(T)here and Here 5 of 5: Suture

Different fluencies.

Rolled and missing Rs.

Accentual-syllabic, slipping in and out, spaces meet in over-corrections and missed rightness.

This is the flavor of language.

What stretches and extends: crocheted flesh.

Here I am (t)here, in the space of a comma.

It comes down to the space of punctuation, a pause to find tonguing, a book that says Gikuyu women suck mucus from their babies’ noses, another that laments their too-rapid entrance into modernity, faces at bus stops that look too familiar, and those lapses when I forget where I am not.

To be orienting.

And the meaning of bright suns in winters.

Even comfortable shoes leave scars, and one wonders at the vividness of phantom pains and pleasures. What feels like here is (t)here, and the confusion of un-feeling.

To be amazed, as though continually surprised, to anticipate the pleasures of stumbles, and the hands that lift.

Patiently. A stitch at a time.

Getting Off

Kenyans like to get off. Repeatedly. Impunity is a habit, a practice, a fetish, and, seemingly, a requirement for national belonging. In fact, it lies at the heart of how we engage in civil and political life, and is one of our greatest impediments to realizing a truly progressive, liberated State. The aftermath of the post-election violence offers a particularly vivid case study on the important role of impunity in present-day Kenya.

On September 17, 2008, members of the Independent Review Commission, led by Judge Johann Kriegler, submitted the Report of the Independent Review Commission on the General Elections Held in Kenya on December 27, 2007 (the Kriegler Report), to President Mwai Kibaki. President Kibaki had appointed the Commission to “inquire into all the aspects of the general election . . . with particular emphasis on the Presidential Election.”

Kriegler and his team compiled a leveling, devastating report with at least three conclusions worth noting. First, in response to claims that the presidential results had been rigged, the Commission concluded that the debate over which candidate won was “irrelevant” because “the process was undetectably perverted at the polling stage” and “the recorded and reported results” were “so inaccurate as to render any reasonably accurate, reliable and convincing conclusion impossible.”

Far from laying blame solely at the feet of the Electoral Commission of Kenya, the Commission also implicated Kenyan society, writing, “Kenyan society has long condoned, if not actually connived at, perversion of the electoral process.”

They concluded, “This culture of electoral lawlessness has developed over many years and cannot be reversed without a concerted, non-partisan commitment to electoral integrity on the part of political leaders, which commitment will need to be sustained and monitored over time.”

Perhaps predictably, the Report’s conclusions became objects of partisan struggle. Whereas Kriegler and his team had implicated Kenya’s entire political structure, from politicians to voters to election officials, members of the key opposing parties, ODM and PNU, pointed fingers at each other, refusing to admit their culpability. On September 23, 2008, an article in the Daily Nation informed us, “President Kibaki’s Party of National Unity and Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement on Tuesday discounted the Kriegler Commission verdict that it would be difficult to tell who won the election.”

The Waki Effect

On October 15, 2008, the Committee of Inquiry into the Post-Election Violence (CIPEV), headed by Justice Phillip Waki, released its much-anticipated report. The so-called Waki Report was composed and written under trying circumstances, impeded by reluctant and inefficient State machinery. The Commissioners faced logistical problems, from finding appropriate office space to getting access to witnesses, many of whom were still traumatized by the violence and worried because Kenya has no witness protection programs. Most damning to the government, the Commission was not afforded enough time to fulfill its mandate, despite repeated requests to the government that its tenure be extended. In the subsequent critiques of the report, and there are many, these institutional and structural impediments are never mentioned. As a result, such critiques, especially from the government, must be seen as evidence of bad faith.

Drawing on previous government-commissioned reports, including the Akiwumi Report (1999) and the Ndung’u Report (2004) as well as reports from Civil Society groups and academic studies, the Waki Report complemented the Kriegler Report. Like the Kriegler Report, it implicated Kenya’s entire political structure in the post-election violence. It argued, “violence has become a way of life in Kenya,” “not just [in] elections but in everyday life,” concluding “impunity has become the order of the day in Kenya.”

The theme of impunity runs through the Waki Report, a recurring bass line that anchors all the other political melodies.

Yet, the very important idea that Kenya has a problem with impunity was overshadowed by the Commission’s declaration that it had placed the names of “alleged perpetrators” of violence in a “sealed envelope,” and if the Kenyan legislative and judicial structures failed to act, the “sealed envelope” would be forwarded to the Hague special investigator for further action.

While, like the Kriegler Report, the Waki Report indicted an entire political system, the focus has been on the contents of the sealed envelope. We might all be implicated in impunity, but, in a moment of strategic evasion of responsibility, Kenyans have decided that those named in the envelope suffer more from impunity. They are “the real” perpetrators.

Thus, the Waki Report, as interpreted by politicians and Kenyan citizens, undercuts both the Kriegler Report and its own conclusions by allowing us to point fingers at secret names in a sealed envelope.

Impunity continues to dominate our political processes and everyday lives.

Sealed Envelopes and Open Secrets

Kenyan impunity has a peculiar structure. Through networks developed under, and because of, repressive regimes, Kenyans know about government misconduct, not simply after it’s reported, but as it’s going on. We know, for instance, that the money we have given to various school-improvement funds over the years has not been used to buy computers or new instruments or new sports equipment, because we have yet to see any of these materialize. Just as we know that a lot of the money we gave during public fundraisings never built roads, schools, or hospitals. Theft is an open secret.

Yet, this knowledge rarely, if ever, translates into action. Or, if it does, the action is stunted from the beginning.

In “Postponing the Truth: How Commissions of Inquiry are Used to Circumvent Justice in Kenya,” the African Centre for Open Governance (Africog) details the perverse alliance between sealed envelopes and open secrets.

As the report points out, Commissions of Inquiry have been a favorite government tool, with at least 31 being established over the past 100 years. However, the peculiar structure of how Commissions function impedes their potential effectiveness. As the Africog report notes, “The Commissions of Inquiry Act has no rules on when a report should be released and so it is left to the president’s discretion.” To compound this temporal problem, “The law does not require a commission of inquiry or the president to publish the findings of the inquiry. Neither does it require the president or any other organ of state to implement the findings or recommendations of a commission of inquiry.”

Consequently, commissioned reports have become part of a new Kenyan genre: the dusty shelf chronicles. More insidiously, and here I stretch the metaphor, they have become sealed envelopes, documenting evidence that causes a few flutters of panic, but is subsequently de-fanged through government action.

For instance, newspaper reports indicate that the hastily formed tribunal, set up to investigate and, having found sufficient evidence, try those implicated in the infamous Waki envelope, may have been constituted as an already de-fanged institution, unable to investigate or prosecute with any measure of effectiveness. If this is the case, the tribunal will be like the Commissions of Inquiry: a de-fanged institution, and the threat of the sealed envelope will remain nothing more than a threat.

The un-sealed envelope, when it is unsealed, might become another open secret that joins the many reports in the dusty shelf chronicles.

Impunity and the Absence of Witness

The absurd structure of impunity in Kenya is such that, even when captured in the act of administering extra-judicial killings or unwarranted cruel and unusual punishment, those who administer justice play Shaggy: “it wasn’t me.” One of the most extreme examples came during the post-election violence, when a young man in a black t-shirt was executed by a policeman. The police administration subsequently claimed that the event might have been staged, and was perhaps a scene from an upcoming movie. So absurd is the structure of impunity that we are not even allowed to believe the evidence we witness.

We cannot even be witnesses to crimes we observe. The very necessary ethical, moral, and civic role of witness is denied to us.

Let’s pause to consider this.

Witnessing lies at the heart of our modern systems of governance and redress. Testimonies from Nazi Germany, apartheid-era South Africa, genocide-era Bosnia and Rwanda, Katrina-flooded New Orleans, and, more recently from Darfur and Gaza continue to affect how we engage the world as ethical citizens. For, in those moments when we turn away in silence, when we shrug and claim that it’s someone else’s struggle, when we blame bad governance or racial, ethnic, and religious structures, in those moments when we abrogate our responsibilities to care for our fellow humans, we lose a little more of our already threatened and fragile humanity. We need the witness, we need witnessing, and we need to be present for testimony to configure ourselves as ethical and moral citizens of the world.

In a culture of impunity there can be no witnessing. There can be no testimony. There can be no possible ethical and moral stance. And we have seen this and continue to see it.

During the post-election violence, many of our leaders closed their eyes, refused to see the pictures of burned and dead bodies, the broken families and destroyed lives. In the aftermath of the violence, many of our leaders have continued to refuse to see those who still lack homes, whose families are struggling to stay together, whose broken bodies tell a sad story of Kenya’s failures.

Ironically, the ostensibly moral calls that we should “forgive and forget” are precisely amoral and unethical because they deny the ethical obligation we have as citizens to listen to witnesses and to act on testimony.

We have lost testimony and the ethics it engenders.

What then? Imagining Otherwise

How do we uproot impunity? And, what would an impunity-free Kenya look like?

I don’t know.

I write I don’t know not to register pessimism about the future, nor to renounce and defer my duty as a citizen to envision a fairer future. Instead, I write I don’t know to acknowledge how difficult it is to re-think and re-fashion, to actually change an entire pleasure-driven and pleasure-giving culture.

Facing and uprooting impunity will require more than de-fanged Commissions of Inquiry and the repeated promises to “end corruption” that form the substance of election-time promises. It will require a massive, collective act of imagining an altogether different culture, a slow process of learning how to build and nurture that culture. It will be a slow process, one akin to raising the most fragile orchid in a technologically bereft greenhouse. It will be a process during which the deep-tangled roots of impunity will emerge over and over, when least expected, ready to drain nutrients from a fragile new institution.

Facing and uprooting impunity is a work of collective dreaming and action that must be embraced by all of us, for we are all part of impunity’s intricate root system, and whether we acknowledge it or not, we are all fertile ground for impunity’s multiple pleasure-giving seedings.

Most crucially, we need to acknowledge how pleasure-giving impunity has impoverished our imaginations and sapped our wills. It is easier to practice impunity, to remain soporific in its warm embrace of easy convenience. It is harder to let go of its hazy promises to turn away from the soft-lens focus it privileges to a harsher, more discordant, and yet more equitable future.

It is almost impossible to change how we dream, imagine, and function. This is our challenge, our task, our call to action.

Thinkings

1. Increasingly I wonder how the predominantly U.S.-based, though also found in French legislation, approach to anti-identitarian politics can play out in Africa, and whether it is even possible to translate its terms into African politics. Given the vitiated nature of the category of citizen, and the contested nature of the term “worker,” and the mostly absent presence of the “cosmopolitan,” and, as I keep pointing out, the infant-creating labor of the term wananchi, what forms of identity-making, identity-fracturing, solidarity-constituting rhetorics and practices might we invoke? How might we learn from the church’s successes in these areas (well, modified successes) while also learning from its failures?
2. I am seduced, increasingly, by the appeal to normality, the seeming promise of normalization. To admit that I crave its privileges might be considered bad politics, yet a politics that rejects its own ambivalence-creating desires is both dishonest and untenable.
3. I am teaching poetry again, literature again, and I am reminded of how very much I love reading and teaching and researching literature, especially poetry. Some part of my brain has been singing arias of joy for the past week as I prep for and talk about poetry in class. It is especially welcome after the past 4 months of reading anthropological and historical studies and government and NGO reports. Useful these might be, and, to be fair, the questions they raise push and pull pleasurably at the limits of my knowledge and abilities. Obviously, reading the Waki Report requires a different critical facility than reading Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” though there is much that is transferable. I fear, however, that the pleasure of the literary text, the aesthetic experience, does not carry over to Waki and Kriegler and the various Civil Society reports.
4. I remain amazed by the ordinariness of blackness here, though, I must admit, its ordinariness is strained in certain stores, certain neighborhoods, and certain restaurants.
5. The Asian store that is two minutes from my house is wonderful! But, 95% of the signage is not in English, and so I restrict myself to those items that I know, for sure, do not contain meat products. I still managed to buy kimchee that had anchovy—I didn’t read the label.
6. I still need to complete a review of Seismosis, the wonderful book by John Keene and Christopher Stackhouse. I have a few lines written, but need much more time to absorb and think and play.
7. Need to read more poetry! I’ve been re-reading Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck and Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony, in part to re-think the politics of testimony and the power of witness. In a piece I wrote, due to go up on KenyaImagine at some point, though I’ll probably also post it here, I re-visit the idea of impunity as foreclosing the act of witness and, as a result, absolving us of our ethical obligations. Had I time, had I time, had I time, I might venture into those deep theoretical waters and write some kind of essay that thinks along with thinkers on ethics and so on. Had I time.
8. Time bends. It is not that I don’t have it, but that it is allocated: reading, writing, research, writing, revision, teaching, grading, reading, more reading, and a lot more writing. Yes, I love this life, and, yes, I do eat and sleep and hang out and cook and so on.
9. A colleague has returned from visiting her daughter in Tanzania, and we talked about the pace of life, how, it’s impossible for we from the continent and those who visit not to think about temporality, our slowed down, speeded up, fractured, and re-made temporalities, our slowed and fastened speeches. I talk faster in Gikuyu than I do in English, which is an achievement of some kind; speed not being linked to fluency.

Reading Eagleton, Reading Poetry, and “gum”

Gayatri Spivak is to be blamed for many things, not the least of which is teaching us how to examine the figure of the native as a structure of foreclosure (perhaps not her choice of term). The native drops out or is left out or represents the process of being left out of modernity and thinking, becomes a limit, an aporia, or when I’m practicing long-lost math, an asymptote. (This last might make no sense.)

I think about this as I’m reading Terry Eagleton’s vastly entertaining How to Read a Poem. Eagleton has such gems as, “History does not always get the facts in the most satisfactory order, or stage its events in the most convincing way. It was an absurd oversight on history’s part to make Napoleon so stunted, or to cram so many wars into the twentieth century rather than spacing them out a bit more” (36). Truly a roll on the floor laughing moment!

I’m yet to complete the book, but two passages stick out so far.

This is not to say that poems can mean just anything you like. ‘And justify the ways of God to men’ cannot mean ‘And fix my puncture with chewing gum’, at least not as the English language is at present constituted. (Though there is absolutely no reason in principle why the word ‘gum’ could not mean ‘men’. Maybe it does in some African language; or maybe it is slang for ‘men’ in some little known English idiom. In Northern England dialect, ‘gum’ is a euphemism for ‘God’, as in ‘By gum’.) (32)

(I cannot find the other passage just now, but it precedes this one in the book.)

“Africa” and “African” appear nowhere in the index, though, to be fair, neither do lots of other terms, including “English” and “British.” Yet, I’m still compelled to ask about the “function” of this “African language,” especially since Eagleton already has a specifically English example.

It is not simply the Saussurean reading about the arbitrariness of the signifier that is at stake here; rather, following Spivak, it is the structure of logic that “African language” occupies and does not occupy in this passage that is immensely interesting. Let us not forget, to historicize Eagleton, that “gum,” and in this instance, the history of rubber in Africa, is a product of imperialism, and names an ongoing structure of global circulation—Firestone in Africa being one chief example.

To stretch the reading, then, there are ways in which “gum” literally engenders, produces particular kinds of men within a global economy, makes possible their being, at the same time as it renders them invisible. What is produced as “gum” from Africa, no matter how circuitous the route, erases the laboring, gendered bodies—as my reading also, engenders another erasure, the work of women in the rubber industry. This being a limit, all I can do is acknowledge it.

To say that “gum” means men in an African language might also be to say that “gum” refers not to the black laboring bodies but to the white imperial bodies that demand it. Gum engenders a racialized structure of production, naming and mediating relationships between workers and bosses.

The band stretches yet.

We might also attend, if we care, to the placement of that “Maybe” in some African language, in the too-casual aside that Spivak would have us linger on. What is a parenthetical Africa? What does that imply about the structures of logic that African languages are allowed to occupy. Note, for instance, that in the “English” example, gum is clearly slang, occupies a place within a linguistic hierarchy, even has an example attached to it. Example attached to example. Empiricism (something Eagleton plays with in How to Read a Poem) creates a certain structuration of identity. (Structuration, ugly word, but useful).

In contrast, the “Maybe” in reference to the “African language” is left hanging, no evidence, simply speculation. And those familiar with armchair anthropology will quickly recognize the structure of “maybe” that so often turns into “in Africa,” the too-quick speculation that anything is possible in Africa turning into the knowing nod about what “happens” in Africa. If we dare let ourselves, we get drawn into this imagined Africa of manifold possibilities that continue to mark its unknowing absence from empirical structures.

I mean, of course Africa is dying from AIDS. We all know this. Evidence? Well, Africans are dying from AIDS and we all know this. Speculation turned into knowledge. Because, too often, Africa is “too far away” and it’s easier to imagine its facts instead of, well, listening to African-based experts.

Do I stretch too much, appending to Eagleton’s throw-away comment histories and contexts that seem superfluous. Can this gum stand up to the stretch?

Maybe.

How does this “Maybe” enact something that comes to be designated as “African,” an adjective that modifies and delimits possibilities, where language, in its impossibilities, becomes possible, maybe, and meaning is always stretched beyond a Euro-epistemology, Maybe.

Dear Kofi Annan

Dear Mr. Annan:

Once again, Kenya’s leaders have failed to make difficult choices.

The Kenyan media report that Members of Parliament have agreed to institute a local tribunal provided those named by Waki as suspects retain their seats in parliament and in the cabinet.

This agreement violates one of the key recommendations of the Waki Report: “All persons holding public office and public servants charged with criminal offences related to post-election violence be suspended from duty until the matter is fully adjudicated upon” (476).

The government’s conduct in implementing the Waki Report’s recommendations has consistently violated the spirit of those recommendations. Instead of careful deliberations intended to pursue truth and justice, the government has delayed acting, only to “beat” the timelines established by the report.

At every step, government agents have been driven by the urge to protect the political class and have paid scant attention to the needs and desires of ordinary Kenyans.

At this point, we Kenyans wonder who will protect us from the government.

Sir, the Waki Report clearly states the conditions under which the International Criminal Court should be invited to take over investigations and prosecutions:

If either an agreement for the establishment of the Special Tribunal is not signed, or the Statute for the Special Tribunal fails to be enacted, or the Special Tribunal fails to commence functioning as contemplated above, or having commenced operating its purposes are subverted, a list containing names of and relevant information on those suspected to bear the greatest responsibility for crimes falling within the jurisdiction of the proposed Special Tribunal shall be forwarded to the Special Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. The Special Prosecutor shall be requested to analyze the seriousness of the information received with a view to proceeding with an investigation and prosecuting such suspected persons. (473)

It is clear that the process has been subverted, and that political protectionism has trumped the needs of the Kenyan people and thwarted the obligations of justice.

Kenyans deserve better.

It is not easy to admit that our leaders have failed us. But the regret and shame of that confession is preferable to the sanctioned culture of impunity that destroys our country and imperils our lives.

We need you to act for Kenya, for our citizens, and for our future.

Owning Kenya

Unveiling the national flag in 1963, Tom Mboya inaugurated an important, ongoing debate about how national symbols function. In his comments on September 25, 1963, he said, “This flag is a flag of unity and we expect it to be respected and symbolize something deeper for all. We would like to appeal to the public not to fly the national flag on bicycles and so forth. We do not want to see it made of cheap material in River Road. It must be treated with respect.” At this foundational moment in Kenyan history, the “we” Mboya represents tells “the public” not only what the flag means but also how it means.

Although Mboya claims that the flag unites all Kenyans, his comments distinguish between two key groups: the “we” who define the flag’s meaning and the public for whom this meaning is defined. The flag is a dividing line that creates a socio-political distinction between the public and what we now call the political class. In retrospect, Mboya’s statement indicates that Kenya’s national symbols both unite all Kenyans and divide us into the public who follow orders and the political class that issues them.

At this early stage in Kenya’s independence history, Mboya understands that governments rule by creating symbols and controlling their meanings. By claiming that the flag means “something deeper” without clearly explaining what this something deeper is, Mboya mystifies the flag and grants the political class the power to define the meanings of our national symbols. If we want to know what these symbols mean, we must ask the political class. It is no coincidence that even today we learn what the colors of the flag represent through government-approved school textbooks.

The distinction between the political class and the public is further defined by the spaces the flag should occupy. Mboya’s comment that it should not be displayed on bicycles expresses a clear division between the public and the political class. While the flag is not supposed to be displayed on bicycles, it is proudly displayed on vehicles belonging to politicians.

From the early years of the twentieth century, the bicycle promised freedom and mobility to black Kenyans. Even today, elderly Kenyans remember the first individuals who owned bicycles in their villages. The bicycle was the mwananchi’s lexus. During the 1920s, Jomo Kenyatta was famous for owning and riding his bicycle around Nairobi. In fact, it’s not overstating the point to claim that the bicycle is an integral part of Kenya’s political history.

By the 1960s the bicycle had become an easy and convenient mode of affordable transport. It could navigate narrow streets and hidden byways. More eloquently than the expensive cars that only elites could afford, the bicycle embodied the freedom of uhuru, the freedom of mobility. After the harsh colonial detention camps and restrictive kipande laws that restricted black Kenyans’ movements, the bicycle symbolized freedom. As Kenyans traveled all over the country on their bicycles, they symbolically marked Kenya as a country of free movement. More than any other mode of transport, the bicycle symbolized the public’s movements, their hopes, their dreams, their ambitions, their abilities to mix and mingle together as Kenyans.

If, at independence, the bicycle represented the spread of freedom, why does Mboya urge the public not to display the new “flag of unity” on bicycles? In one respect, Mboya expresses a longstanding tension in the history of modern democracy: the opposing claims of freedom and unity.

On the one hand, independence meant we were free from British rule and could join together as one people. On the other hand, the ethnic, political, and regional factions, visible in the distinction between KANU and KADU, the so-called shifta wars, and the government-sponsored war against labor politics, divided Kenya into zones of freedom and un-freedom, where unity was an unrealizable ideal.

Kenya was founded as a state riven by the competing claims of freedom and unity, and these competing claims are embodied in how we use and spread national symbols.

Prior to and after independence, River Road was a space of economic opportunity, where petty traders could build their businesses and cater to wananchi at wananchi-friendly prices. Within Kenya’s history, River Road is one of the most important spaces of upward mobility that caters to wananchi. When Mboya derides the “cheap material” from River Road, he advocates a divisive class politics that creates a further separation between the political class who can presumably afford the expensive flag and the public, who learn that owning a flag is an expensive proposition.

Ironically, through the 1980s and 1990s, the cheap paper flag pasted to wooden sticks became a symbol of national unity. Students from Nairobi Primary, State House Primary. and St. Georges, and I was one of them, would be removed from their classrooms, handed paper flags, and instructed to wave and cheer as former President Moi and visiting dignitaries traveled to State House. Cheap flags became the norm, not the exception.

However, in 1963 Mboya wants to limit how the flag circulates. The public “must respect” the flag by buying and owning expensive versions and not flying them on bicycles.

At this moment in Kenya’s history, when we seem to be transitioning from a hope-filled experiment in multi-party politics to a cynical, despair-filled multi-party state, we would do well to return to our founding moments, those similarly hope-filled days of independence, to discover, there, some explanations for how we came to this point.

By focusing on Mboya’s statements on the significance of the flag, I advance three claims. The first is that Kenya’s founding moments are marked by a distinct and explicit split between the political class and the public. The political class creates symbols of national unity and tells us we are united. They tell us what symbols of national unity mean and demand we comply with their directives. We have yet to address this split in any significant manner.

Second, the split between the political class and the public is deeply rooted in a fundamental economic disparity between a “we” who can afford expensive flags that will fly on cars and those who ride bicycles and shop at River Road. The very existence of the political class depends on maintaining this economic disparity—witness the massive salary increases of the current parliament and their reluctance to pay taxes.

Finally, if Kenya is to move from its current status as a peri-oligarchy, a country by the political class and for the political class, we must re-imbue our national symbols with a citizen-driven style. We all feel different emotions when the flag is raised. Some of us cry, some of us smile, some of us want to stand still, some of us want to dance. We do not need to stand still, hands at our sides, as though we are scared of the flag or as though we are trained soldiers.

Our relationships to our national symbols should be creative and innovative, rooted in how we live, work, love, and play in our country. The flag represents our independence and unity, our bodies and faces should reflect both.

On December 12, 1963, Kenyans assembled to see the new flag being raised. Those who arrived in government cars had the privilege of taking home their own flags, the realized promise of independence. Those who arrived on foot and on bicycles left with memories of a beautiful, inaccessible object. The flag that represented independence could be seen from a distance, admired and revered. But only those with money and power had the right to take home the flag and the independence it promised.

Eulogy: 1982

1982 broke my uncle. He died last year. Disappointed.

He hated his meds. Never took them. Hated the silence they created. Hated the whispers of friends turned betrayers. Hated the promise of liberation turned, now, to the night stench of coffee plants.

He was young, barely 50. A casualty of independence myths and the audacity of dreaming. His life barely started, he lived the rest of it as a cautionary tale, evidence that the government breaks bones and minds. Resistance is a one-way highway to psychiatric prescriptions.

If Vietnam, in the U.S., represents a lost, undistinguished generation of soldiers, doomed never to be heroes, 1982 is our unmarked graveyard, where truth lies interred while the minds of those who hold it are broken or held captive in dreamless sleeps, the State’s gift to dissenters and dissidents.

Mau Mau may be a badly written chapter. 1982 is an absent footnote.

My mother asks if I remember it. It’s one word: curfew, a new word in my then seven-year-old vocabulary. An earlier bedtime for everyone. She does not fill in the gaps.

This silencing. 1982’s legacy.

What are the legacies of 1982? How did it shape us? What did it denude? Make impossible? Is it what made us value humility and order over freedom and dignity?

My uncle did not speak. He shouted. He shouted greetings and farewells, shouted request for money and condolences to the bereaved, shouted at friends and enemies, doctors and faith healers, always with a sudden, generous smile.

It was an idiot’s smile Evidence of conversations we could not, dared not, hear. A smile at peace with history’s erasures, immured from that loss by the certainty of having acted.

There are no accolades for men like him, no memorials for those who follow the foolish dreams of youth, those we despise because, unlike us, they privileged vision over their own survival. These men who abandoned their families, refused to embrace the comfort of apathy and the refuge of cowardice.

Like my uncle, such men become family jokes, warnings to those who dream too much, who enter deep waters with no assurances, simply belief that action is not futile.

January 24, 2009

With jewels in my heart, it is heaven here and the light that glows inside my heart feels like the salvation that will hopefully free my soul and brighten many others.
—Dr. James Kariuki Muiruri

I learn, today, that a young Kenyan has been shot, a man half my uncle’s age, who describes himself as the “grandson” of freedom fighters, and sings of his vision for Kenya and the world.

Dr. James Kariuki Muiruri considered himself an “idea that must find expression,” willing thought into action, dreams into possibilities, and, at each step, insisting that he was not unique, that others, too, could travel the same road.

In a June 6, 2006, blog post titled “My Letter to a Young African Sister,” he writes,

Think of high ideals, think of children’s dreams, think of trees and waters flowing down the stream, think of the poor and look at the grass and wonder at how you fit so neatly in nature its best. This is a journey, some of us are chosen.. start your life by realising this, that as much as your are your parent’s child, you are very much a child of this world with parents that are blessed to bring you into this life.

Dr. Muiruri grew up in the shadow of the dream-killing 1982, and still he dared to dream, for himself and for others. He dared to choose what some consider the less wise option of returning to Kenya after he successfully completed his doctorate in international law. He dared to imagine there was space, or that he could create space for himself and his dreams.

Reading through James’s blog, I am tempted to speculate that it captures my uncle’s pre-1982 hopes and dreams, the certainty that past victories ensure future success. For my uncle, the legacy of uhuru directed a vision toward a different Kenya; for James, his personal successes and academic achievements set against a past history of Kenyan-measured failure, assured him that his story was possible for him and for others like him. A recurring thread throughout his writing is that if he could make it, then others could.

And so I mourn for two men I did not know. And for the dreams they held. And for the dreams that die everyday in Kenya.

Writing Queer Kenya

Editors: Keguro Macharia and Angus Parkinson

We lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex individuals, in a word, queers, have had the distinct un-pleasure of being told we don’t exist—in official government statements, historical documents, and contemporary statements. Well, we do.

We want Kenyan stories by Kenya-based and Kenya-born queers. About everything. We want writing about the dailyness of our lives, the good, the bad, the weird, the indifferent. If you have lived it, we want to hear about it. We especially want to reach beyond Nairobi, Mombasa, and other cities to all corners of the country. And we know the rest of Kenya, Africa, and the world wants to hear these stories as well.

Formats

We have three distinct formats. Choose what appeals to you.

1. Interviews: Tell us your story. Get in touch with us and we’ll arrange an interview. We value your time and your confidentiality. Not sure you want to meet us directly? We have phones and email and all manner of ways to make this happen.
2. Letters to Kenya: Write (or unearth) a 500-1,000-word letter. To whom? Parents, pastors, the government, best friends, former friends, present lovers, former lovers, the person you really want to tune. Get personal, get intimate. Say what you really want to say!
3. Personal narratives: Write (or unearth) a 2,500-3,000-word narrative about the dailyness of being queer. The high points, low points, the endless plateaus, the quick glances, indrawn breaths of desire, domestic thrills, sexual boredom, beginnings and endings. If you write it, we’ll consider it.

All submissions should be typed, double-spaced, and submitted electronically to queerkenya@gmail.com. If you can’t type, don’t want to, or can’t get hold of an email program that functions, get in touch with us. We can help.

How You Can Contribute

1. Get the word out. Convince your friends with hidden manuscripts or stories that must be shared to un-closet them.
2. Send us encouraging emails. We need your good wishes, your fabulously good wishes.
3. Volunteer time! We need all the help we can get.
4. Take ownership. We’re editing, sure, but these are our collective stories.

Important Dates

April 30, 2009: Deadline to Receive Submissions
June 30, 2009: Selected Contributors Contacted
Publication: December 2009.

Questions? We’re glad to answer. Please contact us at: queerkenya@gmail.com

Dreaming Diaspora

Haiti where negritude rose for the first time and stated that it believed in its humanity
— Aimé Césaire

One must begin somewhere
—Aimé Césaire

Uga Thaiii!

Thaiii!

Tomorrow fulfills a dream whose written record, magnificent as it is, barely captures the hopes and ambitions of those black people who, throughout and before recorded history, left Africa and were captured, prospered as scholars and merchants and survived as slaves and concubines, traversed foreign terrains hobbled and scarred and stood as counselors to kings and priests, broke bread in shared prayers and ate stolen bread that was a response to prayers.

Tomorrow fulfills a dream written so magnificently by the Harlem Renaissance poet Georgia Douglas Johnson, about a “True American,” whose mingled bloods and anchored histories would enable tomorrow’s vision and today’s celebration.

Tomorrow fulfills a dream, sang by Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, a dream in which the darker brother finds a place, where his beauty is known and celebrated, his abilities recognized, a dream in which white houses no longer have closed doors, and inviolate, poison-free hearts gain strength from America’s vigors.

Tomorrow fulfills a dream that crosses continents, touching the nègre in interwar France, black soldiers in Burma and Spain, those who sang and those who dared to dream otherwise: Gladys Casely Hayford, Jessie Fauset, Pauline Nardal, Leopold Senghor, Jomo Kenyatta, Amos Tutuola, ancestors all, who enable us to keep on dreaming.

We dream amidst dystopias, not to escape from our wars and famines, our genocides and criminalities, not to forget Sudan and Zimbabwe, Kenya and Haiti, not to erase what we have done and what we continue to do to each other. We dream because, in the one-second silences that punctuate devastation, histories of hope and survival and triumph whisper in the wind. And we who have learned to discern the pattern of falling leaves with war-keened ears hear tales of those who have gone before, who have started paths, who inspire a belief that we can be better.

We dream because it is our legacy: we who anchor and pull away from Africa, diasporas old and new, devastating and prosperous. We dream in our three-syllabled names and kinked hairs, our pursed lips and our glorious hips. We dream in dances whose origins are lost in time and sing melodies taught by ocean waves.

We dream because the urgencies of now present no ready solutions. And still we wake.

And still we sing “we shall overcome” in accents from Chicago and DC, Atlanta and New York, Nairobi and Kampala, Lagos and Port-au-Prince, Kingston and Ouagadougou.

Diaspora’s dreams do not disappear into the ether of history. They tether us to the past and reach for new histories. Fredrick Douglass’s dreams find realizations in Nelson Mandela’s freedom. Harriet Jacobs’s imprisonment becomes Miriam Makeba’s multiple passports. Once we ran to find freedom and now we run to celebrate freedom.

It is already tomorrow in Kenya—new dawns where time runs ahead. Here, where Obama will be president tomorrow, we wait for new tomorrows, for time to catch up with itself, with the dreams that it has anticipated and now fulfills.

Diaspora dreaming continues.

Intellectual Rambles

We speak of diaspora as coming and going, connecting and disconnecting, remembering and re-making. Rarely do we invoke the stretching of diaspora, the affective and bodily tug that, while related to melancholia’s unletting, marks the skin and mind, occasions a politics of similitude. Here, Maryse Condé writes in Heremakhonon, here where features are associative histories, evidence of displacement, evidenced through stretch. In Heremakhonon conversation refuses temporal binding, and the speech of the present rubs against yesterday’s memories, and the unofficial official discourses of “they said” and “everyone knows.”

But I cannot write on this. I am teaching Heremakhonon, and experiencing the overflow for which I need my pensieve, but dare not use it.

I return to teaching in a week, and already face a certain manufactured crisis: for the past many years, I’ve been privileged to blog my thinking because it was at a remove from my pedagogy. I was not teaching (fellowship) or taught classes that did not directly intersect with or reflect my own interests.

This distance allowed the overflow to find a home here, allowed me to ruminate without worrying that what sits here will find its way, one way or another, into a paper I grade. And recognizing my own pensieve meditations, I will have to think about questions of attribution and so on. As I say, this is a manufactured crisis.

It does place interesting limits on what it means to write while teaching and researching, the arbitrary line that allows us to write about our research more often than we do our teaching. Now, of course, this is not always true. Unless one is incredibly nosy, for instance, it’s impossible to know what Gay Prof’s “Never Ending Project of Doom” entails, though I’m tempted to offer “Border Millennialism” as one possible sub-heading. (If he uses it, I want an acknowledgment!)

It is also a question, of course, of how we write what we write, the protocols of secrecy—either to hide professional identities or to protect ongoing work—that shape academic blogging. (Not that I can claim to be an academic blogger. I like my detours too much.) So, while we might disclose we’ve been “going to archives” and “presenting papers,” we rarely discuss what we find in those archives or what those papers entail. (Broad generalization, yes, I know.)

To some extent, this secrecy is driven by the paranoid demands of publishing.

But this does not exhaust what, to me, also seems to be the crippling mixture of secrecy and shame that runs alongside (does not undergird) intellectual production. Put another way, yes, I’m interested in the particulars of how, say, hummingbirds become symbols of reproductive legislation in 17th Century Aburiria (this being the fictional country Ngugi creates in Wizard of the Crow). Yet, there’s something odd, quirky, and shameful about admitting this idiosyncratic interest, especially if I can’t say something profound about “neoliberalism,” “affect,” “globalization,” “transnationalism,” “method,” “methodology,” “interdisciplinarity,” those direction givers and anchors that help to place the “idiosyncratic.”

By no means am I slamming the necessary academic demand that we “embed” our work. That’s how we create and sustain scholarly communities and foster exchanges in and across disciplines. And while some of us still cling to the unnecessary myth of isolated genius, others of us, and I place myself here, are interested in fostering conversations across fields and disciplines, eager to learn from and be challenged by different ways of knowing and doing.

To put this another way, and, perhaps, give some structure to a certain ramble in thought: if, on the one hand, there is a constraint based on teaching, there is also a constraint based on research, and the affective protocols that shape both.

And so the birth or continued existence of the peri-academic blog, that, like mine, delves into the flora and fauna of living. We discuss our cats, Wonder Woman, Kenyan politics, the politics and aesthetics of dress, the affective demands of scholarly production within the social spaces we create and inhabit.

The simpler, less tangled way of saying this is, despite what others might assume, academics are not brains on legs. And if the model of the ivory tower is still used to contain and dismiss us, we in the blogging world have been making extensive uses of the subterranean tunnels that lead elsewhere.

To return where I started but could not go: the tower and tunnel are less sites of coming and going, spatially distant places, and more sites of stretch, where one pulls and is pulled, learns to yield and resist.

And one of the major pleasures of the peri-academic blog is the semi-intellectual ramble, the turn to here and there, the pleasure of disorientation and re-orientation, the unexplored rooms between tower and tunnel.