PEV: From Event to Era II

Kima comments:

Let me ask you though, does shame play any role in our public life? It strikes me that shame has no place in our public life. Unless of course it is the shame of unzipped trousers at a rally or something along those lines. I bring this up in response to your post since it made me again wonder whether we have any limits that we will not tolerate the degradation and suffering of our neighbours. Such limits would be set by the kind of ability to feel shame that would have led to resignations by senior government officials after January. There was not a single one and there has not been one for decades if my recall is right. Public life in Kenya is shameless while the private life is filled with a passionate desire for dignity and integrity – often in church or inspired by the church. We want to be clean individuals in a filthy pig-sty.

My response.

We have believed, for too long, that Kenyan politics are wedded to shame. We regularly chastise our leaders, “shame on you,” a practice that has deep roots in colonialism and continues to be perpetuated through our schools and churches. To shame, we attach a cluster of meanings: traditional modesty, Christian temperance, middle-class repression, a narrative that suggests our society is based on and responds to the strategy of shaming.

Above all else, we whisper, we would rather not be shamed.

Shaming is a powerful strategy of control. We use it to manipulate gender and sexuality, to define relationships within and between generations, to define an increasingly internationalizing social that seems to evade our grasp. And so we have come to believe that our quotidian uses of shame to discipline each other function as what Foucault terms a “microphysics of power.” Indeed, so powerful is this belief that, in recounting our childhoods, we recall moments of shame with shame.

Even now, blushes stain our cheeks.

Yet, we are wrong to believe that our so-called “political class” operates within the same economy of shame.

Here’s the political ruse: the political class continually use shaming on us and on each other. And because it remains one of their favorite tools for social control, we believe that they are equally disciplined by shame and shaming, that when organizations take out full-page ads that read “shame on you!” the political class are constrained, their movements checked, their actions reconsidered.

In Kenya, we have assumed that shaming is a strategy that elicits a moral and ethical response: we shame politicians and they finally look at us, see us, act for us.

And, so, we have granted the strategy of shaming a political power, unable to see how that power is vitiated and dissipated, exhausted and ineffective by the time it reaches the doorway to the halls of power. Others can explore in greater detail and with more insight what happens when individuals become politicians in Kenya, what is erased, denuded, and numbed; how one survives on the gall of cynicism and despair.

This narrative remains to be written.

Our political class benefits immeasurably when we believe that shaming works on them. This is one of their ruses: to keep us believing that shaming effects change.

What does relying on shaming preclude or foreclose? What forms of collective organizing? What forms of political strategy? What tactics remain unthinkable and unrealizable because we believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that shaming works?

To continue believing there is a politics of shaming—that shaming creates change or even the possibility of change—is to be duped by a powerful ruse of power, all the more powerful because of its invisibility. As long as we continue to place our faith in the idea that shaming constitutes a politics, we remain bound to a ruse, a trick, unable to understand that the echoes we hear are not responses, merely sound bouncing off locked doors to the halls of power.

PEV: From Event to Era

A curious thing happened on the way to here.

As soon as the agreement was signed between President Kibaki and Prime Minister Odinga, the post-election violence changed tense. It moved, decisively, into the past tense. Politicians spoke with feeling about “what had passed” and “the bad things in January.” They reflected, and continue to reflect, about the “dark age” that we had passed through. In soaring rhetoric, they said we had struggled and come out a little wiser, a little better.

We who had not been killed had not died.

In January and February, those who looked ahead, and there were many, worried about the inevitable crises: the country’s grain basket had been robbed and starvation was knocking; many had not yet been re-settled and diseases caused from overcrowding lurked; many had no security and cases of rape mounted. We worried about the lingering ill feelings that could not be mollified by “forgive and forget,” about the temporality of a PEV that seemed past but also seemed so palpable.

In retrospect, it seems we moved from the event of the PEV into the era of the PEV. We begin our public conversations by invoking it. In private, we sharpen our weapons, keep open plane tickets ready, plan to avoid the return of the repressed.

Despite many promises and many speeches, despite political celebrations of our so-called stability, we are on precarious ground, in a period that can best be defined as a crisis. We live in post-election crisis.

What ails us is not idiopathic. This is not an episode of House and we do not need multiple failed tests and genius guesses to diagnose our condition. It is only a willed blindness that forbids us from seeing the national car is still sliding around in the mud, is tilted precariously, and those of us who are not injured cannot avoid trampling on those who are.

We are unstable.

And the old strategies of forgive and forget urged upon us by our leaders can not work. How does one forgive hunger? How does one forget want?

Our cataract-laden leaders continue to invoke 2012, and those with the luxury to do so also speak of 2012, when ineffective leaders will be voted out, when the people’s voice will be heard, when this, all this, will have to change.

2012 is too far away. And the geo-politics of now daily train the hungry and angry about the power of terror, that might is power, and that unkept promises license violence.

Our leaders cannot continue to believe that their paternalistic promises will suffice for the wananchi. And we cannot continue to believe that we have seen the worst we can do to each other.

In this PEV era, the rules change daily, and the choreography of living evades the rules of sociality. The urgencies of now will not wait for those who can to act, and, daily, those who can’t stand ready to explode.

From here, the tropical dusk glows purple and orange, and the blood-red moon draws closer.

Amber Resistance

Urinating in public is now subject to a fine. Perhaps it always was. I’m told the fine is now imposed. My next sentence ought to have the word exposed. I wonder how this fining works: if caught in the act, does one stop mid-stream? Does one complete the process because the fine is worth it, given the pleasure of an emptied bladder? What are the politics and aesthetics of male public urination?
*
One could create a typology of urinators and their watchers.

He stands under a bridge, hidden. He has lost some of the pleasure of watching his steaming, streaming arc, and cranes his neck about anxiously, looking for the ever-present, appear-suddenly City Council askari. He wonders whether he can charm the askari, and what favors he might be asked to perform.

He stands along the busy highway along rush hour. He dares us to look at his pitiful drops. As we watch, we wonder why he couldn’t wait until he got home. Surely, those little drips don’t need to be displayed in public. But he knows this is one performance of masculinity. Pee in public. Along a highway. During rush hour.

One could write about distance.

He stands close to the bush, his hands folded over his penis, making sure that prying eyes will not see size or shape or circumcision status. He creates mystery, hoping that the right eyes will watch, the right body become curious, the right person be seduced. He is the mysterious pisser.

He stands two meters away from the wall, one hand casually handling his pissing peter. He wants us to marvel that he has a penis. The fact of having a penis outweighs such minor concerns as size or circumcision status. He does this everyday on the way home from his job as a messenger, the job where those in skirts, those without penises, dare to tell him what to do. He is a man! Look!

One could write about age.

He is ten and he has to go. Now. Quickly. It will not wait. And it is raining. He stands at the edge of the ditch along the highway, pulls his penis out from the side of his shorts. This has to be carefully choreographed. The distance between penis and fabric carefully calibrated so that he doesn’t piss on his pants. It’s raining. He’s pissing.

One could write about those who piss in public only at night, those who must wait for daylight, those who piss only in bushes, those who piss against walls. One could write about the men who piss while standing shoulder to shoulder: the brotherhood of pissers. About the men who police their fellow pissers, checking to see whether they are cut or hung or clean or aroused or worth seducing.

One could write about the foreign men who recount the joys of watching Kenyan men pissing and washing themselves in public, the men who stand with their dollars and euros watching for the men who can be paid to masturbate for a foreign camera, or more.
*
One could write a history of men in Nairobi based on public urination. It would be a history of space and government—about how the incredibly filthy public toilets of yore demanded we create other spaces of sociality. It would be a history of distances, of getting from here to there, of the time it takes to wait and the time it takes to go. It would be a history of diuretics—our relationship to tea, soda, water, and beer. It would be a history of those who wait and those who can’t, those who dare and those who must, those who perform and those who are compelled.

If urine stains could talk, what would they tell us about the history of this city? What would be the history of bodily salts and semen-tinged fluids? Of venereal-stained fluids and antibiotic-laced relief? What would be the tale of spatters and streams? Of paint jobs interrupted and colors that can’t mask smell?
*
Following weekends, the sidewalk outside the campus bar smells of puke. After a year away in Amherst, I return to a smell that I have not missed. The smell disturbs me, not because of what it is or what caused it, but because of what is missing.

When I return to Nairobi, I realize what’s missing: piss. The smell of piss.
*
I have mentioned that I want to write about public piss to several people, reactions vary. Some are intrigued by the perverse possibilities (“will there be pictures?”); others can’t quite grasp why this most banal of activities, though now illegal, captures my attention (“aiii, you’re crazy!”); still, others attempt to dissuade me, convinced that the topic lacks elegance or interest (“everyone pisses, what’s interesting about it?”)

It’s precisely the negotiation between the banality of public pissing and its now public policing by the city that intrigues me. It has gained new visibility, as policing tends to do; become less common in some places—depending on the time of day, alley-ways are noticeably devoid of pissers; become an activity of those who are aware they are watched, those who debate between need and law.

And the needs vary.

For some, it is the need, haja, the press that cannot wait, and that one does not have the money to use the piss-for-pay toilets. And here a complex of issues arises: if one paid for tea, should one really have to pay to piss?

For others, it’s a necessary performance of masculinity in an urban environment that can be emasculating, where one’s lean, muscled torso is subject to the whims of yet another tumbo mbele whose gachungwa flirts with hungry eyes and whips off skin with her cat-o-nine tongue.

Still, for others, it’s that the distance between here and the next available facility is too far, though a toilet may be nearby. Class dictates where and whether one may go. One speaks of amber resistance.

And, for some, it’s an ongoing competition: to see how far the stream will go this time. How far up the wall, how far into the valley, how far into the river. The perverse pleasure of believing, rightly or not, that one’s piss is part of the city and will be ingested by its residents.
*
I was here.

I pissed.

Between the grace of the public performer and the awkwardness of the haja the choreography of right and right now.

No Taxes for MPs, No Taxes for Us

Pass it on.

Notes on the Matatu, 11.26.08-11.27.08

I have always through that my desire took shape at Club Z, Seattle, where the erotics of availability trumped the aesthetics of scarcity. Or through my best Korean girlfriend, who explained the distinction between fat and thick, in word and in deed. Or in darkened theaters where questing hands found welcoming flesh.

In memory, desire begins where one finds permission.

If the faces that populate my fantasies begin and end in vowels, I have blamed nostalgia, unable to negotiate the structures of foreclosure that left me unrecognizable.

It is impossible to describe the complex of impossibility that subtended sexual awakening. My prose fractures under the burden of stories that could not.

It took ten years away for me to imagine Kenya as more than no, that’s not possible. It took ten years for the bodies in my fantasies to acquire home-grown names, to smell of imperial leather, Fa, Lifebuoy, rugby, hockey, football, “jai,” funkys’ illicit trips to Riruta, returns from other intimacies.

One writes desire in retrospect.

24. Seattle.

The beginning of oooooooooh.

To recognize desire as such years after requires one to question the impossibility of that earlier recognizing. To understand—and re-feel—the violence of a palpable, silent no.
*
One returns to this site of impossibility hoping for softer, tear-soaked ground, ceilings moldy from accumulated lachro-precipitation, hoping that semen-stained sheets and sweat-soaked bodies provide forms of social lubrication.

One returns to this site of impossibility hoping that the casual touch means something, the flirtatious smile is directed toward one, the seductive glance beckons, that one finds traction on the muddy slopes of childhood playgrounds.

One hopes for finger-nail-size spaces under doors, mosquito-size spaces in windows, and even that seems excessive.
*
I return chasing rumors of rainbow-decorated rooms, Ugandan-themed drag, of young men who take dick seriously and young women who hum in labial folds.

I return to whispers of here at this place and there at that place, to the promise of muddy puddles that offer partial reflections. I return hoping that my US-created scars do not turn into keloids, that Nairobi will pumice my queer-created calluses.

I return hoping for the promise of the not impossible.
*
I had forgotten about the beauty of Nairobi’s men.

Denim is sexy again, skinny jeans eroticized, fashion there surpassed by quotidian haute couture poses here. Everywhere magazine poses—how Nairobi’s men occupy space.

I am struck, here, by what the ordinariness of blackness permits.
*
But one gulps for air and, sometimes, gets enough until the next breath.
*
How does one feel return and is this the same as feeling at home?

Home. Queer. Home.
*
I have re-discovered sugarcane, lost my taste for mango.
*
It rains in patches of 50 meters here. We stand a foot apart in different weather zones. To walk on the same road is not to be in the same weather.

Return. Home.
*
Why are you staying away?

Because I can’t breathe.

Others manage.

Yes, they manage.
*
Home. Queer. Home.

I learned paranoia here and my smile dons a Kevlar vest.

11.22.08

I shut my mother’s curtains.

It is 7:06 pm Nairobi time. And time has changed.

We used to close the curtains at 6:00 pm, when the beauty of the setting tropical sun was no longer visible. I would begin in the living room, head to the dining, and then go to the bedrooms. It was soothing.

This is one way to create a house: the daily rituals of living.

Now, time seems less coherent, the shutting rituals attuned to spatio-temporal dispersal: my body in the Midwest US, my sister in Holland, my brother in Sudan, my mother traveling, always traveling, to Kisumu, Kiambu, South Africa, Mombasa, Uganda, England, traveling, always traveling.

We shut curtains when we return, when we remember, when locked rooms are unlocked, when we get tired of the African Night.
*
Shutting curtains taught me about the African Night.

There was the African Night of my bedroom, from where I heard the ritual drumming of the church across the ridge, the all-night rituals that nobody noticed, nobody discussed. The African Night of my bedroom was silent, every sound magnified, inside out, from my heart to the furtive adventures of hungry geckos and belligerent moths that hit the walls and the ceiling, complaining that we dared to build on their land.

Every night, we learned we were thieves, living on borrowed land, and that land could be reclaimed. We rented and the landlords came for daily inspections.

This was the African Night of books by white men and women who imagined the terrors of the night. It frightened me. It still does. It was isolated and isolating, serenaded by mbwa kali and irritated cars.
*
High school taught me about another African Night.

We had no curtains in high school. I learned to sleep with the moon staring in at me, in front of strangers, through the rituals of snoring and night-talking, of those who hoarded food and ate it at 2 am or 3, of those who woke up to study. I learned to sleep through the temporality of Ramadhan, the ritual breaking of fasts. I learned to sleep through the returns of those who sneaked out to visit bars and brothels, those who met with their male lovers in hidden corners, those who seduced and were seduced by teachers, those who prayed and those who sinned.

Siafu.

Siafu do not visit, they invade.

I learned to wake up at 2 am, control my delicate sensibilities, use soap, water, paraffin, sweep, resist panic. To manage the night of small invaders.

This was not the African Night of white foreigners whose children are invariably attacked. We were irritated, but not frightened. Those who knew how to manage Siafu taught the rest of us. And we learned to manage.
*
It is hot in Makuyu.

Cooked-shrimp-colored scorpions sit in windows, waving their tails at occasional visitors, reminding us that we rent, no matter what title deeds say.

Bats populate the roof and their voices punctuate the aggressive hum of the sausage flies: piccolo to cello.

Here, we do not use blankets. Sheets are almost too much. It is isolated. And the African Night can be lonely.

We populate the night with stories and games, Monopoly and Scrabble, and welcome visitors from Nairobi and Thika. We bring our friends with us because we don’t know how to make friends here.

We are parched for urbanity, for the terrors of the city that are less terrifying than those here.

We crave and fear loneliness.

Loneliness.

This word does not exist in our Nairobi.
*
We close curtains to create the African Night.

My sister tells me this is romantic twaddle. We close them to keep out mosquitoes. But their delicate singing hums through the house. I prefer my version.

We close the curtains after shutting the gate, locking the re-inforced doors, shutting the security-proofed windows. And still we fear the sudden sounds of the African Night.

If you listen carefully, you hear the whispers of teenage boys stealing their parents’ cars to go to Carnivore, of teenage girls returning from dates with their father’s agemates, of husbands returning from their mistresses, wives smelling of their lesbian lovers.

We smile and talk about the glories of all-night prayers.

We worship in the African Night: on slick, wet, warm, pleasure-giving surfaces. Our moon-caressed bodies gleam, black flesh on brown, brown on red ochre, red ochre on dark chocolate, dark chocolate on milk chocolate.

We worship to the hum of mosquitoes, the belligerence of moths, the drumming of the church across the ridge, in dark corners on side streets, in the maize plants that struggle to be farms in the city, in cars under darkened street lamps.
*
Once, a curious man asked to worship with me. Asked me to worship him.

I shut my curtains.

Muiritu Mugikuyu

On January 10, 1961, the Gikuyu-language newsletter Kiri-nyaga carried an item, “Muiritu Mugikuyu Russia,” [Gikuyu Woman in Russia]. It reads,

Uhoro uria urikitie gutukinyira hindi ino ukuuga ati thi-ine wa cukuru nene iri mucii wa Moscow, na niguo mucii uria munene wa Russia, kuri muiritu umwe mugikuyu urathomera kuo. Uhoro ucio urandikitwo magathiti-ine ma githungu, no gutiri kuramenyeka muiritu ucio ni wa district iriko. Ndeto icio ithiite na mbere ikoiga ati ritwa ria mui[ri]tu ucio ni Wairimu. Tugukiuga ati Wairimu athome ohige na agagitucokirera hindi iria akanina githomo. (2)

The news which has reached us says that in a big school in Moscow, and Russia is so very big, there’s a Gikuyu woman studying there. The news was written in the English-language papers and it is not yet known what district the girl comes from. The news says that her name is Wairimu. We will say to Wairimu: study and become wise and return to us when you complete school. (my trans.)

I attempt to capture the locution of this particular article. The article is noteworthy in several respects. First, in the negotiation between oral and written works. The opening, “the news has reached us” participates in an oral tradition of conveying news from person to person; it makes social what might be detached, the act of reading. It is only in the second sentence where the act of reading a newspaper in English is mentioned. How to think, here, about translation? Not only from language to language, but from page to performative idiom on another page. And what becomes the role of interaction? “We will say to Wairimu” speaks from the page to a person, refusing to keep the boundaries between the written and the spoken, the read and the heard.

The article is part of been-to archives: movements by Africans abroad were tracked and traced by other Africans. Celebrated, discussed, debated. One did not travel as oneself but for others.

This particular article becomes even more interesting because of the follow-up article, dated January 17, 1961

Uria Muiritu Mugikuyu Athiire Russia

Kiri-nyaga ni irikitie kuonana na ithe wa muiritu mugikuyu uria twirigite kwandika uhoro wake urathomera bururi wa Russia. Ritwa ria muiritu ucio ni Liliani Wairimu wa Stephen Githaria wa mwena wa Kiambu. Wairimu oimire guku mweri wa May 1960 agithii bururi wa Abachi na niguo Abyssinia na thutha ucio niguo ahotire guthii kuu bururi wa Russia. Ithe oigire ati ndari na kindu arihire gikonii thabari yake ya kuuma Abachi kinya mucii uria munene wa Russia wakuo Mosco. Ekuuga ati kuringana na uria arikite kumenya kuma kuri Lilian Wairimu, cukuru iyo athomagira ithondeketwo tondu wa nduriri cia andu airu iria itathiite na mbere, na nicio cia Afrika ona gutuika ni kuri na arutwo a kuuma mabururi ma Asia.

Cukuru iria Wairimu athomagira itagwo Friends University, Mosco, Russia. Riu iri na arutwo makiria ma Magana kenda andu airu. Lilian Wairimu ekwaba guikara mwaka umwe akiruta ruthiomi rua Ki-Russia na thutha ucio athii na mbere na mathomo ma urigitari. Stephen Githaria egukiuga ati muiritu ucio wake agacoka guku Kenya arikia kuhituka githomo kia urigitari. Riria aroririo kana niegwiciria muiritu ucio ahota gutuika Komunisti, aroigire abatairio ni githomo giciki.

How The Gikuyu Woman Went to Russia

Kiri-nyaga has met with the father of the woman about whom we wrote she is studying in Russia. Her name is Lilian Wairimu, daughter of Stephen Githaria from Kiambu. Wairimu left here in May 1960 and went to Ethiopia, which is also called Abyssinia, and thereafter was able to go to Russia. Her father says she did not have to pay for anything to travel from Ethiopia to Russia. He tells us that from what he has heard from Lilian, the school is devoted to the needs of black students, especially those from Africa, even though a few Asian students attend the school.

The school she attends is called Friends University, Moscow, Russia. She is studying with more than 900 black students. Wairimu will spend one year learning Russian, following which she will proceed with medical studies. Her father says she will return here to Kenya when she completes her studies in medicine successfully. When asked whether his daughter might become a communist, he responded that she is focused solely on her studies.

How did this work? Who initiated contact? Did Kiri-nyaga editors contact the father? Did he contact them? How did he discover that his daughter had been re-profiled (the story is adapted from an English-language paper) in a Gikuyu-language paper? And why did he supply the wealth of details he did?

I am interested in how this hailing functions.

In translating this story from English to Gikuyu, and changing the locution, using direct speech, for instance, Kiri-nyaga editors called out to Lilian and her father, interpellated them as particular kinds of subjects—those who pursue education wherever it may take them, those whose train to build the nation. The editors of this paper issued an invitation.

Lilian, or rather Lilian’s father, answered. He accepted the invitation, shared excerpts from her letters, helped to fill out what might have been absent, affirmed his daughter’s commitment to the nation, to returning and building Kenya.
*
Why do these particular reports strike me? What made them stick out from the rest of the more political articles on Kenyatta and Mboya and Odinga? This is one set of questions.

Another set of questions have to do with ethnicity, why my seemingly relentless focus on Gikuyu-language newsletters prior to independence? What does it mean to risk ethnicity? To dare to transcribe what might seem to be an exclusionary language? To risk ethno-centrism?
*
I continue to think that our most urgent, vital, and necessary task right now is to create and enhance forms of affiliation that bring us together as citizens. And so my focus, in turning to history, is to ask how this might have happened.

How do we call each other into being? And how do we respond to those calls?

One way to read this series of articles is as an example of ethno-centric pride. I think this is a limited kind of reading.
*
Kiri-nyaga was published in Nairobi, and while it seems to have had broad distribution—letters to the editor come from Nyeri, Molo, Nakuru, Kiambu, Muranga, and Mombasa—it’s striking that the editors’ “call” to Lilian was heard and answered by her father, from Kiambu, in less than a week. (Yes, yes, my geography is bad. I’ve admitted this. And I know sections of Kiambu are not far from Nairobi, and rural-urban travel, yes, I know all this.)

What compelled him to answer? What did he hope to accomplish?

It’s not simply that he answered but how he answered. He clearly understands the inspirational nature of her story and offers a route to those who might want to follow: go to Ethiopia and from there to Russia; get in touch with Friend’s School in Moscow. As far as possible, he reassures the young Kenyan who travels that there will be other black people in Russia and that the school enables learning by providing the necessary language training.
*
I have not yet touched the question of gender. And to do so, I offer yet another snippet, this time from February 21, 1961:

Amerika:
Muiritu umwe wa ruriri rua Gikuyu niekurikia githomo kia urigitari bururi wa Amerika mweri wa Juni mwaka uyu turi naguo. Ritwa ria muiritu ucio ni Florence Mwangi, na arathomagira cukuru itagwo Smith College. Riu eguthoma cukuru ingi itago Albert Einstein College. Aroigire ati kuu Amerika andu a ruriri rua Negroes nimakoragwo magiikiriruo karamba maundu-ini tondu ona mawira maria mega marutagwo ni andu aria eru a bururi ucio wa Amerika. Aracokire aroiga ati ari na wendo munene wa kwenda guuka Kenya niguo ateithie andu a bururi uyu.

A Gikuyu woman will complete her studies in America in June of this year. Her name is Florence Mwangi and she is studying at Smith College. Now she will proceed to Albert Einstein College. She said that Negroes in America are oppressed because all the good jobs are taken by the whites in America. She went on to say that she is eagerly looking forward to returning to Kenya so she can help her fellow Kenyans.

It is and isn’t unremarkable that Kiri-nyaga featured two stories, in successive months, on women abroad, both studying to be doctors.

To my mind, these articles highlight how the demands of nation-building and the hopes for independence shaped and re-shaped gender ideologies: the Kiri-nyaga editors are clearly proud and excited to be writing about women who are going to build Kenya.

In this particular article (on WM’s mother!!), Florence Mwangi responds to the editors, as does Lilian’s father. She responds to the hailing, identifying herself with a national cause, inserting herself into an emerging national narrative.

Simultaneously, she participates in the most frequent kind of diasporic exchange: she volunteers information about the conditions of blackness “over there.”

I have argued, elsewhere, that the archives of diaspora are more innovative and idiosyncratic than we have thus far studied. Diaspora is not simply a recovery but a making, a fabricating, and it often begins with the question “what is blackness ‘over there’?” I cannot—or choose not to—go into more extended detail about how archives across diaspora feature news items about “over there,” forging relationships of care and consideration, understanding the complex weft and warp of inter-national race making and re-making.

Part of a longer-term project involves re-thinking the diasporic implications of local writing, the archives available in Gikuyu and Kiswahili, in multiple other languages and dialects across Africa, the Caribbean, the United States, along the Afro-Indian Ocean, to understand these writings as forms of reaching out, of calling to each other across distances and histories, creating shared stories of inspiration and aspiration.

11.20.08

Amidst the myriad complaints against the Waki Report, I have yet to read or hear or see anything that discusses the structural conditions under which the report was written.

A few samples taken from the report, my emphases.

Initially the Commission attended to a number of logistical and administrative matters before beginning its substantive work. These included obtaining office space, hiring staff, and collecting background documents. One time consuming matter that kept the Commission from immediately addressing its substantive work was the lack of office space. This was something the Commission did not and could not have anticipated. The Panel of Eminent African Personalities kindly assisted with temporary quarters even though they were not formally responsible for the Commission. However, it took three weeks of discussion with the Panel and various government officials until the Commission was properly settled and was able to clarify which entities would provide the logistical support needed to move forward. (2)

The Commission concluded early in its tenure that it would not have enough time to visit all areas that had been heavily affected by the post election violence. The life of the Commission, as provided in the Gazette, was only three months and set to expire on 22 August 2008. Hence, the Commission immediately wrote to His Excellency the President of Kenya and to the Panel of Eminent African Personalities asking for a 60 day extension so that it could plan ahead. While the Panel supported the request, the National Dialogue and Reconciliation team, which was the final decision maker, did not. Instead the Commission was granted only a 30 day extension, published in the Gazette Notice no. 7288 Vol. cx – no. 67 dated 12th August 2008. (3)

Because of the failure to obtain a 60 day extension of time the Commission abandoned its original plans to conduct public hearings and investigations in Kakamega, Busia, Kericho, Bungoma, Laikipia, Thika and Limuru. Eventually, the Commission received another two-week extension for the purpose of preparing this report . . . The difficulty of receiving limited extensions piecemeal rather than all at once diminished the capacity to engage in forward planning. (3)

The Commission also sought audience with the political leadership and managed to interview the Vice-President, the Prime Minister and one Deputy Prime Minister. An appointment sought with the President did not materialize while the former President declined to meet with the Commissioners. (5)

[M]any [victims] chose to speak in private because they feared reprisals or were too traumatized to come forth in public. The Commission took great care to protect the privacy of witnesses who testified in camera. However, we did not have a reliable witness protection program which might have given greater solace to others who avoided speaking to us. One of the greatest challenges was to find victims and convince them to testify something the Commission went to great lengths to do in spite of its constraints, including time. The investigation team of the Commission was able to come to towns only two or three days before the Commission. Hence, they had very limited time to find and prepare witnesses, something that elicited disappointment, particularly when the Commission was unable to stay long enough to hear everyone who wanted to testify. (9)

The Commission appreciates very well that in the final analysis only a miniscule sample of the avoidable suffering inflicted upon innocent Kenyans was heard. (9)

Interestingly, it was only after the Commission had held its hearings that members of the public came forward to the investigators seeking to testify. (10)

In Eldoret, the Commission faced two main drawbacks. First, as in all places the Commission visited, there were time constraints. Given that some parts of the North Rift were major locus of the violence, the Commission could have benefited from more than the three days it had. Second, and most importantly, there was a pervasive climate of fear facing victims in the Eldoret area. Some witnesses who were worried about their safety were not prepared to testify in Eldoret. A few came to Nairobi to protect their anonymity. It is possible some witnesses who would have liked to testify to the Commission did not have the courage to do so and could not afford to meet us elsewhere. (11)

[U]nlike other parts of the country, the Commission received little or no assistance in the mobilization of witnesses and individuals who could testify from organized groups within [Western province]. Correspondence to the local branch of the Law Society of Kenya, for example, remained unanswered. (13)

[T]the Commission hoped that it would have an opportunity to serve all individuals adversely mentioned during its inquiry with notices of such mentions and grant them an opportunity to record their evidence with the Commission. For this Commission that opportunity never arose for a large number of adversely mentioned persons except for a few who came before us. Even in these cases, it would still be necessary for the Commission to carry out further investigations before naming names to verify all the material facts. The main reason why this threshold was not met is that the time allocated to the Commission to complete its task was extremely limited; it was in fact too short to contact and hear the side of all those who had been adversely mentioned during the Commission’s hearings. (17)

Based on these samples, Kenyans should have questions for the government.

1. Did the Waki Commission have the conditions necessary for it to complete its mandate successfully?
2. Why did the government deny the Commission sufficient time to produce a more complete and accurate report?
3. Could the government have helped witnesses and victims by providing them with transport to hearings?
4. What guarantees could the government have given witnesses and victims to allay their fears?
5. Why did the National Dialogue and Reconciliation Team refuse to support the Commission’s request for an extension?
6. Why did Kibaki and Moi refuse to meet with the Commission?

The very same bodies and individuals who hampered the successful completion of the report should not be allowed to dismiss it as shoddy and unfinished, not when they did not create or enable the conditions that would have made it a more comprehensive and just document.

My task here is NOT to defend the report. It is to ask that we pay attention to the conditions under which it was produced. And that we take those conditions into account as we discuss the Report’s possibilities and limitations.

11.18.08

We labor under the bleached innocence of ahistoricity.
*
Persistence is return, so I return to a series of questions:

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?

To ask these questions is to question the grand historical narratives we are constructing, in which “politicians,” from Kenyatta to Raila and Kibaki, create the national, regional, local, public, and intimate histories, presents, and futures we inhabit.

But these grand historical narratives fail to explain the pull of hailing. What was the existing hook, indent, hole that could be drawn to join in a call to arms? What public, ethnic, intimate, and familial stories and histories made individuals pliable, ready to be hailed into being as particular kinds of warring subjects?

How do we fail when we presume that the noble aims of national reconciliation and healing address our quotidian micro-fractures?
*
I ask these questions because they trouble me, not because I have answers.
*
We are already talking about the holidays. KCPE exams are done and my niece closes school on Thursday of this week. We have planned holidays here and there, long, lazy days of visiting and talking and eating and smiling and playing. And, no doubt, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol will play on Kenyan tv as it has for as long as I can remember.

What if we could re-write the script?

Not Dickens, but PEV, a script we authored?

Who would be haunted? Who would haunt? What lessons do the haunters have to teach? Would we listen?
*
Ghost of PEV Past: In 1992 you promised a solution

Ghost of PEV 2008: You promised a solution

Ghost of PEV 2013: Will you promise a solution?
*
Reports are trickling in.

As the politicians dance, the people sharpen weapons. As the politicians talk, the young men practice how to swing machetes. As the politicians prevaricate, the people swear never again.
*
Ghost of PEV Past: Even when I chose not to vote, my votes were multiplied, 1,000 registered voters multiplied by 100. Jesus math.

Ghost of PEV Present: The fiercest warriors begin as hyenas. They eat the bones of the aggrieved and transmogrify to exact revenge.

Ghost of PEV Future: Here, there used to be a town. Here, we used to be a people. Here, we used to play. And in that bar, I borrowed cigarettes from everyone.
*
A Christmas Carol preaches redemption.

What is the lesson of the PEV Dirge?

11.14.08

How does my benign impact your quotidian? And how does your benign impact my quotidian? To begin from the relation between the benign and the quotidian requires we re-orient how we approach questions of what it means to cause injury.
*
I started writing this entry about three months ago, and have found it difficult to get past the first paragraph. In part, I suspect it’s because the word “injury” stops me. I’m not sure what it means and how it functions, or even whether it’s the best way to conceive the uneven effects and affects of social frottage—of rubbing along together.

In its multiple registers, hard, soft, fast, slow, deep, shallow, prolonged, sudden, all of which combine in various, unexpected ways, frottage offers a useful conceptual tool to think through sociality—what it means to live together. And if we imagine the benign and quotidian as two aspects of frottage, two bits of social skin that are always in contact, perhaps we come to one understanding of how it is we live together.

To some extent, I reach for the benign and quotidian to re-think or re-orient what I have discussed as normative. But I like the value attached to benign—symptomatic but not harmful—and quotidian—ordinary, everyday, often passing without remark, I like how thinking about these offers an idea of how we think the social functions.
*
I’m circling, in part because I don’t quite know where I’m headed. I suppose I should have an example of the benign—hugging comes to mind—and the quotidian—waking up. I suppose I should also have an example of where the benign meets the quotidian: when one shakes hands, where skin touches. For some, a social without this affirmation through contact is denuded of meaning, has not yet entered the realm of the social, is pseudo-social or pre-social; for others, this ritual invokes histories and presents that are, in some ways, unbearable. More broadly, the rituals of sociality are always places where the benign and quotidian meet.
*
It’s been two weeks since I wrote the last paragraph.

To write of what passes without remark, to make visible what others refuse to see, to convince those who assert the dogma of the benign, to translate hurt when online ink cannot cry, to resist crying because it is seen as an admission of weakness, a confession of lack.

What does it mean to write of impossibility when it is impossible to do so?
I have been reading an exchange on Sokari’s blog on black homophobia.

When she writes of the pain black queers feel she is told to stop trying to shame black non-queers as shaming does not work. When she writes about equal rights she is told to stop trying to force gay people’s agendas down other people’s thoughts. When she tries to whisper she is told she is too loud. When she tries to shout she is gagged. When she tries to move she is hobbled.

And still she writes. And still I write.

Because we must hope that someone somewhere will begin to see, begin to listen, begin to understand, begin to care.
*
Yet to ask that another’s benign be a form of care might be to ask too much, to hope that routine be empathetic might be to overreach.

It might be to ask that exceptions undo rules, that we make only difficult generalizations, that what we deem innocent become responsible. And this, for some, is unwelcome policing.

We ask too much when we ask casual, benign conversation to care.
*
Yet, the benign is also symptomatic. And the lump that might not kill still provokes anxiety. This metaphor becomes too tangled to complete.
*
How does my quotidian rub your benign? My insistence on saying gay and queer every few words? My demand that love between men, between women, between the intersexed, between trans, between people is, finally, remarkable only for being unremarkable.
*
Lines between rubbing, rubbing off, and being rubbed off. Lines between pleasure and irritation, when too much is not enough but in danger of being excessive. The grimace of pleasure.

To rub along is to rub together, to exchange skin and scent, here and there, now and then. We are always rubbing along. And sometimes I taste the bitter scent of your sweat on my skin.
*
More than three months ago, I wanted to re-frame questions of intention and privilege. I wanted to think not of calculated homophobia or so-called negative ethnicity, but of the smallness, the ordinariness of how we live together. I wanted to think about casual cruelty, but to reframe it so that we could focus on its casualness.
*
On the radio, the gay radio announcer (closeted, I am told) enforces gender normativity as he gives away money.

I am not Signorile, but on some days I wish I could be.
*
I leave unresolved what started more than three months ago as an attempt to name what political demands for equality and strategies of shame seemed to miss, an effort to inhabit the value of being casual.

I end on the uneven pressures and unexpected textures of frottage, how we rub along, my benign your quotidian, your benign my quotidian, rubbing.