Fanon’s Aliens

But the fact that I feel alien to the world of the schizophrenic or of the sexually impotent in no way diminishes their reality.—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Who is this “I” who feels “alien”? And what might it mean to take that feeling as a demand, even an obligation? Why does Fanon select the “schizophrenic” and the “sexually impotent”? What binds these figures or so distinguishes them that they are opposing-complementary? This quotation has been nagging over the past year—a particularly annoying burr, it makes itself felt every few days, almost every time I open a Word document, every time I begin trying to think about living in “the world” and living “with others.” It has nagged me. It continues to nag. I am not yet sure why it nags so much, and I think it will remain with me far longer than I can anticipate.

What would it mean to take other lifeworlds seriously, that is to say, as real, as acting upon us? How might one function in the world of the sexually impotent? What fantasies become necessary? What gestures? What practices? What accents? What habits? What might be the demand that one cannot understand but might try to satisfy, even always already anticipating failure? That the “I” who speaks envisions itself as “not” sexually impotent is important, and one could say much about the racial and masculinist fantasies at play here; I remain stuck at the sense that “sexual impotence” produces and sustains its own distinct lifeworlds, even after reading Xala. Having no French, I also wonder what is translated as “sexually impotent”: is this the ability to have sex, and, if so, what kind of sex? Is it the ability to impregnate another? What is the relationship between impotence and pleasure? What fantasies of power surround this image of the impotent? Is the impotent a category akin to the sodomite prior to homosexuality?

What is it to feel “alien” in the world of the schizophrenic? What does that presume about that world and about the “I” who feels alien? Something strikes me about this “I” who permits itself to “feel alien,” as opposed to rendering the schizophrenic or the sexually impotent alien. What is it to set aside one’s normalcy and to enter into the space of another’s world as an alien in that world? To take seriously one’s intrusion into another’s space, to refuse to take for granted one’s view of the world?

These days, I am struck not by the newness of the question—any question—but by the persistence of the question. To think about persistence is to think temporally about the active life of ideology and politics. To comprehend that those things we name as oppressive are never inert, are always working on us, in us, and around us. To think of small moments of intervention and necessary loopholes of retreat. Crippling garrets.

Let me try to flip Fanon’s statement for a moment, to ask how the sexually impotent functions in the world of those who are not. This might be a question about the pull of the normative—the tethers and loops others throw out around us, the ways we are folded into lifeworlds that impress their strangeness on us. Perhaps this is what one’s un-return to an un-home always is, a stack of past due bills one did not know had accrued. (This is only just a metaphor, as siblings and cousins have just paid for a funeral.)

I remain nagged by Fanon’s question, aware of the less-than-honest shortcuts I have used to evade it. Interested by the positions he creates—who, after all, confesses to being sexually impotent? Unsure of my relationship to the “I” he posits.

In one iteration of this post—despite its brevity, it has taken about 6 months to complete this—I thought about using the word “queer” to describe the sexually impotent and the schizophrenic, but that felt too easy. It would have allowed certain evasions, made what feels impossible in Fanon less impossible. And I want to hold on to what is difficult.

Sessions IV of X (work in progress)

You ask if my fear of heights prevents me from loving. Falling is not inevitable, I reply. Fear is more necessary. It is an old conversation, strewn with hubris. Love slays. It comes unexpectedly. It happens when we are not watching. Yet we choose to cross streets, ignoring traffic signs, and I am attuned to the power of stop and go, attentive to the split second between green and amber, even when amber is yellow. Or even as amber yellows. There is a parable of time here. A myth of loving encased insects.

Most of the time I am indifferent.

Every so often my breath catches, looking from a dizzying, inevitable height. Even bridges have to be crossed. Though one need not bridge past and present, here and there, now and then. We avoid living on fragile suspensions. And the homeless congregate under bridges. Those who peer over risk falling. Depths call.

But haven’t there been moments of abandon, you ask, when falling was possible. You have a theory of calluses. Insufficient. Africans grow keloids, thick layers of scar tissue. They do not fade with Vitamin E treatments. They remain suspended, visible, badges of difference. Maybe there was once hurt. Keloids take on their own lives, independent of their origins. Keloid love. One can love a scar. One lives with a keloid.

Keloids require surgical intervention.

You offer healing love, aloe to mild sunburn. Sticky and cooling. As if your persistent massages will re-infuse trust and risk-taking. I like it when you touch me. A lot. Too much. Not that much.

On boyfriend number two, I discovered love had nothing to do with sex. And his fevered protestations could not quell night-enhanced hungers. I sought librarians with strong calves and equestrian prowess. The one with red hair hungered for my hunger, another trophy for his black-lined case. If only the other one with red hair had not just given me a fear of heights, and tall artists with blue eyes.

The story is that banal.

You search for keloid treatments, as you have promised to learn Kiswahili and Gikuyu and how to dance like the Luyha men whose bodies I crave. As though effort will tempt me to delicate suspensions. And you will make my breath catch.

You promise to catch me. If I fall.

When I was six, I fell into a shallow fishpond chasing after orange-flecked dreams, the ephemeral promises of quick-moving dreamers. Algae stains. Even now I stay away from ponds and goldfish, reach for safer dreams. The smell of bread, rain, poppers on a busy street.

After tonight I will need poppers to get off with you, to you. To recover that first rush of penetration, that first giving. That first, spontaneous orgasm. After tonight I will need chemical help to remain attracted, interested, to fall, but never from a delicate suspension. At most from a foot-high stair. Into your arms.

You ask for a promise.

I will stay with you.

Tonight.

Arrivals

An ecstatic voice: “Yes! I’m home! Hallelujah!

Two or three try to recreate the rapture, desultory applause, a wave that refuses to rise. We used to cheer and applaud into Nairobi. We applauded the pilot’s skills in landing us, the first wheel-mediated feel of terra firma, our escape from wing-churned skies.

One experienced homecoming.

I get this wrong.

Homecoming was experienced.

By 1990, on my first international flight, the celebrations of homecoming were fading, though their ghosts struggled to survive. We welcomed ourselves into Kenya—the anxieties of having been elsewhere and traveling on metal wings were vented in hearty cheers, the joy of arriving into the familiar, or, at least, into a space that claimed one.

By 1996, my first summer trip home, the cheers were gone. Or, perhaps I traveled in planes that had more tourists than returning Kenyans. It’s difficult to tell. Perhaps the Kenya of the 1990s was a difficult space to celebrate—one returned to cloistered embraces, a world of striving imaginations. Energies were needed elsewhere.
*
I arrive at 5:30 am.

The first sign I read: Welcome to Kenya—Home of Tusker.

I take a taxi home.

The rituals would be unrecognizable in 1983. Then, the arrivals area was thick with one’s intimates. One was met—there needed to be assurances that one had arrived—and this, perhaps, was simply a ghost of earlier arrivals in the 1950s and 1960s. And also of departures. Many years ago, my mother refused to leave the airport until she had heard my sister’s plane departing. Today, we wave each other onto taxis.

I don’t remember the billboards from my childhood. I assume they must have been on that long stretch of road from the airport through the city to home. But they are crowded out by the bodies squeezed into cars at all hours to welcome those who returned. We have become more efficient.

We are welcomed by taxis and billboards.
*
The attenuated celebrations on landing, the awaiting taxis, the welcoming billboards. The difference between home and not-home shrinks. Over the years, I have felt a twinge of guilt on feeling home as I landed back in Illinois or DC—home, where a set of keys opens onto scents familiar and mine. Onto memories imprinted on objects—the disposable sponge I use to wash my dishes. The accents that envelop one. The banal rituals of cleaning, cooking, sleeping.
*
When did home become other people’s memories?

I blunder into cobweb filaments, the sticky demands of then folded into emerging cavities of now. Time looms. Other intimacies suffuse once-familiar spaces.
*
I have come home to write a book about arrivals and departures and sticky intimacies—it started many years ago as an encounter between thinkers and fields. In the years since its first incarnation, it has become a book about imaginary cobwebs—about the people who spin them, how they spin them, and what they hope to capture and preserve. It has learned—is still learning—how to stretch into time and bend into space, how to be flexible and strong, how to leap and hope there will be catching.

Written once there, it is a book that needs to be completed here, where I am reminded, daily, how it matters.

As it stretches from Liberia to Jamaica and from Kenya to Martinique, with threads that cross through the U.S., the U.K., and France, it sketches a series of impressions, looks for muted patterns, suggests that the most banal observations have shape and consequence. This description of it is unrecognizable in the documents that name it, and part of my labor will be how to translate the uneven passions that shape it, the delicate webs that support it, into something recognizable within other worlds.
*
The welcome to Kenya billboard features a solitary glass, no human figure.

Ongoing work and conversations with WM attune me to the world of images and objects, to the complex imaginative space that opens and closes, to memories and histories and to their negation. The relationship between what remains and what awaits—the fragility of our claims to hereness and nowness. I see absence more readily.

I wonder who this glass of Tusker welcomes, the expectations of tongue and taste. What it means to have a taste for home and to taste homecoming.
*
I have yet to eat chapati.

The Labor of Intimate Diversity

I am ambivalent about a recent decision by a Kenyan judge to recognize woman-to-woman marriage as defined by Nandi customary law. On the side of “the good,” this decision recognizes tradition and custom as repositories of intimate diversity, offering useful paradigms for contemporary debates and struggles over diversifying intimate arrangements. And while it seems risky to route such diversification through ethnic traditions—one can imagine a scenario where one’s claims are barred because one is, say, Maragoli rather than Nandi—it might be possible to argue for a kind of ethno-cosmopolitanism, or to simply argue that ethnic practices have always been deeply cross-fertilized, and what we term “Nandi” or “Kisii” more properly represents various cross-hatched, adapted and adaptive patterns of living and acting. In other words, the ethnic opens up onto multiple sites of local and national exchange and appropriation and can, in fact, be the basis for multiple social, cultural, and legal modes of exchange.

That said, I think it’s necessary to be careful not to conflate woman-to-woman marriage among the Nandi, the Kisii, and the Agikuyu with contemporary same-sex marriage. Connections can and should be made between these practices, and there are ways to talk about the economic, social, and cultural work such practices enable—shared households, shared labor, the distribution of goods, the comforts of friendship and companionship, the erotics of domesticity. But it’s necessary to pay attention to the historical emergence of contemporary same-sex marriage activism, to understand its roots and shoots, branches and leaves, the claims it attempts to secure and the histories it invokes to secure those claims.

Here, I am interested in how a textured attention to ethno-historical practices can foster and support a range of intimate diversities that need not resolve into or be understood as forms of “marriage.” In conversation with friends, I have argued that ethno-historical intimate arrangements in Kenya might enable us to pass incredibly important and necessary domestic partnership legislation that would accommodate the wide variety of our living arrangements. Such arrangements could provide much-needed social and legal and cultural protections to those who live in a variety of intimate arrangements.

And while it is clear that arguments for such a diversity of intimate arrangements will need to come from those who live aslant to dominant and privileged domestic patterns—the queers might need to lead this charge—it is equally clear that many Kenyans would benefit from forms of legislation that recognized the multiple ways we live with each other. It might be that “legislation” is not quite the right angle—and here I am thinking of Katherine Franke’s very useful distinction between decriminalization and regulation/governance. Or it might be that legislation is precisely what is needed to recognize a diversity of intimate arrangements—and, really, here I am thinking about legal arrangements that would benefit come-we-stay partnerships, informal fostering arrangements, fictive kin networks, and various kinds of strange sociality that form the substance and texture of Kenyan intimate arrangements. That is, I want to complicate the modern/traditional binary by opening up a space that recognizes innovative intimate arrangements occasioned by our still unfolding modernities.

While it is useful to read this recent court decision in terms of contemporary struggles for same-sex marriage, it is also necessary to ask how this affirmation of tradition opens up local spaces for action in unprecedented ways.

Book Review?

I keep wanting to like the book I am reading.