My Father

I have my father’s coloring. Shades of ochre faded to white, glistening deposits in termite’s bodies. And his deep socketed eyes, sunken in, withdrawn, brown puddles of loamy silence. His fingers, a frustrated pianist’s, unable to master grace, playing chord upon chord of blocky hymns, foot heavy on pedal, pursuing the elusive beauty that allows redemption, or amnesia.

Every few months I begin to write a letter.

One writes letters to those who are absent, hoping they will be received with joy and care, that they will alleviate tensions, explain situations, forge new relationships, enhance ongoing intimacies. One hopes that one’s prose will be compelling, one’s sentiments beautiful, one’s affect palpable.

And the most beautiful prose tries to move from here to an imagined there. One searches for Charon laden with anxiety-shined coins. I have sat with nightingales to learn their nightly serenades, convinced song can do what language cannot.

I whisper to my “you look like him” mirror-image hoping he hears through the reflecting glass.

Every few months I start to write a letter that describes who I have been and who I am becoming.

I no longer play chess because it reminds me of the day you bought a set to teach me how to play. I no longer read Sidney Sheldon and Stephen King because you are not here to buy them and buying my own copies seems empty. I can’t absorb your body’s oil through the pages. I no longer eat meat because it is obscene to imagine feasts without you. I no longer listen to Handel and Dolly Parton over Christmas. I find it difficult to visit your former optician. I cried the day I realized my feet were too big to fit into your shoes. I cannot be around men who wear Aramis because it is your scent.

I study the history of venereal disease. My work engages with rhetorics and practices of reproduction. I write about men like you, men who travel from here to there and back and leave pieces of themselves here and there. I drink coffee because you decided to plant it. I keep a dictionary next to me, open at all times, because you taught me to look up words. I love libraries because you showed me how to lose myself in other people’s worlds.

I do not ask what might sunder the fragile ties of memory: do you approve of my choices? Would you be proud of whom I have loved and who has loved me? Do you like my shoes? If I asked, would you visit me and stay in my world for a while? Will you read what I have written? Do you like my writing? What do you think of my friends? Am I the right kind of doctor?

I have written this during the quiet early morning hours over a period of three years, on two continents and in multiple towns. Each word a heart beat. Each sentence the length of a breath. Each keystroke, a reminder that you will never wave me off as I catch the next plane and the next and the next.

That when I leave you do not wait for me to return.

I keep promising that one day I will visit your grave and say . . .

What does one say?

Should I eat the grass from your overgrown grave to ingest pieces of you? Should I capture and keep one of the multi-generational insects your flesh nurtured, my brother from your flesh? Should I play Handel and Dolly Parton, Jim Reeves and Crystal Gayle? Should I wear too-small shoes? Scour the streets to find the donated clothes? Hope that your scent still saturates warm leather belts?

I leave at the end of the month.

I thought, this time, I would have the courage to look at your gravestone, mutter some meaningless phrase, touch soil and rock and grass and flowers and believe in the promise of your ghostliness. I cannot.

The ache of distance allows me to inhabit what cannot be loosed—to be melancholic.

I fear that, were I to visit, I would feel nothing, see soil and rock and grass and flowers, and understand that I care more for strangers called Wanjiku than for a dry husk, that interred bones have no affective pull, and your now-consumed body no longer nourishes even the smallest insects.

It’s easier. No, not easier. It’s more convenient to ache in language, to probe long-healed scars and believe in the phantom pains of memory. It’s more convenient to perform loss from a distance, to believe that, like your mirror-image, you peer myopically and see fuzzily, that diminished vision is unconditional acceptance.

The first letter I wrote refused to end.

I could not sign off, not goodbye, not I love you, not sincerely, not faithfully, not my heart to yours, not best. I could not sign off, not because I couldn’t let go, but because I didn’t want to know how I was letting go. I didn’t want to know whether in the 10 years it took to write the letter we had become strangers, bound by experiences that meant less than my last orgasm.

Ache is not pain.

Your going might mean less than the founding absence that made me. It might be, as I stand at your unresponsive grave, that I discover you are not the source of my ache, and my axis shifts, enough that I forgo whispering to mirror-images.

Another early morning. Another continent. On the eve of another departure.

I take books and bedsheets, new loves and old writing, dreams and memories of whispering to broken shards of glass.

The needed promise of what we leave unsaid.

The New Gay Agenda: A Response

I want to start
an organization
to save my life.
—Essex Hemphill

I believe in equality for everyone everywhere.

I believe that we are bound together by the promise of shared humanity. I believe that when we proclaim ourselves human, we promise to treat each other with respect and dignity.

I believe that citizenship is the glue that binds together a nation, a citizenship rooted in the fundamental belief that we owe each other equality.

I believe that between citizens there is no higher mandate than that we cultivate a mutually beneficial citizenship.
*
I begin this way because I do not have the luxury of being understood. I begin this way because I do not have the luxury of remaining silent. I begin this way because I do not have the luxury of being tired.

And there are so many who speak for me and over me and at me, loudly and wrongly.

I do not have the luxury of dismissing others as uninformed or ignorant. I do not have the luxury of not responding. Even when I don’t want to, I must keep responding.
*
We speak on borrowed grounds because our own land speaks in ventriloquized voices.

Kenyans against homosexuality take their arguments from the U.S. Christian Right. They cite the 700 Club and the bible as though the two are synonymous.

They succeed because we homosexuals in Kenya lack faces. We are invisible when standing, silent when screaming, unseen when beaten. We are incoherent when arguing, detached when academic, and misguided when political.

This is what we hear about ourselves.

How does a tree point to its roots?
*
I am here.

We are here.

We hear when you speak.

We feel when you touch.
*
Proposition 8 matters.

Proposition 8 matters because its success tells us that gains can be lost.

It matters because the New Multi-Party Kenya is becoming the old: populated by corrupt leaders, suffering citizens, intolerant factions. It matters because we are losing and might not realize what is lost until it is too late.

That a Kenyan, any Kenyan anywhere, would support Proposition 8, would support taking away legally granted equal rights especially in the wake of the Post-Election Violence should give us pause.

We have seen what we can do to each other.
*
When you tell me that I am not equal, you rationalize the worst that Kenyans can do to each other.

When you tell me that citizens of a foreign country do not deserve to be counted as human, you make me fear for the foreigners who visit us here.

When you tell me that your bible justifies oppression and that it takes precedence over the legal documents that constitute us as fellow citizens, you make me fear the fundamentalisms that destroy nations.

When you tell me that your humanity should count more than mine, I am left silent, trembling, looking for places to hide in the open savannah.

Body Slang

In fact, I’m becoming a well-known faggot.
—Essex Hemphill

One cannot decently “have a hard on” everywhere.
—Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon is the gateway through which many of us, black academics who live across continents, must pass through. This is not only for us but also for the credentialing bodies that, despite our many structural and institutional critiques, still tell us what knowledge counts as knowledge, what knowledge is worth teaching, worth pursuing, worth recognizing.

Fanon is the proper name for a structure of intra-racial policing that insists one must not “have a hard on” anywhere. Decency, that word which plagues so many queers, determines whether or not one will receive approbation as a black critic, academic, activist.

What might it mean, then, to aspire to be a “well-known faggot?”

Kenyans will recognize this formulation: “When I grow up I want to be a well-known faggot.”
*
This meditation began as an attempt to think through body slang. Watching music tv one day, it struck me that if one mutes the volume, one cannot distinguish rappers from Detroit, Kisumu, Kampala, Nairobi, Paris, New York, Arusha, Accra, across continents and countries. What might be termed bodily disposition, or habitus, has become its own language.

Walking in Nairobi, it’s difficult to parse body slang: the bodies move the same way as bodies in Chicago, but do they mean the same things? What happens when the strut perfected in Harlem lives in Kibera or Lavington? When the brotha-hug is the preferred mode of greeting among a certain set who, in a heartbeat, return to the palm-wrist-palm of our grandfathers?

Told that shaking hands is traditional, I have offered to do it properly: to spray my palm with saliva and then shake hands. (Those who wield tradition should beware those of us who study it. I’m not yet old enough, but it’s perfectly acceptable for respected older men to bless an individual by spraying saliva on one’s face.)

Body slang.

How do we understand the bodiliness of globalization—the circuits of production that take cornrows from women’s heads in continental Africa to men’s heads in the United States and back to men’s heads in continental Africa?

I think a lot about what we are gaining and what we are losing.

Men my uncle’s age, in their late 40s and older, still hold hands to emphasize a point. One’s presence is assured by a clasped hand, not repeated nods. Whether or not one’s eyes wander is irrelevant when one’s body remains in contact with one’s interlocutor.

Men my age and younger do not hold hands, at least not in the city. We are well versed in global homo-anxiety. A movie we watched. A song we heard. People we encountered. Sources are hard to trace.

Nairobi’s little queers sing of cock and cum, flame, oh, honey, they flame! Their Kenyan-built bodies ready for house balls in New York. Their walks tell stories.

Yet, the indifferent androgyny of most men here complicates what can be read, and how. Body slang. I’ve never been very good at picking up slang. Body slang.

Travel makes harder, not easier. The nuances of desire slip by me—to be fair, they always have. It’s difficult enough to be multi-lingual, let alone versed in global, rapidly changing body slang.
*
When I grow up, I want to be a well-known faggot.

Despite many attempts on my part over the last few months, I am still not yet a well-known faggot in Nairobi. Well-known enough that former friends at the church, 1.5 minute walk from my house, are always too busy to drop by and say hello.

Yes, I noticed.

But not well known enough to receive hate mail and invitations to secret homo-parties, though the latter is probably entirely due to the lamentable state of my wardrobe.

(This, of course, is the church that praises patriarchy and governs by humiliating and shaming its female members. Yes, I noticed. And only my deep respect for my mother prevents me from writing the scathing letter I had planned. You owe her.)

Back to being a well-known faggot. Or trying to become one.

Context is all important. Essex makes this statement to counter the sexism and homophobia of some guy he meets on the street, the casual comment that “strong women” are turning “black men” into “faggots.” (Have I mentioned I keep coming back to Essex because he understands that any black gay politics worth its salt is deeply indebted to and embedded within feminism?)

Becoming a well-known faggot, Essex style, is to draw from one’s attachments and obligations: to engage black nationalist politics, afrocentrism, feminism, and gay rights. It is to stretch one’s body in multiple directions, to embrace the multiple anchors that ground one.

To feel the pleasurable weighting of embedding.
*
Body slang.

When I was twelve, those who knew it better called me by it: “faggot.” And they laughed. The banality of the story does not lessen its affective power. We little queers dance through banality, knowing there’s something fabulous, a place where the music is loud enough to drown out the laugh.

We become well-known faggots, and those who once laughed now fear approaching us because taint spreads—and fragile male reputations must be protected.

Body slang.

The language of desire my body spoke before my very slow mind caught up. Sitting under a tree with another boy who, like me, disdained sports, and spent hours shaping his nails, more beautiful than mine. Mine also gorgeous, then. What I wanted. Pretty nails.

Body slang.

In Kangemi, a man smiles at me. Flirting, I think. A smile. A “yes, I know you,” an invitation. What we do when everyone watches. What we know when everyone watches. How we feel as everyone watches.

Body slang.
*
In Nairobi the men walk with intent, gracefully inclining where desire pulls.

African Universities

An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education points out that African universities face a crisis in hiring and retaining new Ph.D. holders, many of whom choose to go into industry (or NGOs). Fewer than half of University-based academics have doctorates in their respective disciplines. As the article points out, “most institutions have focused on raising student numbers rather than on improving the quality of education and research.”

With very few exceptions, most of the young Ph.D. holders I have met, early to mid-career, work for or receive extensive support from non-governmental, foreign-sponsored institutions. In addition to inadequate institutional support, ranging from lack of effective mentorship programs to the absence of research funds, other structural reasons limit Africa-based academics. I write, here, from my experience of being in Kenya over the past 3 months.

All the easy conveniences that enabled my dissertation—free printing in a graduate-student designated lab, the relatively cheap cost of printers and paper, the very fast internet speeds that let me download multiple files easily and search multiple databases—all of these can be difficult to find.

Internet resources are lamentably bad—the free access JSTOR and other online resources give to African universities, while appreciated, does not work with the available access. I have waited up to 30 minutes for a single PDF file to download and up to an hour for a single PDF file to transmit to colleagues over email. Even sharing knowledge can be expensive.

Printing costs are exorbitant. One place charged me Kshs 15 to print a single page. While this is on the higher side, even a cost of Kshs 1 a page becomes prohibitive if one wants to conduct online research or print a journal-length article, approximately 25-40 pages. Writing a single dissertation chapter, for instance, runs into multiple pages—the online research, the drafts, the copies. Easily between 2,000 to 3,000 printed pages.

It would be grossly unfair to compare the library resources at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with those at the University of Nairobi. UIUC has a world-class, top research library, matched only by a handful of institutions in the US and the world.

But.

While here, I have been looking through Kenyan history for a new project on Kenyan Intimacy, and have spent a lot of time at the Kenya National Archives.

I had hoped that I would have similar experiences at the University of Nairobi library. I could not get into the library. I could not even apply to get into the library. Well-placed sources told me the vice-chancellor has restricted access to students and faculty of the university. In practical terms, international researchers who might travel to Kenya to look at archival material at UON have no access; colleagues from Kenyatta, Moi, Maseno, Strathmore, USIU, Methodist, and other public and private universities have no access. I was told that even foreign researchers who had previously received permission from the government and the university had that permission withdrawn.

University of Nairobi library is closed. Sealed. Blocked. I asked my well-placed source whether official letters of protest from foreign universities might help and he shook his head. The decision is administrative and idiosyncratic, not pragmatic.

Faculty members teach ridiculously high loads, up to 400 undergraduate students in a single class, often without graduate assistants. A colleague here spoke of her MA rather than Ph.D. students, and told me that many want to receive the MA to fulfill bureaucratic requirements. As a result, research projects are often unimaginative and repetitive—the “girl child,” “FGM,” “Poverty in Africa,” not that these issues do not merit attention. However, the idea of higher education as a structure that produces new knowledge is absent. When a North American based friend gave a lecture here on the relation between material culture and symbolism, the students were baffled, unable to make certain conceptual leaps.

Now, all is not gloom and doom.

In what are less than ideal conditions for producing and disseminating knowledge, Kenyan scholars have forged innovative partnerships with other cultural producers, artists, publishers, musicians, journalists, the NGO sector, the informal labor sector, and though the volume of work emerging from Kenya may not always reflect this, interesting, unique, and exciting conversations are taking place.

Faculty may work under trying circumstances, but they work. And the work is fascinating and rich and textured, and has a wide audience.

Here’s a for instance.

In late October, I participated in a workshop on sexuality. Workshop presenters included academics, gender activists, film and documentary makers, editors and publishers. Workshop attendees ranged from those working in sports-based activism (football for girls) to representatives from the Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Kenya (GALCK). We had teachers and lawyers and actors and community-based activists in the audience.

The publication emerging from this event—due out in February 2009—will probably run to well over 1,000 copies. Now, this may not sound like much. But this is where it might end up. In government offices, including those belonging to legislators; in NGO offices working in the areas of gender and sexuality; across borders, in Uganda and Tanzania at the very least; in the church; with activists across a broad spectrum of fields.

I have no guarantee whatsoever that it will be read. But one never knows if anything is read. I am not the only academic who has a shelf full of “I’ll get to you when I can” books.

I do not want to create a distinction between, the well-placed article in Critical Inquiry or Publication of the Modern Language Association (PMLA) or African American Review that will be read by 100 interested academics if one is lucky, more if one is famous, and this peri-academic publication that will reach a broader swathe of individuals from multiple sectors. I respect and value specialized academic work too much to argue that one publication “makes a real difference” and the other doesn’t.

My broader point is simply that the very structures that limit the production of new, “groundbreaking” research paradigms in Africa also enable multiple conversations across multiple sectors. And the very scarcity of certain resources also means that peri-academic and academic events are attended and attended well. One workshop had room for 40 participants, and over 70 indicated they would attend, and this number does not count the other interested parties who just showed up, drawn by the topic.

We are curious and, as the jua kali sector proves, we generate new and innovative forms of knowledge all the time. As scholars such as Joyce Nyairo have shown, it might be that our most interesting forms of knowledge production and dissemination may not happen within the universities. Kenya’s knowledge economy thrives and flourishes on matatu graffiti, on street corners, in community-based theater productions.

But to say this is also to ask, then, about the role of our universities. If most of our knowledge is produced and disseminated elsewhere, what role do our universities have in the knowledge economy? What happens to our so-called “best and brightest” when they enter a space that lacks the resources to help them excel?

What happens when our university faculty cannot become scholars? Do not have the time or resources to conduct research and produce new knowledge? What happens when students enter an old, obsolete knowledge economy only to emerge into a world where the very language and concepts force one to learn new knowledge quickly, often without the leisure of student time or the presence of supportive peers?

Certainly, not all forms of knowledge circulate or translate into all other contexts. Many of the US-based arguments I learned and teach in queer studies do not apply transnationally: they would require extensive modifications to even begin to make sense here. Similarly, much of the knowledge produced here does not translate outside of an East African context. Place is key to how knowledge economies function.

Yet, the very structure of the global knowledge economy requires that academics learn to be if not fluent then at least conversant with influential, if not dominant, knowledge paradigms. Kenyan academics must know how to speak to their colleagues across Africa and in Europe and the Americas. We cannot continue to rely on that old, tired “I’m an African” bit so beloved of conference African participants in international conferences who use that opening statement to disengage from the tough conceptual demands being placed on them.

Locating ourselves is an ethical and political act. Disengaging from tough conceptual demands because of location is anti-intellectual.

The structural impediments mean that asking foreign-based Kenyan academics—in South Africa, England, Canada, and the U.S., to return and teach cannot be a solution. At the same time, asking inadequately trained MA students to teach university students deprives such students of the specialized knowledge acquired and disseminated by Ph.D. holders.

Africa cannot continue to be the place of “despite,” where we continually “make it” against the odds. Kenyan universities, in particular, cannot keep boasting about their recruitment and graduation rates all the while stunting the students who attend such institutions. One of the saddest chapters in the yet-to-be-written account of Kenya’s universities is how the so-called intellectual elite, those students who qualified for university with very high grades, found little shade under the tree of knowledge.

12.05.08

No one does anything in Kenya.

Official and unofficial writing is filled with erasures, fingers that point nowhere. “Beginning on June 15, 2008 current accounts will be closed.”

By whom?

Bodies without embodiment.

“The Management.” “The Board.” “Government.”

“Mobile phones not allowed here.”

“Simama Hapa.”

“Last week four men were found dead.”

No one ever does anything. Our sentences have no characters, no subjects who act, no agents. We live in a non-agential country, where actions simply occur.
*
What does it mean that we absent ourselves from our writing? What does it mean that when I revised my sister’s work she complained that I used “I” too often, even and especially when discussing her accomplishments? How does this rhetorical strategy tell us something about how we understand acting and actions, about how we construct social intercourse and, most especially, about terms like “responsibility” and “accountability”?

How can anyone be responsible when in our written language, the language in which we write instructions and orders and make plans and execute them, no one acts and no one orders?

Authority is rendered invisible.

How can anyone be accountable when we erase all signs of agency from our writing, learning to write, for instance, “loitering will be punished.”

By whom?

Who does the instructing? Who does the punishing? Who executes decisions?

If we erase all signs that we have been here, then how can anyone be found after we leave?

To look at our rhetorical strategies as an index of how we understand responsibility and accountability might seem like an exercise in sophistry (though not really sophisticated enough to deserve that description). And, only literary critics and those who study rhetoric might find such an exercise useful.

However, if one believes, as I do, that we write ourselves into being, then it’s possible that these sentences devoid of characters describe, in some way, how we feel about ourselves in relation to the life-worlds we create and inhabit.

We desire the anonymity of non-accountability even as we demand it from others.
*
Everyday Kenyanese says more than we realize.
*
“Just surviving.”

How did this become an appropriate, acceptable, and even commendable response to the question “how are you?”

What does it mean to “just survive,” and this voiced by residents of our “better” suburbs?

What kind of present does “just surviving” occupy and what kind of future does it anticipate. Is there not something perverse and wrong in believing that the fact of waking up is blessing enough?

We should be grateful simply to breathe, no matter the state of our bodies, our lives, our relationships. We have no richness to inhabit, to create, no beauty that illuminates the everyday, no joys to share, nothing.

We “just survive.”

And it is conscious.

Someone says to me, “if you’re not struggling in Nairobi, then you’re not really living in Nairobi.” This from a resident of our “better” suburbs.

I have written, elsewhere, how this narrative of shared deprivation masks and actively erases class distinctions. It is violent. And it is strategic. In this statement, there are no “haves” and “have-nots.” We are all “pushing along.” (The Gikuyu is much more eloquent, and those who know it will recognize the reference.)
*
We are addicted to “solutions.”

In every public forum I’ve attended, I have heard “no more theory, we want solutions.” If one doesn’t have solutions one doesn’t have anything.

And yet “solutions” are so conceptually bound to “problems” and “crises,” that even if the solutions are “creative,” they cannot escape their embedding in “problems.” Put another way, we cannot seem to think outside of the problem-solution dyad.

We suffer from a lack of imagination. And this, for me, remains our greatest failing.

But this statement requires texture.

We allow imagination as long as it is tethered to religion. Our cults and independent churches flourish. And we drown ourselves in their temporary numbing.

Yet, as I’ve found in conversation after conversation after conversation, any thought that veers toward abstraction, that dares to think outside of “problem-solution,” that introduces conceptual density into a society driven by the empirical, albeit an often badly conceived empirical, this thought cannot find fertile soil.

One can never assume that there’s such a thing as over-explaining. And, even then, one can never assume that there’s ideological space for thinking otherwise. This, this is hard.

How does one talk about gender, when it can only mean woman? How does one critique heteronormativity when nothing exists except heterosexuality? How does one dare to imagine otherwise when one is constantly blocked by facts, figures, the reality of “just surviving?” How does one speak of impoverished discourse to those whose heads are full of facts and figures and action points and strategic plans?

How does one speak of our collective soul when all the souls are already pledged to an indifferent deity?
*
Imagining otherwise is hard, almost impossible.

One must dare to inhabit what Raymond Williams terms the “emergent”: what is still in solution, unformed, inchoate, what may or may not sediment into recognizable form. Where one realizes that there is more besides and beyond a “problem-solution” structure, that possibilities abound when we let go a little, just a little.

This is difficult.

And we are reluctant to let go of the security that enables us to “just survive.” As I keep being told, we have elected the same politicians over and over and over, despite their records.

We are so wedded to the power structures we inhabit that even radical groups desire to attach themselves to powerful individuals with clout, and would rather submit to the ministrations of experts rather than think creatively, innovatively, not in or out of a box, but without the box at all.

We don’t need the box. We continue to fail as long as we tether our actions to its spatial allocations. In or Out.

There’s more than this.

We can think of more than solutions. We can refuse to be problems that need to be fixed. We can inhabit structures of conflict without killing each other. We have yet to even imagine what we can do. But we must imagine.

We must imagine.

We must refuse to accept the lie that we can only inhabit the reality principle, a lie peddled to us from our educational system and by our politicians. We must refuse to accept the lie that we have already seen all there is to see, that our dreams end once we enter leafy suburbs and buy new cars, that we are what we own and can buy, that the right solutions will finally do all for us.

We are more than solution-seekers and solution-creators.
*
Yet our language continues to betray us. We continue to be somnambulists in someone else’s dream, afraid to inhabit our own dreams, unaware that we can be more than restless figures in a morality play scripted to make us grateful to “just survive.”

This. This I cannot write more about. This. This disturbs me.

Roses for World AIDS Day

I’m always late for World AIDS Day.

Each year I promise to write something on it, during it, but it slips away, and I remember, too late. Yet, this lateness describes a temporal relationship to AIDS, and to the communities of men who embodied it, and who I can never meet except through their works.

Melvin Dixon once charged us to keep alive the names of the many thousands gone, to read and re-read, to circulate and re-circulate, to teach and re-teach, to publish and re-publish their works. To understand the value and importance of black gay archives: evidence that we have been here. It is partly for this reason that I return, every few months, to the same names, and it is partly because I know how easy it is to be erased that I blog under my given name. Even when I want to stop, when I take a long hiatus, I return.

And it is mostly because Nairobi can be so silencing, so proscribed, that I have been writing as much.
*

The Black homosexual is hard pressed to gain audience among his heterosexual brothers; even if he is more talented, he is inhibited by his silence or his admissions. This is what the race has depended on in being able to erase homosexuality from our recorded history. (Essex Hemphill, “Loyalty”)

Essex Hemphill grounds me. I bought my first copy of Ceremonies in 1996 and have held on to it ever since. On trips home, it has eased the loneliness created by compulsory heterosexuality and the anxieties created by homonormativity. After being preached to and preached at, I have found healing in his passion, his anger, his tenderness.

How could he have known this?

Occasionally I long
for a dead man
I never slept with. (“Heavy Breathing”)

Essex’s re-burial haunts me. His family wanted to erase all signs of what had perturbed them. At the end, they wanted him to have found religion and lost his orgasms. When I first read Essex, I started writing my eulogy, a desperate act to forestall what I feared might happen in some distant future, when loved ones erased me to keep me, lost me to find me, bleached me to accept me.

This time around, re-reading him—I was in a workshop and the heteronormativity exceeded anything else I’ve experienced since I returned; I needed to read him to remind myself of me—the passage from “Loyalty” jumped out at me.

Entangled by “silence” and “admissions.”

I am incredibly fortunate. In the middle of a conservative, Catholic undergraduate college, I found teachers who saw me reading queer theory and mentored me. Encouraged me. Offered me opportunities that they could so easily have denied. Graduate school mentors worked with my idiosyncratic thinking and interests—and they have been and continue to be idiosyncratic. The history of pornography lived alongside the history of medicine; postcolonial theory filtered through fisting; queer theory re-processed through African histories; the conceptual apparatus of diaspora re-thought via theories of intimacy; Shakespeare in frottage with Hemphill; Mapplethorpe in dialogue with Malek Alloula; my insistence on routing Gikuyu epistemology through diaspora (still not sure how this one worked, but it does).

And I have written. A lot. Much of it not very clear, I grant. It is less a record of profundity and more feeling my way through thought, thinking through feeling, learning to name what nags and needles, probes and pries.

Kikulacho.

Yet, the threat and promise of Hemphill’s life is that if silence will not protect me, neither might admission. That in choosing to pursue one research agenda I might find myself in empty conference rooms; that, as has already happened, following presentations, I might be the one panelist who is not asked questions, and I will be filled with crippling doubts about my arguments, my style, my topic, my academic value.

That, among my black heterosexual peers, especially the black U.S. and African men who still hold the keys to the academy, I will be “hard pressed to gain audience.”
*
Ceremonies is filled with roses.

At the end of the day,
through some other vision,
perhaps the consequence
of growing firm and older,
I see the thorns of the rose
are not my enemy.
I strive to see this
in each of us—
O ancient petals,
O recent blooms. (“The Tomb of Sorrow”)

Out of this confusion
I bring my heart,
a pale blue crystal,
a single rose,
a kiss long held for you
before the myth of Atlantis
was created to challenge
the genius of
Memphis and Senegal (“So Many Dreams”)

Our kisses are petals,
our tongues caress the bloom. (“Black Beans”)

A field of flowers blossoms
where we gather
in empty warehouses. (“Where Seed Falls”)

What the rose whispers
before blooming
I vow to you. (“American Wedding”)
*
And longing.

Don’t let it be loneliness
that kills us. (“Heavy Corners”)

Being here, now, I think a lot about what it means to be lonely.

Nairobi is a whispering city, where homo-secrets are always open. We “always already” know who is gay. And we whisper. It’s amazing how isolating whispers can be.

Were it not for the love and refuge offered by some amazing people, almost all of whom I met through Concerned Kenyan Writers, I’m not sure how I would have survived the past few months. But this, this is still too raw to be written.
*
I believe what I feel
moves unsaid in the air
between us. (“Romance is Intrigue”)

How does one name the intimacy between strangers across the thresholds of life and death? How does one mourn what one has always known as absence?

These questions resound through the histories of the black diaspora, anti-colonial activism, and civil rights

These are the histories within which black queer life, love, and activism is embedded, finds its being, defines its strategies, attempts to negotiate.
*
I am always late for World AIDS Day.

I miss the speeches, the statistics, the progress reports, the promises.

I miss the erasures, the official silences about “men like me,” black and gay, especially here in “Africa” where AIDS is “heterosexual.” I miss the promised negation, the invitation to be a dumb partner in a chorus of activist voices.

I forgo the pledge to save “our husbands, our wives, our children,” pledging myself, instead, to other intimacies, to plant roses in unmarked graves, to mourn over blank pages, to return to the men who first gave me language.

Essex. Melvin. Craig. Assotto.

The many thousands gone.
*
This year I will not be writing elegies. Not for my beautiful friend Gerald. Not for my amazing mentor Phil. Not for my cousin who discovered his status and killed himself.

This year I plant roses.