Bombing Uhuru Park

A stray thought: at some point in our past, foreign planes bombed freedom fighters. Or, more accurately, they bombed the forests that sheltered freedom fighters.

For the moment, let us hold in abeyance the metonymic slide that would read Uhuru Park as the bodies of the dead and injured, the people in Uhuru Park rather than the park itself.

What does bombing Uhuru Park mean?

In asking this question, I hope to foreground how spaces acquire meaning through our interactions with them, and to see Uhuru Park as an assemblage of desires and dreams, an archive of pleasures and pains, a promise of collectivity and unity, a performative space of contestation and contradiction.

As, that is, a space for making Kenyan-ness in all its diversity.

From this perspective, the bombs attacked the process of making Kenyan diversity. They bombed the space within which such diversity flourishes.

Uhuru Park is one of the truly few spaces in Nairobi, if not Kenya, that allows for a promiscuous mix of classes, ethnicities, religions, genders, sexualities, and age groups.

Sheltering the unemployed, the underemployed, and the secure middle classes; gathering the introspective and the gregarious; permitting clandestine meetings and sanctioned courtships; providing all of us with shared stories of going there, being there, leaving there, Uhuru Park embodies an optimism we continue to maintain in our togetherness. It affirms that we desire to belong with each other.

For me, Uhuru Park represents stories I have heard and stories I have lived. My parents took my siblings to row on the little boats available for hire. I attended Christian crusades and concerts there. On days when I have desired solitude in public, I have sat there, one among many others who chew on pieces of grass and contemplate life.

Uhuru Park is woven into my Kenyan dna, a part of my Kenyan fabric—without it, a part of me unravels. Without it, a part of all of us unravels.

Whether one reads Uhuru as independence or liberation, we have a public park that represents, in its free spaces, its availability, its congeniality, the promises of freedom that continue to guide our interactions with each other and our interventions in the world. We have a public space that affirms the dreams of freedom can be realized in our quotidian lives.

This promise was bombed.

We should not be sad or angry based on our “yes” and “no” positions.

We should be angry because the shared ground that symbolizes the realization of past struggles and the promise of future victories was desecrated.

We should be angry because someone dared to suggest that our spaces of gathering and contestation do not matter, that petty divides count for more than what we collectively share and treasure.

We should be angry because someone tried to destroy the ground that has witnessed our dreams, our ambitions, our visions, our failures, our disappointments, our tears, our joys.

We should be angry because someone decided that the necessary, contested, negotiated process of making Kenyan-ness is less important than scoring a very cheap political point.

And we should grieve.

We should grieve that we have so devalued the spaces we share collectively, we have so desecrated the sacred lands that shelter our fragile yet resilient Kenyan-ness that we count further desecration as nothing.

We should grieve that the space that embodies the hopes and aspirations of our nation can be so casually, so easily destroyed.

We should grieve that our memories are now punctuated by a bomb: henceforth, we will talk about Uhuru Park before the bombing and after the bombing. Because it has changed forever.

And so have we.

Our memories now bear with them the faint, lingering scent of fear and panic, of blood and sweat, of bomb-tinged destruction. And our retrospective memories will always be haunted by the thought: “at least I was not there on the day the bombs exploded.”

We have yet to realize what we have lost. And in not realizing it, we have yet to acknowledge its now blood-soaked value.

Untitled

Scream

Seven Images of Blue Sky

Maputo, Mozambique

The Writing on the Screen

Untitled

Untitled

I have learned to trust the wisdom of farmers
to believe in the meanness of fallows

their thick silences
broken in stutters and sighs

I have learned to trust the wisdom of weeds
the patience of butterflies, the promises of pollen

© Keguro Macharia
Photography: Wambui Mwangi

Sitalala

Sitalala

Hata wakinifunga
Sitakuwa nikilalala
Sitalala sitalala

Na wale wako nje
Hawakuwa wakilala
Hawalali hawalali

Sitakuwa nikilala
Hawalali hawalali

Hatulali hatulali

^©Keguro Macharia
Photography: Andrew Njoroge

Baba

By the time my father died, I had become intimate with his body. Its smells. Its textures. Its failures. Its promises.

In the preceding three years, it had become an experiment in sacrality. Purged by medical technology, repaired by African herbalists, anointed by Catholic priests, bathed by our tears, deafened by our prayers.

I wonder now at the cruelty our hope inflicted. The belief that our faith justified a half-life. That our attachment prolonged decay. That my last images are of withering.

In the twenty years since his death, I have been unable to process our final intimacies, marked, as they are, by too many erasures. A pre-diseased corporeality that seems imagined. A scent marked by a proper name, Aramis, that does not compute. I do not like scent on men. An avoidance of hospitals. A distaste for drugs. An emptying of certain faiths. Even, perhaps, a distrust of love.

It would be possible to trace in this list a certain psychic keloid, a not-getting-past that haunts certain choices, certain habits, certain intimacies, certain deliberations, multiple uncertainties. It would be possible to diagnose certain origins, certain directions, certain orientations, certain trajectories, an ongoing flirtation with. Certain silences.

I return home to be told I look like him. I am not haunted. I have become haunting.

One inhabits ghostly affects.

Bodies fail. Even when faith doesn’t. There was once a lesson in this.

A year after I completed my undergraduate degree, ten years after my father’s death, I attempted a kind of writing.

*

May 29, 2000

The smell of your mortality assaults me with its subtle and not so subtle reminder that we live in a state of constant decay and decomposition. This truth imprints itself on my flesh.  I take a pumice stone to my skin to scrape off the ever-present deadness that clings to me, reveling in the pain of the pink that emerges.

Again and again the ash of decay gathers. My friend calls me ashy. I learn to embrace ashiness. I take it as a sign that I am marked by mortality, marked as your son.

I refuse to hide the scent of my mortality with harsh, foreign made chemicals. I am labeled eccentric.

I grow dry as our time shortens and the words do not come.

I want to sit silently and partake of your company, simply enjoy being in the moment, but I have to look at you, smell you, touch you.

I am sated.  For my pores are clogged with bits of you, the skin that flies off you so easily and hangs in this white space we have been taught to think of as empty and sterile.

Clogging me, you impregnate me with the unspeakable. I struggle to restrain my gag reflex.

I learn to distrust beautiful men who proclaim their beauty.

There is nothing beautiful about this scene or about me or about you or about the words or the emotions or the thoughts that, haltingly, slowly, emerge from a place I dare not open, for it sweeps over and fills my mouth and my throat and my senses with the me that is distasteful. I tongue my skin constantly, as a mother does to her cubs. I wish you could do for me, and take in what I exude. These patterns of ingestion and retention continue and turn into a cliché: my credo “I internalize well.”

Cramping assaults my fingers as do little tiny biting sensations, army ants before they begin their voracious destruction, poised to strike. If I lie still they will not bite, will not hurt, will not reduce me to the husk that you have become, for above all I resist being you.

I am hurt and hurting and hurtful and stricken dumb and want to rain blows on your intubated chest.

May 30, 2000

Dying is a selfish act and you do it well.

June 1, 2000

Trained in the silences that men must maintain at wakes, I resist calling you back to me.

You are small and shriveled, no longer superdad:superman:Dad. I despise you. Above all I despise weakness; this is a lesson you taught me well.

So my farewell is not a praise-song for you but a litany of my failures. Desiring you, I turn to desiring others like you. You tell me that I am intelligent, that I will grow out of what is feminine about me, that I have a wonderful future ahead of me, but never that I am beautiful

Thinking myself not beautiful I give myself to any man who wants me.

*

I would not write it again.

Not now.

As a record of grief, it tells its own story, a story of a person I used to be. Might still be. Though I find it hard to recognize myself. Something of its emotion still pulls. And I wonder for whom I am still mourning.

*

I have always written for you after your death, as the day ends, too late, with the strange sense that had I timed it right, you might have been here, the letter might have been delivered, the message sent, the sentiment received.

Perhaps the condition of all mourning. The belief that a letter still needs to be written. And that it might be delivered and received.

*

The well of grief is easily replenished, keloids displaced by new scabs, trace emotions newly etched in place. Time wrinkles.

But the fear of disappointment keeps me away from séances. Not that you might not be found, but that I might not want to find you. And if I found you, I would not know what to ask. Or would be afraid.

When Men Cry

Since I first read it, I have been troubled by a passage from Alex Haley’s Roots. I paraphrase: “Let me tell you, I am a man. I cried like a baby.” Written when he “reaches” the village that connects him to the past, the passage has irritated me.

Eve Sedgwick helps me to understand this irritation.

The sacred tears of the heterosexual man: rare and precious liquor whose properties, we are led to believe, are rivaled only by the lacrimae Christi whose secretion is a such a specialty of religious kitsch. What charm, compared to this chrism of the gratuitous, can reside in the all too predictable tears of women, of gay men, of people with something to cry about? (Epistemology of the Closet)