Who is this Pussy Galore from Harlem?
‘She is the only woman who runs a gang in America. It is a gang of women. . . . She is entirely reliable. She was a trapeze artist. She had a team. It was called “Pussy Galore and her Abrocats”. . . . The team was unsuccessful so she trained them as burglars, cat burglars. It grew into a gang of outstanding ruthlessness. It is a Lesbian organization which now calls itself “The Cement Mixers”.
Ian Fleming, Goldfinger (1959)
I am engaged in yet another conversation in which my interlocutor looks at me patiently, pityingly, and gently tells me that “this is Kenya.” I snap back that it doesn’t have to be. My interlocutor offers what can only be described as the woiye expression.
I have been having these conversations for as long as I can remember. They are, in part, inter-generational and inter-regional. My Kiambu-living aunt has most often been the one to remind me that “this is Kenya,” usually when we are in Nairobi.
That she reminds me makes me wonder what it means to forget where one is. What is it to forget the space-time that one inhabits? Not the past, not the “was,” but the “is,” and how does such forgetting enable the “is” to morph into the “will be”? What does forgetting the “is” mean for memory and history?
I am not thinking, here, of forgetting traumatic events—though I continue to wonder if there can be such a thing as the trauma of the quotidian, and believe there is. Instead, I am wondering about the ongoing forgetting that demands constant reminding. The ongoing “forgetting” (that might not be the right word) that we mean to correct when we insist on hereness and nowness.
And what is it to insist on hereness and nowness, to continually nudge others into the present we occupy? What anxieties about living in time and on time, about sharing space, compel our constant need to affirm that we are in synchronous time-space?
How do we live with those who are out of sync? How do we live when we are out of sync?
*
Hereness and nowness rarely coincide. The more extended the not-here, the more difficult to occupy the-now.
A banal example.
One listens to conversations with a gracious, slightly confused smile, unable to follow cause and effect, stone throw and ripple, and, when proffered, explanations rarely capture the urgency of the now and then. From a different now, one finds it difficult to understand why this particular now should matter or be interesting.
To ask such questions when one is off-time and off-place suggests something about the urgencies of our own quotidian. Of course, we also construct intimacy as hereness, an extending nowness. And so to be in the same place and time is to envision the extension of that being. A banal explanation for why we return to places where we first “felt.”
*
I remain troubled by the intimacies that structure hereness and nowness, the demand that one be in time and on time, the invocations of those who are fully present, as expected.
To be fully present is to aka nyumba, to set up one’s house, to affirm one’s commitment to a place, to a history, to a trajectory.
The word “plot” recurs too often to be accidental.
It used to mean “something to do.” Now it means somewhere for living to occur, histories to be created, futures to unfold. It has become a repository of time and place, of hereness and nowness. Plots make forgetting difficult, insist that one remember. Childhood meanings blend into adult tongues.
Stutters break time. And, in the interval, nowness is anticipated.
Two candid shots of Obama stand out on the Obama wall. Both shots feature him seemingly unscripted, his suit crumpled, his face turned away from the camera. This is Obama at home in public. They are good shots, clear shots, evidence of solid, if unimaginative, photographic work. They are, in fact, evidence of the kind of work produced in this studio.
The studio offers 12 passport photos for Kshs 150, Kshs 200 gets you 8 done express, within 5 minutes.
Although other kinds of photography take place here, the studio is dedicated to passport photographs. It is definitely not Studio One, across the street, from where our obligatory family portrait emanated in another time.
I wonder about the promise of the passport photograph, and how it functions as a tool of social mobility—a mobility that may be diagonal, vertical, horizontal, the only promise being that movement will happen.
I wonder, even more, about the promise of Obama’s face in this particular studio. It is repeated at least 6 times, twice on the calendars that hang on the wall, as though to suggest we are now in Obama time, or that the passport might change time and destiny.
This narrative is suggested by an ad in the paper: Obama’s face looks out from an ad that promises to help one get a green card to the U.S. Apply now and become Obama, or so it seems.
I have suggested, previously, that Obama represents the myth of Stato, a confirmation of unconfirmed stories. After all, we only have the word of the summer bunnies and the winter bunnies that they are “doing well,” little proof. And we know plenty of stories about those who disappear into the ether of foreignness. Whose faces, unlike Obama’s, cannot be displayed as emblems of success, the kind of success premised on “anything is better than here.”
And so we line up here to take our passport photographs taken. It is a hopeful gesture, an indication that we continue to believe in the futures Obama embodies.
*
The other photographs are official, issued from the U.S. image-makers, and they also tell a certain kind of story, create a certain kind of dream to which one might aspire.
This story is more ambivalent.
One part of it is about the kind of institution this studio aspires to become, an institution in which images are created that circulate around the world, an institution that takes photographs of important people. And one sees, in some of the faces here, an aspiration to be one of those whose image will circulate.
A darker narrative is about going to the place where such images have been created. It is a narrative about the passport photograph joining to the passport and enabling travel to a different kind of image-space.
I am struck, most, by the multiple Obama calendars on the wall. A passport ensures, it seems, not only access to a different space, but also access to a different time.
It is a time that lives in the difference between the 12 photographs, promised within an hour, delivered in two, and the 8 photographs, promised within 5 minutes, delivered within 10.
*
The studio also has photographs of Kibaki and Raila. They sit across the room from the Obama wall, in a recessed shelf. They also represent a time-space, a kind of poa, time will wait, space will accommodate. They are accommodated and take up space.
Kibaki and Raila do not represent the promise of the passport photograph. The forms of movement associated with them are de-linked, paradoxically, from mobility for others. One cannot aspire to be a Kibaki or Raila, and while becoming Obama seems more difficult, it is also, paradoxically, easier to dream about.
Kenyan photo studios have always been aspirational spaces. We lined up to pose as the families we wanted to be. Lovers posed in magazine-learned contortions, convinced that standing just-so ensured a just-so future.
One of the photographs on the wall represents one of these just-so futures: Barack, Michelle, and their daughters, posed as the family passports enable.
There are no pictures of a Kenyan family on the Obama wall. No counter-narrative offered, and it registers as blankness. Instead, the Kenyan test shots feature employees of the studio, each standing alone, each against a generic black or blue backdrop.
And each one threatening to fade into a background that will not allow movement.
Your voice echoes and I ask you to repeat. Distance ghosts and prolongs haunting. We are always hanging up and re-dialing, looking for sunny spots where voices are less reedy, mis-timing the interval of a sentence. We are always breaking up.
You are convinced that the right phone card will solve the problem, and have set up a rating system. An hour of talk time yields three complete sentences and an avalanche of interrogatives. We abandon pardon for what. Learn to be telegraphic.
I miss the luxury of complete sentences.
You mentioned, once, a trip you took in time. A childhood place where you hoped to find a long-ago laugh. Sound dissipates, and while yesterday’s waves linger in new configurations, happiness is not always waiting.
I remember this as I review the list of places I shall not—because I cannot—return. One weighs the molding impress against the promise of fresh paint and strange voices.
But you know I have a leaky memory, and it is not the crispness of then I seek, but the pieces of me I left behind: a coin, chewed gum, string from my ever-fraying sweaters.
*
And the other places, where so much is invested.
What is the fear of the overly known?
I have not yet learned not to fear disappointment, and I marvel at those who have. One approaches promises with trepidation. It is only untried youth that believes “you will have so much fun,” and I have already confessed my distaste for “fun.”
One cannot anticipate fascination, nor can one predict what will become enshrined.
*
You laugh at my love for street benches and brightly colored doors, my faith in the healing power of spring grass and fresh cement. And you wonder if I shall stop returning to you.
Like my U.S.-born friends, I can finally write about the ordinariness of holidays, of traveling to see “the family.” It is not that everything is familiar, more that I can handle the unfamiliarity with greater ease, even when it is my own unfamiliarity.
Returns “home” are invariably ethnographic, especially for those of us who travel infrequently. Over the course of a few weeks, we learn the unfolding shapes of family trees: the marriages, the deaths, the divorces, the come-we-stays, the never-should-have-beens. We learn about those who are “doing well” and those who are doing “not so well,” and about those who are passed over in silence. We learn, as always, about what counts as achievement, and learn how we have both measured up and failed.
These narratives are also about expectations. More than once, my mother has mentioned that a daughter of a friend has “bought a plot” and intends to “build a house.” It will be mentioned again during my stay, a subtle infection calculated to produce certain results.
This repeated narrative is part of the ordinariness of return. The first time after a long time, one is allowed to be eccentric. The fact of being home takes precedence over much else. After that, others desire to shape one’s life. One must don protective layers.
One learns to manage meetings and encounters. To devote time to those who share one’s interests and passions, to ensure that accidental meetings with former friends never blossom into extended “remember when” sessions, to take political and ideological temperatures and gird one’s loins when necessary. To say no and never show up. To cultivate what feeds one. This last is the only way the ordinary can be so and remain pleasant.
*
I return with a toothache and metaphors. Disrupted sleep patterns and a mostly empty bottle of Advil.
For the past few weeks, I have been following a discussion on H-Africa on what drugs to take when traveling to Africa, more specifically Ghana. When I arrive at the airport. I receive a document that indicates I have come from a country with Swine Flu.
Malaria vs. Swine Flu.
One is a worldwide epidemic.
*
Returns grate.
We return as much to reconnect as to remind ourselves why we stay away. I return to find the avocado trees in full bloom, the house full of green goodness, and awaken to a diminished appetite. The freshest, most organic food I have had in a while, and I do not desire it. In some corner of the universe, a wicked god laughs.
Returns produce writing. Travel produces writing. Yet, not the lovingly created narratives that Binyavanga writes, developed from plunging into life in all its thickness. I envy him this. Instead, I dip my toes in nearby pools and scan for signs of life and infection. I monitor the color of my toenails, and boil chlorinated tap water. I return to find metaphors, and do not have the skill or patience to parse them.
*
I return to terms like mũhĩrĩga and itega and ngurario and kũrashia, to declarations from a dying generation about Ũgĩkũyũ and anxieties from my generation about doing things “right.” A cousin married abroad returns to marry here. Talks must be held, gifts exchanged, animals killed. I relish the ceremonial aspects of it—I’m a fag, after all—though I cheerfully refuse to attend any part of it.
Old allergens embrace me and my sneezes change timbre, sound more “at home.”
Black pepper comforts me
Sodomy is always presumed guilty in Kenya.
Last year, we discovered that sodomy debauches prisoners and this year we are discovering that sodomy debauches young street children. That it has similar effects on what are presumably two unlike populations speaks to its power as a corrupting force. In both instances, the discourse on sodomy produces a certain kind of Kenyan.
It is worth dwelling, for a moment, on the comparison between prisoners and rehabilitated street children, the targets of sodomy, for both might be said to occupy similar positions in one kind of social imagination. They are, for better or worse, neglected and negligible populations, populations whose value lies in their invisibility. Nairobi prides itself on “clearing away” street children, for instance.
What does it mean that neglected and negligible populations must be defended against sodomy? What does it mean that marginalized populations, those that occupy the edge of the social must be defended against sodomy, in parliament no less? How might we read this securing of borders against invasion?
What happens to sodomy in the absence of any pro-sodomy discourse? Who will defend sodomy?
*
In his rich, and probably dated, glossary of prison terms, Maina wa Kĩnyattĩ offers the following definitions:
Mende/Mfiraji/Shoga/Nding’oing’o: All refer to those prisoners who sodomize other prisoners. “Mende” is probably the most popular and accepted name. A rich “mende” has a host of concubines. He feeds them, supplies them with cigarettes and provides them with security which is needed in prison. Those “mende”who are not rich rape other prisoners. Literally, “mende” means a cockroach and “nding’oing’o”means a beetle which feeds on human excrement. “Mfiraji” or “shoga” means a faggot or homosexual.
Kumkula/Kũmũrĩa: Means to sodomize another prisoner. Literally, “kula” or “kũrĩa” means to eat.
Kũhũra Mai/ Gũtindĩka Mai: To have anal sex, literally, “kũhũra mai” means to beat shit with penis and “ngũtindĩka mai” means to push shit with penis.
I have yet to think through these definitions, which are only one part of the rich homo-discourse in Kĩnyattĩ’s work. For now, only to note how rich the tonal shades of these descriptions. And to suggest that it might be possible to find interesting, ambivalent descriptions of sodomy in Kenya.
*
But does sodomy need to be defended? By whom and for what reason? (Elsewhere, I have noted why it is important to discuss sodomy, not homosexuality.)
*
To judge sodomy as guilty or proclaim its innocence misses the rich textures, shades, colors, and variations of sodomy. I write this aware of the rich way the term sodomy has functioned in history, to describe all non-reproductive sex acts. But I also write it in the context of the limited understandings that continually find sodomy guilty in Kenya.
We try sodomy without saying anything about trying sodomy.
I continue to believe that Kenyan discourses on sodomy are impoverished and truncated. Since we already know what “it” is we need not detail, see, talk about, discuss, debate “it” nor can we countenance any alternate stances, any differing viewpoints. And our fledgling queer rights activists are not yet convinced that erotic lives and practices are worth defending—to do so might be to compromise the emphasis on rights and dignity, and yet not to do so risks losing what is specifically queer.
Queer is bodily.
As long as we Kenyan queers remain silent and bashful about sodomy, we continue to enable the kind of framing in which sodomy is something to be tried and found either guilty and innocent. In this case, always guilty.
*
What other ways might there be to frame and re-frame sodomy?
I return, as always, to Foucault’s invocation of bodies and pleasures. And I think about some of the effects of queer pornography on queer politics. Not simply pornography as titillation, but as a way to make visible and palpable what can be done and imagined with the body, as a way to make evident bodies and pleasures in all their ambivalent varieties. I continue to invoke ambivalence because we feel in complex ways about what we do: feeling “good” might not necessarily be the point.
I am not suggesting that multiplying discourses on sodomy will provide a new trial in which sodomy will be found innocent. (I am not convinced that innocent sodomy is any fun.) I am suggesting that multiplying discourses on sodomy, saying more about how “it” is less singular than imagined, more richly textured than envisioned may provide us with more interesting terrain than we now occupy.
The news is discussing the budget and sodomy.
It seems oddly appropriate.
He was the kind of guy every guy wanted to suck off.
He inspired fantasies of teabagging.
His ass inspired fantasies of rimming.
*
I have been thinking of ways to make evident everyday heteronormativity as an expectation linked to desire.
Initially, I wrote, “he was the kind of guy every guy wanted to fuck,” but that was too easy. Fucking is too easy. Ask the hetero-married, homo- and hetero-fucking men who live on Craigs list. And rimming, even rimming can sometimes be too easy.
But sucking off might well be the test.
*
Hetero-Kenya inspires crassness. Not that I have a problem with crassness. I do have a problem with hetero-Kenya. Because I am in “that stage of life’” all the news so far has been about weddings and children. I am not generous. This news does not feed me.
Hetero-Kenya is also “dominating” the news waves as a fresh scandal over priests and boys emerges. I am uninterested in the particulars. I am still waiting for the Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Kenya to issue a press statement, to hold interviews, to do something that complicates the homosexuals are pedophiles narrative that is emerging.
Right about now it would be great to have some prominent queers come out and make public statements.
Right about now is also a potentially dangerous time for queer work and queer workers: homosexuality = pedophilia is a disabling narrative. Yet, if left unchecked such a narrative will continue to hamper queer efforts, whatever they might be right now.
A crooked line can be traced from the debates on the Sexual Offenses Act in 2005 through the first instantiation of the Marriage Bill in 2007 to the current reporting on the pedophilia scandal. It’s worth remembering that the Sexual Offenses Act arose from efforts to combat child abuse.
In fact, one way to read what has happened over the past 4 years is to examine how the figure of the child dominates Kenyan discourses on sexuality, what this figure allows and what this figure makes invisible.
I’m struck, for instance, by how pg rated Kenyan gay blogs are, with the possible exception of one that displays erect penises (why these are chosen and deemed erotic is a whole other story, and I do like my porn to have narrative). It is not that I am seeking confessions—porn is a genre, and not everyone does it well. It is more that I lose the sense of queerness as embodied practice: as what we do with our hands, feet, tongues, butts, penises, vaginas, ears, fingers, breasts, stomachs. That seems so absent, and regrettably so.
Paradoxically, we might attribute this lack to a certain effect of identification: Kenyan + Gay. And the dreaded, dreaded, dreaded demand for respectability that haunts all our discussions.
Of course, it might simply be that we do, we do not speak. I have always relished both.
*
In the next few weeks, I get back to the Queer Kenya anthology, a project that is inching along slowly. I’m not quite sure how to define its contours yet. We are not flooded with material, despite my hopes and several promises, and this situation demands some thought. We need to decide whether to extend the open submissions period, start making vaguely threatening phone calls to people we know, or work with what we have. We also need to decide what narrative to shape, how to position the work for now and for here.
A friend told me that the project really needed to address heteronormativity in Kenya. I had forgotten, until I was in line at the airport in Amsterdam, how hetero-Kenya haunts one. The conversation, the jokes, the anecdotes, all structured around marriage and babies.
Such intimate practices and fantasies do not constitute shared ground. In fact, they leave me mostly indifferent, bored, searching for something else to say, or, better yet, buried in a novel.
As a symptom: after a few hours here, I start asking for directions to the nearest queer brothel.
On the plane, a white man who lives in Maryland tells me that I don’t sound African. He is vaguely disappointed, and comments that I must have lived abroad for a long time. When he tells me that he has been to Tanzania I cut off that line of conversation. I don’t do comparative Africa on planes.
*
At the Safaricom store, a young black woman asks me where I’m from. I probably don’t sound African to her.
*
On the plane, a black Kenyan man tells me that “home is best,” a sentiment I am supposed to share, and don’t.
*
I have been mulling over what it is to “sound African.” What does sounding African license? What kinds of assumptions? What kinds of statements? In part, I am always dealing with this. At one office, a woman sees my passport and asks, “things are bad there, aren’t they?” I know the response. I have seen it performed. I answer, “there’s a global recession. Things are bad everywhere.”
To sound African is to license a set of statements and assumptions that always ensnare one. To sound African is to invite unneeded pedagogy: here, in this not-African place, we do things like this. It is to be dragged into conversations about wildlife and family values. Because in Africa we really treasure our homes and families, unlike in the atomized elsewhere. Africans eat meat and like well-fed women. Unlike the materialistic elsewhere, Africans know what really counts, except when they are corrupt.
None of it is new. And it is not offensive.
It’s simply not interesting to me.
*
Increasingly, I think about what “sounding African” means in terms of what knowledge is permitted to come out of Africa and more specifically to come from Africans. There are fellowships available to study development and governance from elsewhere. The old flavors of elsewhere persist. We are in love, or supposed to be in love, with instrumental knowledge.
I wonder what kind of knowledge we are supposed to produce, and whether, in fact, we are supposed to produce knowledge. We are so symptomatic that it seems the best we can do is apply remedies. I’m sure there’s a complex relationship between knowledge and remedy but the constraints of the latter are palpable.
Perhaps nothing is as symptomatic of this remedy deficiency as the most privileged genre in Kenya: the report. Almost every person I know is constantly writing “a report.” To be fair, the report is much like a novel: it is a loose, baggy monster. But it seems to define something quintessential about here and now. We are incessantly documenting and signing and creating jobs where others endlessly sign and document. One could write a fascinating story termed “the report,” in which we could map how knowledge is both produced and constrained. I use the term genre advisedly, for genre dictates what it is possible to say and how it is to be said.
We are report writers.
*
To stage a certain return.
Sounding African has often been envisioned as being a native informant: with privileged access to a diminished (yet present) African psyche and a rich African spiritual life. In fact, I just read a review of a book that praises the symbolic richness of “African dancing” which, unlike elsewhere dancing, brings communities together and has ritual significance. Obviously, the writer has yet to attend the local queer club elsewhere.
I wonder to what extent the report writer is simply a native informant writing in a more bureaucratic genre. Let us not forget that in one imagined future we were supposed to be government clerks.
This demand for genre is overwhelming. During a meeting I attended last year, the attractive, highly intelligent lawyer who works for a reputable NGO was disappointed that we did not offer “Action Points.” We threw the genre out of joint.
The native informant aspect of report writing is also about how capital circulates. Many reports go elsewhere to look for money. And must sound appropriately African. It is fascinating that much of the writing I have seen from recipients of funds sounds the same.
*
How does one not sound African? What kinds of statements, propositions, forms of writing, modes of acting do not sound African? And what does that mean in terms of their reception and dissemination?
This is a tricky question. Because sounding African is elastic.
One could write about the bad: poor, corrupt, war-torn
One could write about the good: comfortable, well governed, peaceful
And still be writing within the range of the genre. It is not only what one writes, of course, but also how one writes it. Style is as important as content. From my perch as a literary scholar, we often sacrifice style to be native informants, to sound African, to write reports.
Arguably, it’s frivolous to discuss style. After all, Africa has bigger issues than style. Will style help us fight poverty, alleviate hunger, still wars? I have returned to these questions several times over the past two years. It has haunted every bit of writing, including the pace of writing, as though the speed of my fingers could forestall the doom I anticipated.
The same question has also foreclosed other forms of writing and thinking, created fissures between what I consider appropriate to share and what I post elsewhere. I have been seduced by the genre of the report, convinced that the right Action Points might have some impact.
Impact is, of course, part of the genre of sounding African.
*
I have been trying to ask what it means to sound African. What does sounding African allow and what does it refuse? What topics does it allow us to tackle and which ones does it deem irrelevant? How does it circumscribe form and limit imagination?
I am, admittedly, not very interested in sounding African, and apart from this meditation, I spend very little time thinking about it. I am more interested in understanding the terms of the invitation to sound African, issued by those elsewhere and in Africa.
