The front flap of Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter contains two items.
The first, a $6 tag
The second, a name: Michael
Accompanied by an address: 2901 3rd Ave, Suite 400
Somewhere in Seattle, where my body materialized.
Archive for February, 2009
To the Harbormaster
I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder
in my hand and the sun sinking. To
you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage
of my will. The terrible channels where
the wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks, it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.
Frank O’Hara, Meditations in an Emergency
A brief survey of the media, mainstream and non-mainstream, which is mostly populated by white reporters (hello, Salon!) reveals an interesting, if not unanticipated, trend. Daily, through a series of rhetorical tics, we are reminded that Obama is black.
David Brooks, for instance, writes with the anguished despair of the white male conservative, comparing Obama to a “colossus,” the reference being, of course, to Cassius’s famous speech to Brutus on Julius Caesar. Shades of Thomas Dixon run through Brooks’s prose. Obama may not be raping white women, but he sure is raping the economy. Lost in all this, as some commentators continue to point out, is that Obama did NOT get us into the mess we’re in.
But he seems to have inherited the presidency, along with all culpability for Bush’s idiocy over the past eight years.
It would tax my patience too much to parse Joan Walsh’s prose—she always wins the prize for self-flagellating, tortured white liberal—and point out how race is invoked. Thankfully, she has resisted turning Obama into a Magical Negro. Woe to him if the economy should revive faster than forecasted.
Even that sacred cow, Glenn Greenwald, you know, the one we are NEVER supposed to critique, because he “speaks truth to power,” even he is culpable. And here I must confess that his rhetorical tics have been grating on me: find outrageous thing conservative says, demonstrate it’s outrageous, mock conservatives for being LOSERS! (it really is this puerile). And let the groupies chant your name in support.
Yet his prose, his “speak it, brother,” prose, recaps, in form if not substance, all the Reconstruction-era anxieties: black man in power; orange alert; black man in power; watch the nation; black man in power; see, he’s a liar! And a cheat! And if he goes back on this, what will he do next! Save Yourself!
By no means am I suggesting that Obama is above critique. But it strikes me as being somewhat disingenuous to proclaim his “badness,” when we already knew, going into this, that he was not of the far left, though he speaks to those on the far left. We already knew he was more centrist than we liked. And for those of us busy condemning his stance on U.S. imperialism, the clues were there in his speeches all along. He never promised he’d re-think U.S. imperialism, only that it *might* become more benevolent. Might.
Obama is not beyond critique. And we on the left need to keep being loud and active, voicing our critiques of actions and policies that harm us. At the same time, the racial coding is overwhelming, perhaps more so for those of us familiar with black histories in this country, most especially in the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction era.
I want someone to write about Obama and Reconstruction, because the tropes are eerily familiar. And the current rhetoric is haunted by that forgotten era.
Seismosis
Text: John Keene
Drawings: Christopher Stackhouse
Seismosis is a difficult text.
Difficult because it insists that we attend to the hyphen that sutures word-image, not a gap but a pulling. Written language asserts its visuality while, contrapuntally, image foregrounds its textuality. The figure of the hyphen is apt, for it threatens to cut in half what it sutures: its condition of being is unstitching. If I insist on the metaphoricity and, more generally, the tropic nature of Seismosis (trope and tropism), it is because it is a text that inclines, that leans.
Seismosis is a collaboration between John Keene and Christopher Stackhouse, comprising 52 poems by Keene and 52 images by Stackhouse. It is both a giving and letting go, as Keene is also an artist while Stackhouse is a poet. One is struck by the interplay between hypotaxis and parataxis, where text speaks to image, image to text, where one defers to the other, and where one parallels the other. Stackhouse’s art tugs at the edges of the term art, daring us to imagine possibilities for loops, lines, squiggles. Images struggle to come into being all the while clinging to their conditions of emergence. Similarly, Keene’s elegantly wrought poems strain on the page, their denotative meanings precariously secured and obscured by their sheer beauty.
To call this work edgy is to re-define what that over-used word means. One experiences the anxiety and possibilities of what Edmund Burke terms the sublime, the unmaking of encounter that is, simultaneously, a re-making, a being returned to one’s embodiment.
Stackhouse’s loops, lines, and squiggles track the emergence of meaning-making as it fails to coalesce into image or text, haunting yet never fully inhabiting both. As Keene writes, “in the mark event, you enter your signature” (“Process”). We are invited to recall and participate in the “mark event,” the marking that, as event, provides a canvas for reflection and assemblage: history and story, significance.
This “theory of traces” (“Field”) is also an “erotics of touch” (“Field”). Juxtaposed, text and image overlay and overlap, language’s textures expressed in frenetic, too-mobile images, image’s sediments collected, lovingly, in textual parataxis. One does not encounter collapse, but frottage. And all the ambivalence of frottage’s affect—pleasurable disquiet, irritated sensuality, touching always touching. I find myself longing for and yet resisting image as emergence—the traces, as in “Figure V,” whose strongly linear lines evoke known objects. But glancingly, touching the familiar without becoming it.
Stackhouse’s images render the endless mobility of simile: “like,” never “is.” Simile is, of course, the less theorized and perhaps less respected cousin to metaphor. It is apt in this case. The “as” joins image to text, mediating and suturing, “Counterbalanced, not / metonymic” (“Azimuth”).
In a moment of what can only be termed expository ekphrasis, Keene writes,
Emerging, through shadings . . . he tries
to ferment possibilities and mind them—
balancing surface textures, shadow spaces
distilling what lies there.
Concluding the poem,
Scribbling
being reading and pursuing each approximate tale,
tipped by collective and conceptual
implications. Always an edge towards true being,
mingling all expression, becoming anew. (“After C (4): Event Location”)
What is it to “scribble” being and to understand “scribbling” as “reading”? Enjambment sutures modernity’s promises, especially to minorities: that writing brings one into being. But this writing always contends with “scribbling.” One is reminded here that on reading Phyllis Wheatley’s work, Jefferson could not bring himself to term her a poet. The risk of “scribbling / being” is precisely that the being predicated on such scribbling risks itself—this, of course, is the shared fate of all art made public.
In his Foreword to the text, Ed Robertson writes that Seismosis “could appear to be the notes for an innovative lecture,” only to clarify that it is “the complete text for the course.” When I first read these comments, I was reluctant to agree. Now, I’m more swayed.
I’m swayed, in part, because of how conscious of itself Seismosis is. Everything I want to write about it is anticipated in stunning word and image, word-image. Still, let me draw attention to two terms that linger: echo and fold. Both are structural elements and aesthetic strategies.
An echo is, of course, a distorted re-hearing, a throwing back of sound and language, a becoming strange to oneself. On a textual level, poems re-turn, re-formulated. For instance, the final poem is titled “Process,” like the first, and similarly consists of one line: “In the mark, we choose and lose signature,” echoing the first section of the first “Process,” but re-hearing, re-turning. “Analysis I” re-turns as “Analysis II,” though assuming a different arrangement on the page. And, most strikingly, “Prisms” features a vertical line separating two portions of text, as though in columns. As though because the mechanisms of reading the poem, whether one reads across the column, acknowledging yet ignoring the line, or down one column and then down the next, the poem emerges multiply.
Echo is also a way to register the visual effect of Stackhouse’s art, which sounds in its visuality, the screeching halt, the arrested smile, the yearning to break from voice to image and to have both, all re-sound in text. Now, this is difficult to do, and even more difficult to describe. One does not simply see these images—one feels them in their, paradoxically, auditory muteness.
If echo provides one conceptual way to map this collection’s concerns, fold, as in invagination, provides another. And here I must revise my earlier assessment. While the hyphen sutures this collection, the fold describes its overall method. Image folds into image, text into text, image into text, text into image. One moves from one to the other feeling haunted: at times, it is only the page numbers that keep track of progress. One gets lost. One becomes unsettled.
It might seem too obvious to conclude on a note about the title, but Seismosis grants one, or at least me, the courage to complicate the obvious, and the permission to embrace the shame of being obvious.
I can only assume that Seismosis derives, in some way, or has some relation to seismic, to moving and re-arranging, to unsettling and being unsettled. As Keene puts it, “Yearning to reorder the ontic things” (“Ontic”), seeing “In these fragments futured arrivals” (“Ontic”). Seismosis is intentional, with all the weight accorded that term in phenomenology: “deferral becomes an act of witnessing” (“Fugues”).
To write of Seismosis’s ethical value seems far-fetched, yet I am struck, repeatedly, by the collection’s attention to sideways glances, what one sees at the corner of one’s eye, at the edge of memory, hanging precariously over history’s edge. These edgings/etchings are re-folded into the quotidian, re-integrated within a Whitmanian ethic that insists on the suture and the hyphen as our daily possibilities and challenges: “As you contain them you continue” (“Folds”).
An important shift has taken place in how we think about Displaced Kenyans. As their ongoing presence in unsafe, makeshift camps rife with disease and sexual violence continues to embarrass our national leaders, our leaders are experiencing compassion fatigue.
Displaced Kenyans are increasingly portrayed as stubborn children who resist the government’s resettlement schemes. Once objects of compassion, they are now victims who revel in their victimhood.
William Ruto, the controversial minister for Agriculture, is one of these figures leading what, borrowing from the U.S., we might call compassionate conservatism. As the Daily Nation reports, Ruto says that Displaced Kenyans should be re-settled on their farms by the government.
Obviously, the irony is lost on Ruto that the very agents whose vacillations and falsehoods led to displacement now seek to re-settle Displaced Kenyans.
Even more troubling, Ruto is blind to ongoing ethnic tensions. In responses to expressed fears that further violence might break out on farms, Ruto brashly argues that “peace” has returned to Kenya. In a Kenya where ethnic groups across affected areas have vowed “never again,” it is worrying, though not surprising, to see Ruto remain deaf to chatter on the ground.
It is not surprising because by claiming that peace has returned, Ruto can re-fashion Displaced Kenyans as self-created victims, people who stubbornly refuse to move on, even though they have been given every opportunity. Worse, like those infamous “welfare queens” in the U.S., who supposedly took government welfare checks and drove around in expensive cars, a lie peddled to great effect by Ronald Reagan, Displaced Kenyans seem to want their status.
In what is probably the most callous statement of the year so far, Franklin Bett, the minister for Roads, has claimed that some Kenyans are “masquerading” as poll victims to defraud the government.
Apparently, the status of Displaced Kenyan carries some kind of status and prestige and cons have decided to cash in.
By claiming that some Displaced Kenyans are not really displaced, Bett not only diminishes the ongoing struggles faced by Displaced Kenyans, struggles to find clean water, sanitary waste disposal spaces, adequate food, money for school fees, personal and familial safety, and desperately needed medical attention, he also, sadly, transforms Displaced Victims from victims of systemic government corruption and failure into criminals.
There is no pride in being a Displaced Kenyan. It is a shame-filled terrible state. Many of those in camps once had flourishing farms and businesses. These were destroyed in terrible and tragic circumstances, and many were lucky to escape with their lives, though their families were destroyed and many continue to carry physical and psychic scars that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.
Displaced Kenyans are not criminals, nor are they opportunistic victims looking to get free handouts from the government. If they stay in unsanitary and unsafe camps because they believe the threat of violence is too great for them to return to whatever remains of their homes , many of which were burned and utterly destroyed, then the government needs to take their concerns seriously.
Instead, by criminalizing Displaced Kenyans, leaders such as Ruto and Bett reveal their own lack of compassion, their lack of understanding about the plight of the very people they claim to represent and serve.
Displaced Kenyans are not strangers. They are us. And their tragedy is not theirs alone. It is our tragedy and our shame. We cannot, must not, let the government criminalize them and abrogate its responsibilities to them and to us.
Idle speculation.
Kenyan journalists love their stock phrases. Close to 50% of every article builds on such phrases.
One of their most popular is “to the tune of x amount of money,” for example, “to the tune of Sh2.3 million,” taken from the Sunday Nation.
What does this tune sound like?
When asked what I do, I sometimes respond, facetiously, that I study black people having sex.
Having commented on someone else’s “knotty” prose, I thought it only fair to post some of my own “knots” in progress. These might be called notes around what “I do,” at least a few days of the week, when I’m not claiming that the history of written pornography is central to modern histories of translation. It is!
* * *
How does one negotiate between the ethical mandate of what Adrienne Rich terms the politics of location and Paul Gilroy’s critique of “the nationalist focus which dominates cultural criticism” (Black Atlantic 6)? What conceptual dis-orientations must one embrace, what we might call, living kizunguzungu, to trace the embeddings and fissures of the particular within its other histories—these might be called broader or universal, but one hesitates to metonymize history and event.
A more formal(ist) answer finds me caught between metonymy and synecdoche, spatiality and consubstantiality, as they mediate across and through blackness. It is a mobile project, and a long-term, life-long one, that seeks, in some abstract way, to trace the relationship between Alex Haley’s Roots and what Kenyatta describes as miri ya mikongoe, the roots of the fictional mikongoe tree. It is both this fictionality and its ongoing real-world effects (and this explains, in part, my ongoing love for psychoanalysis, which provides a language for tracing the effects of fantasy in life actions) that form the conceptual core of my intellectual and political projects.
Diaspora names this ongoing making and un-making of blackness, the conceptual, historical, and affective dimensions of which still remain to be mapped, discovered, explored. Over the past few months, I have encouraged others to think of diaspora not as what is past, but as ongoing fabrication, a tale, a story, an ongoing narrative. Even when we concentrate on historical events on anthropological ones, we are not simply describing, but fabricating. I think, here, of the work of dowry giving, which is to affirm and extend life-long obligations. One never completes this work.
Often missing from diasporic scholarship is the sense of ongoing fabrication: that those thinkers we now cite, Blyden, Crummel, Du Bois, Kenyatta, though ostensibly engaged in socio-ethnographies, made it up as they went along, and that their strategic fabrications grant us permission to also make it up as we go along, even as we must contend with them.
My focus is on diaspora as dissemination, forestalling or freezing in place the hetero-insemination that is foundational to diasporic scholarship.
If we focus on dispersal—remembering diaspora shares the same root as sperm or spore (and sperm is good because only ONE can fertilize)—then diaspora, especially the black diaspora, ceases to privilege hetero-futurity as the realization of diasporic history and action.
One other way to state this: queerness has always been central to any theorization of diaspora, though often occluded by the unquestioned and unquestioning hetero-futural aims of diasporic scholarship. In fact, one could argue that the emphasis on survival within diasporic scholarship—and I think, here, primarily of the black and Jewish diaspora—has often occluded those moments of queer world making that are, importantly, not melancholic fragments of truncated lives.
There is an argument about affect here.
* * *
One of the great joys of seeing and sharing work in progress is that others get to experience the snarls of thinking, the moments before complete, smoother prose emerges and intimidates! Given the new availability of dissertations online, I have been comforted to read work that started as a dissertation, to realize that even scholars whose work I admire often began in the thickets of language, overwhelmed by too many ideas, crowded out by nominalizations, strangled, if only briefly, by writing tics—brackets, dashes, parentheses, asides.
These seams at the edge of writing allow my own fabrications, no matter how fragmented or inchoate.
Moreover, they offer some hope that I need not leave what I am daily learning—to write for a non-academic audience—when I turn to my academic work. Beautifully written academic prose is a wonderful thing to achieve. I think, for instance, of the many happy hours I have spent with Nietzsche and Freud and Wittgenstein, mostly because their writing (albeit in translation) is so amazingly fun to read. Where I cannot grasp arguments, I let aesthetics carry me along, and this, I must admit, has made the reading process much more relaxing, has helped me sink into language in a different way, with the pleasure I often reserve for poetry.
My undergraduate mentor, Linda Kinnahan, taught me how to do this through showing me how to read innovative poetries. Reading Susan Howe taught me how to re-read Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak. One fragment at a time.
And also how to overcome the shame of acknowledging fragmentariness—this, of course, is a lesson I keep learning from Spivak, whose continual acknowledgment of limits allows for an ethical relationship to knowledge and learning.
So, here, my fragments.
Tayeb Salih, the Sudan-born author best known for Season of Migration to the North, died on February 18, 2009. Like many readers, I came to Salih’s work through Season, and have remained enthralled ever since.
Season recounts the fractures and fissures of living here and (t)here, of men educated in one system, a colonial one, who live in its post-independent aftermath. It is a story of men whose homosocial and heterosexual relationships are framed within histories of their own making and unmaking, where passion is destructive, and dreams live in locked rooms, on shelves lined with many read books.
Season lived on my shelves for many years before I first read it. And I regret how long it took for me to realize its worth. It tells an ongoing story, my father’s and mine, about how we stretch across time and space, learn to occupy the world through foreign tongues, aware that in becoming so voiced, we lose and gain any sense of place we might once have owned.
It is about the ethics of becoming strangers to ourselves, even and especially when we fail. The brilliant character at the heart of the novel learns to choose what will let him survive, in one way or another. It is a difficult choice. One we are all compelled to make. To choose the possibilities that shut other doors, and let us live, if not flourish.
While the immediate context of the novel is post-independent Africa, its ethical burdens must surely haunt all of us, as we negotiate the kinds of intimacies that give life pleasure and meaning, knowing that the two are not commensurate, and that intimate choices are ethical ones, structured by the knowledges we possess and share and the ones we choose to withhold.
Season is a difficult book, with difficult lessons to teach. Its haunting, lyrical English, for those of us who read it in translation, is both rich but also comes with a sense of loss: what does it read like in Arabic?
This necessary loss and gain that accompanies translation speaks more broadly to Salih’s legacy to we who negotiate the modern world, split between our allegiances to here and (t)here, and we all have them; acquiring and losing fluencies, some of which we are aware, others hidden, lost until during a moment of need, we discover ourselves floundering; riven among the competing demands that give our lives structure and de-structure them.
In Salih, reading becomes both retreat and refuge, succor and agony, an ethical masochism that gestures to worlds out there, worlds still to come, worlds still to be built, and worlds that cannot be realized.
My debt, our debt, to him: incalculable, immeasurable.
Go well, learned brother.
Go well.
Dear President Kibaki:
I write as a citizen of Kenya to express my continuing disappointment at how the government continues to mistreat Kenyan citizens, especially Human Rights Activists.
On February 18, 2009, three Kenyan activists were arrested and beaten by the Kenyan police after peacefully standing outside Parliament. Patrick Kamotho, Philo Ikonya and Fwamba Chrispus were among a handful of Kenyans hoping to grab the attention of Minister for Agriculture, William Ruto and Finance Minister, Uhuru Kenyatta to plead with them to act swiftly to prevent more deaths from starvation in the looming famine that is threatening 10 million Kenyans. They were taken to Central Police Station.
Philo is the President of the Kenya Chapter of PEN, the international society of writers dedicated to the promotion of literature and freedom of expression.
Since her arrest, Philo has written movingly about being harassed and degraded, watching her fellow activists suffer through beatings and other forms of torture designed to break the spirit and silence political critique.
It is sad that a government that came to power in 2002 promising to reject the old methods of rule by intimidation and harassment, and promising a new era of openness and accountability, stands by silent while its appointed officers brutalize fellow Kenyans.
Your ongoing silence is particularly egregious, compounded only by the contempt with which you commented on the harassment and arrest of a Kenyan citizen who dared to speak his mind during last year’s Jamhuri Day.
In recent weeks, you have asked about the Kenya We Want.
We want a Kenya where the Constitution, which forbids torture and harassment of Kenyan citizens, is followed. We want a Kenya where those who have pledged to be responsible to us and for us fulfill that promise. We want a Kenya where freedom is not something we once acquired from the British, not an old song hummed in bars by our grandparents, but a daily practice of living.
We are willing to work with you to create this Kenya.
Are you willing to work with us?
Here.
Recent Comments