Break Up

Dear . . .,

You have begun to annoy me. You are everywhere. You are indiscriminate. You allow yourself to be used too much and too often.

. . ., when we started this journey I loved your coyness, your knowingness, your wink-nudge-titter as much as I loved your cluelessness, your endless shrug, those tiny spaces of possibility and silence. You were mysterious and knowing, delicate without being fragile.

I adored each of your dot-space-dot-space-dot.

I don’t know that I will ever feel the same way again. I had warned you that , would always be my first love, that seductive bit of hesitation, the never-ending foreplay. You, . . ., smile too much and too often, even without occasion, and I have seen you give yourself to apprentice writers, court naïve editors, woo unsuspecting readers.

I’m sorry, . . ., I cannot, any longer.

Obama in Ghana

Obama’s trip to Ghana raises fascinating questions about diaspora as a mode of affiliation, about the kinds of choosing we must undertake to forge connections across histories, and also about the kinds of histories we make available as sites for identification. Ghana is, of course, one of the prime centers for such affiliations, if for no other reason than that Du Bois chose to move there. And certainly its status as the first decolonized African country has meant that it is owned by all Africa in a way that, for instance, Ethiopia might not be, and South Africa certainly is not.

I’m thinking about sites of affiliation because the Kenya news reports that Ghanaians have “prepared” former slave-holding locations for Obama to tour. I have no real clue whether or not he will tour them. But I am fascinated by the kinds of affective histories that such sites are meant to provoke, and the kind of historical connections Obama will be asked to negotiate.

In one sense, these slave-holding locations forge connections between Ghana (the Gold Coast) and the United States. They bind the two in a shared, collective history, one in which each location could not exist, in some way, without the other. Even as Obama speaks of contemporary interdependencies, he is also being asked to remember that such relationships precede the present, and that he should recognize interdependencies rather than what is presumed to be Ghana’s dependency on the United States.

These locations also ask Obama to associate himself with, to create affiliations with Atlantic slave histories. As an aside, it is fascinating to speculate on whether he would be urged to associate with Indian Ocean slave histories were he to come this side of Africa.

By virtue of his parentage, Obama might belong to East African histories (some have argued Luo histories), by virtue of his upbringing he is affiliated with West African histories.

Yet such a mapping is clumsy and flatfooted. Which is not to say that some kinds of clumsiness are not productive.

Who has the right to own, to claim, to affiliate with Atlantic slave histories?

To my mind, such histories must be seen as global histories, and that opens the troubling question of who may not be allowed to affiliate with such histories. It also raises the question of who might have privileged access to such histories: who might speak about them and how. I consider this question often as a scholar trained in African American literature, devoted to theorizing diaspora, and affiliated, by birth, with East African post-independence histories. In a recent class, one of my students kept saying “we black people were slaves on ships in the Atlantic,” and I had to keep thinking about the kind of affiliation she wanted and that I was too uncomfortable to provide.

I wonder about that “we” that surrounds and haunts Obama’s trip to Ghana. The “we” with which we keep insisting he’s African. The “we” that creates a line between Ghana and the United States, that implicates him in Atlantic slave histories. The “we” that wants a kind of affect to overcome or intercede between differential structural positions—the “we” that wants him to forget he is the U.S. president on an official visit to Africa.

I also wonder about the “we” that Obama will construct and deploy while in Ghana. The “we” that will anticipate and negotiate the multiple “wes” being thrown at him. The “we” that will allow him to the implicit and explicit demands that he be pan-African, which has, in some incarnations, been highly critical of U.S. policies and politics. He will be asked to negotiate a “we” that demands he be “one of the people,” and that has specific demands on presence and etiquette (one man on TV already complained that Obama will not spend enough time in Ghana).

Obama will be navigating pasts and presents while forging presents and futures. If, as friends and I have been discussing, he embodies newly diasporic Africans, his trip also represents a set of ongoing navigations that will continue to affect Africa in ongoing, unfolding futures.

Un-Blogging

I have been trying very hard not to blog about Kenyan politics, Michael Jackson, James Bond, Agatha Christie, trash romance, cilantro and rosemary, the weather, ongoing research projects, visits to the archive, queer politics, queer sex, queer celibacy, hot daddies, Kenyan condoms, avocadoes, shades of brown, flowers and gardens, anti-intellectualism, Kenyan education, U.S. education, “the” job market, filing nails, cutting hair, brushing teeth, nieces and siblings, dancing, debating, dalliances, Tyra, toothaches, titillation, hot Kenyan men, average Kenyan men, ugly Kenyan men, and the mindfuck of reading British spelling.

femiplan?

Dear Kenyan Heterosexuals,

Please explain the difference between femiplan family planning condoms for men and “regular” condoms? What is the femiplan secret? Will it hurt gay men?

Sincerely,

Confused Queer

Currently Reading: My Life in Prison

Salim Abdullah had been in that damn place [Mathare Hospital] for so long that he had forgotten the difference between a man and a woman. In his life, I guess, he had laid more men than women. If you did not know how to handle him, you could land in his trap. He had the face of an ape, the roar of a lion and the strength of a buffalo: but he was also the most cowardly creature you could ever come across. Looking at him or listening to him as he threatened you, you could feel like kneeling and begging him to spare you: but those of us who understood him knew that he was quite easy to deal with. To get him off your back, you only needed to give him a blow in the face or bend down as if to pick up a weapon. When you straightened up, he would be gone.
* * *
A pansy passed nearby as we were talking. He was short, fat brown with even, white teeth. He was handsome, all right, this queer. He moved sexily in front of us, with slow calculated steps as if intending to impress us. The calves of his legs were fat and smooth, his whole body well washed and smeared with a sweet-smelling toilet soap, which could only be afforded by prison tycoons. He had protruding buttocks, which trembled with every step. A hyena would have followed him for miles expecting them to drop at any moment so that it could eat them.
* * *
A Kenyan classic, complete with tales about queer prison gangs and all!

“Was” Racist

What is the shelf-life of a racist text? Is there a point when it ceases to be racist? If there is such a point, how is it related to pedagogy? I am not, here, thinking of those texts whose racism has to be explained because it’s subtle or incidental. Nor am I really thinking of those “classics” by Conrad and Twain. Instead, I’m thinking of a book like Dixon’s The Clansman.

These are odd questions, engendered by an online discussion in which it was suggested (good old eliminate agent!) that certain texts were published as racist texts. That “were” caught me. If they were published as racist texts—to enable certain political, social, cultural goals—what are they now? Are they still racist? And how do we teach them, if we do?

If certain goals are no longer possible—it is unlikely Jim Crow will return, though time is fickle—then what does a book like The Clansman communicate? In part, this is a question of persistence and re-deployment (the military metaphor is appropriate). It is also a question of how “new” racisms emerge and function.

What is “new” about them is precisely the contexts in which they emerge, but also how their “newness” remains invisible under guidelines and paradigms designed to detect and correct for “old” racisms. Thus, for instance, the persistent notion that racism is a white/black issue has made it difficult to make visible other kinds of social relations. But now I’m venturing too far from my original questions.

When we claim that a text “was” racist, we mean something about the kind of labor the text was supposed to perform within a particular place and time. It cannot be a transhistorical claim.

Yet, we are always faced with the problem of what Williams termed the residual, no matter how attenuated.

Within the classroom, part of this residual has to deal with students’ affect. How does one engage with those who agree with Thomas, for instance, that cross-racial contact is a bad idea? How does one engage with those who love the genre and novel (as I do) and feel guilty for doing so, because they think it implicates them in its racism? How does one engage with those who refuse to engage with the novel because it is wounding to read its descriptions? (Here, the subtle point that disengagement is also a form of engagement has little traction.)

There are other dangers: for instance, some students may use racist texts as divining rods, to fault those who don’t agree with them. And few classroom encounters are as uncomfortable as trying to adjudicate the “you’re racist” accusations.

In which case, why teach racist texts? Why teach racism as emanating from specific historical points and having specifically historical functions? Why risk a kind of pedagogy that, to be frank, many would disagree with on ideological, formal, and political grounds? Dixon may be fun, but it’s hardly Henry James. And why spend two weeks on Dixon instead of two weeks on Du Bois? (It’s nice to imagine that one can teach everything. We pick and choose.)

I don’t want to put myself in the awkward position of “defending” racist texts, even as I acknowledge that choosing to teach a racist text expresses a certain kind of defense: the syllabus is a mini-canon, and to canonize, even in that limited form, is to value.

I am interested in thinking about what it means to continue to risk pedagogy. I’m interested in how we bend and stretch as teachers and thinkers, even as we anticipate teaching our students to bend and stretch.