Notes on Teaching

It is always a risk to teach what one loves. Often, I choose to teach works I like but do not love, or authors I prefer, but do not adore. It is one of the great privileges of my chosen craft that I can introduce my students to those with whom I’ve had longstanding, if uneven, affairs. This metaphor is necessary.

There are, of course, certain authors I will never teach. Edmond Jabes, for one, and I am increasingly reluctant to teach Essex Hemphill and Audre Lorde. I can manage when students don’t like or love Amos Tutuola or James Baldwin (barely). I manage less well when students disdain authors I truly adore.

We might well speak about the canon of the unteachable, an idiosyncratic canon, but a canon nonetheless.
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What is it to risk teaching? What kinds of vulnerabilities are made visible, palpable, unavoidable during pedagogy and as part of pedagogy? What tropes do we have available to us to speak about what it is we do when we teach what we love? How do we teach “loving” and is that even part of our mission?

It is risky to teach what one loves.

It is risky because that love may not translate into the classroom. One attempts to formulate a plan and ends up with “I love this text. I love this text so much. Don’t you love this text?” And when that love is not shared, not transmitted, not acknowledged, and not ingested (phagocytosis is the metaphor that comes to mind, and it might be wrong), one feels wounded, wronged.

Sometimes, we cover that up with, “well, the students aren’t smart enough,” or “don’t have good taste,” or “are politically naïve.” Really, what we mean to say is, “they don’t love like I love.” And one not being able to love like another is big. Huge. Massive.

I am interested in the impossibility of this demand—that students learn to love like we do—and also in its inescapability. It is not a demand that is easy for us to handle, as teachers and as students. Explaining our passions is difficult, teaching them impossible.

It is as though we need students to be “spongy,” to absorb both knowledge and enthusiasm, even love. Sometimes it works. Some instructors have “contagious enthusiasm,” others inspire deep love for certain authors, a love that is often not explainable. The question of whether students love particular works or whether the form of attachment develops because of how individual students “felt” in the class is altogether too complicated to navigate right now.
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In part, of course, I’m trying to think about the reasons we teach what we do, especially those of us in the humanities—and to narrow further, literature. Why teach this author over that? This text over that? What is the irrational reason?

For instance, I prefer Nella Larsen’s Quicksand to Passing. I have a whole host of reasons—it’s a first book; the focus on the individual is richer; it directly engages the politics of migration and immigration; the style is more lush. Many reasons. Whether these reasons precede my love for the text and are justifications after the fact I cannot know. When we love, we can rationalize.

But what is the effect of trying to teach “loving?’

A former professor would almost always begin class by asking if we had enjoyed what we read—he taught classes on the renaissance. If not at the beginning of class, then at some point he would ask how we “felt” about literature. It was a repeated question. And it taught me something about how to do what I do.

I ask my students if they enjoy what we are reading. I suspect that many of them find the question silly or irrelevant. My class is, after all, one out of several, and often not “the most important,” especially for non-majors. (Those “lovely” diversity requirements fill my seats!)

It is true, of course, that some students learn to “love” or “better tolerate” a text following class discussion. When this happens, it can be satisfying. But there is also a certain “magic” that happens when students “feel” or perform feeling the same way one does about a text. Perhaps this is just a long way of saying that we like to spend time with people who like the same things we do.

Of course, teaching is more than “sharing love,” though that plays a significant role, one that does not lend itself to easy assessment.

I am fortunate that at least 90% of the time what I like-love and what I teach coincide.

To write of “teaching loving” is to defer other metaphors: teaching as infection, for instance. It is also to acknowledge the range of emotions teaching engages: crushes and disappointments, fulfilled and unrequited passions, fear and indifference, apathy and passionlessness, warm fuzzies and insane jealousies.

It is to think of what one seeks to nurture and what cannot be controlled.
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“Official” teaching protocols do not allow us to describe teaching as experimental. Modes of assessment and evaluation and demands for quantifiable results provide us with correct languages with which we can justify what we do.

It probably comes as no surprise that I am drawn to aspects of Stanley Fish’s argument about the “uselessness” of what we teach, about the non-instrumental nature of literature classes.

For instance, my current research project thinks about non-instrumental queer histories: histories that track unevenly, if at all, along the paths of resistance and futurity. These histories do not offer models for political action, nor are they necessarily germane to “how we live.” They are also not necessarily histories of how “we” have lived, for they refuse to enable “queer connections” across space and time. In fact, the histories that most concern me are too idiosyncratic to enable a “we” across time and space. I have no interest in finding queer Kamaus and Mainas and Njoroges and Wamuyus and Wairimus and Wangus. Instead, I am thinking of how to forge queer relationships with queer pasts, all the while figuring out how “queer” functions as a conceptual method/tool/orientation.

While I am enthralled, in thrall to, the conceptual density (impossibility) of this project, I also realize how “unteachable” it might be. (Long digression on teaching/research, and why I believe the two are inseparable, though kissing cousins.)
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I have been trying to think about teaching as a “risk,” an “experiment” with uneven results, if any, and, sometimes, with “results” that don’t translate in any easy way. It’s difficult to “make a case” for “teaching loving.” And, following Fish, I have no desire to try. Derrida once claimed that if we dared to look into the heart of the university, we might find an abyss. It is that looking that concerns me.

The politics of outing

Recent news that Kenyans are being outed online has me thinking about outing as context, and how one comes to occupy the political.

Within the context of outing, one’s individual wishes and political stance are subsumed by another narrative. One is positioned as a homosexual, hailed as such, and must respond within the structure so created, a structure in which non-response is not possible. One need not respond to one’s accusers, but one responds to those who know one: family, friends, even to the email that offers information and sympathy.

Those who have been placed within the context of outing are now, for better or worse, the faces, names, and lives affiliated with homosexuality. Being outed—and, here, the “fact” of one’s actual sexuality does not matter—colors one’s past and present, rewrites histories of friendship and intimacy, and changes, as well, the meaning of space. One’s convenient “local” might become a “gay friendly” space in some re-tellings.

At the same time, one’s friends, acquaintances, and family come under renewed scrutiny. I am told, for instance, that whispers about me continue to circulate—all the more, I suspect, when I am in Nairobi. I am paranoid enough to believe this.

Once outed, one is drawn into a political space one might not have wanted to occupy. It is not only the space created by what one says or wants to say, but also the space created by those who wrestle over one. Those who agree, those who disagree, those who propose, those who oppose. One is caught in tangles not of one’s making.

One becomes co-opted. One is marked as a “queer” Kenyan or a “gay” Kenyan or a “lesbian” Kenyan, and then asked to speak for that collectively imagined identity. Dear X, what do gay Kenyans think about y? Some of us have accepted this position, others of us have viewed it skeptically, yet one’s words, particularly if one writes, can always be taken as “evidence” of widely held sentiments. One can start feeling responsible to others.

In fact, rather than outing telling the “truth” about a person, it creates a context around a person, a space-place-time that is suffused with multiple forms of desires. A very drunk neighbor who had never really paid attention to me once made a clumsy pass when he discovered I was “that way.” It was, I suspect, less my charms that overwhelmed him and more the chance for him to tell another kind of story about himself. (I must say that his clumsiness made me wonder about all the women he supposedly “bagged.” Was this how he “tuned” them? Or was this yet another example of how gay men don’t need “tuning” because we are “more direct”? Seduction still happens in bathhouses and bookstores.)

It is this cluster of desires around one that I term “the political,” borrowing from Lauren Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism. To be outed in a country that provides no official spaces or languages for recognizing outing is to become subject to a host of desires, some friendly, some not, some lustful, some not. One becomes marked. Many years ago, when I first came out, my mother composed a grand narrative of my life that, in retrospect, sounds like something from Austin Powers. I was a mad party animal bottom. Her terms, not mine. When I asked how I found time to study as a mad party animal bottom, she replied, quite rationally, that I was a mad party animal bottom from Friday through Sunday. (In truth, I went out Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and was relatively asexual, which I made up for in that glorious year I turned 24. Ahhh, 24!) (A confession, happy now?)

It is, of course, a very different thing to be a relatively anonymous blogger (though I use my real name) writing from the states (though I visit Kenya) when one has not lived in Kenya for many years (14 this year!). I do not have the webs of affiliation that run through Nairobi, the people met through work and clubs, the people who know people who know people, and thus my being “out” remains abstract, and will probably do so until I get booked on a tv show in Nairobi to talk about being queer. Interesting prospect. Will never happen.

In contrast, those who have been outed are embedded within Nairobi (I presume), are known enough that their names being made public begins to realign spaces around them, begins to rearrange desires around them. Desires from those who now malign them, those who now desire them, even to desire more about them, desires that move erratically, creating a field we might term “the political.” Now, it’s really quite irrelevant whether those “outed” had already been out before. As any queer who has done queer 101 knows, one is always being placed in a situation to come out—my mother’s friends are asking to see my wife. This I take as a joke. And one struggles to navigate attachment and obligation. What will it cost to “out” myself? What will it cost my mother? Even as she knows and disavows. That’s another narrative.

One is drawn into a political in which one’s presence, one’s life, serves as “evidence,” not least to international allies. At such moments, one realizes that one is haunted by afterlives.
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It has been necessary, here, to construct a “one,” to defer the (auto)biographical that would become intrusively and unnecessarily pedagogical. The politics of outing are never simple, never uncomplicated, and never easily resolved. It is less a single, singular process than an ongoing negotiation in which one negotiates others’ wishes, desires, fears, hopes, and expectations.

I confess this post feels belated—the “outing” took place weeks ago, and so far I have learned nothing new, but I have also not been looking. To track “outing” as anticipation is impossible—I have not yet learned to see around corners.

I have written, previously, about the dangers of homophobic discourse within a space that does not have any homosexual discourse. In such a space, outing becomes impossible as an affirmative gesture. Yet, isn’t it precisely in such impossible spaces that we have become possible?

Samuel Delaney writes that “coming out” used to mean coming out into a homosexual community, not as a performance of truth to gazing heterosexuals. I do not use the word community much, and do not trust it. But it can be a powerful thing to imagine, and wonderful to belong.

Such belonging might be one necessary, useful, and pleasurable afterlife.

blowjobs for beginners

She approaches the bus stop dressed in her missionary best. A sweet-looking woman, grandmotherly—though not all grandmothers are benign, and she is not. She is slightly self-effacing, almost shy. As she reaches into her appropriately black purse, she seems to be struggling. No doubt, a wise doctor would diagnose social anxiety disorder and medicate her. But she manages.

There is an intricate choreography to this ritual, and each step adds up. Watch carefully.

She removes a sheaf of tracts, walks up to passengers at the terminal, and begins to hand them out. Gently. Like a present. No one dares refuse the gentle old woman, who, it seems, barely speaks English. English is not the language of bus stops, here. Not here.

Her body speaks for her. Take the tract—the tune of “feed the birds” from Mary Poppins comes to mind. Save your soul. Her silence, her submission to the power of the tract, to the eloquence of her body, to her belief in her task, all of this emerges as a semi-halo.

I am reading Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom. A big book. An academic and academic’s book. I carry books everywhere, often academic books. This is how I catch up, although I am always falling behind. Still.

And I resolve not to take a tract. Perhaps this is mean. But I do not endorse whatever she is selling, and I refuse the implicit bludgeoning, the public disapproval that will attend my refusal.

She approaches. I refuse.

A young man, perhaps my age, slightly older, I noticed him earlier because he has a beautifully thick body. He chastises me: “All knowledge is good knowledge. All knowledge is good knowledge. All knowledge is good knowledge.” A mantra.

It is a challenge: academic book vs. tract. But also a challenge based on evaluation. Book learning, so called, does not compensate for other kinds of learning. The fool has said in his heart that there is no God. (I am still grateful to bible school and a random memory that lets me remember bible verses when needed.)

Where are the blowjobs? Provocative titles disappoint. Judith Butler’s Lesbian Phallus taught me that.

I wonder, now, whether the more appropriate response to such provocations would be to propose a barter trade. Your tract for mine. Puns intended.

To the “Have You Heard the Good News?” We might barter, “Have You Felt the Orgasmic News?” To “He’s Coming!” We might barter “He’s Cumming!” To “Love Everlasting” barter “Love Ever Lusting.”

After all, just because statistics claim Christians have more sex doesn’t necessarily mean Christians have better sex!

As trash romance books have taught me, the blowjob is the height of heterosexual sex expression. Who am I to disbelieve books that have higher sales numbers than whatever book is considered a bestseller?

And so, my first tract, ready for barter exchange: blowjobs for beginners.

Thank you for telling me about eternal life. Here’s a little something to enhance the next thirty minutes of your life.

Tract exchanges: the new way forward.

Scared of Intimacy

Assume, for a moment, that pop psychology mantras tell cultural truths. In this instance: men are afraid of intimacy. If one studies the politics of intimacy, especially those intimacies that arise from propinquity, it becomes difficult to understand how anyone can be unafraid of intimacy. In this instance, perhaps “men” have it right.

It is intriguing, for instance, to believe that in making ourselves vulnerable to each other, we issue welcoming invitations. “I’m naked, I’m vulnerable, love me” has to be one of the most frightening statements ever penned, and when said, it makes the world explode. In part, I suspect such statements, made popular by irresponsible love songs, do not quite understand the ethical demand they place on one, a demand compounded by an intimate imperative: you have my heart in your hands. How can one not squeeze or drop or pierce with uncut nails. Such giftings of self are occasions for terror.

I cry from a piercing joy.

Such giftings are dangerous. Another’s nakedness should terrify us. (I think, here, of the “gifting” between bug chasers and givers, and how instead of being extraordinary, it might actually reveal something about the nature of all intimacies, might be a metonym of intimacy in its terror-inducing form—still waiting for Tim Dean’s book to be released!)

To be scared of intimacy, terrified of vulnerability, one’s own and another’s, might be to apprehend something of the risks and responsibilities created and demanded by propinquity. A friend reminds me of my ongoing love for the term propinquity—I had missed you, lovely word!

I am reminded that proximity to deities is marked by fear and trembling, passion and desire. (“Fear the Lord your God.”)

We underestimate the power and obligation of intimacy when we think of it purely in terms of warm fuzzies—I like being with you quickly goes through the range of affect produced by frottage: excitement, irritation, pleasure, tingling, and so on. We invite others into our territories and feel invaded.

It is precisely this sensation of “invasion” that is evaded, voided, in fact, in the rhetoric that “x” are “scared of intimacy,” because that rhetoric presupposes that intimacy should always be welcomed and is, in fact, benign. Or, to be more fair, it presupposes that vulnerabilities can be shared, made bare in the same way, and in that sharing act as buffers of some kind. I have yet to work this out. Play with me.

To be scared of intimacy might be to understand the complexity of its demand: that in sharing space one exchanges bodily elements. I spit on you as we chat, though you may not feel it. The germs coating my hands transfer as I shake your hand, hold your shoulder. My diseases, and their memories, leap across skin barriers, to be combated by your defense systems, but they leap. We are always infecting each other with pieces of our selves.

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Taking propinquity as a model for intimacy requires a certain faith, a certain leap that feels disingenuous. After all, we distinguish between the woman on the bus who stands too close and the man we fuck in the bathhouse. Different strangers. Different intimacies. Different potentials for disease.

Increasingly, I wonder about the line between propinquity and intimacy, how to refract each through the other, to see what models might emerge. The slave ship becomes crucial in this endeavor. And the problem of time. But the time of propinquity might be equivalent to the time of intimacy, and irrelevant to the happening of affect. Sensation lingers and flavors time, colors space.

Propinquity orients one. From its point, worlds emerge and look different or the same, and how we feel about them is different or the same. A casual ride on the metro results in: “so this is how people on this metro stop behave,” and one’s orientation to that stop changes, one’s relation to that particular space.

Intimacy orients, a lesson I take from Sara Ahmed.

What might it mean to think of intimacy not as a relation between individuals, but about orientations toward orientations?

I think, for instance, of the U.S. version of the “me, I”: “I’m the kind of person.” Having taken the injunction to “know thyself” to a sad extreme, many of us run around convinced that our inner knowledge about ourselves, mediated by factors we fail to footnote, provides a template for the world. We are unaware of our orientations, that is, how we project our desires into the world.

Those moments when desires project into the world, when orientations become visible, when we turn to this and not to that, those moments fascinate me. Those moments become the orientations that determine, in part, my own orientations. I am, then, less interested in confessional declarations based on self-knowledge than I am in where one turns—the why is also relatively unimportant. (That this is itself a moment of confession based on an un-footnoted mediation does not elude me, and that I’m aware of it as such also does not elude me. The impossibility of evading mediation is itself another mode of mediation.)
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I am trying to imagine what it might mean to take propinquity as a model for intimacy, and how to consider the obligations of orientation, where to turn, how to turn to those spaces and places, and how those acts of turning enable other kinds of turnings and turnings away.

To understand, that is, how our practices of space enmesh us in overlapping, unavoidable forms of sociality.

If we begin from these enmeshments as the conditions that allow for and enable intimacy, enmeshments that are rarely within our control, and here I am taking propinquity as the model for intimacy, then it strikes me that a degree of terror should accompany intimacy.

I avoid here the distinction between casual intimacy and deep intimacy, and that might be where this excursion falls flat, though it might have flatlined from the first word.
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Would it be possible to “admit” being terrified of intimacy without that being viewed as a move toward greater intimacy? Is there something denuded, always already appropriated, about intimate discourse that makes it difficult for it to be difficult?

One can end on a series of confessions.

Once, a knowing person said, “you’ve been hurt in love.” And I wanted to slap the person. It was the sureness with which each intimate history and present could be plotted along a chart—our cues already given, our natures already known, our orientations already measured. Underlying this, of course, a narrative of intimate normativity—“we all want to be loved,” says Reba McEntyre.

What if I just want cum from strangers?

What if a “terror” of intimacy is not a condition to be overcome, not a pathology, but an orientation toward the world? What might that kind of orientation enable? What if one is indifferent toward intimacy? What if one is agnostic? Can one be agnostic?
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I have been circling around the stare that rubs, the rub that aches, the ache that lingers, the constitution and afterlife of propinquity. In an indirect way, I have also been offering a reading of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed.”

Arguably, intimate life is already too complex without my attempting to complicate it further. But the only boy meets boy and girl, enters into polyamarous relationship, and lives happily ever after narratives I like live in romance books, and those are the only ones I give a pass.

Intimacy is complicated. Terror in the face of intimacy is a justifiable reaction.

Kenyan Masculinity

I am eager to burn
this threadbare masculinity,
this perpetual black suit
I have outgrown.
—Essex Hemphill

Mutahi Ngunyi fascinates me, about as much as he infuriates me. He is a provocative thinker with, I am told, a loyal fan base. A friend tells me that “people read him” and “respond to him,” even “take him seriously.” And it is this last I cannot do. He is smart—that is mildly condescending, but there’s no way to write it without it being so. And disappointing.

His provocations are entertaining and limited and, sometimes, so conservative they make my teeth hurt. I would say ideologically violent, but that might be aligning writer and person too much. Perhaps, and I would like to believe this, he gets carried away by his own cleverness. I hope so, but even that cannot excuse some statements.

As a prelude to a post, the above might be considered petty. But we poltergeists can only slam doors and rattle walls, not least in the presence of those who ghost us.

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Ngunyi opens his recent “letter” to Kenyan men by creating Kenyan men. Here are the first few paragraphs:

This is a letter to the men of Kenya. And with your permission, allow me to include Hon Martha Karua.

I will go straight to the point. Good people, you need to get angry. No. You need to explode with ‘‘holy’’ anger. Last year you wasted your anger butchering one another. And you did this for two ungrateful men. That was foolish.

This time you should get angry and do the right thing. Your duty is to God, your woman and to country. Get angry for country; get angry for your woman. Forget the cantankerous politician and tribe.

One could write about the ongoing masculinization of Martha Karua, which serves, in good patriarchal fashion, to highlight the “lack” that is other women—most notably, the women who recently called the sex boycott.

One could note the “Good people” trope, though my irritation with certain left-over British affectations is my own issue, and I have my own U.S. affectations that are, no doubt, just as irritating.

One could note the ongoing reduction of the post-election violence to a contest over “two men,” an interpretation that is dangerously partial, and ignores the webs of political filiation and affiliation, the complex, tangled brambles of political action that do not map neatly onto Kibaki or Raila, no matter how much the official discourse terms it so.

I am—how do I feel? Enraged? Disappointed? Chastened? Saddened?—I am touched most by the creation of Kenyan men whose “duty is to God, your woman and to country.”

I am not religious.

I am not heterosexual.

I am ambivalent about patriotism.

In fact, I refuse to accept this “duty,” to accept the way it interpellates “Kenyan men,” and in refusing to be its addressee, even though I am its reader, I ghost myself even as I am ghosted by it.

It is, in fact, a silly call to duty. One marked by Ngunyi’s love for bombast, I assume, rather than any deep devotion on his part to creating the perfect Christian patriarchal nation of patriots.

Bombast has consequences.

Right now, gay and lesbian Kenyans are having their intimate lives exposed online—I will not call this being outed, as I am not sure any of them are “closeted” (and whether that term can live outside a “western” context is a whole other issue). As queer Kenyans become more visible, we pay for that visibility, in part by being made public and also by being ghosted.

I have no desire to claim queer men are “also” men. In fact, I have no interest in defending “masculinity” on such limited terms.

The term that infuriates me—ahh, that’s how I feel—is “duty.” It infuriates me because over the past many years, some of us have been trying to re-think “Kenyan duty,” to re-work its contours, and to advance a notion of citizenship that moves beyond religious devotion and the confines of hetero-kinship

What binds us as Kenyans cannot be, and should not be, that we believe in and practice forms of religion or hetero-patriarchy. That version of Kenyan-ness too easily slides into religious intolerance toward and hetero-patriarchal violence against queer Kenyans.

More, as we have learned from feminist scholars, invocations of “proper” masculinity and “proper” manhood create gendered straitjackets, and calls to action that require us to don straitjackets are calls to inaction.

No doubt, Ngunyi intends his call to Kenyan men to mimic, perhaps parody, the women’s recent call to action. Yet the parody falls flat because he calls Kenyan men to don the straitjacket of heteropatriarchy, one that puts women in their place. Note, “your women,” signed, sealed, delivered, yours.

I am a humorless feminist. I accept this designation. Because heteropatriarchy, whether sold as silliness or parody or good fun, is never amusing, never funny, never interesting. It’s crass and powerful. It ghosts. And while some of us have no problem living as phantoms, others of us do.

This letter to Kenyan men binds politics to heteropatriarchy, makes visible their mutual embedding, and ghosts those of us who refuse to wear the “threadbare masculinity” Ngunyi advocates.

Ngunyi is merely symptomatic, though, of a broader structure in Kenyan written journalism that is ruled by heteropatriarchy, a structure in which women are schooled on “how” to be women available to men and men are schooled on how to be heteropatriarchal men. It is a written structure in which every newspaper reading is not only a painful exercise in normalization but, and this is what burns, a pro-masculinist, anti-feminist screed, under the guise of “African gender.” To read a Kenyan newspaper as a gender progressive is to walk on thorns that still pierce through calluses.

To accept the masculinity that Ngunyi advocates requires abandoning any sense of masculine diversity, accepting that we occupy only the most narrow, most trite definitions of national masculinity, and that we can make no space for difference.

And it is this last that might be the biggest problem: to read the PEV as a battle led by two obsolescent men is to miss the ongoing struggles over difference that provided the fertile ground, the still fertile ground, for battles and wars. And to erase difference in creating a national masculinity simply continues to water this ground.

We have done a bad job in listening for the dead. We do an even worse job as we continue to ghost the living.

Off-Desire

What is off-desire? Is it like off-white?

What is it to have lost that thing that one was never sure one had? To ask this question is to begin to trace a history of desire.

It is to ask what it means to desire and to lose it, or to lose some aspect of it, which might well be to question ontology. One’s life as a sequence of punctuation marks, and I have always been fond of the implied question we term a comma.

To the question asked of desire: what do you want? So often the answer is “I don’t know.” What is it not to know what one wants? Not the bashfulness of evasion, but the sincere not-knowingness that so often shapes our lives and interactions.

On the way to an orgasm and not knowing whether one still wants to get there: the sexual encounter whose most delicious pleasure lies in anticipation, the realization, 2 minutes into a 15 minute encounter, that one is bored, and that one races to orgasm because of boredom, to get the encounter over, to change location, get rid of a trick. These unfleshed micro-narratives that struggle to coalesce into a theory, or story, or sexual biography.

I think increasingly about pornography and what it has enabled: a profusion of desires, a mode of experimenting, daring to see where one might tread, in fantasy. Yet the compulsion to watch pornography, to tread where one might not have previously, is so often instrumentalized. One gets off and shuts down.

The desire “to get” competing with the desire “to get off” with someone particular, or a type. And how type is defined in one way or another: to desire married men, or men in bookstores, or men in public parks, or men in bathhouses, or men in relationships with other men, even men in uniforms.

A long-ago conversation with a young woman, who, mad at her football-playing boyfriend, proclaimed him ugly, very ugly, and when he wanted her back, proclaimed him hot. Hot is not the same thing as beautiful or handsome, but it is honest. (This post was going to be about hotness, but I got sidetracked by shiny things.)

To term desire a history of phantom losses is basic—any Lacanian will laugh at such a simple description. I am not engaged with psychoanalysis here, but with the idea of transcription. How does one narrate and transcribe that history of ongoing loss that becomes renewed as history, written as history, with every moment of desire, even off-desire?

This might be to ask why the much-anticipated trick turns into boring sex, no matter how desirable the trick promised to be. To ask, that is, about the pleasures of anticipation, and the promise of frigidity.

Coda: A set of related terms: desire, anticipation, disappointment, frigidity, impotence.

Time

Time to write an academic journal article, not including research: 3 months

Time from submission to print: 6 months to 2 years

Time to write a blog post, including research: 1 hour

Time from submission to print: 1 minute

Hauntings

My father played piano. It was haunted. His eyes would be intent on the page, never looking down at his hands, his feet on the pedals, keeping strict time, his face studious, never smiling. His pleasure came from getting it right.

He loved to play Für Elise. Never once did he vary the tempo or alter the dynamics. Never once did he improvise on a written piece of music. As it was written so it was to be played. Always.

He was haunted, like so many other Makerere men of his generation, by the ghosts of English instructors who insisted on properness. His English was denuded of Muranga and Nyeri, his affect proper, even in matters of traditional ritual. Before my circumcision at 13, for instance, he might as well have told me to keep a stiff upper lip.

Not surprisingly, when he bought a VCR in 1981, one of the first movies he owned was My Fair Lady, which remained a staple in our household, and, in retrospect, was an allegory for his life.

My father’s haunting is not unique. He was part of a haunted generation, a generation whose haunting we have inherited.

The phantom has a name: What Will They Think. I call it John, for short.

John haunts our utterances and our actions.

It is startling that even progressive, politically minded Kenyans are haunted by this phantom, are paranoid, always seem to be aware of the schoolmarmish John peeking over our shoulders, silently approving but mostly disapproving. And this anxiety over getting “it” right, over pleasing the never-pleased John is crippling.

Thus, we have, in one iteration, philosophers asking why we don’t have our own Hegel or Kant. We have historians asking for our E.P. Thompson, scientists asking for our Einstein. In the popular media, we are told how to dress “like” English ladies and gentlemen, which means we should dress like characters in James Bond movies.

A recent article on Valentine’s Day tells us about flowers and candy and champagne, and we cultivate our Britishisms, no matter how incongruous they make us sound. Old Chap, gel, and so on. Even our Americanisms, no matter how silly we sound.

It is not simply a matter of mimicry, which has its uses. It is, rather, that this haunting means we can never fully look at each other, never really see each other, never really hold hands, because we are always lagged, a step behind, hoping the phantom will materialize and finally smile.

So pervasive is this phantom that even our acts of cultural, anti-imperial resistance are self-consciously performative. We perform resistance for John because we want a reaction. We need a reaction. Without John’s reaction, some small part of us cannot come into being, cannot function.

Paradoxically, we relish being chastised by John’s proxy, the so-called western countries, because this proves that we are being noticed.

Let’s follow this path carefully. Watch for the thorns.

John is a phantom. It does not sediment into a proper name, a proper location, or even a specific country. In Freudian terms, we might speak of John as an idealized father, a super-ego, an impossible imperative to be ordered and orderly. But where the super-ego can save us from our worst excesses, John hobbles us.

John hobbles us because we lose the scene of responsibility, the being-here-together that we need to work and live and love. Instead, we are here with cricked necks, always looking anxiously to see whether or not the ever-disapproving John will approve.

We write book reviews that lambaste John’s proxies for “not getting it right.” We do not write for each other. We, and I am very guilty of this, rail against the continued neo-imperialisms that scar us, but we write, less frequently, to build and fortify ourselves.

We become collaborators in gestures of continual resistance, misunderstanding shared outrage for foundation building. And when it dissipates, as it does, or when we are seduced by the slight twitch on John’s face that might break into a smile, our foundations dissolve.

We need a politics of outrage. But we need to recognize that it is a flimsy foundation.

What does it mean to refuse this haunting, or, more realistically, to live with it but not to be crippled by it? How do we face each other, write for each other, build institutions for and with each other? And how do we avoid having our cultural and intellectual production reduced to a reaction to John’s haunting? Should we cultivate indifference?

Ultimately, John doesn’t care. It is a phantom we cultivate by offering unsolicited and unneeded libations.

This work has been happening. To offer just two examples, Betty Wamalwa’s beautiful choreopoem “Cut off My Tongue” sings with a distinctly Kenyan accent, about Kenyans, and to Kenyans. Its language, staging, execution, and very conception force us to look at each other, even when we might prefer to look past each other. “Cut Off My Tongue” is not exclusionary, not an ode to Kenyan exceptionalism. It is grounded in Kenya, for Kenyans, and welcomes those who want to engage with us.

Muthoni Garland’s recently launched series of children’s book similarly tell Kenyan stories in Kenyan space. I cannot overstate how excited I was to buy these books for my nieces last Christmas—to be fair, I bought only one, but then I made my mother buy the rest!

My 3-year old niece, Kelita, insisted on hearing these stories over and over and over. She has memorized them. I cannot begin to fathom how this experience will shape her life, but it will. She is reading books written in Kenyan accents by Kenyans for Kenyans. And learning, as she must, that “the book,” that object we still hold sacred in Kenya, can be a structure we occupy with fluency and grace as readers and writers, producers and consumers.

We will not exorcise John. To my mind, this is one of the enduring fallacies promulgated by the Ngugi generation. And each attempt at exorcism only got more desperate and continued to give John what it needed to transmit across generations, so that we have to deal with it now.

We might even need John, as one more ghost in our pantheon of ancestors.

But we need not be hobbled by John. We need not look over our shoulders.

Instead, we can draw inspiration from Langston Hughes, who understood we are better when we look at and to each other. I can do no better than end with Hughes’s words from “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926).

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

Indeed.

End of Semester Reading: Names, Topics, Meltdown

Names: Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie, Thomas Holt, Diana Paton, Kamau Brathwaite, Jayne Krentz, Mary Balogh, Amanda Quick, Maryse Condé,

Topics: James Bond, Miss Marple, Jamaican slavery, Jamaican freedom, Jamaican punishment, rip-my-bodice, heaving bosoms, paranormal romance, colonialism, postcolonialism, harems, trash romance, heteronormativity, heteronormaphilia (mine!)–topics is a capacious category

Meltdown: my poor students are being inundated with how diaspora creates a unique history of sexuality–and somewhere in there I throw in the words ontology, epistemology, counterculture of modernity, counter-intimacy, contra-intimacy, Britney Spears, Beyonce, hegemonic, performativity, the politics of intimacy, the intimacy of politics, heterocolonialism, and Claude McKay!

Claude McKay explains everything!

Hello, New Addition to the Tech-Harem!

I was forced to buy a netbook because the good people in Nairobi have hungry eyes and I did not like how they looked at my macbook.

He has two big brothers:
white macbook: Basil I
black macbook: Basil II

What shall I name him, this child from a different plan(e)t?

A Kenyan name? Because he’ll be coming on my journey home with me?