Return to Sender

I return to the city where a thousand years ago, a friend announced his new-found love for Asian men, bought a wok, and learned how to make crispy tofu. He also met a young man, who subsequently moved in with him; consulted an expensive immigration lawyer on the young man’s behalf; discovered the young man was cheating on him—and also didn’t really want to have sex with him.

I also return to the city that taught me about the racialization of desire, or what Dwight McBride terms the marketplace of desire. And it is this intersection of these two returns that drives this narration.

My friend had been disappointed in love and lust several times by other white men who did not deem him attractive enough, though many enjoyed his penis at 3 am, when no one else was watching, or late afternoons, when no one else had to know. His turn to Asian men seemed, at the time, to be a kind of reaction, a turn to somewhere where the laws of taboo and transgression, foreignness and assimilation, might give him an edge. I should mention he was particularly attracted to foreign-born, heavily-accented Asian men.

I could speculate further—mention my own tangled and deviant desires around accents and silence—but let me move on.

I have returned to the city where I first read Richard Bruce Nugent in the anthology Shade. I remember liking “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” and then not liking it. Even now, two consecutive readings of the story rarely elicit the same pleasure, and, in fact, toggle between pleasure and un-pleasure.

In an interview, Nugent claims that he had tried to “howyoudoing” black men in DC and Harlem, and been rebuffed. He then turned his attention to Latin men who welcomed him.

What might it mean to “direct” interest? (I hesitate to use the term desire.)

To some extent, of course, I’m asking a rather silly question. Our “interest” is always being directed and shaped. We are constantly being told who and what deserves interest. I am always intrigued by the “newly gay” who, almost invariably, go through a phase of learning and practicing a vocabulary of “interest.” Many never move beyond this initial vocabulary. But then 60 year old heterosexual men are still chasing after 18 year old cheerleaders. Interest anchors.

Interest anchors and orients: this club, not that; this street, not that; this restaurant, not that; this hobby, this sport, this cologne, one can add.

In some sense, I merely repeat knowledge about how and where communities form, how and where they are cultivated, and by whom. To that, I want to unfix the category of home (with all its connotations) and think, not instead but besides it, about places of interest that anchor and orient, the not-homes and can’t-be-homes in which we, nonetheless, find ourselves living and moving and choosing.
*
Returns are about un-fixing, with each prior space becoming a potential site for return. Each not-home becoming familiar—the train station or airport that consoles.

I am fascinated by those with clearly defined spaces: home/not-home; play/not-play; work/not-work. Spaces without leaks or cracks or seepage.
*
I return to the city that forced language to bend, made me a soundscape tourist, a word contortionist, a bewildered navigator. Where anyone meant someone, and someone was elsewhere. Made my relationship to language belated, as I asked children the distinction between sun and son, run and ran, where sound became more important than context, and words dropped out of sentences. Hearing by phonics.

A directed hearing. An interested hearing. Where native-born girls could not understand my non-native English, heavily accented with Rex Harrison’s Audrey Hepburn, and I wanted to mutter “tuppence.”

This city that first taught me poetry in the elegant play between Verdana and Lucida. And the meaning of spaces. And the possible impossibility of naming “that” feeling. It is also that city that taught me, imperfectly, about interest.
*
Many years after I first leave, a chance encounter with a random stranger, once met, never experienced, and his confession of desire, were it not for “my roommate’s appetites.” I remember him vaguely, wonder how he remembers me—though not how he remembers the roommate’s appetites, and think about the interest that sent me elsewhere.
*
I leave tomorrow, return to another city whose residents cultivated my interest—Nugent, Essex, GDJ—a city dominated by their ambivalence then, one I imbibed and indulge, albeit with interest.

Mutahi’s Nightmares

Another nightmare would follow. A Korean homosexual midget was raping him. The man had walked through the wall and he stood there stroking his goatee. And there he was shrunk with fright . . . the Korean came closer, his eyes becoming more and more bloodshot . . . his face became menacing . . . other midgets, both male and female appeared . . . they began to make perverted love . . . Nakaru was powerless . . . the Korean was approaching . . . he started stroking him . . . Nakaru could not move his hands . . . he heard the Korean howl with laughter and excitement as he reached orgasm . . . Nakaru cried with anger, shame and pain . . . he woke up from the dream and saw that he was still in the cell. (Wahome Mutahi, Three Days on the Cross)

What is this Korean homosexual midget rapist doing in Wahome Mutahi’s fictional exposé of Kenya’s “secret” torture prisons?

Until his death, Mutahi was a leading satirist in Kenya, the man to whom some turned for entertainment. His prose tracked the adventures of an everyman negotiating the dense scapes of urban and rural, domestic and public, politics and culture. He was popular and made me laugh about 2% of the time (not a bad record).

What Mutahi could get away with in the space of a column, he cannot in the length of a book. In a column, the punchy joke can be the point, the little humorous failing a punctuation mark, the anecdote the narrative. Mutahi’s novels are almost unreadable: the dialogue much like that of a high school play, the narrative action a parody of itself, the characters caricatures, the entire effect cringe-worthy.

It is clear that this midget Korean homosexual rapist scene is supposed to be funny, a moment of comic relief as the narrative approaches its denouement. There is, in fact, a tradition of “the midget” as “comic relief” within Kenya’s popular culture. I can only assume that the Korean angle reflects a cringe-inducing anti-Asian discrimination donned as a badge of honor by some Kenyans (a former roommate proudly uses the term “ching-chong” to refer to Asians and proudly sings her Kenyan-ness—I generalize, I know). The character’s homosexuality is one more ingredient to demonstrate his otherness—as is his goatee, stroked mysteriously before the assault.

This nightmarish figure launches the most extreme assault on imprisoned political masculinity in Mutahi’s novel. It embodies, in its grotesque otherness, the ultimate torture that a guest of the government can imagine, the supreme nightmare in which political masculinity is violated, fucked by a nightmarish foreignness. Indeed, so nightmarish is the encounter that it must be rendered elliptical, left for us to un-imagine. It is less important we know what the Korean midget homosexual with the goatee does and more crucial we understand that this nightmarish figure lies at the edges of the non-protecting government. This nightmare emerges from a tortured imagination—Nakaru has been beaten by government agents.

Much more can be written about this scene—and will be in another version of this writing. For now, I return to the question that animates this project: under what circumstances does the figure of the homosexual emerge in Kenya’s prison writing and what ends does he serve? (I have yet to come across any lesbians; most prison narratives are authored by men.)

A proper answer to this question would require tracing the transnational circulation of the homosexual figure in prison narratives (in film, novels, music) and how that circulation functions in Mutahi’s 1980s Kenya. It also has to do with the traffic across genres—from the crime fiction beloved in Kenya to the political narratives of illegal imprisonment to James Hadley Chase soft porn to the Kung Fu movies that created generic Asians in the Kenyan imaginary.

An improper answer—what can be accomplished within a blog post—might dwell on the government’s ability to create infinitely vulnerable citizens via torture, a vulnerability that is physical and psychic, with the figure of the rapist homosexual embodying the elliptical nightmare encounter. An encounter with this figure is the nightmare threatened when the government withdraws its protections.
*
For some time now, I have distanced myself from the sterile debate on whether or not homosexuals existed in pre-colonial Africa. I read the scholarship and am grateful for it, but have no real investment in staking a position. Instead, following Chris Dunton’s seminal work, I am interested in the labor the homosexual figure performs when it becomes visible.

I am especially interested in its relation to political masculinities: why it recurs in prison writing by Kenyan progressives, and is always compromised and tainted, when not nightmarish and threatening. How, in fact, does the figure of the homosexual occupy Kenya’s political psyche, a psyche that has been most visible in prison-based narratives?
*
After several tries at a semi-ending, let me try the laugh Mutahi imagines eliciting.

I picture Mutahi’s ideal reader: critical of the government, though not necessarily progressive; comfortable in his masculinity, and willing to accept Martha Karua as a “lesser man”; a little past the days when drinking two crates of beer was an achievement, doing so, now, only on select boys weekends out; interested in football, not rugby, but with an occasional glance at basketball; fluent in Nairobi, though not foolish enough to believe fluency wards off all attackers. He has read Grisham and Ludlum, because they were the thing to read; knows of James Hadley Chase and Harold Robbins (or similar writers); consumes the newspapers avidly, but always has bar friends who know the “real” story. Sneers at the men who buy suits full price; has a tailor and a preferred mitumba dealer.

On reading this scene, he wince-laughs, that peculiarly male reaction to seeing someone get kneed in the groin. Assures himself that all homosexuals are Korean midgets—easily beaten in a fight. Sips his drink. Shoves his hand down his crotch, and continues reading.

He dozes off, and dreams.

Love Story

How did you two lovebirds meet?

I responded to his 419 letter.

It was love at first lie.

Leaving

I am always leaving.

Half-eaten avocados tan. Ibis cede hard-won ground to bully crows. Indecision rusts. It is too exposed. Red dust waits to erase untaken steps. We speak of full emptiness, hysterical pregnancies, camouflaged promises.

In the morning, the baby snakes will be waiting.
*
Home has become difficult to feel. An acquired taste for jaded palates and callused tongues.

Phrases agglutinate. There is sifting. Taxis are best friends.

“Where are you from?”

“Where are the Datsuns?”
*
We settle in holding patterns. You will be next. Certain explanations. We throw bones. Read the clouds. Create fruit salad futures.

He chews half-cooked flesh with a laugh and a beer.
*
My niece’s favorite word is “winner.”

In the middle of someone else’s story, I pause to insert a comma, remove a space, delete a semi-colon.

Small rituals make familiar worlds. Snowflakes disorient. Lacking their familiarity I look for patterns in dust dances.
*
Rain no longer evokes memories. Days are dry taps. And clichés no longer comfort.

Smiles are no longer inevitable, and fossil surfaces will not yield to entreaties. Familiarity is not spongy, and I am spongy.

Spongy comminglings.
*
I am always leaving.

Playing hide-n-seek with keys, peek-a-boo with locks, getting caught in passages, trapped in time, missing the mark.

Leaving is inexact, and the hours fissure on nerve endings, my fast feet and lagging hands, my lingering sleep and hungry stomach, my new allergens and old viruses.
*
Those who arrive keep their first shower water for a year.

Perfect & Jood

I return to learn that E. Lynn Harris has died. An outdated email message finally acquired from an account that was inaccessible from Nairobi. And so this return feels like other returns to other places, in which death notices serve as welcome mats. I have not read Harris’s novels in over ten years, and my initial feelings toward them (gratitude) and subsequent re-evaluation (anger) have been muted.

Somewhere in the ever-growing list of essays to be written is one titled “Perfect & Jood,” a somewhat narcissistic take on my relationship to Harris and James Earl Hardy, both of whom I read at the same time, and both of whom supplemented and critiqued each other. In my memory, Harris and Hardy needed each other to create a richly textured world of black male intimacy. Where Harris’s men were upper middle class daytime soap star types (too good looking, too successful, too mired in minor dramas), Hardy’s were up-by-the-bootstraps successful, but with the kind of success that was a generation, or paycheck, away from un-success. Harris’s men loved closets, and hid in them while wives and girlfriends romped with their DL lovers; Hardy’s men were all over the map, from the barely out to the gay parade marshals.

I have been thinking about literary appreciation, more specifically about what remains of a work once it has been read. When I first read Harris and Hardy, I was grateful. It’s difficult, in retrospect, to quantify that gratitude, to give flesh to its openings and enfoldings. It was, at that point, a familiar gratitude, the kind that overflowed as I moved from one life-changing text to another, one life-changing idea to another, as I absorbed, greedily, and without discrimination, what would later form a variegated, if moving, base, a contingent foundation.

One of the major papers I wrote then, major not for its ideas but for the directions it has enabled, featured Hardy as a counterweight to Larry Kramer. Of course, I realize, now, that the Hardy good/Kramer bad argument was rather silly, but it was enabling, because it allowed me to claim black gay urban fiction as an intellectual foundation. I was learning, then, what Sedgwick terms a reparative mode of criticism: to find sustenance by marrying traditional and non-traditional texts and methods, and to extend what I found truncated, albeit with ellipses.

Harris and Hardy would teach me what it meant to humanize black queer characters, how to enflesh them, even when writing about them as a critic, how to love them, how to let that love translate into critical prose.

The first few paragraphs of Harris’s first novel described “perfect.”

It was, in memory, impressions and sensations, a world that one desired to desire, a kind of dream that left behind kisses, impressed itself on the mind, the body, the life. I have not returned to the novel in many years, and my recollection might be fuzzy, but I want to hold on to the fuzziness of how it felt to read it then.

Perfect was opposed to “jood,” Hardy’s aggressively used neologism for something that was better than good. Jood was bodily, boldly so, the cat whistle that made black gay desire visible (Hardy preferred SGL, a description with which I have some issues). Jood was blackness being made desirable between men, it was a bodily sound, a term that made blackness as pornography available, beyond the “oh yeah” and so on of Bel Ami models. Jood, a term I’ve yet to hear any live person use, was world making, and so was perfect.

Then, I was hungry for worlds to be made, I should say hungrier, and I devoured them, world after world after world, each one helping to open the possibilities for the others, each one creating even newer worlds I had yet, still have yet, to fully explore. (This might be, I hope, a more generous reading of what it means to desire one’s youth, to realize that its possibilities are still possible.)

I have mentioned anger at Harris’s work, and should probably explain it.

In his early novels, Harris addressed a class- and masculinity-based ambivalence that I could not process. His characters knew, or feared, the consequences of their sexual revelations, even as they struggled with the psychic costs of their secrets. He wrote, in those early novels, wonderful examinations of the closet. How could successful black men be gay? I’m not yet sure we have an answer to this question now. I’m not sure an answer is possible, or, possibly, I am the least qualified to address it.

I was angry because, as Essex puts it, I had believed in the dream of liberation which, at the time, I thought was the absence of ambivalence. To claim I was out was a duty, to embrace the freedom of outness a right. The multiple stories of how I learned to inhabit ambivalence require more words than I have and more. Harris’s characters inhabited ambivalence more frequently than I could process then. Even now.

Perfect & Jood were wonderfully, richly alive, and I needed that. In those days, each new author I discovered was yet another truncated life. Hardy and Harris were wonderfully, gloriously alive, and that aliveness was one more possible map. Playing in graves has a lot of dead ends.

I have not yet perfected a way to say goodbye to intimate strangers who feed my dreams. Belated waves from fast-moving traffic might capture what I want to say. I’ll look out for them.