Aesthetics of Kinship*

Posted on May 31, 2010 by keguro

Obama’s political career coincides, roughly, with the Kenyan government recognizing and attempting to marshal the economic resources of Kenyans abroad. This coincidence enables us to examine how rhetorics of kinship function to secure identification, and to meditate on the function of identification. I will be suggesting that at least two paradigms of identification intersect in Obama’s case: an ethno-nationalist one from Kenya and a post-Roots one from the U.S.

The Kenya government’s attempt to secure investments from Kenyans abroad is premised, in part, on the obligations of ethno-kinship. I use the term ethno-kinship to suggest the range of attachments and obligations that attend belonging to a specific group—in Kenya, such groups have often functioned along ethnic lines, though they are not limited to ethnic affiliations. I am interested, however, in how ethno-kinship provides a governing paradigm for conceptualizing attachment and obligation: to belong is to have responsibilities.

Ethno-kinship functions in at least two ways. First, the government’s attempts to secure investment in Kenya are premised on reports of money that Kenyans have already been remitting, predominantly within ethno-kinship structures. The government hopes to expand the scope of (diminishing) remittances so that they extend beyond satisfying ethno-kinship needs—paying school fees and rent, for instance—and help create local, national, and regional structures. In this instance, ethno-kinship will ostensibly become metonymic—that this is how Kenyan politics functions as a whole needs to be remarked.

Ethno-kinship is as much affective as it is economic, and is, in fact, premised on the notion that the affective will direct the economic. Invocations of kinship, where one is termed a son, a daughter, a cousin, and so on, are meant to create affective ties that are realized in material ways. In fact we cannot separate the economic from the affective, and it is especially this connection that Obama represents and ruptures.

Obama belongs to the post-Roots generation. First published by Alex Haley in 1976—although portions had earlier appeared in Playboy–Roots claimed genealogy for African Americans. In Roots, Haley traces his family’s history back to the Gambia, creating an ostensibly direct link between Africans and African Americans. Notably, the idea of this link already suffused Black Arts discourse; Haley merely provided an empirical method for proving this link.

It is no exaggeration to say that Roots changed African Americans’ relationship to history and to historical method, especially following its serialization on TV in 1978. Names from the novel were adopted, African Americans booked tours to the Gambia, and genealogy became a national obsession. Roots was so powerful that even when scholars revealed serious problems with Haley’s narrative, it remained just as culturally powerful, undiminished in its affective power.

Roots inspired African Americans to discover where they were from, a task that has been enhanced with advances in DNA technology today.

Yet the novel and its aftermath were distanced from pan-African politics and other forms of black solidarity. The affective kinship that Haley described so movingly was divorced from other forms of economic obligation and mutuality. While it was both fashionable and important to know where “one was from” that knowledge need not translate into any political or social action.

Throughout his campaign, Obama constantly evoked his Kenyan background, but it was always in the context of establishing his U.S. bona fides. Whereas Kenyans, and the Kenyan government, heard such declarations within the frame of ethno-kinship, those statements often lived within a post-Roots framework. Within such a framework, identification is frequently aesthetic: something interesting to state, akin to having an interesting mole, but has no obligations attached to it, no expectations demanded or expected.

Arguably, little of this would be that important were it not that Obama represents one of the many Kenyan descendants abroad: those born in Kenya and those born to Kenyans. These are populations whose attachments and obligations to Kenya are not clear. And while some may choose to answer the call of ethno-kinship, it is just as likely that many will embrace the aesthetics of kinship.

*I wrote this a year ago, and that might account for the mothball effect.

Forgetting the Moynihan Report

Posted on May 30, 2010 by keguro

I am unsure how James T. Patterson wants his article to be read. And so I will try to be generous. If I can. He writes,

[T]oday the Moynihan Report is largely forgotten. Sadly, its predictions about the decline of the black family have proven largely correct. Fortunately, many of its prescriptions remain equally relevant.

. . .

[I]f we do not act, the “tangle of pathology” that Moynihan described in 1965, having grown far worse, will be impossible to unravel, and America will become more deeply divided than ever along class and racial lines.

Where does one start? Who is it who has done the forgetting? And how do we understand the work of remembering this report? How is it that Patterson’s article so glibly dismisses, erases, unthinks, refuses to register the many black feminist engagements with this report, including my favorite by Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” which I try to include no matter which class I’m teaching?

How does the history of its reception, and a truncated one, help create the “need” for us to “remember this report, with its controversial and, frankly, insulting conclusions?

As Patterson frames it, the report focused on out-of-wedlock births in the black community, and their “unfortunate” effects in helping to perpetuate cycles of poverty. This story is partially true, or strategically so.

I came to the report through black feminism. The report, blamed the “condition” of the “Negro family,” then and seemingly perpetually “in crisis,” on the gender-inverting role of black women, who, because of the legacy of slavery, had been forced to become matriarchs, and had created unstable family structures that could not compete with stable nuclear families. Black matriarchs were “responsible” for the “tangle of pathology.”

Framed in this way, as opposed to how Patterson puts it, it is difficult to see who, if anyone, has forgotten the Moynihan report.

Since its publication, we have been living in an ongoing Moynihan present, marked by an incessant call for gender normalization in black communities (issued by “insiders” and “outsiders”); marked by an ongoing pathologization of single-parent, women-headed households (see many, many films); marked by ongoing, increasing, and almost hysterical attempts to “marry off” black women; marked by profound anxieties over “the state” of “the black family”; marked by incessant expressions of worry by young black women that they will “never” find “the right men”; and these really filtered all through mass and popular culture.

I find it troubling that Patterson so easily dismisses the vast amounts of scholarship published in the wake of Moynihan by all kinds of historians and anthropologists and sociologists, all of which troubled Moynihan’s thesis, seeing in it the very active remnants of racialized heteronormativity.

Here is what is ugly about Patterson’s writing: A “tangle of pathology” marks black communities and it stems from black women’s habits and proclivities. It is not stated that baldly, but there it is.

If only black women would get married. If only black women would stop being promiscuous. If only black women would get more educated. If only black women learned their proper roles as wives and partners to men. If only black women, if only black women, if only black women . . .

But none of this is new. It is a running refrain all over the place. We have not forgotten the Moynihan report. In fact, despite efforts by black feminists, it seems to have become all the more entrenched in the U.S. psyche.

I know the NYT often publishes completely objectionable pieces, but this one, this particular one has really crossed a terrible, terrible line.

Unfortunately, advocates for black heteronormativity, and there are many, will probably read it approvingly, marveling at its wisdom, and praising its call for black women to get married and to learn how to take care of their children properly.

This article could have taken another path. As a meditation on the relationships among class, gender, and racialization, it might have focused attention on how cycles of poverty perpetuate themselves, how individuals and groups enter into these cycles, and the ongoing problem they present, especially under neoliberalism. It might have asked how social and economic policies continue to undermine many efforts to create better lives. It might have borrowed from Moynihan without claiming that the “tangle of pathology” continues and has expanded. It might have actually paid attention to work by black feminists. And this last, for me, is its greatest failing.

It is not that we have forgotten the Moynihan report. Far from it. Patterson has erased and ignored the many people who continue to engage its claims and recommendations.

Let me give the last few words to these voices.

“The Moynihan Report” links black poverty to the deterioration of the black family, begun in slavery and reproduced in successive generations in the form of fatherless, matrifocal households, which spread from the South to the North like migrating locusts, infecting the inner cities with unemployment, illegitimacy, delinquency, and crime—a “tangle of pathology.”

Like the scholarship on which it draws, the report seems to put much of the onus for this black pathology not simply on the peculiar institution and Jim Crow discrimination but on the black female’s supposedly more dominant role within that institution and her greater success at negotiating its aftermath. Various male scholars and civil rights leaders are quoted on the subject, as if their opinions were empirical facts. Whitney Young, Executive Director of the Urban League, offers the historical perspective that “in the matriarchal Negro society, mothers made sure that if one of their children had a chance for higher education the daughter was the one to pursue it” (34). His claims are reinforced by the eminent Harvard psychologist Thomas Pettigrew, quoted as if in dialogic agreement: “Embittered by their experiences with men, many Negro mothers often act to perpetuate the mother-centered pattern by taking a greater interest in their daughters than their sons” (34).

These extraordinary claims go unrebutted in the report, although both history and literature offer abundant evidence to the contrary. Black women emerge from the document confirmed not merely as matriarchs but as emasculating Sapphires of Amos ‘n’ Andy fame and man-hating mothers, who drive away their mates and discriminate against and psychologically damage their sons. The report recommends a kind of rescue mission that would encourage black males to enlist in the “utterly masculine world” of the Armed Forces—”a world away from women, a world run by strong men of unquestioned authority.” (Ann du Cille, American Literary History, 2009)

The figure of the black matriarch haunts Patterson’s piece, and her absence in his rhetoric is significant, not, I think, that he wants to resituate her, but that he desires her haunting presence, the founding absence.

The Black matriarch of Moynihan’s nightmares threatens the system of gender and power to a degree that she threatens the “natural,” asymmetrical order of patriarchy and heterosexuality. (Mattie Udora Richardson, Journal of Women’s History, 2003)

How do we see the limitations of the terms Patterson proposes?

Indeed, a more radical social transformation is precisely at stake when we refuse, for instance, to allow kinship to become reducible to “family,” or when we refuse to allow the field of sexuality to become gauged against the marriage form. For as surely as rights to marriage and to adoption and, indeed, to reproductive technology ought to be secured for individuals and alliances outside the marriage frame, it would constitute a drastic curtailment of progressive sexual politics to allow marriage and family, or even kinship, to mark the exclusive parameters within which sexual life is thought. (Judith Butler, Differences, 2002)

And that gorgeous, gorgeous opening from “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”

Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. “Peaches”a nd “BrownS ugar,”" Sapphire”a nd “EarthM other,”" Aunty,”" Granny,” God’s “Holy Fool,” a “Miss Ebony First,”o r “Black Woman at the Podium”: I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.

The problem before us is deceptively simple: the terms enclosed in quotation marks in the preceding paragraph isolate overdetermined nominative properties. Embedded in bizarre axiological ground, they demonstrate a sort of telegraphic coding; they are markers so loaded with mythical prepossession that there is no easy way for the agents buried beneath them to come clean. In that regard, the names by which I am called in the public place render an example of signifying property plus. In order for me to speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings, made an excess in time, over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness. (Hortense Spillers, Diacritics, 1987)

Aging

Posted on May 29, 2010 by keguro

Aging

The one the grandchildren called Herbie
is blind; called Karanja
by the swing when she mutters at dusk
to the passing wind. As if she didn’t need
the visit. To feel.

‘Ka Gari,’ the old owner to himself,
to the swing as if it were the grown up
child, who doesn’t visit much.

Karanja has heard so many prayers
he believes he will turn to dust
bit by bit. Karanja tithes.

^©Ngwatilo Mawiyoo

Photography: Wambui Mwangi

Desire & Discovery

Posted on May 29, 2010 by keguro

You are reading a story that is written to you and you are in Nairobi giving a blowjob to a flabby white tourist who has “diplomatic immunity” and wears a “condom.” Head can be dangerous. He wants a 16 year old and so you lose 10 years. He wants transgression and so you blow him in public. And gag on his condom flavors. You are reading a story addressed to you and are implicated in its production, as its ostensible subject and its audience. You Wreck Her.

You are reading Parselelo Kantai’s “You Wreck Her” and learning that discovery is damage, that the African woman exists because “You Wreck Her,” make and unmake, discover and undiscover. This is as much of a plot summary as you will get. It is about a woman who was once made, then unmade, and is now making. And, maybe, she dies. Or has always already been dead. These are questions of interpretation, not plot.

You are reading a story about place and gender, place and agency, about a Europe that still craves authentic Africans in torn clothes. The clothes are on the bodies of women and not on the women, and this is a question of who wears what and where. Choice is at stake. And choosing will not be easy. Not choosing can make one famous.

“You Wreck Her” is about choosing and not choosing. About the women who choose and the women who are chosen for. About the structures that enable choosing and those that foreclose it. About the kinds of choosing that allow 26 year olds to masquerade as 16 year olds and the kind of choosing that might lead to no choosing. A gun goes off and the story ends.

Guns make loud silence.

Do not go gently.

In that soft soft silence, let us return to the beginning, to this gag-plastic-un-touch-touching. This pleasure as transgression and the transgression of pleasure. Let us ask the rude question about pleasure, about black women’s pleasure.

Listen:

An African girl begins as a prostitute and becomes a famous model in Brussels.

You were surprised when at the point of his crisis that first time you made love Goort called you my Sudanese girl. You told him you were not Sudanese but he said not to worry, that people can be whatever they want to be. He told you that Sudan was “hot” at the moment and that if you behaved yourself you could be the new Alek Wek. He laughed when you asked him what Alek Wek was.

“Not vaat darleenk, who. Alek Vek is very famous African model in Europe and America. You are beautiful like her.” Then he kissed you very gently at the exact moment that you understood that you were in love for the first time, he kissed you on the forehead and said: “You can be her.”

People can be whatever they want to be. How banal this promise. The promise of anonymity. Because everywhere in Africa is Africa and so can be anywhere else. You can be African and anonymous. This is easy, to read like this. But let us be rude: was the sex good? Did Goort know what he was doing? Does this question matter? Why does love come with the “gentle kiss?”

Again:

Then another night when you had exhausted each other in his bed and he was smoking a triumphant cigarette, he told you how he had discovered his life’s mission after his motorcycle accident in the streets of Brussels, how he would change himself and bring beauty to the world.

. . .

“So zat night when I see you in ze disco I say to myself, ‘You wreck her!’ Mais oui. I have found it.”

Abstracted into the meaning of beauty. This might be called the slide into metonymy. Part to whole. Partly whole.

We already have a rich framework for thinking this abstraction into beauty—objectification. Yet, yet, yet. We can dare to think otherwise. To understand the pleasures one takes in representing beauty. She stares at her new self as it is displayed on buses. There is a pleasure to the gaze she can turn on herself. And because there is pleasure in this gazing on the self, because life is not correct, I push against Parselelo’s language: “The world loved you, silent and sad with your African beauty.”

Or, I complicate it by asking who “the world is,” how “the world” also includes “you.” There is a fissured self. We might dwell, for a moment or more, on the pleasure of loving one’s silent and sad beauty. We might pause, here, refuse to move on to Parselelo’s demand that “you” want education, a way of being in the world that realizes the ephemerality of your position. We might resist your desire to “better” yourself. His desire for you. Is that really your desire? Why and how must we read it as your desire?

I have asked, elsewhere, about how we desire African fiction. Here I ask how we desire African women. Strong. Practical. Practical. Strong. Hustling, always hustling. I wonder about their emotional crevices, the places where they are less marionette. In Europe, you are a marionette. Played on, yes, But you are in love and enjoy the play. This story wants to rush past your pleasure, get us to the strong parts, the parts where you strike back, become 16 when 26, sell transgression that un-diplomats.

Soft soft.

Tell me, soft soft, about the pleasures of the gaze.

Tell me, soft soft, about the joys of the caress.

Tell me, soft soft, about the radiance of being worshipped.

Soft soft. Shh. Even softer.

Soft soft. Writer to writer. Soft soft. Object to object. Soft soft. Fetish to fetish. Soft Soft.

Let us discover.

I am reading a story by Parselelo Kantai called “You Wreck Her.” It is about a prostitute turned model turned prostitute, about a Nairobi woman become European cosmopolite become Nairobi woman. It is about despair turned into hope and then into something else. It ends with a gun. There is silence.

In the first version of this writing, I trotted out my nice conventions: this story follows x trope and revisions while also extending. And I was bored by it. So very bored. And I thought, why not write about this story the way I am reading it. As a writer, as a critic, as someone who has read some stuff before, as someone who is interested in shaping what we read and how we read. This might be called literary experimentation. Perhaps.

I wanted to be kimwili with this story. To inhabit its harsh places, its soft places, its abrasive places, its soothing places. Stories, as Tahar Ben Jelloun writes, come to inhabit us. We are termite mounds. And there is crawling and growing and itching and shedding and dying and more of the same, and the occasional fight with other aggressive cousins.

I am thinking about the kinds of psychic satisfactions the story grants, the ones that it withholds, the affective landing places, and the slippery slopes of uncomfortable feeling.

That “you” address, that second person is so devastating. Hey, you, it goes. And we are all interpellated. And it is strange to be told that you are a prostitute going down on a white john who has diplomatic immunity, and a condom. It makes me think about the taste of condoms, their texture, their use, about saliva and transgression. And sex. (I have been told that American gay men give the best head. I wonder if the surveyor tried African prostitutes. I am inclined to rudeness.)

There is a polite way to read this story. As a kind of revenge fantasy: the objectified used woman returns as a hustler, wise to the game, hip to reality, fucks over “the man.”

But there is a gun.

And silence.

And a black man dressed up as a cop looking at her going down on a white john. And it is not clear who the black man would prefer to shoot. The black prostitute, his partner in the hustle, or the white diplomat, who has diplomatic immunity, and is now flaccid, his condom sliding to the floor of his car.

This policeman is interesting. Because he watches and judges my attempts to become kimwili with this story. And while I enjoy exhibitionism, he has a gun. Is this Parselelo with a gun? Warning that this story should be read this way and not that? Who is this superego figure who wields the power over life and death, over knowledge about life and death.

A gun goes off.

There is silence.

There might be dying.

There might be survivors.

We do not know.

Anxiety is a cousin to fear.

Is this, I wonder, about scorpions and frogs. Critics and writers. Readers and writers. Writers and writers.

You tell me this: “They say that if you wish for something too much you should also worry about how you will receive it.”

Who is “they?” And why does this woman keep being bounced from man to man to man.

III

But there are the Congolese women. In Nairobi and in Brussels.

This is what they tell you, “Marabou, Kenyan girl, arret, arret, s’il vous plait! You kill os! You know notin’, notin’ at all!”

You are doing it wrong because you don’t know how to do it right. Caught in a trap. “[Y]ou learn how to move your waist and your inner-thigh muscles while holding your shoulders completely still, your face communicating that you are appalled at what your buttocks are doing.”

You dance for these women. Learn from them. Unlearn from them. Shame. Pride. Humor. You move for them. You move them. To tears, to laughter. You move them.

You move them so that when you are dying in Brussels, or think you are going to die, they buy you a ticker back to Kenya. Because it is sad to die away from home.

And these women represent a pedagogy, an induction into a community of women who love women, women who support women, women who are there for each other. And you die, or approach death, when you are away from these women, when you are being bounced from man to man.

Because it is not clear that your fake cop partner will ever be for you. In this story, a battle between men over the meanings of women’s bodies. But also, in brief, brief moments, the pleasure, the relief, the joy of being around other women, of learning about your body’s possibilities, it’s secret places, its ability to dance.

How, then, to think of those two moments: when you go down on some white john and when you dance in front of women. I want to pause, arret, on this ephemeral moment of dance, this performance of sisterhood, this moment when you are fully human—able to inhabit shame, disorientation, to experience pleasure, to shape yourself, among a community of women. I want to pause on this ephemeral moment because it provides respite, succor, a way to think about what Audre Lorde terms the possibilities of the erotic, a resource within women that enables them to ask for more from their lives, their loves, their work, their pleasure.

Lorde famously distinguishes between the resource of the erotic and the emptiness of pornography, where pornography is sensation without feeling. The flavor of condoms in mechanical, repeated motion. Or, put otherwise, pornography is about inhabiting numbness, the wrongness of feeling. This is a metaphor, and to be read as such. Lorde is writing in the late 1970s, and pornography then is not pornography now. We must read her historically.

As you dance for the Congolese women, you discover the strength to live, to venture, to experiment, to think outside your own space. They laugh at you, with you. Such a small moment. Life-giving moments are so small. So very small.

You are reading a story called “You Wreck Her” by Parselelo Kantai, and it takes you a few days to translate the title. It is about discovery. About, we have wanted to think, genius. Male genius. About men who lie in tubs or sit under trees or peer through microscopes and discover, and change the world.

Her.

We have started, due to feminists, to think of the hers that subtend this labor, the hers that enable such moments of sacrifice, the hers whose labor, whose love, whose care, whose minds, whose brilliance, and whose tragedies have so often enabled those moments of discovery.

Let us return to Goort. He wants to “change himself” and “bring beauty to the world.” You are a means to an end, a means that can be changed, as rapidly as one changes a tire on a deserted road in Nairobi after dark. Or drives home on rims.

Goort.

The male artist-patron with his female muses and drudges, and the African woman, the muse-drudge waiting to be discovered and re-discovered.

But this is a depressing way to end, and I am torn between impulses.

Samuel Delaney says we must do violence to the concept of woman so that real women can have freedom in the world. This story performs that necessary violence. Its brutal ending refuses to grant us resolution or satisfaction. It solicits our revenge fantasies and leaves them wanting. It objectifies a nameless, unnamed, pseudonymed Marabou, and so it grates. It grates at those places that want African women to be proud, strong, independent, in control. It grates because we don’t know who wins the hustle. This is one ambivalent reading. It performs a necessary violence to a concept that is as damaging as the policies it demands we enact. I crave this violence.

Yet I worry about my desire for this violence. I worry about the forms of masculinity that become complicit in needing women’s bodies, stories, subjection, and humiliation, to tell our stories about ambivalence and objectification. I worry, in writing this, about the kinds of policing I might enact on male writers. I worry about aesthetics and ethics, about the labor of fiction and the co-labor of criticism.

Scorpions and frogs.

Lichen on trees.

In my classes, I have asked my students to think about how Africa is to be desired, and how international awards speak to us about desires for, toward, and about Africa.

I remain stuck on the question of Marabou’s desire. What does she want? What does she really want? We know so much about what other people for her, from her, but not as much about what she wants. We remain Freudian, in this.

That her desires remain incidental, at least those desires that extend beyond the basic and the banal, that they cannot be named, cannot even be envisioned. And that, elsewhere, they are always already known and truncated: clitorises and underwear.

“You Wreck Her.”

What is it to be discovered, always, constantly?

Coda

On reading this writing, a friend expresses anxiety. He wants Marabou’s world to “come alive,” for me to inhabit her imagination, her sensations, more closely, to give quiddity to her vagueness, craving to her desires.

I understand this desire. It drives the sotto-voce feminist reading I broach, but do not accomplish.

Marabou has a rich flatness that I want to inhabit, a kind of absent being in the world, driven, it appears, by scripts that she does not quite grasp. She is, at every moment, over-scripted. And there might be something valuable in tracing over this script, adding yet another layer, playing along with its demands, its desires, its rhythms and pulsations.