currently being framed is adequate. And if it is only the beginning of what we owe, this debt that cannot be paid, then we must also consider what else we owe and who gets to pay and how.
BALDLY PUT: WE HAVE A DISINGENUOUS IDEA OF WHO WE ARE AND WHAT WE CAN DO TO EACH OTHER AND IT IS STANDING IN OUR WAY.
If we accept that African masculinity has “a history,” how is that history to be written or understood? And what are the implications of tracking “this history”? I use the singular form here because I remain uncomfortable with the notion that pluralizing terms is enough to account for the diversity such a rhetorical strategy purports to accomplish. Also, I’m interested in the conceptual difficulty of thinking through the diversity of singularity—attempting to negotiate this conceptual minefield.
To be even further reductive, I want to suggest that there are two competing—though not incommensurable—theses regarding African masculinity. The first argues that colonial modernity—or modernity in general, and this is code for a range of factors, including feminism, urbanization, and globalization, has emasculated African men.
A diverse body of literature tracks how wage labor, women’s earning capacity, and education has diminished men’s traditional roles as leaders, owners, and patriarchs. There are several historical and conceptual assumptions here that need to be challenged, not least that masculinity and gender relations were stable and relatively hierarchical before the advent of a de-masculinizing modernity. We must track how these gender discourses came into being—and, we are fortunate that some archives exist that allow a far more complex view of gender relations.
The second thesis claims that masculinity has proliferated, that the ways of being and acting masculine have changed along with history. While I like this thesis, I am also wary of its seeming originary claims: that one form of masculinity fractured under the weight of modernity. The claim of proliferating masculinity risks retrospectively stabilizing what might not have been very stable initially.
Now, there’s no doubt in my mind that something known as Afro-modernity—which does NOT begin with Africans encountering Europeans—impacted African conceptualizations of masculinity, which were always already multiple or, to use a metaphor I like, variegated.
It’s quite obvious that I favor one narrative over the other.
I have little patience with the de-masculinization thesis in part because it stems, quite often, from a very patriarchal view of masculinity.
At the same time, it’s historically irresponsible not to theorize how certain moments of Afro-modernity produced wounded or injured forms of masculinity in addition to many other kinds of masculinity.
How do we think about scarred masculinities on a continent where scarification is evidence of courage (battles won) and beauty (ritual scarification) and impotence in the face of superior weapons?
How do we think about textured masculinities? What are the textures of masculinity?
How do we think about hard men and soft men? About hardening men and softening men?
How do we understand the production and reproduction of African masculinity?
How does one write Africa?
Contemporary anthropology—names will not be named—offers an intriguing example of how Africa keeps being invented. It is noteworthy that “responsible” contemporary articles seem to make no distinction between colonial archives and recent research, such that a typical citation reads (X, 1865; Y, 2005). What does this temporal juxtaposition suggest? And why is it often in reference to Africa? (I admit, I’m quite thin on Asian anthropologies.)
As my friends know, I am slightly obsessed with citation—as format, as genre, as archive. I’m intrigued by the kinds of historical work performed on Africa through citation. On the one hand, we could take temporally disparate citations as evidence of persistence, a kind of long memory. Yet, the nagging questions that Africanists and postcolonial scholars have raised about temporality also persist.
In juxtaposing evidence from 1865 and 2005, do researchers seem to suggest that “nothing” has changed? We could be more sympathetic and argue that this temporal simultaneity diminishes the role of colonialism on Afro-temporality. In such a reading, colonialism does not re-organize time and borders. Yet, such a reading willfully ignores that the evidence adduced from 1865 (a temporal marker I use metaphorically) comes, almost inevitably from Euro-colonial sources (this phrasing also accomplishing some work). It is, invariably, from the chronicles by, the diaries of, the unpublished manuscript rendered by (insert European name).
And so what seems intriguing is that the circle of knowledge about Africa, at least in some places, continues to be a Euro-network, where the citations are invariably comforting in their Euro-familiarity. Even works that strike a good note—I like Rudi Bleys very much—can become distressing when one reads that the function of transnational ethnography is to teach Euro-Americans about themselves.
This is true, yes. But what about the hapless African (me) who picks up a book or article that mentions “me” only to discover the content and lessons are not for me? (Whether this is critique or complaint remains to be determined.)
* * *
All of the above is why it’s good to think Afro-modernity with Tutuola. Far from presenting Afro-modernity as a spatio-temporal transition from the forest to the city, he depicts this transition as a journey through the metaphorical forest of modernity to spaces of strangeness: his characters are often confounded and imperiled, but rarely impressed or comforted. They are constantly translating, using approximation to describe the sensation of things: one feels Tutuola’s modernity in all its bewildering splendor.
*
Here is one Tutuolian narrative by Taban lo Liyong:
Note VI
5 a.m. Had a long dream tonight. Dreamt was in a classroom – professor (my ambition in childhood). Right there before my pupils, had a most singular intrusion from vandals. A horde of them had the guts to come to my classroom, and call me a debtor, to my face! Within no second they had reclaimed every thread I owed them; every one I owed them; every synthetic unit I owed them; every piece of wood or grass they claimed I had taken from them. Then they proceeded to gnaw away at my skin, cubic millimetre by cubic millimetre, beginning from toes and fingers. I felt the reduction coming inevitably, but surely. Fortunately, it was quick – they were numerous. They made a special point to stop before attacking my heart. They even had the common sense to draw the attention of my bewildered students to my heart and saying that this organ ‘could have saved me, but . . .’ The class jeered before that fateful sentence was completed. Then they set to work again, with renewed vigour, with claws and teeth, and enlarged swallowing throats. They spent more time there. It was then an easy matter passing from lungs and liver to throat and neck. When they reached my head, they had instructions to the owners of my bushy hair to reclaim their things and go. That done, those who wanted my eyelashes, eyebrows, whiskers, moustache, beard (I am an intellectual intelligentsia-convertible, you should know) and any other hair on my face was taken. The skin was removed (together with the ears and the nose), the lower jaws were disengaged, with tongue, teeth, and palates. Two creatures (I think man and wife) sucked my eyeballs at a go. Now the skull was eaten away, and earthworms given the privilege to gobble my brain. (“Lexicographicide”)
It has been 15 years since I first read “Lexicographicide.” And it is only within the past two years that I have started to understand it, to think through the complications of adopting or, to use Liyong’s concept, to borrow one’s very being, one’s way of being in the world. We recognize the hints of Shylock in this exchange.
The story is dedicated to Amos Tutuola.
We recognize, from Tutuola, the idea of the complete gentleman (a professor in this case), who returns what has been borrowed, or, in this updated version, has the creditors come for their payment. This story strikes a note with me because of its setting: the university classroom becomes the site of undressing and denuding, where the post-independence, post-colonial scholar is unmasked.
Whereas Tutuola’s unmasking of the Complete Gentleman reveals the insidious death-making intelligence of imperial and war-making enterprises, Liyong’s macabre live dissection unmakes the “new” African, the new intelligence-producing African. It is a dangerous narrative insofar as it suggests that one’s heart, if it remains true, might save one. But true to what? (To be fair, this question was much in the air at the time of this writing—the story is first published in 1969 and Liyong had been a student in the States.)
It is here, I think, that African thinkers can learn from Afro-diasporic intellectuals and artists, who have been theorizing hybridity for at least one hundred years, if not longer. For while debates about authenticity and purity have been essential to Afro-diasporic discourses, they have existed, been woven with practices and discourses of hybridity, of learning to be multiple (an inadequate designation).
We need to learn from Afro-diasporic thinkers for as we write Africa as Africans, we risk autochthony too often, become hermetic. We need to learn how to write Africa as Claude McKay writes France in Banjo, to acknowledge the effects and affects of deracination with which we continue to negotiate, which continue to provide us with new energies, new paradigms, new ways of being in the world.
I have suggested previously that the labor of thinking Africa and the term African has the potential to alter how we imagine who and what we are, that, in fact, as opposed to those who want us to be specific, divided into countries and nations, tribes and ethnicities, races and genders, we might be and become African. To think this is to envision diversity as Afro-diasporic thinkers and artists have imagined it for us.
Kenyan exceptionalism continues to rear its ugly, arrogant head.
We were “on the edge of the precipice,” “at the brink of disaster,” “facing an uncertain future.”
But.
Unlike that country and that country and that country, we “pulled back,” “resisted the few bad apples,” “recovered our grounding,” “remembered who we are.”
Kenyan. Exceptional.
We need to be very clear about what we did to each other. We administered the “shibboleth” test on each other. We pulled each other from matatus and hacked each other to death. We pursued each other into forests and hacked off hands and feet and ears. We trapped our people in buildings and burned them alive. We killed each other violently, with intent, with full awareness. We fanned ethnic hatred. We hated our neighbors and friends.
We have pictures. We have witnesses.
Yet the report from the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights bears the title, “On The Brink Of The Precipice.”
Unlike those other countries, we held back
Earlier this year, I asked about the impossible debt we owe the dead, impossible because it can never be repaid.
At the very least, we owe them honesty.
We were not “on the brink” or “at the edge.” The moment the first person died we jumped into the chasm, eyes open wide, hands clutching a panga.
It is disingenuous to have a debate about amnesty—what limited debate there is—to point fingers at “those who were really responsible.” Increasingly, I find myself uninterested in the “list of names” of those who “incited violence.” The line between legal investigations and witch-hunts has always been very tenuous here. We are very good at pointing fingers, and cries of mwizi on the street are guaranteed a quick response, always.
We enjoy meting out justice—and this biblical word must be employed here.
We are less good, often no good, at thinking about complicity, about the “we” that merits collective justice, the “we” that cannot stand apart from history, cannot distinguish itself from the “we” that deserves punishment.
We search for guilty raindrops in poisoned wells.
*
To our great detriment, we are using the Kriegler and Waki reports as glass houses. Now that the “really guilty ones” have been identified then we need not examine our own complicity.
This is dangerous. Very dangerous.
What social, cultural, historical, political, and economic factors allowed the so-called guilty parties to succeed? Why were we bribed and seduced into forwarding text messages and lifting pangas? (The debate on scale needs to be more complex than it is currently.)
We cannot and should not use the Kriegler and Waki reports as excuses to withdraw from the deep, painful, and necessary labor of self-analysis we must have as a nation. We cannot and should not use lists of guilty parties to absolve ourselves of all responsibility. We cannot and should not continue to believe the stories we circulate about our goodness.
Too much is at stake.
Despite my best intentions, I am coding my conversations. In conversation with my brother’s friend, I avoid mentioning that the major life decision under discussion was driven by an intimate choice. (sufficiently vague, yes?)
Is this discretion or fear? And what are the obligations of attachment? Essex writes of being the benign, unreadable figure in the family portraits. (This is one reason why I refuse to be in family portraits—what is captured of me, my picture in the living room, shows an averted face with eyes being rubbed—there is no engagement with the camera.) It is, of course, that I believe I have made myself over-readable, that I am a too-obvious script, a caricature.
I teach interpretation. I should know better.
The distinction between what I can tell my brother’s friends and mine, what can come up in conversation and what must be avoided, and the expectations, the assumptions that I think I should challenge but then think again.
Here’s one context: I am preparing for a workshop during which I shall narrate one version of a coming out story. I will use the words “gay,” “homosexual,” and “queer” in quick succession to describe my life narrative—not that I moved from one to the other, but they describe, in some way, my relationship to the world, how I inhabit space, how I relate to men’s bodies, to women’s bodies, to structures of desire, to creating intimacy, to how I produce knowledge, to how I understand history, to how I theorize the quotidian.
I know, in some strange way, that it is always easier to come out to strangers, to activists, in some professional settings. In such places, the bonds formed and the distances created do some kind of work, be it to create a certain space for a discussion, to embed myself within prevalent discourses, or to rupture the assumptions others might have.
On a related side note: 13 years after the fact, I’m still trying to explain how a “Gikuyu man,” a “Kenyan,” and an “African” can be vegetarian.
Sara Ahmed writes about the obligations we have to make and keep others happy, that these obligations shape our worlds. Happiness is good to think with, as she claims. I think, also, about the narrative my brother’s friends have of him. I would term him a maverick, but the term has been destroyed. How would my narrative interrupt his, change, in some way, the narratives his friends have of him? It might not.
A wonderful poet tells me to live, simply live. Not to question as much.
How to think about the practice of discretion, the loopholes of retreat.
*
Today is family day—all the nieces and nephews are here, and it’s odd how 4 children seem like 400—and after playing with my littlest nephew, whom I adore, I am hiding in my mother’s room.
Working. Hiding.
Hanging from her wall is a photograph of the Woman’s Guild, not Women, Woman, and this is very specific. All the women of the guild are pictured, or at least the ones who showed up that day, proudly dressed in their headscarves: proper church ladies, a credit to their home education teachers 40-50 years ago.
I am struck by their names: Initial. Husband’s Last Name. Initial. Husband’s last name.
In what might be termed a Barthesian moment, I wonder whether these women—Woman—stand in as proxies for their absent husbands, many of whom do not attend church.
It is not that their bodies in uniform (headscarf, etc.) are effaced by their appended names, written on an uneven sheet of paper that has been placed at the bottom of the photograph—uneven, pasted on, not part of the photograph, a supplement. Instead, it is how to read this naming of absent presence in its materiality.
This piece of appended paper sits uncomfortably in the frame, has been squeezed in, is not at home. Perhaps this is true of all captions. Yet, there’s also something forceful about it, writing paper full of names—a kipande system, what makes these women Woman. It engenders a narrative that is supported by the bodily positions, those who are seated cross their legs at the ankle, their hands folded on their laps, their faces responsible rather than happy.
At the center of the picture sits the church reverend: the only man, the center of the Woman’s guild, an anchor, perhaps. But his body, though spread comfortably, looks squeezed in—perhaps the effect of his grey vestments that darken the picture, draw in one’s eye: the darkness at the core of the group, the reason the group exists, to support patriarchy. After all, the Woman’s guild cooks and cleans and raises children and demonstrates that the civilizing domestic mission worked very well.
This reading of patriarchy does not exhaust the picture, for I know the guild, know the women turned Woman, know they lead courageous lives as pioneers and supports, know that this sorority is a foundation of the church.
But the piece of paper appended to the bottom of the portrait. Initial. Husband’s last name. Makes me question the foundation and aim of this sorority.
*
What is the work of portraiture? This seems to be my question. What does it mean to be in a picture? What narratives accompany pictures? What stories are told? What stories remain hidden?
One can only resist the picture for so long: as any number of red-faced folk have discovered, we no longer control what is recorded and disseminated, if we ever did.
In this land of a thousand stories, what is the picture?
*
Police are “cleaning up uchafu” in Starehe—arresting prostitutes. The reporter terms women uchafu, dirt, something out of place, not realizing or caring that Nairobi was built by black prostitutes, that they are the black mothers of this city, that they deserve a huge monument celebrating their achievements.
We watch police slapping women on tv. Because men beat women. Police beat uchafu.
The Waki Report has been released. We can now comfortably point fingers. We have identified the wrongdoers. According to a nation editorial by Mutahi Ngunyi, “Kenyans are Good People.” We have bad leaders.
What would it take for us to be honest with ourselves?
