Richard Onyango’s Bodies

Drossie was so unique and familiar, and she was my first lady. Maybe she influenced me to see the big ladies first before the other ones. So when I see a big lady, it is much easier for me to see her than any other lady, and again, I discovered that most men don’t like fat ladies, so for me it is a disaster for the fat ladies, when they are in the community like any other person. (The Life and Times of Richard Onyango)

Richard Onyango’s bodies are unsettling.

Art journalist Margaretta wa Gacheru mentions Onyango’s “disturbingly fleshy forms,” noting that she “was never a great fan of Drosie in Onyango’s art.” In a tiny mention, James Murua claims that Onyango’s “most memorable works” feature his “fat lover Drosie.” Frank Whalley describes Drosie as a “woman of mountainous proportions,” writing, more generally of Onyango’s work, “Our Hero has some difficulty with proportions, too. Unless painting women with bodies like elephant seals at the height of the rut, generally his heads are too small and the bodies too long.” A young blogger wrestles with Onyango’s mind-body negotiation.

Of the (very little) commentary I have found on Onyango’s work, almost no one mentions his continual acts of self-portraiture. In fact, most of the so-called Drosie paintings depict Onyango with Drosie, and I find myself wondering about these critical acts of elision. What is it about Drosie that “disappears” Onyango? And what would it mean to read these two bodies together? What happens if, reading Whalley against the grain, we understand bodies in relation to Drosie? She is, Whalley suggests, the only one whose body is “proportional.” Everyone else is somehow excessive—the heads are “too small” and the bodies “too long.” Something interesting happens in these various readings of “excess,” something about how we imagine bodies to look and act. What might Onyango’s paintings make visible and imagine possible about bodies?

I find myself looking for Onyango in his paintings, intrigued by the multiple acts of self-portraiture that struggle against a critical desire to make him disappear. Often, he is overwhelmed by Drosie: cast in the shadow of a foreground she dominates or smothered under her during an intimate encounter. His lean body compels us to think about masculine vulnerability. There are other ways to think about his lean-ness: the power differentials produced by class and race and geography—Drosie is a doctor and Kenyan Indian and wealthy, at least much wealthier than Onyango who, when they meet, is a part time musician.

Drosie’s desirability is never in question, even as it is variously tender and seductive, rapacious and overwhelming. This desirability makes a claim on the observer, a nagging claim that is difficult to engage. The obsessive nakedness of Onyango’s desire unsettles us: it’s always difficult to translate our desires for others, even and especially when those desires are non-normative. Those desires make claims on other people, soliciting, eliciting, inciting a range of responses—I am struck, again, by Whalley’s and Gacheru’s discomfort, especially Whalley’s insistence that Onyango’s women cannot be desirable.

Writers on Onyango’s work find it difficult to frame his work, or, put otherwise, find it difficult to theorize his aesthetic. Obligatory references to Ruben and Lucian Freud are made; his works are described as “cartoonish.” Whalley, in fine form, offers what I take to be the least generous assessment of Onyango’s style: “What would be condemned in an academically trained artist as breathtaking incompetence, with Onyango passes as charming; the articulation of a personal vision, presented with tenderness and humour.” (Here, I write “least generous” after several hours of wrestling with how to assess Whalley’s assessments—I disagree with most everything he writes about art.)

Yet, I also find useful Whalley’s term “charming,” because it attempts to arrest what is disturbing about Onyango’s work. What might words like “incompetence” mask? What assumptions about art and artists are at stake—the academically trained vs. the self-taught; the cosmopolitan visionary who knows enough to break the rules vs. the one who doesn’t even know there are rules to break. One could multiply these.

But I want to return to the experience of standing in front of Onyango’s Drosie paintings: to the sense of discomfort and shame that attends being invited (even compelled) to recognize and share in someone else’s desire—I have not yet mastered/mustered the cosmopolitanism that allows me to look at nudes and nakedness easily, and I think this lack is useful. I want to suspend, for a moment, the ways I know how to talk about male artists and female subjects, to pay attention to how Onyango’s insistent body forces me to another place I cannot yet name.

I want to put to the side the bodies I have learned to see through Gauguin, Rubens, Freud, Currin, Bourgeois, Walker, Mapplethorpe, Mutu, Nugent, even Soi, and work through and around the discomfiting presence (and pressure) of Onyango’s bodies.

(This post has been enabled by ML’s meditation on bodies.)

Edit: On further reflection, what I find disturbing about assessments of Onyango’s work has to do with the relation between “seeing” and the “imagination”: seeing is an act of the imagination. And those who fault Onyango–I am not claiming he cannot be faulted–often seem unwilling to think through, with, and around his imagination. I am interested in asking what his imagination extends and enables, to think of the world-building he expresses as it travels within his viewers’ minds and bodies.

Welcome Mourning

In a ghoulish video somewhere, I hold a dead man’s photograph and precede a coffin processional, a scene I remember too well from a long-ago production of Oliver Twist. The suit is navy blue—a color I associate with funerals and detest. It’s easier, now, to let Oliver Twist color my imagination of that day, to imagine it as wintry and wet, desolate and grainy. To forget the smell of incense, the reading of scripture, the voices lifted in dutiful comfort. Lovely—I barely remember the song now. I remember being told I read the scriptures well: minor accomplishments that mark the process of public grieving.

I mention to my mother that I shall be attending a memorial service—she says, “now, you are fully back in Kenya.” I am struck by this sense that being Kenyan has something to do with our collective rituals of mourning: the funeral announcements, the meetings, the parts named to be recognizable. That, in fact, without these ritual parts—many of them relatively recent (I wonder, for instance, when it became ritual to have radios announce death and funeral arrangements)—something has not yet ended satisfactorily. One must have a “fitting” send off. (A train of association leads me to custom-fitted suits—in Nairobi, mine were tailored for two funerals and a wedding—I wore black to the wedding.)

I returned to Kenya through mourning, trying to write my way through and beyond the protocols I had inherited. And it is, perhaps, the experience of mourning that first defined my relationship to Kenya. In some vague memory, Kenyatta’s death is the first television image I recall. I might not have pierced my screen memories—instead, his death and funeral were replayed so often on television, time might collapse, and the sediment of latter years might claim to pierce the unremembered and the forgotten.

It seems obvious by now to claim that mourning—as ritual, as performance, as habit, as protocol—enacts powerful work in collectivizing. “A nation mourns,” we read or hear or see or remember. The grainy footage of such remembering-by-others trains us into our mourning positions—to be a nation, to belong, is to have the capacity to mourn collectively.

When I started writing this post several weeks ago, I had hoped to think about the relationship between “return” and “mourning,” here, perhaps a long-delayed response to Saidiya Hartman about the “impossible” feeling of return, the being-made-strange that happens when one cannot mourn, or does not mourn as one should. I think about the mourning that happens for an object or situation that is mistaken as mourning for another object or situation—it is why I think words like “habit” and “performance” can be useful in discussing mourning. Collective mourning is an aggregation of situated performances—the time of its happening is often more important than the object or event around which clustering happens.

I was feeling rather “clever.”

And then news of Wambui Otieno Mbugua’s death arrives, and I am struggling to explain my sense of loss.

With the grace of hindsight, I understand that Wambui, through what some call the SM Otieno case, guided my way into the politics of intimacy. I think about her claim that SM told her where he wanted to be buried and the court’s decision to disregard this intimate conversation. Without Wambui in my personal-collective history, I would never have had a way to understand or appreciate LGBTI claims for partner rights. Or, put another way, I would not have been able to translate them into paradigms that make sense.

In many ways, and I recognize this only now, Wambui’s life offered me (and others) one of the first opportunities to think about marriage and intimacy, about the claims of the couple as they intersect with the claims of the clan, about the importance of space, about rituals and performances of mourning.

Without Wambui, I would not have been able to come to feminism as I did. I would not have been able to understand the gendering of testimony, the acoustics of gender, the importance of bodies as they matter and mutter. Without Wambui, I would not have been able to appreciate how nations feel and act on their feelings.

There are the things I can enumerate in her name—and many others that I cannot, because I cannot know them.

Kenya mourns for Wambui Otieno Mbugua.

I mourn for Wambui Otieno Mbugua.

Masturbation is Great!

Go masturbate! Seriously!

I have never believed that masturbation was a layover on the way to secure (or consistent) partnership or, as some would have it, an adolescent habit on the way to adulthood. Earlier in my sex-career, I discovered that finding sex was hard work. First, the finding, then the having, then the after-having. (Usually, the after-having was a lot of work. But sometimes also the having—I get bored easily.)

Masturbation solves many of these labor issues.

And it need not be selfish, to kill yet another myth. Shared and public masturbation can be intensely pleasurable. I have spent many wonderful hours watching masturbation happen, sometimes joining in, sometimes just enjoying the spectacle. These moments have been filled with generosity, tenderness, playfulness, and experimentation. And while some of us might really just be into “getting off,” understanding masturbation as a simple transaction—pull-hard-cum (this being how a good friend once described his patterns)—others attend to the leisure of exploration—they know how to “edge.” To balance on the knife edge for hours at a time, sometimes as pleasurable or even more so than the act of release. The sustained hum of the edge, the accumulation of pleasure-tension feels oh-so-good. Little touches it.

As feminist sex activists discovered in the 1970s, masturbation is an act of giving oneself permission, of learning the importance of pleasuring oneself. There are psychic and social benefits to this, and here I use language from Audre Lorde:

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.
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Beyond the superficial, the considered phrase, “It feels right to me,” acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding. And understanding is a handmaiden which can only wait upon, or clarify, that knowledge, deeply horn. The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge.
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Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a book- case, writing a poem, examining an idea.

That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.

This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.

Lorde’s insistence on the importance of “it feels good to me” and her claim that being “in touch” with the pleasure of the erotic gives flesh to the demands we can make on the world remain powerfully provocative. I want to use these two to think a little about Philip Kitoto’s agony aunt column on masturbation, or what the newspaper copywriters have termed “self-abuse.”
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“Masturbation causes a lot of stress, shame, depression, guilt and low self-esteem in those who practise it. . . . Understanding the causes of this habit helps you to get to the root of the cycle.”

This promising caption precedes several letters:

Hi,
I have a problem with masturbation and pornography. I have never really understood how it started since I grew up a chaste man.

Things changed about four years ago. I am approaching my dream marriage age (26 years) and I want to end this so that I can have a good marriage. Please help me since it is becoming serious.

Hi,
First is to thank you for your informative column. In last week’s column you discussed a problem that I am currently suffering; masturbation.

I wish to disclose to you that I have been suffering this problem for the past 22 years. I am now 35 years old and tired of the suffering I have been going through. Please help me.

Hey sir,
I would like to thank you for your good work. I am a regular reader of your DN2 column.

Due to the fact that I work outside the country, I found it difficult to meet and get into relationships with women, so I found myself engaging in masturbation. My problem is that I am now addicted to it. Please help.

Responding to these queries, Kitoto offers up these gems:

Since masturbation is a physical act of exciting the sexual organs by rubbing, stroking, or fondling, it may be as a result of sexual habits that develop during adolescence, sexual abuse, and lack of love and support while growing up and enticements that come through subjecting one’s mind to pornography or cyber sex.

Recognising that the time one would have spent building productive relationships is now spent trying to achieve an elusive satisfaction will help you come up with strategies to help you overcome the habit.

Most people caught in the habit of masturbation tend to feel helpless, but this should not be the case.

Breaking the cycle of masturbation is a process and will require a lot of time, willpower, and accountability support from yourself and a counsellor.

Those familiar with the history of anti-masturbation campaigns will recognize Kitoto’s rhetoric—masturbation is infantilizing; it robs a nation of useful erotic energy; erotic energy should be directed to hetero-reproduction; God is watching. What worries me is that Kitoto writes in the major Kenyan newspaper. He has a reach and grasp and hold (yes, I use these terms deliberately) that is difficult, if not impossible, to match. No matter how many pro-masturbation and pro-sex individuals take to twitter or blog, he has a massive headstart on his shame-spreading crusade.

Shame is a vicious instrument of control. Hierarchy-producing and hierarchy-sustaining, it shepherds those who are often seeking guidance and those willing to confess their vulnerabilities into self-destructive and often pleasure-denying lifestyles. (Yes, I am aware of the very sophisticated work done on shame, but allow me this).

I am worried when young men (only young men?) believe that masturbation and marriage are incompatible or even that masturbation might make marriage impossible or unbearable. I wonder what this reticence over masturbation suggests about how we learn about other people’s bodies and pleasures. I fret over our own reluctance to explore (and even celebrate) our bodies and our capacities to experience pleasure. Learning from Lorde, I wonder about the attenuated modes of existing we term living, about the demands we are unwilling or unable to make of each other and of ourselves.

Something interesting (even useful) happens when we are able to envision our bodies and those that surround us as being capable of intense pleasure, as more than useful bags that transport inner essences (call this soul or spirit) from place to place. There is something interesting (even useful) in understanding a capacity for pleasure as one of the things that binds us–this from the capacity for simple laughter to the pleasures of erotic play. Something interesting (even useful) happens when we are able to multiply the ways we can imagine embodied points of commonality.

I understand that Kitoto writes within a specific faith framework and I want to respect the practices and beliefs of that framework–in other words, I’m not invested in urging those who view masturbation as sin to commit sin. However, his writing extends beyond that framework to all potential readers of The Daily Nation. The newspaper gives him a powerful platform to address the curious, the hungry, the experimenting, the young, and groups that I cannot envision. He speaks to multiple publics, and I would like those publics to have additional frameworks, to be able to choose how to live, whether that includes masturbation or not.

Richard Onyango’s Memory Work

I came to Richard Onyango later than I should have. Which is to say, I came to know about him later than I should have, even though I recognized his work and style, especially his Drosie portraits. In (or around) 2008, Kwani? published The Life and Times of Richard Onyango, a narrative of his life as told to and written by Binyavanga Wainaina. Onyango details his life and work, his rise from someone who used to decorate buses to an internationally renowned artist. (I abbreviate a much richer narrative.)

As detailed in Life and Times, Onyango started drawing and painting buses and tractors in the mid-1970s—he would draw pictures of matatus and sell them for twenty shillings at matatu stations. This attention to modes of mobility and how they intersect with Kenyan history recurs in his recent exhibition at Gallery Watatu, which features, among other things, memory objects from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, recent paintings depicting a recent past (it also includes imagined pasts, including two paintings in which Onyango imagines himself in ancient Egypt, as a mate or servant to Drosie in one painting and to Deb in another). I found myself returning to paintings that featured buses and trains, wondering what it was that captured Onyango’s imagination and what it was that kept pulling at mine.

East Africa Bus History, 1967-1987 (2009), depicts five buses—I confess, I tried to figure out how history functions by looking at their number plates, but this is beyond my abilities. From left to right, these were the number plate numbers and destinations: KJH 121 – Garissa; KJN 912 – Galole; KJM 705 – Bungoma; KQY 201 – Lamu; KJY 400 – Mombasa-Kisumu.

Parked in a bus depot, empty, perhaps awaiting passengers, the buses offer an imaginative geography of Kenya, imagining a space that stretches from Garissa to Bungoma, from Galole to Lamu, and from Mombasa to Kisumu. Intriguingly, of the five buses, only the one from Mombasa to Kisumu lists a potential origin and destination—the rest list single locations. It’s not clear where the depot is. I returned to this painting several times, thinking about movement and stasis, about the relationship between space and place, about the imaginations enabled by and embedded in transport narratives, about how nations are imagined in and through public modes of transportations.

Now—I write this several weeks later—I wonder how the bus imagines the nation it traverses and how it registers, in distance, in wear, in scent, in texture, the world it marks and that marks it. I am reminded of Armah’s amazing description of the bus in the opening scenes of The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born. Armah’s bus is an accretion of sounds and smells, repeated and missed encounters, scenes of subject aggrandizement and diminution.

East African Railways 1969 (2009) depicts a train in motion, winding through a landscape of greens and browns, filled with passengers, barely visible in the many carriage cars. While many accounts (and images) of the Kenya-Uganda railway focus on how landscapes were changed during the railway’s construction, the relative anonymity of the passengers in Onyango’s painting, the absence of stations and towns, and the lush landscape compel me to ask how the landscape shaped the passengers who moved through it. How did the landscape imagine and experience the snake that trained through it? What did it mean to be carried on the much-prophesied-about snake?

In the short biography featured on African Colours, Onyango terms his earliest sketches “photo pictures,” noting that he didn’t have a camera and so drew to remember the rapidly unfolding modernity he witnessed. Forthcoming work by Kenda Mutongi and Mbugua wa Mungai similarly meditates on Kenyan mobilities by focusing on matatu cultures as an index of Kenyan entrepreneurship and culture work. This is, perhaps, an aside, though I think there are interesting ways to think through what these three figures might offer each other.

There is also much more to be written about the notion of the “photo picture” and what it suggests about Onyango’s aesthetic, especially given his use of scale and perspective. But I’ll leave such discussions to those trained to talk about painting and the visual arts.

A remarkable amount of memory work is taking place in Kenyan arts. Recent (and forthcoming) books by Shailja Patel, Rasna Warah, Binyavanga Wainaina, Yvonne Owuor, and Billy Kahora (fiction and non-fiction) all focus on scenes and events and objects from the recent present. (Here, let me plug a forthcoming book from David Kaiza on Idi Amin that will be absolutely wonderful—Kaiza is an amazing writer. Note, I use “forthcoming” in more or less academic terms, anywhere from the next few months to two or more years.)

I have yet to get any handle on this memory work—not simply what is being remembered in an amazing variety of ways, but also how it is being remembered. (Here, one could also mention Maina wa Kinyatti’s incredible number of histories produced in the last few years and the kinds of political alignments and re-alignments they suggest. It’s also worth noting that it’s only in the recent past that the Wagalla massacre has become available as a public object.)

At a time when much of our national (political) rhetoric seems to suggest the possibility of only two options, a complete break with the past or its continuation, and at a time when we risk privileging either ethno-racial purities or proclaiming the salvific power of hybridities, I find myself wondering what the accumulation and circulation of various memory objects might enable, wondering about the uses of what Nairobians might term chorochoro routes to other elsewheres.

It is, perhaps, this metaphorical mapping of directed space that provides the occasion to think of Onyango’s memory work, of the potential and accumulated mobilities that his work suggests. And this thinking probably inevitable at a time when our roads and routes are in complex processes of extension and transformation.

Imagining Futures

A recent article in the Daily Nation begins,

Imagine you are invited to address an international gathering of “young leaders” — those brilliant, world-travelled, multi-lingual twenty-somethings who graduate from top schools with top honors and — having walked away from six-figure salaries — work for almost nothing in NGOs.

One of these “young leaders” is fated to be a future “president.” (It’s not quite clear to me how this formula for predicting presidents works—it’s certainly not how access to presidencies have functioned in the past, but let’s indulge the fantasy for a moment.)

In recently published work, I have tried to meditate on what it means to “imagine futures.” For whom can “futures” be imagined? How might a more nuanced understanding of imagining futures arrest, if only momentarily, the battering ram critiques of repro-futurity that too easily yoke hetero-reproduction to (an imagined) futurity?

Put more simply: some of us have futures imagined for us much more readily. The future is not simply an unfolding of time, the minute that follows this one and that one, but a careful plotting imagined by individuals and institutions, policy documents and private diaries, families and strangers. And while there might be movements through time not imagined as futures, I am wary of some recent queer claims about bending or thwarting temporality. As a good friend insists: people die.

We see this imagination powerfully exhibited in the quote with which I started: “young leaders” are imagined into being, marked, in advance, as a sequence of accomplishments, a series of fluencies, an accumulation of various forms of capital. It is easy to imagine futures for these “young leaders,” as presidents, diplomats, as people occupying what is imagined for them as their “rightful” place in “the order of things.” There are seats at an imaginary table waiting to be filled by these imagined “young leaders.” These “young leaders” are imagined into being, their trajectories mapped, their histories known in advance.

I’m not sure they are allowed to be surprising, but this is another train of thought.

I want to use the framework of “imagining futures” to extend an ongoing conversation about “the poor,” and to think a little more deliberately, if counterintuitively, about poverty. There are, of course, numerous ways of thinking about and constructing “the poor”: in the realms of income, health, food, security, law-keeping, human rights, “the poor” are marked by absence, loss, attenuation, slackness, irresponsibility, laziness, shortsightedness. It is not simply that they live on less than a dollar a day; it is, rather, that given a dollar a day, they would not know how to manage it, extend it, multiply it, create futures from it.

There is, to adapt Foucault, a “speaker’s benefit” to imagining “the poor” in this way: all their deficits read as credits (if not surpluses) in the lives of those who are “not poor.” Here I want to use “not poor” as opposed to middle or upper middle class or obscenely wealthy, because I want to assemble an unwieldy group of people. (It’s not clear to me what middle class means in Kenya, apart from “not poor.”)

“The poor” are marked, as well, by impoverished imaginations. I mean this in at least two ways. One, the “not poor” cannot imagine for “the poor”: cannot imagine their futures as worth imagining. Take a look at the opening quote again: future “leaders” trade success to work with and for “the poor.” (And while I recognize the absurd leap in logic that aligns NGOs with “the poor,” I don’t think it’s totally absurd once one looks at a lot of NGO work in Kenya.) Indeed the “not poor” see it as their task to imagine futures for “the poor” in which the “not poor” play starring roles—there is a swerve, a trick, a refraction of attention that allows such charitable attempts to focus attention on the “young leaders.” Thus it is that future “young leaders” who sacrifice high salaries can be imagined as future “presidents.” (Capital accumulates in diverse ways.)

Second, “the poor” are understood to have stunted imaginations, to insist on clinging to their “way of life,” “habits,” “patterns of living,” to be unable to imagine themselves otherwise. In contrast, the “not poor” are endlessly imaginative and innovative—and, indeed, one can “transfer” from “the poor” to the “not poor” through an act of innovation, even as that act is assimilated into an even more rigid distinction between the two. (One sees this pattern repeatedly in coverage of Kenyan “innovation from the slums,” coverage that, I am suggesting, performs valuable work in policing “the poor”/ “not poor” binary.)

It would be easy, I think, to point to many “up-by-the-bootstraps” figures—the DN recently featured one—as evidence against the claims I am making here. Easy to point to many figures, surely in the thousands if not in the tens of thousands who have, by dint of luck and hard work, moved from “the poor” to the “not poor.” Indeed, my father’s generation provides vast evidence of this “move,” even as their consolidation as the “not poor” was predicated on marking their distance from “the poor.”

I am interested in the strangeness of futures imagined by those deemed to be incapable of imagining futures. I am interested in what it could mean to un-imagine future “leaders” as an accumulation of already-known accomplishments and to re-imagine a space for what might be termed “surprise” or “the unexpected” or that for which we might not yet have language.

Seeing, Staring, Looking

[Seeing] is a product of battle-tested strategies and hard-won epistemologies honed into tools for carving out a space and habitation of survival.—Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection

Aaron Bady’s recent essay on Tarzan in American Literature (AL, open access, it’s a good thing) thinks through the fantasy-reality of Tarzan’s flight as Tarzan moves from Burroughs’s universe to other genres. If we remember anything of Tarzan, it is the spectacle of his flight, a spectacle that is invisible to the native villagers he terrorizes in the first novel, Tarzan of the Apes (1912). I find incredibly useful Aaron’s weaving of flight, spectacle, and terror, and also, the geo-racialization of spectacle: what can it mean to have access to the spectacle of Tarzan’s flight? And how do we make sense of Tarzan’s invisibility to the natives he terrorizes?

Spectacle and ghostliness are modes of racialization in Tarzan of the Apes. The terrorized African natives—themselves relatively ghostly given how little we learn about them—understand Tarzan as a spirit, unseen and malignant. Within their cosmology, the unseen Tarzan who, as Aaron points out, terrorizes through lynching, can only be approached through propitiation. He enacts his horrors while unseen. Here, it’s worth noting that the horrors he enacts range from the silly and mischievous to the truly ghastly.

I have been trying to think about what it means not to see Tarzan, that is, specifically, about the modes of racialization anchored around not seeing—taxes paid to a foreign government whose representatives are terror, for instance. And, more generally, about the modes of subjection anchored around not seeing. What kind of labor is entailed in seeing Tarzan? What battles must be fought for seeing to happen? And while I use seeing to suggest demystification, I am also interested in the more banal (if equally powerful) act or process of seeing. I am interested in the kinds of “battles,” to invoke Scott, fought to see. In a sense, I am interested in what W.J.T. Mitchell describes as “showing seeing”: “to overcome the veil of familiarity and self-evidence that surrounds the experience of seeing, and to turn it into a problem for analysis, a mystery to be unraveled.”

What would it mean for native villagers to see Tarzan? What names or paradigms would become available were they to see him stealing arrows and food and killing humans and animals? What names or paradigm would become available were they to see him living with his family of apes, fighting for dominance within that family? To invoke Scott again, what forms of “survival” become available through acts of seeing?
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Staring is a state of being arrested by and in thrall to the extraordinary.—Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Ways of Staring”

A Nairobi story: a man would stand in the center of town and stare intently into the sky. Individuals would collect around him, intent on seeing the object-scene-situation being stared at. The original starer would then leave the staring crowd, laughing at the trick he had played.

Versions of this story abound—it is a true Nairobi story, a trickster tale, suggesting something about gullibility. We might choose to laugh with hare as he proceeds on his merry way. But I want to stay with the crowd, to think of what the collective, intent desire to stare might mean. I want, in other words, to return to the spectacle of Tarzan’s invisible flight as an object of desire, to think about the collectives who agglutinate around staring.

Let me be upfront: I am departing from Garland-Thomson’s essay in significant ways: she examines staring within the framework of disability studies, paying attention to the labor enacted by extraordinary faces and bodies—how they work on us, or work within a U.S. context. I think it’s important to mark geographies here, because staring does not work the same way in all places. There are protocols in place for where one should look and how one should look (at objects, at scenes, at others), and staring can provide a measure of relief—a certain freedom.

How might one read or re-read the collective Nairobi stare? What kinds of freedoms are possible when one stares from within a collective? What forms of togetherness (contingent, though they are) emerge from this shared experience of desire, of inclination? And while versions of this Nairobi story have so often focused on the duped crowd, I wonder if it’s possible think about the psychic loss occasioned by the trickster.

While I want to be attentive to geography, let me branch out a little to Nella Larsen’s Quicksand:

“Helga found herself wondering who they were, what they did, and of what they thought. What was passing behind those dark molds of flesh? . . . Yet, as she stepped out in the moving multi-colored crowd, there came to her a queer feeling of enthusiasm, as if she were tasting some agreeable, exotic food—sweetbreads, smothered with truffles and mushrooms—perhaps. And, oddly enough, she felt, too, that she had come home.”

Adjust the scene for a moment and picture these “dark molds of flesh” engaged in collective staring. Engaged in a seemingly meaningless random act of suspended meaning-making, the making of a collective “something” that might remain unnamed, but performs valuable work.

What might be “the extraordinary” conjured up by an act of collective staring? What forms of enthrallment are in play and at stake? And while I suggested the absent Tarzan as a possible object of enthrallment, it strikes me that the kind of collective staring I am thinking about might make Tarzan besides the point, precisely because its modes of object-making and situation-creating and event-becoming are so loosely tethered to spectacle. This is not “come see the massive accident.” It is, rather, come see. And that opens up other possibilities.
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The right to look is not about merely seeing. . . . The right to look claims autonomy, not individualism or voyeurism, but the claim to a political subjectivity and collectivity.—Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Right to Look”

Nicholas Mirzoeff offers a useful genealogy of visuality and counter-visuality:

In tracing a decolonial genealogy of visuality, I have identified three primary complexes of visuality and countervisuality: the plantation complex that sustained the transatlantic slave trade; what was known to certain apologists for the British empire as the imperialist complex; and what President Dwight Eisenhower identified as the military-industrial complex, which is still very much with us.

More concretely (to my mind, at least):

Visuality’s first domains were the slave plantations, monitored by the surveillance of the overseer, the surrogate of the sovereign. This sovereign surveillance was reinforced by violent punishment and sustained a modern division of labor. Then from the late eighteenth century onward, visualizing was the hallmark of the modern general as the battlefield became too extensive and complex for any one person physically to see. Working on information supplied by subalterns—the new lowest ranked officer class created for this purpose—and his own ideas and images, the general in modern warfare as practiced and theorized by Karl von Clausewitz was responsible for visualizing the battlefield. Soon after this moment, visuality was named as such in English by Thomas Carlyle in 1840 to refer to what he called the tradition of heroic leadership, which visualizes history to sustain autocratic authority. In this form, visualizing is the production of visuality, meaning the making of the processes of history perceptible to authority. This visualizing was the attribute of the Hero and him alone. Visuality was held to be masculine, in tension with the right to look that has been variously depicted as feminine, lesbian, queer, or trans. Despite its oddities, the interface of Carlyle’s appropriation of the revolutionary hero and his visualizing of history as permanent war with the military strategy of visualization has had a long legacy. While Carlyle’s idea of mystical leadership was not a practical form of organization, British imperial visuality was organized by an army of missionaries bringing light to darkness by means of the Word, actively imagining themselves to be heroic subjects. The fascist leaders of twentieth-century Europe claimed direct inspiration from Carlyle, while today’s counterinsurgency doctrine indirectly relies on strategies of local and remote visualization.

What is one to make of the staring natives that populate imperial texts? That is, while I am very interested in the genealogy of visuality Mirzoeff sketches in this essay—I have yet to read the fuller book—I keep thinking about the multitudes of staring natives. That stare, often described as “blank” or “disturbing” is persistent. Its archive is vast. And it seems to me that we have yet to find ways to write about that particular stare—to register its textures and tones, to think about its ubiquity.

It has been easier for us, I think, to refuse what is disturbing about that stare, what is irritating, what is shameful, and to offer too-general explanations of resistance and subversion. No doubt, these are correct, but they also feel incomplete. The staring native remains startlingly invisible. We would rather accompany the Nairobi trickster in his playful subversiveness.
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Seeing. Staring. Looking.

Despite what might sound like certainties—especially the very tentative argument I’ve suggested about the importance of theorizing native staring—I am still feeling my way through these variously (related) models of discussing the visual. I am fascinated by “blankness” and “expressionlessness,” intrigued and terrified by the pages upon pages of staring natives, and their afterlives in our semi-pornographic, genuinely Kenyan postcards.

Sudsy

[T]he family identity produced on American television is much more likely to include your dog than your homosexual brother or sister.—Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”

Contemporary gay men must be delivered from unseemly, uncivilized sexual practices carried out in the great cities of Europe and America just as savage, if somewhat childlike, Africans had to be rescued from similar behaviors enacted in the fantastical African “bush.”—Robert Reid-Pharr, “Clean.”

[I]f the “dirty faggot” did not exist he would have to be invented. Moreover, as so many of us struggle to sanitize this vile creature, we would do well to remember that if we check beneath his well-buffed nails we will almost inevitably find the traces of someone else’s excrement.—Robert Reid-Pharr, “Clean.”

Washing dishes relaxes me. It reminds me of quiet Sunday mornings in my mother’s house, the singing in the nearby church, reverent and poised (good Presbyterian music), sliding through the kitchen windows, muted and colored by green fences. The feel of clean plates and mugs and glasses against my bare skin—I dislike gloves—offers a glimpse of the pleasures a savior might feel at washing away sins.

And, so, sometimes, I let the dishes pile up until Sunday, revel in the pleasures that await. Death-bed confessions might be a kind of holy crack.

Perhaps golden showers are most appropriate to Sundays.

Like many other queers, I distrust the promise of respectability. I come to respectability “honestly,” if differently: as a (now-excommunicated) Presbyterian; as an appropriately-circumcised Gikuyu; as the grandson of a teacher; as a son of post-independent Kenya’s new bourgeoisie; as a former chapel prefect; as a life-long “good son”; and now as a faculty member (academic queer radicals are a nice fantasy). I understand the protocols of respectability. I understand the rewards of respectability. I understand the promise of respectability.

I understand, also, or think I do, the lure of the “filthy faggot.” There is something about the mud-food-scat-used diesel oil-animal shit-bukkake-train-bareback-felching-sling owning-bathhouse going-orgy having-anonymous sex having faggot that is immensely appealing. While I’ve spent time with Foucault, a tiny part of me believes in the freedom of sex expression. (I will now debate whether or not to revise that sentence—sex puns suck.)

Yet. Yet. Yet.

I read academic accounts of the “filthy faggot” as melancholy. No matter how many sex acts one may describe participating in, no matter what desires one names, no matter how many fuck-shit-suck-swallow-faggot-shit-suck-swallow one writes, the “filthy faggot” remains a fantasy-object, perhaps a might-have-been. I am not sure he survives peer review.

And so what is it queer academics do when we write about the “filthy faggot”? What fantasies of ourselves do we hold on to? What notions of sex-identity-freedom do we crave?

The building that houses the English Department at UMD has hand sanitizers along the walls. They are a powerful metaphor of what institutions can do and do do. Clean. It is, perhaps, because institutions are so good at cleaning that certain imaginative possibilities remain so difficult to grasp. Yet, there is also a pleasure to cleaning and to being clean. The promise of respectability.

I have been trying to think through what makes me so ambivalent about Robert Reid-Pharr’s essay “Clean.” The original title of this post was “The Romance of Filth.” I wanted to think about invocations of “filth” or “dirt” and their world-making capacity within queer thought and life—transformative brown fucks, if you will. But then something feels off about that. I wanted to think about the pleasures of “cleaning” and “being cleaned,” be it by golden showers or holy water. I wanted to arrest something that felt like it should be right—respectability as an unattainable lure, the promise of filth, the dangers of respectability—but also felt familiar and off. Not quite. Not yet.

I wanted to think more deliberately and precisely about the promise of respectability, the achievement of respectability, this within inter- and intra-racial histories where my Gikuyu grandfather was as likely to be termed savage by a white European as by a black one. It matters how we come to respectability—or its promise. I have grown weary of the transformative promise of brown fucks. This is, of course, a terrible misreading of Reid-Pharr’s essay, but misreadings have their place. He writes, “we should be careful to not give up so easily on our dirty prehistory, the lived reality of (sexual) “promiscuity” and experimentation, for the presumably clean uncertainties promised by the weak light of the world-shattering dawn.”

But time does not move through space in a straight line and the “prehistory” of the “gay” and “black” Reid-Pharr writes about throbs as an incessant, prolonged present from Nairobi. It is not clear that the modernities invoked in Reid-Pharr’s essay cross the Atlantic when I do: what I can say in the States needs to be said differently here, or not at all. I am wary of the promise of kinky promiscuities. And in this place of flying toilets, many people have shit under their fingernails.

I find myself resisting the lure of Reid-Pharr’s argument, perhaps unfairly. Perhaps it was never meant to cross oceans, but travel happens, and one must read from one’s clime—the brisk Nairobi air, the itch of mosquito bites. Bersani notes, “While it is indisputably true that sexuality is always being politicized, the ways in which having sex politicizes are highly problematical.” I understand, of course, that filth need not have anything to do with having sex—the image Baldwin uses of white subjects trying to see if black rubs off is evidence of this. Even as the entangled histories of race and sexuality make proximate, if not intimate, sex and dirt.

There are pleasures to filth and to respectability—many of us (queers? Queer academics? Been-tos? Afro-diasporic subjects?) negotiate these pleasures with various degrees of care and carelessness. (After the conference, check out the local bathhouse.) I want to be careful not to romanticize either filth (as pre-history, as spatial dislocation, as temporal thwart, as global racial history, as strategy of poverty, as kink) or respectability (as access, as prison, as aspiration, as attrition). Or, perhaps, to be more deliberate in noting the romance of both.

Those Terrible Poor People

The need to play victim and blame others is found across Kenyan society. The poor are some of the worst human rights offenders. Many believe they are owed by society.–Wamuyu Gatheru, Governance Consultant

Kenya has too many consultants.

Frottage (One)

A friend tells me that books (critical, scholarly) should have some kind of personal narrative, a kind of “this is how I came to this project and this is why it matters to me.” This is an interesting convention. We spend multiple years working on books, and for the untenured, the tenure-track, the hoping-to-be-tenure-track, and the hoping-to-move-from-one-tenure-track-position-to-another, the book is a passport. Which is to say, for many, many books written in the humanities—though I can really only speak for my discipline—the book’s personal narrative reads: “I want a job” or “I want to keep a job” or, and perhaps most truthfully, “I like eating.”

However, since we in the academy prefer to theorize about starving artists and scholars rather than to live their lives—though many of us do—a personal narrative is called for.

This requirement poses considerable problems: where does the staunchly anti-autobiographical critic turn? What story of self should one craft to satisfy an indifferent and voyeuristic public? And what about the self so narrated can in any way anchor the argument to follow: “I fuck men so please read 100 pages about Liberian history.” (That, incidentally, might not be a bad thing to write.)

Grouch though I may be, I am also conventional. So these are my false starts.

I am writing a book called Frottage.

No, it is not a “how-to.” (Though, really, just get together and rub.)

My first real awareness of the slave trade—which is to say, the image that has stayed with me over the years—came from Alex Haley’s Roots, which I read when I was about 10 or 11. I could not get over the image of bodies packed in slave ships, the feel of wood against skin, metal against skin, skin against skin, a voyage of forced proximity, forced rubbing, literally and otherwise. Over the years, Roots has stayed with me, less as a genealogical project (though I had thought it was) or even as the spatial re-organization of intimacy and intellect Paul Gilroy might favor (as a route). Instead, it remains, in memory, as contact: body against body against surface against surface.

According to art critics, frottage is a technique developed by Max Ernst. It consists of capturing the texture—image—impression of a surface by placing paper (or some kind of surface that can be rubbed on) on top of a rough surface—wood, stone, a wall, some kind of textured surface, and rubbing the paper with charcoal or pencil or something to “reveal” the textured image below. (If you have placed a coin under a piece of paper and rubbed a pencil over it, you will recognize what I mean.)

As taken up by sexologists, frottage is a paraphilia that consists of one gaining sexual excitement and even orgasm by rubbing up against another when clothed—think men who rub up against women in crowded buses. For the moment, I will avoid the question of who rubs against whom. The term frotteur enters English in 1892, through a translation of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis while the term frottage seems to enter English in 1933, in Havelock Ellis’s Psychology of Sex. (The sexual meaning of frottage seems to precede the art meaning, at least in English—it would be quite another job to trace the origins of frotter, the French from which the English takes its direction.)

But here is the OED: Frot ?c1225 derives from Old French:

1. trans. To rub, chafe; spec. to polish (a precious stone); to rub (a garment) with perfumes; in early use, to stroke, caress (an animal). Obs.

Frottage meditates on encounters between and among African-descended people: Africans with African-Americans, African Americans with Afro-Caribbeans, Afro-diasporic figures with themselves and the homes they imagine (Claude McKay writing about Jamaica after a 20-year absence, Kenyatta writing about a rural Kenya he left at the age of 8 or 9). I am interested in how frottage-as practice and figure—might provide a language or perhaps method for thinking about Afro/diasporic encounters.

In the plainest terms possible: I want to figure out or suggest what happens when black folk get together. How do they rub along?

At the same time, I am not overly invested in the shape of the encounter. We already have evidence of what, say, Blyden thought of Du Bois, Du Bois of McKay, Padmore of Kenyatta, James of Kenyatta, Fanon of Kenyatta (lots of people thought about Kenyatta). Nor am I very interested in narratives of intra-racial discrimination or self-hatred–these are already well documented. I am after something slightly more elusive: I am after the selves and others narrated as a byproduct, as evidence, of frottage.

I am intrigued, for instance, by Blyden’s role as intermediary between Americo-Liberians and indigenous Liberians; by Maran’s rendering of the Central African populations he governed; by McKay’s return to Jamaica; and Kenyatta’s return to Kenya. What happens if, instead of taking Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya as the ethno-biography it purports to be, we take it as a response to his interactions with his London-based friends? What happens it we see it a response to or in dialogue with The Black Jacobins? How, then, do we understand its imaginative work?

While the figure (and practice) of frottage slips in and out of the book, it acts as a reminder about the flesh of the men I am studying, about the range and varieties of their bodies as they crossed space and time, rubbed up against, along, and with each other and the worlds they occupied.

I am thinking about moments of irritation and desire, bewilderment and seduction, repressed and insatiable desire: men in too-close proximity, the worlds they imagined, and the imaginations we have inherited.

A Most Perfect Introduction

It seems that we are on the verge of something. Although the snows of winter still linger, the light of the queer morning seems surprisingly strong. The thrust and counter-thrust over the matter of so-called gay respectability occur with such shocking regularity that colleagues, friends, and family alike continually remind us that though we remain in the wilderness, and even though the manna has become stale, we should rejoice that soon and very soon the promised gift of propriety will be ours. Still, to invoke Leo Bersani, there is a big secret about the dawn: most people don’t like it. The strange shock of light and life is a pale and peculiarly unfulfilling substitute for the technicolor majesty of our dreams. And no matter how supple the body that we may lie alongside, we are always frighteningly alone. Indeed, stink, crust, and the painful creep of age are our only constant companions as we rise from our beds, sweaty or cold, eager or anxious, always obliged to fix our manufactured faces for a world sublimely indifferent to the never-quite-articulate passions that under-write our secret pleasures and public labors. (Robert Reid-Pharr, “Clean: Death and Desire in Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand,” American Literature 83.2 [2011]: 389-90)

Robert Reid-Pharr makes me believe critical prose can be astonishingly beautiful.