Defending Human Rights

Over the past few months, I have found myself in the strange position of defending human rights activists to leftist/progressive Kenyans. It is a strange position because it feels so out-of-fashion, so out-of-date, so yesterday. And it indicates that yesterday’s poison lingers in our collective bloodstream. I get ahead of myself. Let me choose an arbitrary starting point.

Dissident was a filthy word in Moi’s Kenya. Those people wanted to destroy the Kenyan family that was guided by baba Moi. (We cannot overlook what happens when kinship relations supersede political ties, even and especially through metaphor, and the dire consequences for constitutionally defined rights and protections.) And they were funded by Kenya’s enemies: not Uganda, not Tanzania, not even India, (I choose arbitrary countries), but those terrible human rights people. My childhood memory tells me Amnesty had a terrible reputation in Moi’s Kenya. Human rights were “western impositions.”

I should explain, here, my continual return to Moi’s Kenya. I am not arguing that every current Kenyan framework derives from the Moi era. Such an argument truncates the multiple histories that feed into Kenya today. Instead, I am interested in the persistence of attitudes and ideas, and their subsequent appropriations and transformations. And, given my experiences over the past few months, it’s quite clear that we need to interrogate our attitudes toward human rights and other human-service organizations.

Let us not forget Moi’s ongoing claim that human rights organization and individuals were funded from abroad and were corrupt and corrupting. Ironically, this belief continues to circulate in various forms today, and leftist/progressive writers and thinkers disavow human rights organizations and individuals, claiming that they are tainted, “in it for the money,” in bed with power.

Unfortunately, this claim, predominantly hinged on “I have seen and I know,” authorizes a lazy dismissal of all human rights organizations and individuals, who are all “tainted.” And when human rights groups try to mobilize action or stage protests, we can then dismiss them as performing “stunts,” because they are “well funded” from abroad.

I am left to wonder how much money is given so that human rights activists can be arrested and assaulted, as happened with my friend, Philo Ikonya; how much is given so that activists can be arrested and held in secret locations and separated from their children, as happened with Jayne Mati; how much is available so that activists can sit in their cars and be executed; how much money is available so that activists are forced to go into hiding, afraid for their lives.

Leftist/progressive Kenyans distrust human rights actions and activities, and, in doing so, they sacrifice needed coalitions and lose potential allies.

One reply I have heard when staging this argument: “we don’t need those kinds of allies.” And this reply worries me a lot.

It is a reply that drinks deeply in Kenyan cynicism, wallows in political depression, sighs dramatically about the “state we’re in,” and demands untainted purity from potential “allies.” This reply justifies apathy in the name of wisdom, laments the absence of “good people” while flinging mud on everyone around.

It is an impossible demand couched as a reply, and I am interested in what it makes impossible, and also what it licenses.

To begin with the latter, what it licenses: it is not simply that all human rights activists are dismissed, but that a scale of value is created in which class status distinguishes between the “good” and “bad” activists. Those from the middle and upper-middle classes, those with advanced degrees, and, arguably, greater cultural capital, are suspect. In contrast, community workers with “bona-fide” credentials of the “I was born and work with ‘the people’” become lionized, not simply lionized, but fetishized. Thus, we who disdain middle-class activists readily speak with great eloquence about “real activists” doing “real work” in Kangemi and Kibera and so on.

That “we” who speak with such approval are invariably middle-class is its own particular irony, as we keep searching for “authentic” spokespeople, ashamed of ourselves and skeptical of our own motives and abilities, except as “champions” for those who “need championing.” There is something incredibly disingenuous about this position. And dangerous, for this is not a “learning from below” so much as it is a fetishizing of class origins and status.

Such championing of others “not of our class” also absolves us of any need to put ourselves on the line: after all, why get involved when “born and bred there activist” already knows the terrain so well?

Of course fetishizing class origin helps to police class status: if we cannot trust ourselves, as the middle and upper-middle classes, to work with altruism for human rights, then we shouldn’t work in human rights at all, and should leave such labor to those who are “real” and “genuine.” The logic is perverse, pervasive, and self-serving.

As part of this perverse logic, the only space available for middle and upper-middle class human rights activists is as martyrs. At such a moment, class protectionism melds with class-based fear, and we grudgingly allow that human rights work in Kenya might be dangerous for us. (A criminally irresponsible article has recently suggested that Kenya’s human rights activists should be executed. I mention it but cannot link to it because it is criminally irresponsible.)

To some extent, human rights activism also suffers from a problem of tone: Kenyan commentators have perfected satire. And we have come to understand satire as the best kind of critique. Against satire’s sharp bite, the earnest tone of much human rights activism elicits sneers and yawns.

Why aren’t activists more entertaining? And shouldn’t all activism be satire? I cannot, here, begin to outline the limits of satire as critique, and will leave that task for another person, or another day.

To return to an earlier question: what is made impossible by the demand that human rights individuals and organizations be free of taint?

I am not, here, justifying corruption or cronyism or nepotism. Instead, I am interested in the formal operation of metonymy to discredit all human rights activism. Metonymy is when a part stands in for a whole, and it is pervasive in dismissing human rights activism.

Yet another irresponsible article, not criminal, but irresponsible, demonstrated such metonymy when it claimed that it’s possible to see a vehicle belonging to a human rights advocate parked outside the houses of known criminals. Metonymy: one vehicle represents all vehicles, one presumably corrupt activist represents all activists. I need not continue. You see the (ill)logic.

I have no answers, no recommendations, and have certainly not posed all the questions that need to be posed, but it’s vital that we re-think our positions toward human rights activists. A lot is at stake.

Similes in Tutuola

Amos Tutuola’s similes in Palm-Wine Drinkard “hyphen” Afro-modernity, suturing differentially experienced time-spaces. Similes are about the potential of proximity, designed to invoke a sensation, a memory, an experience, a history that can be drawn out, elicited, invoked to create a shared framework. Their task is to make strangeness proximate, if not familiar. And this labor of proximity makes similes very strange indeed, and, perhaps, the best able to render strangeness.

We experience this strangeness when Tutuola writes that “spirits . . . were just like partners.” In what sense is a “partner” something to be feared? Is this about proximity, about the threat of it that emerges from Afro-modernity, and Tutuola’s recent experience of the war? How do we understand the disembodied threat of the spirit to be akin of that posed by a partner?

To think of a spirit as a partner requires forging a conceptual-affective relationship between the two, and this become the work of simile in the service of Afro-modernity, as the hyphen that sutures Afro-modernity.

Take, for instance, this description of the narrator’s baby: “there appeared a half-bodied baby, he was talking with a lower voice like a telephone.” We have to ask ourselves what “like a telephone” is doing in the middle of a dystopic story of aborted parenthood—the narrator and his wife have just attempted to kill their monstrous child. Also, what is this sense that the telephone does not facilitate talking, but actually talks? How do the telephone’s distorting effects create it as an agent within a techno-modernity? And how does framing a monster-human-baby’s voice through a techno-modern agent-displacer tell us something about Tutuola’s Afro-modernity?

Here, of course, the ongoing question of how Tutuola’s “voice” is framed and amplified and distorted and manipulated through English and through editing: how he is “telephoned.”

And for whom does Tutuola frame this sound-voice distortion of Afro-modernity?

My favorite of these distortions is when Tutuola writes of the power of juju to transmogrify. During a moment of danger, “I became a big bird like an aeroplane.”

In this simple simile lies the power, horror, and possibility of Afro-modernity. References cross the organic/inorganic divide, aeroplanes appear in the forests of the imagination, and the human body is transformed into its ability to occupy another space, in another form. Surely, it is no coincidence that this World War II veteran reaches for the aeroplane, that militarized object, to describe transformation, pointing, also, to deep changes in epistemology.

Proximity.

Like or as names proximity: a comparison is made to something or someone that can be readily evoked, something that is a memory away. There is no such thing as a frame-less simile, a simile that does not create the possibilities for its own framing.

Tutuola’s similes demonstrate the changing imaginative landscape of Afro-modernity. Even what can be imagined or recited—here, the claim that Tutuola “appropriates” folk tales—must forge a relationship with and be mediated by changing notions of space, time, and sensation.

And, so, these similes construct histories of before and after “like” or “as,” histories in which we ask how to describe a big bird prior to Tutuola’s experience with the aeroplane, what this new simile has “cost” (comparisons as sites of endless loss), and also what we might have gained, for similes are also polysemous: while Tutuola may only want to invoke “size,” he also invokes other meanings of the aeroplane—its history in WWII, its noise, its smell, a history and present of sensation.

Two names frame this engagement, and I cite them here to be responsible: Fanon and Jameson. Fanon’s claim that taking on another language is taking on another world, and implicitly erasing one’s own, published the same year as Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard, encounters resistance in Tutuola’s work. Because Tutuola’s vision is always dialectical, always interested in making visible the process of encounter (using “as” or “like,” for instance) and inhabiting the uneven results of that process. Jameson’s claim that genres emerge within and change given historical circumstances finds great resonance in Tutuola’s “appropriation” of folk tales to map Afro-modernity. And, here, I’m especially indebted to Jameson’s discussion of Conrad, as a writer whose genre is located on the cusp of two moments, in that long-abrupt transition to modernism.

Cusp or bridge.

In Tutuola, simile is a bridge, not one that compels a crossing from one side to another, but one that enables voices to travel from one side to another—hence the telephone.

Arguably, I am staking a lot on a little, taking a certain lesson from deconstruction-influenced close reading too seriously, to see in the slightest of units significance, and this risk I happily take. (I will confess, here, that I was tempted to think about Tutuola in terms of translation, if only because it would make a friend happy to have me thinking more seriously about translation, but I am still in thrall to simile.)

To reach for simile is to reach outside the self and the familiar, not simply to inhabit but also to create proximity. Simile not only names what is available, but also makes available what can be named. It makes proximity available—and I admit that language is straining here.

Thinking through simile in Tutuola is one way to apprehend the conceptual stakes of his work, and the crucial, indeed foundational, role it must play in any discussion of Afro-modernity.

The Tragedy of Bantu Mwaura

Update: Shailja Patel has details on memorial/funeral arrangements

Breaking news that Bantu Mwaura has been found dead.

Bantu was a human rights activist and university lecturer. He received his Ph.D. in performance studies from New York University. He was a poet and had published in English, Gikuyu, and Kiswahili, and was also a thespian, director, and storyteller.

I have yet to confirm the circumstances of his death. Assassination and suicide are the two competing narratives.

There are many tragedies here, and I choose an idiosyncratic one: human rights defenders have been assassinated in the past few months, allegedly by government forces. As a result, every single suspicious death of a human rights activist is clouded, and the tag cloud is dominated by government-funded figures.

A few weeks ago, I was on a panel with Dr. Wangui wa Goro, and she drew a parallel between the Moi-era exiles of intellectuals (to which she belongs) and the current Kenyan migrants abroad (to which I belong). I resisted the comparison. I wanted to say it was not applicable, that the Moi-era exiles had been exceptional. After all, they were the Nyayo-house generation: freed from the British to be tortured by the Kenyans.

Now, I am less certain about my resistance.

Under Moi, we survived through a necessary paranoia—the rumors and whispers that allowed some to leave their homes before government agents came for them.

I had thought, mistakenly, that paranoia was no longer necessary. I had thought, wrongly, that life-saving gossip was a no-longer necessary Kenyan genre. While I know Kenya is impossible for me, I had thought others like me, intellectuals, artists, dreamers, and visionaries, could flourish, create art, transform society, as only intellectuals can. I thought that human rights activists could help create a more just Kenya.

It is difficult to let go of this dream. And it is difficult to watch friends and loved ones continue to make themselves visible and vulnerable, because they believe in the promise of Kenya, and they believe their actions can make a difference.

I did not know Bantu Mwaura, but I have close friends who did. Some agreed with his politics, others didn’t. And I repeat, again, I don’t know the exact circumstances of his death.

Bantu, do not rest in peace.
Haunt us.
Whisper to us in our dreams.
Give flesh to our visions and urgency to our actions.

Women in Love

We were two girls, one brown
one white. Loved
each other, from Kenya
to England. We held hands
on an East London street.
All hell broke loose.
—Shailja Patel, “Two Girls”

Frame One

A few weeks ago, two lesbian friends celebrated 25 years together.

Yesterday, on the metro, a young lesbian couple cuddled together.

Frame Two

At the African Literature Association conference, a speaker insisted that African women are meant to get married and to give birth within a heterosexual setting, and that is how they prove their worth. No one questioned the violent erasures of her statements.

Frame Three

Yet another email, yet another bashing in Kenya.

The Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Kenya in solidarity with Minority Women In Action are profoundly concerned about the increasing violence, discrimination and violation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, trans gendered, intersexes and queer (LGBTIQ) individuals rights in the country. We particularly vehemently condemn the unjust and unconstitutional acts occasioned against [a Kenyan lesbian] on the early morning of Saturday, April 18th, 2009 at Florida 1000, on Koinange Street.

[A Kenyan lesbian] was leaving Madd House on the said morning with a friend – (anonymous), when, as they were walking through the exit, a woman shouted out behind them “ma lesbians”…. [The Kenyan lesbian] didn’t recognize the woman and they got into a verbal confrontation during which the woman hit her with her bag and went off to go back upstairs. [The Kenyan lesbian] and (anonymous) followed the woman, later identified to them as Constance Sirikwa Rukia, and saw her being hidden in the changing rooms by the bouncers.

[The Kenyan lesbian] went to ask the bouncers why they were hiding the woman when they should be kicking her out for disturbing them. The bouncers held each of [The Kenyan lesbian’s] hands and attempted to throw her out. Upon seeing that [The Kenyan lesbian] was being held by the bouncers, the woman then hit [The Kenyan lesbian] on the head with a bottle that she’d been holding and she fell down, bleeding heavily.

The bouncers then attempted to get the woman to escape in a taxi but were unable to get away due to the interventions of (anonymous), patrons of the establishment and some taxi drivers. [The Kenyan lesbian] was driven to Central police station with Constance and the two bouncers, with (anonymous) following them behind. She remembers the woman saying in the taxi “you’re still a fucking lesbian and there’s nowhere you’ll take me”.

Upon arrival at the police station, the woman was taken inside and (anonymous) was told to rush [The Kenyan lesbian] to hospital as she was still bleeding heavily. They left the two bouncers talking with police officers. [The Kenyan lesbian] was admitted in Nairobi Hospital and had surgery yesterday morning to get stitches on her forehead.

Frame Four

Shortly after watching the horrible video of an old man roasting because he was accused of witchcraft, I saw horrible photographs of the lesbian’s face and head—evidence of bashing. Those who have read know that lesbians have often been accused of being witches, and suffered the punishment for it: burning.

There is no distinction between the young, angry man who kept hitting the old, roasting man and Constance Sirikwa Rukia, who believes it’s her right and duty to assault lesbians, and to inflict bodily harm. And there is no distinction between the villagers who watched that old man roast, and did nothing, and the bouncers who held the Kenyan lesbian’s arms as she was assaulted. No distinction at all.

I have been forced, here, to use “Kenyan lesbian” because we Kenyan queers are still too fragile, too vulnerable, and few of us can use our real names with limited repercussions. But I also use it to signal how very vulnerable all of us are: all it takes is one angry, hate-filled person, and we can be assaulted.

Pater Nostra has noted the cases of blackmail against gay men. And other friends have told me about assault against gay male sex workers.

Perhaps the most sickening aspect of all this: for each report, each deed told, countless others remain untold, invisible. I’m yet to see anyone write about the homeless queers, thrown out of home because of their desires. I’m yet to see anything appear in the local papers that is not reactionary or repressive or conservative. And nothing I write, no matter how eloquent, will find a place in our local media.

When we tried to place an ad for our anthology in the newspapers, the word “homosexual” was “accidentally” left out.

Break Frame

We held each other in the night
whispered stories
waited for daylight
two little Kenyans who dreamed
of a world
where girls, one brown, one white
could love each other un-
hated.
—Shailja Patel, “Two Girls”

Many years ago, when I still thought a future in Kenya was possible, I said no to a man who loved me. I said no to his dream that we could “visit Kenya together,” build a life on two continents, find a way to “make it work.” That no has continued to live with me, as has the anguish of having to utter it.

In the more than ten years since that first no, I continue to inhabit its impossibilities, impossibilities that have, paradoxically, enabled another kind of life for me. Yet not a life I can have in Kenya, and for that, I cannot forgive Kenya, nor can I have patience with the hate-mongers who threaten me and mine.

I’m tired.

I’m tired of being angry and scared. I’m tired of receiving emails about yet another queer bashing, another queer death. I’m tired of getting yet more evidence that “people like me” have no value in and for Kenya. I’m tired.

I’m tired and I’m sad and I have no more rage left.

And as I think of that old man sitting in the fire, that old man who knows he has absolutely no value, I wonder about that absolute resignation, that complete loss of fight, and if this is what Kenya would do to me if I let it.

Africa kills her sun, and, right now, it feels as though the darkness is most thick over Kenya.

Sitting in Fire

We survived Kenyatta
We survived Moi
We might survive Kibaki
Will we survive ourselves?
—Anonymous

An old man sits inside flames as they lick at his body. They kiss, suck, gulp, swallow, eat him alive, and he does not move. He does not scream. He sits inside them. Resigned. Impotent. He does not resist.

This is not a metaphor.

The old man has been accused of witchcraft by villagers in a region of Kisii, and the partial video of his execution—we are spared his death throes—is online. I cannot reproduce it here, and I watched it with the greatest reluctance, because I had to. I had to see what we Kenyans can do to each other, are doing to each other.

A young man, slightly younger than me, in the full power of youth and rage, kicks and thrashes this human faggot, screaming at him. A crowd watches. No one intervenes. No one seems to question the rightness of this execution, this murder, this sacrifice.

In one venal moment, every sentimental idea about respecting old men and women in Kenya is torn away, another national façade destroyed. We burn our old men and women alive.

This is not staged.

The hand that records the video is steady, capturing the film greedily, almost lovingly, as though it is a picture of a baby learning to walk. There is no shock, no apparent affect in the film-making hand, no shaking, no seeming reluctance to capture this scene, this desecration, this obscenity. And we who watch it from the seeming safety of computer mediation witness and partake in this ritual.

We have watched videos of men being beheaded and young women being caned. These have been difficult, but mediated by their foreignness. We know about Kenyan violence—about the petty thieves lynched, the villagers macheted to death, about women and children burned in churches. We have pictures and evidence.

This old man won’t let me go.

He sits inside the fire. He rocks, barely, but is silent. He does not try to move away. He feels his flesh being eaten by flames, feels himself turning to blister, to raw flesh, to ash, and sits. Sits and burns. Smells his flesh turning into charcoal. Smells his flesh bubble and sizzle and melt and char and ash. And knows that there will no scars. And knows that in the watching crowd are men, women, and children whose names he knows, whose houses he can identify, whose houses he can recall, whose hospitality he may have enjoyed, and to whom he may have extended hospitality.

He sits in the engulfing flames. Silent. Aware that his burning flesh represents the negation of any and every social contract. Aware that his death, his sacrifice, enables a society to forge collective bonds, that human sacrifice is one of the obscene secrets that binds communities, that his torture will produce a form of social cohesion based on murder and fear.

This is not a metaphor. This is not a scene from a movie. This will not let me go.

I wish I did not understand the terrible logic of his murder. I wish I could unthink all the reasons why his death is necessary. I wish my knowledge of Kenya would make it impossible for me to understand his murder, his sacrifice, his death. I wish I could dismiss this video as some terrible aberration.

A friend asks me to speak to a doctor about the extent of the man’s burns. We speak of burns in discussing scars and survivors. I don’t know what a doctor can tell me about roasting humans.

This old man sits inside his burning skin.

What is that moment when one realizes life is not possible? When the social so violently ejects one, abjects one, that the only possible response is a non-response, even to the smell and feel and taste of one’s own burning flesh?

Burning is not hanging, or being shot. This old man is not a Ken Saro-Wiwa character who insists on being executed: kill me, is that demand, but kill me quick.

He dies slowly. Painfully. A physical pain no doubt exacerbated by knowing that those who knew him, perhaps loved him, now disavow him. He dies having lost all value, knowing that his life has counted for nothing, and seeing and hearing his community disown him, demand his death.

Let us be clear about this: this was not a random attack by government forces nor by vigilantes, be it mungiki or forces from Mt. Elgon. This incident was not caused by cattle raiders or even part of a longstanding inter-ethnic feud.

Members of a village identified fellow villagers as witches and proceeded to beat and burn them alive. One of them, or a steady outsider, filmed this spectacle, and it is now available online, in crisp, clear detail, so that we netizens can watch it again and again and again.

We need to watch this video. Kenyans need to watch this video. We need to understand that our most potent threat does not lie outside of ourselves, and those ethno-cocoons to which we so easily retreat do not offer safety.

Home is not safe.

The video does not show the final moments of this old man’s death. Did he scream then? Or did he sit silent until the end?

What is that moment when social death is so palpable that physical dying, roasting alive, elicits no visible reaction, no visible resistance? What is that moment when we witness social death turn into physical death and do nothing?

It is tempting to think of these villagers as monsters, as extraordinary. They are not.

Kenya is haunted with the ghosts of those we have killed and forgotten and with the living bodies of the socially dead, those who have no recourse to the law or to the community, who understand their forms of living to be impossible.

This old man will not let go of me—and I need to hold on to him.

We need to hold on to this old man as he sits in a fire and burns to death.

Jambo Bwana: Obama as Tourist-Guest

Jambo
Jambo bwana
Habari gani?
Mzuri sana
Wageni mwakaribishwa
Kenya yetu
Hakuna matata

In January 2009, members of the Concerned Kenyan Writers collective (CKW) learned that the Boys Choir of Kenya had been invited to perform for Barack Obama’s inauguration, and were going to perform “Jambo Bwana.” Outrage erupted, with one member of CKW terming the song an example of Kenyan “minstrelsy.”

“Jambo Bwana” sits in the repertoire of “tourist classics.” When I stayed at the Kenyan coast in the mid-1990s, the local band sang it every night to welcome newly arrived tourists. It is a song that articulates relationships, creating the distinction between native and tourist, host and guest, and relying on a fantasy that “all is well,” one that both the host and tourist need. For the host/worker in the tourism industry, the reassurance that all is well attempts to guarantee ongoing business. And since tourism is so vital to Kenya’s industry, accounting for 10% of the GDP according to the Ministry of Tourism, it is vital that Kenyans, especially those in the tourist industry, maintain a façade that all is well. For tourists, the repeated assurance that all is well helps to allay fears that might be generated by rumors and fictions about foreign countries as sites of disease and death, and especially rumors and fictions about African foreign countries in the tropics, home to malaria, cholera, and civil strife. The upbeat “Jambo Bwana” allows hosts and tourists to inhabit a fantasy of reciprocity, no matter how tenuous.

And this reciprocity is tenuous, once we examine the form and content of the song within Kenya’s histories. To map, briefly, what follows: I provide a “standard” reading of the song, advancing this argument through a poem by Kenyan poet and activist Shailja Patel. I then, in a clumsy, roundabout way, perform a counterintuitive reading of the song—more for my own pleasure rather than to advance an argument. Finally, I examine the significance of this song as used during the inauguration: how did it position Obama in relation to Kenya and vice-versa, how, especially, did it, even unwittingly, contest and revise the ideas of Luo-ness and Kenyan-ness that had been used to frame Obama? In this final section, I am interested in mapping the relationship between Obama as benign/uninformed tourist and Obama as U.S. president.
*

Hello
Hello sir/mister
How are you?
Very well
Visitors, you are welcomed
Our Kenya
Has no troubles

“Jambo Bwana” is suffused with ambivalent colonial nostalgia, and this nostalgia pivots on the word “bwana.” Within colonial histories, the term “bwana” demarcated racial and class distinctions: white men were “bwana” and white women “memsahib.” The implicit distinction was between colonizer men as rulers and colonized boys as servants, an ideological as opposed to chronological distinction. I invoke the ambivalence of colonial nostalgia following William Bissell, who has examined the significance of formerly colonized populations expressing nostalgia for colonialism. By using the term “bwana,” this song enables a “return” to colonial racial tropes—significantly, domestic tourism is generally not strong, so the song appeals to foreign-born tourists, interpellates them into a broader imperial nostalgia, in which the black servant is so crucial.

Tourism allows for and even encourages the re-circulation of historically unequal structures as Jacqui Alexander has shown in the context of the Bahamas. In this instance, “bwana” allows the fantasy structure of colonial/imperial nostalgia to proliferate, recreating, if only during “brief holidays,” the racial-gendered structure of colonialism, mitigated, in part, by the income generated, though unequally shared—and here I defer a longer discussion of how much different actors in the tourism industry earn, formally and informally.

If the term “bwana” conjures up one compelling site of colonial/imperial nostalgia, the closing line of the refrain, “hakuna matata,” emphasizes the ostensibly trouble-free, ahistorical fantasy aspect of colonial/imperial nostalgia. There are “no troubles” in Kenya—let’s recall the country was named Kenya in 1920, when it shifted from being the East African Protectorate to the Kenya Colony. And there are “no troubles” in this host/tourist interaction. “Hakuna matata” erases the past that would trouble the term “bwana” with its colonial associations and the present that troubles the term “bwana” with its neo-colonial, imperial, and imperial nostalgia associations. We are in the suspended time captured with stunning accuracy in Disney’s Lion King, where the phrase “hakuna matata” lubricates and enables a space and time out of space and time, a trouble-free fantasy available in a disembedded social space.

In her poem, “Hakuna Matata,” Shailja Patel stages an ideological unmasking and critique of this song. In full, the poem reads,

If I could hang, draw and quarter a song, I would do it to this one.

If I could tie a 50 pound weight around a song and drop it off into the murkiest, most sewage-laden depths of the Indian Ocean, it would be this one.

If I could put a song through a shredder, and put the shreddings through a meat grinder, and put the paste through a blender, and put the result in an incinerator, I would do it, three times over, to Hakuna Matata.

Every gifted African musician who’s ever been forced to churn out this festering putrefaction of a lyric, to a bunch of grinning tourists, on a hotel terrace, deserves compensation for psychological damage.

Everyone who’s ever lived the reality, the complexity, the day-to-day humanity of East Africa, as opposed to the tourist hotel fantasy package, and then had the tinny simplistic sugary crap of Hakuna Matata forced on their eardrums, deserves a free detox treatment at the spas of the same hotels. (reproduced with the poet’s permission)

Patel points to the implications of performing this song—and the fantasy it embodies—to Kenyan artists. The “gifted African musician” is a metonym for the many enterprises sutured to tourism, and thus “forced to churn out” market-oriented art. “Jambo Bwana” represents the truncated and foreclosed opportunities for African artists, whose modes of survival have become joined to the tourist industry.

This oft-repeated song—played every single night for the five nights I visited the coast, for instance—also grinds down those individuals forced to work in the tourist industry. And, here I defer the more extended description of how tourism has foreclosed other local industries, creating formal and informal labor pools that “serve” tourists. I will briefly point to—and defer—a more extended description of how sex tourism is the best metonym for all tourism to Kenya.
*
And now a clumsy, counterintuitive reading.

If the term “bwana” conjures up colonial-era race relations, the ideas of ownership invoked by “wageni” and “Kenya yetu” situate this song firmly in post-independent space and time. The relationship posited between tourist and host (as opposed to tourist and laborer) is staked on the grounds of ownership. The citizen-host welcomes the tourist-guest and reminds this figure that “bwana” is a colonial relic used by citizen-hosts as a generic honorific. Kenya is owned collectively by its citizen-hosts. The extent to which this claim for ownership is itself a fantasy deserves a more extended reading than I can provide here.
*
Another clumsy transition, to Obama.

When the Boys Choir of Kenya performed “Jambo Bwana” during Obama’s inauguration, they contested Kenyan narratives that claimed Obama as “one of our own” by framing him as a tourist-guest. At the same time, the song attempts to mitigate his potential influence over Kenya by insisting that Kenyans own Kenya.

As has been well documented, in the run-up to Obama’s election, Kenyans claimed him, and Prime Minister Raila Odinga invoked the bonds of kinship by terming Obama a “cousin.” These claims of “kinship,” especially “Luo-ness,” were meant to interpellate Obama into a system of Kenyan-based patronage, in which ethnic alliances shape political strategies. In part, this invocation of kinship was also meant to create a narrative of intimacy that would supplant the political narrative between Kenya and the U.S.

Intimacy failed.

Despite claims of “kinship,” the Kenyan government did not receive an invitation to the inauguration, a powerful rebuke to Kenya’s ongoing wrangling parties. Obama’s grandmother received an invitation. Kinship was asserted as intimate and private and divorced from ethnic patronage.

In singing “Jambo Bwana,” the Boys Choir of Kenya positioned Obama as a tourist-guest in relation to Kenya, not a lost son, not a cousin, not even a distantly positioned relative. He was a tourist-guest, one whose access to resources and ability to disburse resources merited the racial-colonial term “bwana,” and one who could be welcomed to Kenya by its citizen-hosts. The song registered what official and unofficial Kenyan discourse had been unwilling and unable to do: it foregrounded Obama’s political obligations and kin-citizenship attachments as distinctly U.S., not Kenyan, his abilities and promises as first and foremost to the U.S., not Kenya, while insisting on Kenya’s sovereignty, even a sovereignty rooted in acting as citizen-hosts to tourist-guests.

To end on a note of over reading: it is, of course, ironic, that a group whose members range in age from 13-24 are termed “boys” and that they performed a song suffused with colonial tropes of development and underdevelopment for Obama, the new “bwana.”

Elegies: Eve Sedgwick Through Gary Fisher

As the tributes to Eve Sedgwick’s life and work are written and proliferate, let me register her ongoing impact on my life. Between Men was one of the first 3 queer books I ever read, as a sophomore. I did not understand a word but it stayed with me. And I stayed with it. And it gave me a language, a frame of reference, a map with which to navigate the academy, a map that I still use.

Queer elegies are occasions for thinking about what queer lives and loves and losses enable, what they generate, what they make possible. And so let me muse, briefly, on one of Sedgwick’s most enabling texts: Gary in Your Pocket.

Gary Fisher was a black graduate student at the University of California-Berkeley who took a class with Sedgwick when she was a visiting professor there in spring 1987. He was also one of many of us, who never submitted his work for publication, but kept writing the world as he experienced and imagined it.

Friday, April 20, 1984

Darkness, darkness. Good Friday. I’m feeling a little religious, a little inquisitive, a little frightened, a little lost in the magnitude of what I have to say. It’s not going away, this tenderness under my arms, the occasional burning sensation, a couple of painless red dots—one on each hand. It’s not going away and I don’t feel good about that with AIDS such an issue. I want to blame and beg and apologize to certain people, to God, to my dying mother perhaps. That’s been feeling like a consolation, a bit of relief perhaps knowing I won’t go alone . . . Never alone, Gary, just faster.

Gary told Sedgwick his status while apologizing for missing “so many classes.” He also confessed that he hadn’t “told this to other people” and asked her not to do the same.

Sedgwick writes, “It wasn’t commonplace back then, at least it hadn’t happened to me before, to hear from young people that the futures they look forward to are so modest in duration.”

Modest. And profuse.

Monday, September 3, 1984

Time, time time, look what’s become of me . . . My rash is just an itch now, but I discovered a small protrusion of skin, another mole I guess, and it made me feel old and dying. Unfairly though—not fate, but my decision to lay down and die so easily

In 1984, Gary was 23.

Sunday, March 29, 1987

So I’m on my knees again, before God. Tall, white, wary of me, trying to work him into a froth of masterliness. . . . I hope to draw out the ego, the cruel ego in the men that I suck.

Inhabiting the muck of racio-sexualized masculinities

I haven’t written the paper for Sundquist and now I want to suck cock, or think about it anyway. The loads churned in my stomach, my ass is still smarting from Michael’s torture. . . . It is after midnight. I have not started this paper. Thursday night 5 men ejaculated the semen from their hard penises into my mouth and throat. There were several other encounters but five that actually fed me and left me full and strange that evening. The first man I met was big and white and darkly bearded, but he stinked like the onions he ate for lunch and had a small dick.

Are we allowed to write like this? To call white men “God?” To dream of sucking off “God?”

Monday, April 27, 1987

. . . I’m on BART and there’s a man in front of me, big, white, mustached, glasses, rather cruel- and solid-looking, kind of military, and I’m turned on by him, want to be used and humiliated by him, then made love to in that odd one-sided way. . . . What is this fantasy that cuts across all of me, racial, intellectual, moral, spiritual, sexual . . . ?

A radical queer, Gary practiced modes of interracial submission and domination, wrote, in great detail, about s/m sex, its ego-shattering appeal, wrote, in other words, about forms of queer practices that queers of color often disavow, through deliberate silences or the pieties of health and safety and futurity.

Thursday, May 28, 1987

I took a chance on a handsome, dark-haired big man. I rubbed his chest and crotch and he rubbed my crotch but kind of absently, looking anywhere but in my face. This bothered me, but in hindsight, isn’t that the kind of encounter I wanted—one-sided, well-defined roles?

Gary Fisher was not a good black queer, not a respectable black queer, not even an admirable black queer. He was, in fact, a black queer it would be easy to throw away, one of the many who “give us a bad name,” as blacks, as queers, as black queers.

Saturday, October 17, 1987

I went home with him. We got drunk and had intense sex. I jerked off before I serviced him, and then I serviced him for five hours. I was in a fine state of arousal most of the night and so drink I could hardly stand up. He fucked me and pissed up my ass. He had me suck him off. By then I was exhausted, but he threw me out, and he wasn’t gentle about it. . . . This guy just wants sex from me. And I’d settle for that if we could make it steady.

Sedgwick did not throw him away. And in not throwing him away she taught me how not to throw Gary Fisher away, not because he was too unlike me, but because the likenesses were too frightening, too uncomfortable, too unbearable. And, here, I must register how Sedgwick continues to teach me to be honest, to face what is difficult and ugly and unbearable in me and in the world.

9.19.93
. . . I want to write about KS. I haven’t really written about what I look like now. I have a new skin. I have a new identity. They are not the same, but they do on occasion converge, even eclipse one another.
. . .
The spots, the lesions, patches—they are so random (Even the name is slippery. What should I call these things, individually, I mean. One KS. Look, there’s a KS. I have a KS on my hand, under my thumb). They refuse a common shape or texture or size and they sprout-spring-develop-appear unpredictably, time and location. (Backtrack: even the action of the disease is slippery.) Some are clustered; some are island-like. Some are small—just dots. Some are large, sprawling, giraffe-like.
. . .
(It’s hard to write and watch movies at the same time.)
I’m that sick.
I could die that soon.

Sedgwick writes,

The time of immersion in this volume has brought me many such experiences. Almost every night of it I have dreamed, not of Gary, but as him—have moved through one and another world clothed in the restless, elastic skin of his beautiful idiom. I don’t know whether this has been more a way of mourning him or of failing to mourn; of growing steeped in, or of refusing the news of his death.

To dream as Gary is to act surreptitiously in the world, but to act. His journal’s geographies traverse bars and clubs, bushes and sex clubs, spaces that I, too, have traveled through, inhabited, sought the pleasures of loss and the loss of pleasures, and created thinking and art. Gary turns us to the ambivalence of black queer desire—at least the kinds of desire I own and share with him. Border crossings across and along skin as texture and color and health create multiple fractures, some filled with pleasure, others with none.

How does one have an ambivalent orgasm? Or none at all? What is the point where getting someone else off is more important? What is the point where one can no longer resist cock-hunger and risks a lot, too much, even, following an insatiable libido?

I come to Gary Fisher through Sedgwick, and return to Sedgick through Gary Fisher.

For Eve and Gary: “Love in Prepositions,” by Gary Fisher

I don’t want you to love me. I don’t even want you to like me. I don’t need these abstractions of you. I might want you to want me, I know what want is and I know that after the third time (arbitrary as three is) you must know want, mine or your own (mine from yours), and you will respond to want with more want, at least a second one. So, maybe then I want you to want me.

But more than all that, I want your prepositions.

I want you in me; I want you on me; I want you all around me (forgive the little flourish there); I want you under me (on occasion anyway; but mainly) want you over, over top of me, on top of me . . . I want you between me (—?—or more exactly in me tearing me apart); I want you near me; I want you next to me . . . I want to remember you as you were in relation to me.

Provinces of Queer Radicalism

It has been many years since I passed that stretch of road from Githunguri to Nairobi that is suffused with the smell of coffee plants at nighttime, a sweet smell of shit, death, decay, and acid. At night coffee plants release carbon dioxide, and it is not pretty. It is, in fact, one of the most nausea-inducing memories from my childhood. In recent years, this smell has become layered with histories of loss—Githunguri is no longer “home” to my grandparents; it is where they are buried, along with my uncles and cousins, and my return to colonial histories of death and dying, killing and being killed, lets me imagine that coffee plants are sucking up and expelling histories of loss.

But there is something peculiar about this smell. I have passed through other coffee plantations, at night, but this particular sickly smell is rooted, in my memory, on that particular stretch of road. And so it might not be the smell of coffee at night, but the smell of coffee combined with something else on that particular stretch of road. It might be a rooted smell.

Roots are tangled systems that earth and unearth histories, are history-making and history-keeping, not always available to be unearthed or unearthed deep enough—even when uprooting, we may never get to the root of the root, and will always search for what Kenyatta described as miri ya mikongoe, the root of the fictional tree, or what I sometimes think of as the phantom root of ethno-histories.

Phantoms are rooted, of course. Found in this location and not that, haunting this spot and not that, bound to this history and not that, much like the smell that, in memory, lives along a particular stretch of road and returns me to 6 or 7, the age when smell burned itself into memory.

Here I might be digging around, finding the best angle at which to approach the phantom-ness of queer rooting-those elusive bits that yield reluctantly, in shards and fragments, on the borders of paper-wood-skin cells, and whose finding yields abrasive pleasure. To be reminded of where one-ness experiences from-ness demands sloughed-skin, and returning to that founding denuding produces new sensitivities, even and especially to that potent mix of paper-wood-skin cells, the womb-ing with a denuding caress.
*
When I started writing this piece a week ago, before the two conferences fried my brain and left me metaphor, I was thinking around action and location, about the provinces of queer activism and the provinciality of queer radicalism.

I have been working through my frustration at what seems like slow-slow action in Kenya, among Kenya’s queers—as shogeek points out, we seem driven by fear. I have been waiting for what I have learned “counts” as radical actions—rooted and uprooting actions.

What is the queer equivalent of uprooting railway lines?

Yet in attending to other uprootings, here where I am, I so easily miss the rootings and uprootings of queer Kenyan life there, where I am not, or am virtually and affectively.

And this is difficult to navigate: that my own rootings and uprootings make it difficult, sometimes impossible, to recognize other rootings and uprootings, and that I have yet to figure out how to navigate multiple root systems from different plantings and graftings.

As I mentioned: metaphor.
*
A few months ago, a wise friend noted that the most urgent task among Kenyan queers might not be to overturn or challenge laws, as urgent as that task remains, but to build up our networks of attachment and affiliation, to create elaborate root systems that could survive the violent uprootings aimed at us, and already at work.

At the time, I was not as receptive to that idea. I wanted to see queers lifting railway lines—and I still do.

Yet, I continue to think that I must refuse to privilege my own deracinations as models for other modes of living—there are and continue to be costs I pay, attachments I forgo, modes of living that must remain impossible, to enable other possibilities. This can be mentioned, but not written about, at least not now, not yet, perhaps never.

Deracination may be good to think with—it is impossible to live with.

So, I turn to roots and rooting, root-systems and root-navigations, to thinking about Adrienne Rich’s politics of location, and to the Kenyan-bred intimacies that sustain rooting and uprooting and root and uproot.

But while I want to recognize the power and foreignness of Kenyan root systems, I also need to embed queer action and inaction in what I know of Kenyan action and inaction: political action is so often foreclosed, made difficult to imagine, that we have whole groups of people who believe all action must be surreptitious. We may be the country of the bar rant and power-point presentation, as Martin Kimani argues, but we are also the country of a thousand operations carried out in the shadows, so shadowy that they never gain substance.

I’m yet to work out how to think about the relationship between shadow and substance, and the impossibility of acting that happens under the guise of action. And, of course, the fear that keeps us shadowed and shadowy, lacking substance, and thus easy to ignore.

Shailja Patel, with whom I had a lovely, albeit too brief gab, mentioned the impossible structure of Kenyan activism: visibility or effectiveness.

It is one that many of us continue to navigate.

A friend has mentioned how “out” I am, how “visible,” and I tell her it’s because I am not. I am not to the extent that I dissolve in Kenya, vanish into crowds, vanish into all the men who look like me, become just another black face in a crowd of blackness. I do not ask for this, of course, but I welcome the (uncertain) safety of anonymity.

This is not to say I do not appear in public settings as a queer—I am willing and available to perform queerness when asked, even in the form of confession. That this is not asked speaks to something deeply structural, of course.

That certain of my writing is published and valued, and not the queer critiques, speaks, also, to a structure of normativity that envelops even politically radical spaces, or spaces that think of themselves in that way.

Of course how that queerness is performed is yet another factor: I am not inclined to discuss fisting and group sex to credential something about queerness, nor am I willing to display my cockring collection to prove something. Something about inhabiting root systems and trying to navigate them has made my musings earthy in a more abstract way, and the shock-queerings of my early 20s have given way to something else. That time may have dulled me remains a possibility, though I view all such narratives of decline with great suspicion.

I view with suspicion even my own confession that time may have made me more textured.
*
To ask that even our demands for political action attend to locale and location, to soil-types and earth-densities, to mineral content and water sources, to histories of mulching and fertilizing, might be to push metaphor to the realm of the absurd, to think organicity into action. It might be to complicate that “make” in the notion that “we make” our history. But it might also be to complicate that notion of fabrication, to insist that it be embedded within the materials and locations that enable making and fabrication.

Solid Gold

There are two kinds of people:

Those who loved the Solid Gold Dancers

And the rest

Un-loving Kenya

At first I wanted to write a different kind of opening, to begin with a confession.

Language interrupted.

Instead of thinking about my love for Kenya, or its absence, I started thinking about Kenya’s love for me, or its absence. And this gets hairy. I do not feel Kenya loves me and I certainly don’t feel love for Kenya.

But what is this “entity” called Kenya that I feel should be capable of love? And is that even a reasonable expectation for something held together, in part, by a fragile document that is followed selectively? What is it that “does not love me” and that, in turn I “cannot love?” What is it that I feel “does not love me?”

To answer this final question requires thinking of Kenya through a series of hauntings and possessions, to abuse empathy and displace the living and dead, the attacked and abused, the assassinated and in hiding, and to see myself in them. Yet to do so also requires turning away from other hauntings, other possessions, in which I can so easily be the “doing well” and “doing very well,” the “making it” and “the made,” the “secure” and the “very secure.” To attach to the former kind of possession, in other words, means that I choose to attach myself to one narrative and not to another. And this choice determines, then, how I can feel Kenya feels about me.

Perhaps “love” is the wrong demand. I am expecting the wrong “thing” and Kenya, in turn, might be expecting the wrong thing. After all, we recite a loyalty pledge, not a love pledge. Yet, loyalty, so steeped in a different age, invoking military metaphors, seems inadequate to describe this “thing” between Kenya and me, or this thing I expect and can’t seem to feel I receive.

How does one feel a nation?

In writing that I don’t feel Kenya loves me, I try to express that I don’t feel desirable, desired, or in less sexualized language, valued. Valued both in terms of the skills I have and can use in Kenya, for Kenya, and valued for the potential I could bring to Kenya, if allowed. Let me dwell on the latter, for a moment.

How does one come to feel valued by a nation? How does Kenya demonstrate it values us? How does Kenya demonstrate it values me? And, again, I return to the question of what it is that I want to value me. How would I feel that Kenya valued me? In part, the question is narcissistic, to the extent that the abstract nation might not feel obligated to value each citizen. That, in fact, to ask Kenya for proof that it values me is absurd.

Yet it strikes me that Kenya has no problem devaluing me. Every random assassination of every young man and woman tells me Kenya does not value me. Every threat against defenders of civil rights assures me that I have no worth. Every blackmail attempt and bashing of queers confirms that I am devalued. Every instance of gender-based violence and domestic violence proves I am devalued.

Value and devaluation accrete as we forge affiliations with each other, as we attach ourselves to each other, outside of the unfulfilled promises of our constitution. There are, perhaps paradoxically, forms of Kenyan-ness that come into being and are practiced outside state sanction, besides the constitution, and these are important and vital. We have found ways to value ourselves faced with an indifferent and apathetic Kenya. The relation of that “we” to something called “Kenyan-ness” remains to be thought.

But I want to return to that thickness, that sponginess, that remarkable tangle of emotions and expectations that we term “love” because “value” does not have the same valence as love. Value does not capture what Lauren Berlant terms “cruel optimism,” that ongoing attachment to objects and situations that continue to wound us, our hopes that the wounding will cease, even as we decay in unloving miasmas.

And here, I must confess, that “un-loving Kenya” is a process rather than a state. I cannot become indifferent. As though I am breaking up, I keep returning to ask “why?” I find myself trying to un-love, because I believe that continuing to love Kenya will destroy something, something vital, or will free me up so I can cathect onto something else, something that will love me back.

I have realized that it is Kenya I need to un-love, or at least I need to find a way to manage Kenya’s un-loving me.

I pledged my loyalty, not my love, but I made the mistake of thinking the two were the same: that I had pledged love, not loyalty, and that my pledge encouraged reciprocation. I began to expect that loving Kenya meant Kenya had to love me back. It doesn’t.

Against all evidence, I insisted that a love relationship existed, a relationship of care and attachment, a relationship in which we both gave and received, in which we shared a vision of creating a tomorrow for both of us. Only to realize, too late, that queer bodies have no future in Kenya. We are written out of official documents, do not exist and so legislation does not need to address us. Some of us have been fighting for queer equality. We are ghosts without quiddity or agency, without even the power to slam doors and rattle houses. We are being un-loved.

It is a cruel un-loving.

It is cruel because Kenya holds me in its embrace, wraps me in its histories and documents, refuses to let go and continues to be un-loving. And I, fool that I am, keep believing that one day the force of my attachment will compel love, that one day I will feel that Kenya feels love for me.

It is an odd position to be in, to be held in and to need Kenya’s un-loving embrace. As I’ve written previously, one doesn’t write a “Dear John” letter to one’s nation.

I’m still stuck at the question of what Kenya “is,” what feelings to have toward its fleshy abstraction, fleshy in a suffocating way, so that I feel its weight and presence around me, its un-loving presence, even when I I most want to get away.