Kenya’s Marriage Bill

In a recent article, Judy Thongori advises Kenyans to read and understand the Marriage Bill, which was introduced into parliament in 2007. As she rightly notes, “Marriage affects all of us at one time in life, whether it is our marriages, our parents’ marriages, or those of our children.” This bill, Thongori continues, will be the first time that Kenya’s marriage laws have been reconsidered since 1962.

Before explaining the content of the law, Thongori argues, “Our family values and experiences must enrich this law.” Indeed they must.

The Marriage Bill privileges heterosexual marriage as the ideal union that receives recognition and privileges within the law. For instance, Part IV, Matrimonial Rights, Liabilities and Status, notes,

either spouse is presumed to have authority to pledge the other spouse’s credit, or to borrow money in his or her name, or to use any of his or her money which is in his or her possession or under his or her control, or to convert his or her movable property into money, and use it, so far as that credit or money is required or used for the purchase of necessaries for himself or herself and any children of the marriage, and so far as is reasonable having regard to the other spouse’s means and way of life.

Although this section of the bill protects both men and women by providing them access to jointly shared and created assets, it also discriminates against the many Kenyans who share households but are not married. It discriminates against those men and women who live with their parents, those siblings who share houses, and friends who live together. After all, bills are bills, whether owed by a married couple or siblings who live together.

We cannot presume that marriage is based on a commitment so profound that it trumps other kinds of social attachments. Many of us are pledged to take care of our parents, siblings, friends, and other loved ones, and those pledges are not recognized by a system that recognizes marriage as the privileged social bond.

Family values in Kenya are not restricted to monogamous marriages, nor even to marriages. They are drawn from our extended families, the obligations we have for distant cousins and adopted relatives, the habits of care that we extend to each other as citizens. Family values cannot and should not be an excuse to discriminate against other Kenyans.

The Marriage Bill discriminates against Kenyans with same-sex partners and companions, who cannot get married.

We need to remember that this Marriage Bill was introduced into parliament shortly after the contentious Sexual Offences Act passed. An earlier draft of the Sexual Offences Act had to be revised when conservative members of parliament argued that the Act seemed to decriminalize homosexuality.

Moreover, Kenya is not immune to world forces, and we have followed debates over homosexual marriage in South Africa, where it is legal, and the United States, where it is available in some States, not all. Homosexual marriage has been debated by various church organizations, creating fractures in both the Presbyterian and Episcopalian churches.

Let us be very clear about this: this bill is for heterosexual marriage and against homosexual marriage. After all, it defines marriage as “the voluntary union of a man and a woman intended to last for their life time.”

In fact, this bill is so threatened by the very idea of same-sex marriage that it does not even prohibit homosexual marriage!

Out of sight, out of mind. If it cannot be mentioned then it cannot exist. Apparently, Kenya has no homosexuals, and certainly none who are interested in establishing long-term relationships that would receive the same marriage benefits as heterosexuals.

As written, the bill is discriminatory.

Yet, as Thongori notes, it is an important bill, and one that will help Kenyans by providing legal guidance about marriage.

If Kenya is to become a more just society, a fairer society, a place where individual rights are not sacrificed on the altars of conservatism and bigotry, then we must re-think this Marriage Bill.

We must understand that so-called family values should not trump the obligations we have toward each other to act as ethical citizens, bound together by the constitution that guarantees our rights. When we privilege “family values” over the constitution, we fragment into ethnic enclaves and class-protected cocoons, eager to defend our own against external threats.

To amend Thongori, then, we need to consider how our values as citizens should inform this bill. Not our family values, but the values we share as Kenyans. This, I suspect, is a far more difficult question to answer. What values do we share as Kenyans? What do we wish for each other? How do we enhance each others’ lives?

A marriage bill based on these questions would be, I suspect, a radically different beast. It would look at how we actually live, not idealize marriage as the form we should inhabit. It would note, for instance, the many young people who have longstanding relationships that do not culminate in marriage. It would look at homes composed of parents and children or siblings or friends, and consider them equal to the marriage home. It would look at different sex and same-sex relationships, and understand that love and passion are not limited by the sex of one’s partner.

A marriage bill based on the values of an ethical citizenship would ask about the obligations we owe each other as Kenyans. As Kenyans, we owe each other the rights guaranteed by the constitution. We owe each other the right to pursue freedom and even happiness. Our goal as Kenyans should be to expand freedom for each other, not to create needless, discriminatory barriers in the name of family values.

Quarrel in Ian Fleming’s Dr. No

Quarrel is the central-peripheral black male figure in Ian Fleming’s Dr. No (book 1958, film 1962). Dr. No was the first James Bond book turned into a film, though it was the sixth novel in the Bond series. In preparing for a conference, I read the novel and watched the film, and I am struck by the ideological work embodied in the figure of Quarrel, and what it suggests about the circulation of James Bond films in colonial and, later, former colonial spaces.

A few thoughts.

In the novel, Quarrel is a long-time acquaintance of James Bond. They met five years prior to their encounter (and Quarrel’s death) in Dr. No. A “tall brown-skinned man,” Quarrel’s “dark grey eyes” show “descent from a Cromwellian soldier or a pirate of Morgan’s time.” This evidence of racial mixture articulates a central point in the novel: the distinction between “good” and “bad” forms of miscegenation, a distinction that only makes sense in a British territory, Jamaica, not in England itself, and whose relegation to a far past makes it palatable, for it emphasizes power relations (a soldier or pirate when the only women available had some relationship to slavery).

The anglo-black racial mixture is important because Dr. No’s foot soldiers are the wrong kind of mix: Chigroes, a mix between Chinese and Negroes. Following the racial dictum that blood will tell, there are no good, honest, or decent Chigroes in the novel. In the movie, this racial mixture is obscured, and only those who have read the book can tell what it signifies when the evil black assassins don Chinese-looking garments. Appearance is everything.

Back to Quarrel.

In the novel, Quarrel is an accomplished driver and fisherman, Bond’s black buddy, anticipating the interracial buddy movies of the 1980s. Although he is libidinal—a scene in the novel depicts him rhapsodizing on the significance of a fleshy Mount of Venus, the “soft lozenge of flesh in the palm below [the] thumb”—he is also deft and shrewd, less a servant and caricature, and more a trusted guide.

While Jamaicans as a whole might be “kindly” and “lazy,” “with the virtues and vices of a child,” and Bond tends to protect Quarrel from news that might be too much for him, Quarrel is clearly not meant to be a stereotype. The extent to which his courage and aptitude should be attributed to his visible descent from English ancestors is up for debate.

The Quarrel of the novel, the dependable, shrewd, libidinal, and honorable character, is strikingly absent from the movie.

Instead, the movie traffics in the worst stereotypes: Quarrel sips alcohol continuously, rolls his eyes comically, is shifty and awkward, a “movie nigger.”

He is not Bond’s buddy, but a new acquaintance, whose relationship to Bond is mediated by the white U.S. agent. In the movie, the white U.S. agent introduces Bond to Quarrel. And the information that Quarrel provides to Bond in the novel is given, instead, by the white agent. Quarrel is a hired hand, body, not mind, and is, in fact, so irritating, that when he dies, we feel little for him. After all, he’s a lousy drunk, a “movie nigger,” and his actions foreshadow his inevitable end.

How does the figure of Quarrel secure an argument about blacks at the moment of empire’s long demise? Why does the likable buddy of the novel become impossible within the film? Why must Quarrel be a “movie nigger?” And what fantasies about empire and imperialism does this depiction secure?

In a previous installment, I have suggested that Bond secures a fantasy of empire’s omnipotence, one that is phoenix-like, embodied in the Bond who never dies, though his features might change. In the transition from Dr. No, novel, to Dr. No, film, we see empire reconstituting itself, both masking its founding violence (one that creates Jamaica and Quarrel) and erasing its present obsolescence (there are no racial tensions in 1958 Jamaica—all the conflicts related to independence in the book have been erased).

Through the juxtaposition between the killed Quarrel—the heading-toward-independence colonial who cannot survive the transition, especially the global vulnerabilities of independence embodied by the Chino-German Dr. No—and the surviving Bond and Honey Rider, the two main white characters, empire is secured as heterofuturity. The white man and woman survive to reproduce empire’s logic, whereas the heading-to-independence colonial cannot survive the ravages of the presumably post-imperial world.

Crucially, heterofuturity is not marked through biological reproduction—as far as we know, Bond and Honey never reproduce, and Bond is never biologically reproductive. However, whiteness is reproduced as a form of modern currency that is invulnerable to the ruptures of history, whether the enemy be German (the old), Chinese (the old and new), or a blend of the old and new, Chino-German.

One brief note on Honey.

In the book, Honey is Creole, a declassed white Jamaican who is raised by her “negress” mammy after her parents die. Her full name is, in fact, Honeychile, a name that embeds her within Jamaica’s racialized histories. However, the movie cannot reproduce this history of white decline within its narrative of white omnipotence, and so Honey is her full name, “chile” is dropped, and her deceased father was a roving marine biologist, unanchored, undiminished, killed not by his own colonial excesses, as in the book, but by the evil Dr. No.

Quarrel in the book is likable. Quarrel in the movie is unsympathetic.

The distinction between the book and the movie and how both circulate within post-independent empire is crucial in marking the ideological work of late imperial books and films. It is crucial that film predominates in forming and mediating relationships between former colonizers and colonized.

Kara Keeling writes,

A film starts. A viewer creates various circuits between the present perception of the set of images that the film comprises and past memory-images available to make sense of the film. Although these circuits are open, attentive recognition seeks to conform present perceptions to past memory-images by pummeling the fullness of each into the molds of the other. Clichés will come to predominate perceptions under conditions wherein one’s set of memory-images is already a set of clichés or, speaking most broadly, when that set consists of collective images, experiences, traditions, knowledges, and so on, and when the bodily habituation that determines perception has been made common through “affectivity.” (The Witch’s Flight, 12)

How does Dr. No the movie interpellate its white, ex-colonial, late imperial viewers? How does it construct and reassure them? What does it hide and what does it expose? Simultaneously, how does it interpellate its colored, ex-colonized viewers? What hierarchies does it defend and support, even given historical evidence to the contrary? And, given my ongoing interest in the intra-racial dynamics of diaspora, how does it mediate the relationships between blacks across the diaspora?

As I watch Quarrel, I am struck by how many Africans, especially Kenyans, might have laughed at his antics, found the “movie nigger” funny, instead of painful, not yet reached the Fanonian point of understanding the ideological work of race-making within movies. And I think, from my own experience, of the ideological work of the “movie nigger” in Kenya, the kinds of identifications it makes possible and forecloses.

By no means do I mean to suggest that all identifications are wrong. After all, as many people laugh at Quarrel because he reminds them of someone they know as those who laugh at him because he is buffoonish. Also, given the scarcity of black characters in 1960s movies, the fact of his appearance might be more ideologically significant than the tenor and timbre of that appearance.

Still, what difference might it have made if the Quarrel from the book was the Quarrel in the movie?

Queer Fluids

I want to slide through the social and its edges tear skin and hair.
Razor smiles in rainbow pins.
To move, as in a book on fluids, in containers.

Tight razor smiles
Unheimlich

Delicately disgusted in sweat showers.

Blood.Spit.Semen.Sweat.

I am increasingly baffled by claims that queerness is about fluidity.

We might contest the genealogy of queerness, but let us remember it is fertilized by blood, sweat, spit, semen, the interred bones of the AIDS generation, the delicate minds of the cancer warriors, the gleaming ivory of teeth, and the tears of little queers in homo-hating homes.

Blood-Spit-Semen-Sweat

We insist on using the metaphorics of fluidity to discuss queerness.
One gets tired, one sweat, one spits, one sweats blood and leaks semen.
What is the materiality of fluids and fluidity, in a raspy social?

Spit. After a while. Add lube. Water-based. Even sweat dries. And mucus is unreliable. Spit. On me. In Me. At Me. Labile.

Raspy social.

I thought being black made me ashy. But the dry rasp of queer spaces produces acute rashes. Queerness might not be about being at home, as Lee Edelman once claimed, but I wonder why it seems more unhomely for the queer Kenyan in US waters, where the sensation of having landed leaves one at sea. Queer diaspora: at sea on land.

Sandpaper Glances.

I turn to frottage to register the feel of queer spaces, the feel of normative spaces, to register what resists lube, the necessary shearing that is one mode of dailyness.

Sweat turns into blood, cutting glances, sweaty palms holding paper-cut invitations.

I sweat more, now, the heat, the fat, the miles of travel to travel, and the return to the unhomely, to being unhomely. To slide into place and leave wet splotches, to peel away from the social bark, and be threaded.

How it feels to be queer me.

I wonder about the shame of confession, what has become impossible to say, making even the impossible even more impossible, and the narrative of that impossibility narrated, here, hidden from the hereness of here.

To blush is to realize that one’s shame is shared-not-shared, but black people do not blush. We are visibly invisible, and those that provide recognition do so through chitin-skins and lowered lashes.

Shame. Sweat. Blood.

Dangerous fluidic space.

Spit.

Call for Submissions: None on Record

None on Record: Stories of Queer Africa
Edited by: Notisha Massaquoi & Selly Thiam

WE are collecting stories of Africans from the continent and within the diasporic communities that identify as queer, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (QLGBT).

One of our biggest challenges as QLGBT Africans globally is forced invisibility. Human rights violations in many countries on the African continent are at an all time high for QLGBT Africans who speak out publicly.

In order to identify ourselves rather than be defined by others we must first see ourselves, create discourse and story. And only we can write it. We must no longer cooperate in the maintenance of our own invisibility. Our voices must be heard. We do exist.

It is the goal of None on Record to link the struggles, triumphs, joy and pain of QLGBT Africans everywhere. We aim to add to the exponential growth of histories and stories being told by queer Africans all over the world.

We invite QLGBT Africans to submit original, unpublished essays, poems, short stories, plays, creative non-fiction, and visual art. We’re looking for work that explores the lives of QLGBT Africans and how your experiences have shaped you emotionally, politically, socially, and culturally. We are interested in the ideas and language that make you African and QLGBT.

We accept work from QLGBT Africans from the continent and those who have immigrated to other parts of the world. We also accept submissions from first generation QLGBT Africans born outside the African Continent. If you self-identify as a QLGBT African but do not fit the criteria written above and would like to submit work for consideration, please write us at: NORsubmission@gmail.com

ALL WORK NEEDS TO BE TYPED in 12-point font, double-spaced. All submissions should include your name, address, titles, phone number and email address. Please include a short biography with your work.

All submissions must be unpublished work.

Fiction should be one short story or an edited piece from and larger work. 15pg maximum
Non-fiction should be one essay or an edited piece from and larger work. 15pg maximum
Poetry: Maximum of three poetry submissions per author. 6 pg maximum.

Playwriting should include one complete work or one act from a larger work. Please limit submissions to 15 pgs.

VISUAL ART
Photos and artwork must be reproducible in black and white. Do not send originals. hi-res digital files on CD or ZIP, or high quality photocopies of line art

All pieces must include a short bio, including age, gender, sexual orientation, nation of origin and/or ethnicity, adopted country, and any other biographical information which is important to understanding your work. This demographic information will not be published. Please indicate the name(s) you would like to use for publication. Don’t forget to include your contact information!

Please note that due to space limitations there is no guarantee that submissions will be included in the anthology. However, you will receive confirmation that your submission was received. We greatly appreciate all submissions, and will handle them with care and respect. We look forward to seeing your fantastic work!

Please submit work to: NORsubmission@gmail.com.

Notisha Massaquoi is a queer identified researcher, educator and activist originally from Sierra Leone. She is currently the Executive Director of a health centre for black women and women of color in Toronto, Canada and a doctoral candidate at OISE/University of Toronto. Her most current publications include the anthology Theorizing Empowerment: Canadian Perspectives on Black Feminist Thought.

Selly k. Thiam, is a queer identified Senegalese woman born in Chicago. She is an independent journalist and oral historian. She is currently the Associate Producer for the StoryCorps Griot Initiative in New York City. Selly is the founder of the None on Record: Stories of Queer Africa oral history project.
None On Record Stories of Queers Africa was originally created in 2006 as a sound documentary project that collects the stories of Africans from the continent and within Diasporic communities.

http://www.noneonrecord.com

Plug; do check out the amazing website and consider submitting work!

Dear Professor

Please clarify whether the quiz based on the book we were supposed to buy that we are supposed to be reading right now is based on the book we were supposed to buy and that we are supposed to be reading right now.

Thank you,

Eight-weeks into the semester student

Echo-Maker

You asked for a bite-into-it story
But my necrotic skin would not yield
And your touch remained outside me

Your eyes accused men-like-me
chitin-dressed, kin to narcissus
echo-makers

What I said
What you heard

Pumice-words graze newly soft places

*
echo-maker
echo-maker
make me a word

*

We lack etymology
Men like us

Neologisms elude us

We dine on the afters

Word-shimmers
Image-glimmers

Sutures

© Keguro Macharia, 2009

Currently Reading

Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004).

Reginald Shepherd, Some are Drowning (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994).

David William Cohen and E.S. Atieno Odhiambo, Burying SM: The Politics of Knowledge and the Sociology of Power in Africa (London: James Currey, 1992).

Claude McKay, Banana Bottom (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1933).

Bethwell A. Ogot, History of the Southern Luo (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1967).

Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

In the next few months, I’ll try to strike a better balance between literary and historical texts, emphasizing more literature. Must keep reminding myself that I am NOT a historian, though I like to play in history.

Snippets

Timeless

Shuttling between here and (t)here, time stops.

A passing comment.

Timeless: Attached to whiteness, to the notion of the classic.

Timeless: Attached to non-whiteness, atavistic, not in time.

How to think about these two, these two moments that are so saturated with time that we deem them “timeless.” What is that point of saturation that can only be marked by its absence?

What is the time of blackness?

Timeless.

Victims

Which victims deserve compassion and which are playing cards? And why have we allowed ourselves to agree that being victimized is shameful? Why have we allowed shame to silence our confessions? And why do we continue to allow oppressors to triumph by shaming us for being vulnerable?

What is the shame of vulnerability?

As Leo Bersani has persisted in asking, why is there so much bottom shame among gay men?

As others and I have asked, what does the myth of the strong black woman foreclose?

What does the myth of the Kevlar-vested minority enable?

Desire

Between the pin-here-and-pricks-now

To remove oneself from an economy does not halt circulation

Increasingly, one is bundled, as at an auction, attached to what sells

Desire remains tropic, inclining

Poetry

He wants to know how to turn back, get on the bus
and pay the fare
—Reginald Shepherd, “Brotherhood”

But, oh, they dance with poetry in their eyes
Whose dreamy loveliness no sorrow dims,
And parted lips and eager, gleeful cries,
And perfect rhythm in their nimble limbs.
The gifts divine are theirs, music and laughter,
All other things, however great, come after.
—Claude McKay, “Harlem”

Simple

As
Like
If
Were

Argument

By juxtaposing . . . Soyinka . . . thus . . . is enabled . . . paradigm . . . queer

Response

. . .

Casual Homophobia, again

“Where’s that faggot?” the black saleswoman asks, looking for a sales associate.

Why do such moments still reduce me to enraged silence, stump me, leave me shocked, violated into silence? What is that trigger that is so easily pressed? Why can’t I respond to casual homophobia? Is it because it is always like a trick punch? Unanticipated, and so always crippling?

Why, when I have learned to stop flinching, do I return to that cowed position, one in which, sadly, so many black women reduce me to, with their casual homophobia?

Obama’s Sediments

Obama’s Kenyan ancestry was noted throughout the course of his campaign. He was African American, we learned, not African American. He did not emerge “up from slavery” and thus he was presumably free from the ongoing wounding (as potential) that is the peculiar legacy of those Africans whose histories are directly embedded in U.S.-based slavery.

Indeed, in a moment of historical revisionism, one British newspaper claimed that Obama might redress the history of colonialism, a history in which his grandfather had been treated badly by the British. The article suggested that Obama’s relationship with England and the English might be more ambivalent than that of former, more anglophile presidents—anglophilia, we might remember, is one of the chief features of U.S. nativism, and is often a prophylactic against the ideas and ideals of multiculturalism and multiracialism. Of course, the idea that former U.S. presidents have been more anglophile is its own particular case of historical revisionism.

The distinction posed between an African and an African American heritage has at least two implications.

First, it effaces the notion of diaspora as a fabrication, a necessary historical weaving that has been going on since at least the mid-nineteenth century, and before, in works by Martin Delany, Edward Blyden, Alexander Crummell, Pauline Hopkins, and W.E.B. Du Bois. These works, and others written by African-born and based intellectuals, reach across seas and oceans to promote solidarity within the racial histories that produce blackness. Africans and African Americans embed themselves in and through each other (it’s more accurate to write of “the Americas,” because I’m thinking of Touissant L’Ouverture and the Haitian revolution as specific nodal points of contact).

And given the transformation of slave-holding properties in the Caribbean into colonies, it makes little historical or conceptual sense to posit any kind of absolute distinction between slavery and colonialism within black histories—a point René Maran, C.L.R. James, and Aimé Césaire emphasize in their respective critical and creative works.

By erasing the co-implication between Africa and the African Americas, commentators could ignore the histories of radical figures such as Marcus Garvey and Frantz Fanon, an erasure that continues today with the continual invocation of Abraham Lincoln. (And, here, the way that genealogy has been racialized and de-racinated, as presidential rather than blood-based, offers an intriguing lesson into the politics of presidential race-making.)

If, within one kind of cultural imaginary, disembedding Obama from the racial histories of the Americas serves one purpose, that of re-making him affectively—he’s not angry, bears no historical wounds directly attributable to U.S. histories—it also re-orients him in relation to the tropes available with which to speak of him. And here Kenya enters, albeit, a dramatically re-formed Kenya.

Obama does not simply become Kenyan, he becomes Luo. And he becomes an intriguing kind of Luo.

Those familiar with Kenyan histories know the truncated histories of Kenyan radicalism that privilege a Gikuyu Mau Mau—though its members were also drawn from other groups. Mau Mau is only the most famous instance of militarism in Kenya, not the only one. Less remarked upon is the equally important history of labor activism in Kenya that ran from at least the 1920s, when Kenya officially became a colony, through the eve of independence. If Mau Mau is “Gikuyu” in one imagination, the multi-ethnic labor radicalism is generally “Luo.” These quotation marks speak more to perception rather than reality.

Indeed, what is often termed Obama’s “Kenyan heritage” becomes a very U.S. story of overcoming the odds: his father is poor, pursues and receives a scholarship to the States, challenges color codes by marrying a white woman, and then fades from the picture, leaving a single mother to raise her son. What is specific about his father, about Luo-ness, about Kenyan-ness, fades to black, only to crop up in Obama’s trip to Kenya, where his remarks about race and the country read as little more than tourist jottings.

Obama’s Kenyan history becomes a floating signifier: distancing him from U.S. histories of wounding and activism but also distancing him from Kenyan histories of wounding and activism. In fact, I would argue, it becomes aesthetic, like a beauty mark that provides him with distinction.

But this is not all.

In disembedding Obama, commentators simultaneously make him available for other tropic readings.

Tropes are historically created sediments that remain possible within the waters of history. Like sediments in a river, they sink to the bottom, waiting to be re-agitated by the movement of history. When disturbed, they re-color the waters of history.

In recent (often conservative, but not always) comments on Obama, it has been striking to see how much he is “Africanized,” though that might not always be the term used. Like other African leaders, he has “gone back on his word,” does “shady things,” acts in a manner “inconsistent with U.S. values.”

While I have suggested, elsewhere, that we should look to the rhetoric of Reconstruction to see where these tropes emerge, I am increasingly convinced that we also need to look toward Africa. Disembedded from U.S. histories of race, Obama can only signify an ambiguous blackness, and the Africa about which much still remains unknown—except in happy tourist fashion or devastated NGO fashion—provides an impoverished set of tropes through which to imagine him.

It is striking, then, that the Kenya Boys Choir chose to sing “Jambo Bwana” for Obama’s inauguration, perhaps the closest we come to minstrelsy in Kenya. Kenya, the song fantasizes, is tourist Kenya, a disneyfied Kenya without trouble, “Hakuna Matata.” It is a Kenya that lives outside history, sanitized from what Toni Morrison might term “eruptions of funk.”

And Obama is its product.