You got a B
because
You pay money
to go here
I’ve been warned
students sue
You came to my office
and cried
I can’t fail
students for racism
You sent me
two hundred emails
I can’t fail
students for absenteeism
You threatened to
sabotage my evaluations
I was trying
to complete an article
You simply could
not keep up
I grew tired
of being exhausted
Romance novels taught me how to think about the incoherence of attachment. To see this incoherence, one needs to look at the range of failed and failing relationships that background romance novels: unhappy mothers, divorced friends, jaded bachelors, devious perverts, anxious children, disappointed spinsters, abusive marriages, terrified singles, an entire catalogue of unhappiness from which the privileged couple form emerges.
At a certain point, I noticed that more romance novels concluded with a leap forward of either several years or decades to prove that love lasted, that romantic love could sustain togetherness. I think I started to notice this trend in the mid-90s, though it could date to the early 90s (my archive of romance is too vast and disorganized for time to make much sense). This marked, I think, a certain anxiety over the divorce statistics that increasingly worked for and against romance narratives. Whether true or not, the idea that divorce rates in the U.S. have hovered around 50% over the past 25 years or so has been consistent. Romance novels succeed (and fail) because of this divorce rate; indeed, the faith in “rightness” and “fit” succeeds and fails to sustain an entire industry in which I would argue romance novels play a substantial part as they filter through various forms of cultural adaptation: you might not be reading Mills&Boon, but the logic of these books infuses almost all concepts of romantic love.
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This post has mutated
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When I started it a few days ago, I wanted to think about incoherent attachments and about attachment as inherently incoherent. It was a post about Kenya and love and relationships, about what keeps us tethered to certain imaginings of worlds that are “no good for us.” Perhaps it was also a post about country music, which, to my mind, registers so often the banal incoherence of attachment. (I keep repeating the phrase incoherence of attachment because I’m not sure what else to call it.)
I have been thinking about what it means to work with and against incoherent attachments: the attachments we find difficult to narrate, and the ones that can’t really be narrated for us. The ones we resist, even though they might name something that we are not sure how to think about.
A for-instance: I don’t like the term patriot. To me, it suggests an uncritical love of nation, a jingoistic, unthinking allegiance to exclusionary and masculinist and normative forms of nationalism. No doubt, much of this comes from my upbringing in a sycophantic country, where to be a patriot was to shut up and worship power. No doubt much of this has also been shaped by the past few years of living in a post-9/11 U.S., where patriotism has often meant shutting up and defending government actions, not to mention the violent xenophobia expressed against “aliens.” And, no doubt, this distaste for “patriotism” is even now being fed by the fawning sycophancy that seems to have swept Kenya, as people line up to worship the new regime.
I remain “attached” to Kenya: for better or worse, that is where my political and social and aesthetic inclinations lie. It is the place I have been writing “from” and “for” for many years, no matter the topic and method of writing. It is the place that I “wait for,” “watch for,” “lean toward.” It is also the place that keeps breaking my heart over and over and over.
And that I can’t quit.
Some might call this love, and perhaps it is. Others might call it duty, and perhaps it is. And maybe it is “patriotism” of a kind. Not one that revels in pride, but one that finds itself most at home in the cliché-ridden sentimentalism of romance novels and love songs: “I just can’t quit you.”
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The “you’re no good for me” but “I stay” mode of attachment; this thing that’s about disappointment and hope. This thing that’s about promise. This thing that’s about “this thing between us.” This thing that’s also not like “Mean.” Because I keep returning to it.
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There’s a moment in some romance novels when the banality of one’s attachment is named by someone else, a moment of clarity for the character willing to assume that banality: yes, I am in love. I am in love because someone else has named how I feel. Love might name this thing. This thing that’s about not knowing how not to be with someone or something else. This thing that’s about knowing how not to be with someone or something else.
*
Perhaps I’m writing about Rihanna and Chris Brown.
*
Perhaps the reason romance novels are considered such a debased genre—despite and because of their mass popularity—is that they register the messiness of attachment in ways that the ostensibly psychically rich worlds of literary fiction are unwilling to contemplate: feeling is not all detachment and irony and strategically deployed madness. Instead, it is red-faced-blotchy-messy. It refuses to be organized by beautiful sentences and philosophy. It spills over, interrupts, unmakes, disorganizes.
Romance novels have as a constant refrain, “I had not planned this” or “I wasn’t looking for this” or “this is not how I thought it would turn out.” If this is an ordering into normativity, as it undoubtedly it, is it also an indexing of disorganization, a rearranging of a plot. That is, if one critical reading of the marriage-love plot is that it is too genre-bound to suggest anything “significant” or “meaningful” about the world, I would suggest that it is precisely because it is genre-bound that it can tell us something about the world, for genre is a mode of organizing formal categories that never quite fit. The heterosexual romance plot may always include men and women and love, but even a cursory reading demonstrates the range between, say, a Barbara Cartland and an Amanda Quick. One notes, for instance, that women’s virginity is less fetishized now than it was in 70s and 80s romance, though it is still very fetishized.
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One not-wrong reading of this writing would suggest that it asks how what I learned about incoherent attachment from romance novels has guided how I think about attachment to place, to Kenyan-ness. I do not have the distance to evaluate this particular interpretation.
I am interested in what acknowledging incoherent attachment, what refusing to name it as “love” or “patriotism” could enable, especially for those of us for whom “love” and “patriotism” carry too much baggage to be used in a casual way.
ellipses:
Ellipses know too much, do not know what they know, know nothing, and produce knowingness. What is the knowledge economy of ellipses? What is the duration of the elliptical? What is knowledge after ellipses?
profiling:
Foucault teaches me that profiling is taxonomy: coding for threat. Perhaps all taxonomy has always been about coding for threat. What is most threatening? Who is most threatening? How can threat be managed?
visa:
My visa expires. It expires again. And again. I keep explaining that a visa is an entry and exit document. An expired visa is threatening. Few of those monitoring my visa dates know how visas work. I keep explaining to those who don’t need to know, to those who insist they know, to those who refuse to hear my knowing that I know what the law says. My visa is expired.
sayable:
To be in this now—this Kenya-U.S-now—is to navigate censorship. Things I cannot say as a holder of a visa. Things I cannot demand: equal protection under the law; a voice in how to read this moment; a claim to rights. Nothing has been said. Perhaps I misread the tea leaves. Things I cannot say as a particular kind of Kenyan: one who lives abroad, one privileged by ethnicity and education, one marked as dangerous. People with names “like mine” and backgrounds “like mine” are saying and doing terrible things. I do not know what to say, how to respond, how to forge alliances, how to undo the weight of privilege I did not earn, that my saying exercises, that my silence exercises.
U.S.A.:
I write U.S. or U.S.A., because I don’t want to cede “us.” To be here is to inhabit a strange provinciality where “we” and “us” is constantly invoked, as perhaps it is all over. Every time I hear “we” and “us” I shrivel a little. I have still not learned how not to flinch. How not to hear “nation” and “culture” and “not you” when I see US. That scream of unbelonging, the chant of patriotism. U.S.A.
accent:
U.S.A.: “where are you from”?
Kenya: “where are you from”?
attachment:
One is squeezed into place, adhesiveness produced by prolonged contact, sometimes not of one’s making. Attachment produced as habit, as refuge, as tropism. The crooked plant is seeking light. The stuck-in-place object is pressed on constantly. To be un-stuck, to be un-pressed, to be ripped from place. Even this causes pain. And might not be freedom.
now-here:
The imprecision of emergent forms, the vertigo of precarity, the fear of saying the wrong thing, the unwelcome thing, the dangerous thing.
habit:
To continue as before, to believe that repetition produces normalcy, to read the normative as the inevitable, to be habituated, to resist disruption, to pursue peace, to flee definition.
safe:
If you hide, stay silent, squeeze into a corner, stay in your house, refuse the endangering social, it might take them a little longer to find you, detain you, arrest you, monitor you, disappear you.
alien:
“where were you born”?
“when did you come here”?
“why did you come here”?
E.T. was a film about immigrants as tracked, trackable, monitored, and endangered. Discuss.
freedom:
How do the “unfree” discuss “the land of the free”?
In whispers and in silence.
It’s possible to argue that the slogan “the personal is political” comes from a particular bourgeois version of personhood. However, if one starts from the moment of enslavement, then there is no personal and, indeed, no person, for the thingification of slavery takes away “the personal.” Things are not persons. But it is through the histories of slavery that the personal becomes political, as the quest for personhood requires disclosure, nakedness, revelation, confession. Slave narratives tell one horror after another: a beating, a rape, a mutilation, a catalogue of family separations, of things being disaggregated, of units collapsing and being re-joined. Of black male slaves used as studs to impregnate black women slaves.
How can language not collapse when things are gendered and compelled to reproduce themselves? (Thinking on “things” in philosophy, aesthetics, and political science fails to reckon with fungibility; the “unimaginable” “thingness” of those once human.)
The archives I know best tell me that certain bodies are minoritized through being “disclosed,” through being forced to “disclose” themselves. Show me your suffering, the injunction goes. Mark it on your body. Show it in your life. Those who live in Kenyan slums are routinely scrutinized: their sex habits, excretory habits, sanitation habits routinely broadcast on local, national, and international news outlets. Their homes invaded, photographed, described. Their sex lives narrated and re-narrated in whispers and shouts, in official reports and scandalous news stories. Privacy has unequal meanings.
In our disclosing now, it seems difficult to distinguish between the intrusive gaze that minoritizes and the intrusive gaze that demands reciprocity (and promises intimacy: “let’s share secrets”). Practically, of course, it’s not that difficult: one gaze emanates from the state and its agents while the other might be state-related, but is framed as the normative structuring of sociality. At a moment when the normative structuring of sociality blends so readily with the state’s gaze—the Kenyan government can monitor private phone communications without a warrant, it seems, and the newly passed CISPA in the U.S. takes away many privacy protections—it’s difficult to know what privacy is, who has it, who can demand it, who can be protected by it, who can never access it.
To be minoritized is always to have less or no access to privacy. My resistance to disclosure, my stubborn refusal to answer the most banal of questions as a condition of sociality stems from how I know the histories of disclosure. I disclose as a matter of strategy.
A certain bad reading of Foucault coupled with anti-feminist sentiment has dismissed “the personal is political” as a bad bourgeois strategy. It has claimed that “confession” and “disclosure” cannot be strategic. Nor can disclosure be considered “good” art or poetry. Rather, it is “lazy.” Lazy, I think, because all is “already known.” And nothing “new” can be discovered through such disclosures.
How did we come to know “all” about the minoritized? And might it not be useful to distinguish among sources? Might it not be useful to hear what the minoritized say about themselves? Might it not be useful to think of disclosure as a strategy? And, more: as a strategic risk.
For to disclose is always a risk. Especially when those already assumed to be fully known—or fully knowable—risk disclosure. One risks being dismissed as repetitive, boring, derivative, pandering, lazy. As though one’s risk has no particularity.
What does it mean to risk disclosure? And who gets to risk disclosure? And how is such disclosure a risk?
I might be talking about “coming out.” About what it means to “be” out, and what it means to keep coming out. About the worlds created by such disclosures and the worlds made impossible. About coming out as a strategy and a choice. About the desire to have a private life. About the desire to manage scrutiny, and to enable other lives.
Histories of blackness (and anti-blackness) and feminism (and anti-feminism) teach me to be wary of disclosure. Yet I could not be were it not for those who have risked disclosure. Those who understood—and sometimes didn’t understand—the risks they were taking to enable futures distinct from the pasts they had endured. Futures for strangers.
Perhaps I want to offer a simple claim: privacy and disclosure are unequal playing fields. Some risk more than others when they choose disclosure.
Here’s a simpler, more cryptic claim: A friend was interviewed. The published interview is heartbreaking in what it does not say. It’s even more heartbreaking in what it says.
Bodies are notoriously difficult things to think about. They press themselves on thinking, interrupt writing, and impose sensation on philosophy. They fragment style, giggle at logic, and seek pleasure in formulations that favor prettiness over intellectual rigor. And just when we think we are finally writing the body, thinking the body, feeling the body, bodies respond: “That is not what I meant at all; / That is not it, at all.”
*
The archives I know best, and not at all, those of the black diaspora, make bodies difficult.
*
Something happened on the slave ship.
Hortense Spillers tells us that what happened is “unimaginable” from our vantage point: humans were transformed into objects.
Not simply objects of knowledge, as Foucault has it, but into things.
Fred Moten writes, “The history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist.”
I hear Spillers and Moten as I read Nikolas Rose and Simone Browne on the contemporary management of bodies in real and virtual spaces through biometrics and other technologies of surveillance.
The archives I know best suggest that we need to return to the unimaginable then to apprehend our unbearable now.
We may have left that unimaginable world, where bodies were re-made by the constricted spaces of slave holds and the obscene logic of fungibility, but we still inhabit the precarious afterlife of slavery. Our bodies are marked by management and surveillance and exchange.
*
How can we think about the body in these precarious times?
History does not disclose the name of the first black person dragged onto a slave ship, the first black person held in newly constructed prisons, or the first black person forcibly recruited to work on a colonial plantation. But black people have been arriving late ever since, hoping that the slavers have left, the ships traveled beyond the horizon, the whip silenced, the work done, the suffering gone.
Black time—whether you call it colored people time (CPT) or African timing (AT) or the deliciousness of syncopation—black time is about delay, interruption, break: strategic lateness.
Black time is long time, deep time, waiting time, excavated time, time around time. The not-here, the not-yet-there, the it-will-be-coming, the it-has-been-to-come, the it’s-not-wasn’t-yet, the it-was-just-here-yet-to-be-now. The fold, the crease, the wrinkle, the tick that does not tock. The tock that does not talk. The silence that does not break. The breaking that will not be broken. The.
You-just-missed-it.
Black time is hungry time. Ravenous time. Gluttonous time. Cannibal time.
Black time is waiting time, time after the reservation, time after other people’s time, time cut by other people’s time, time as didn’t-see-you, time as can-you-wait, time as you-again, time as I-don’t-have-time-for-this-shit.
Black time is dropped consonants, slipped sounds, skipped beats, don’t-wanna-ain’t-gonna-coz-it-don’t-make-no-difference time. Black time is learned time, doing time, time done, time-to-do, time-never-done, time-undone. Time-served, time-to-serve, time-serving, time-unserved, time-put-off, time-for-time, pipeline-time, skipping-time, cut-time, time-cut, cutting-time.
I haven’t seen you for a minute.
Sorry I’m posting this late. I was running behind.
African women—women from Africa, women expected to speak for and as Africa, women invited to events to be African—face the daunting burden of speaking, but not too well; understanding, but not too fluently; responding, but not too abrasively; knowing, but not too comprehensively. And always, always, upholding their dignity as African women. U.S.-based institutions invite African women to be African women: we want colorful head dressings so we can ooh and aah, appropriately chunky jewelry that socially conscious students can emulate, and down-home wisdom rendered in proverbs and riddles, references to ancient wisdom and secret knowledge.
Chimamanda Adichie visited the University of Maryland to participate in the Dean’s Lecture Series, and she said “fuck, fuck.”
It happened early during her session. And here’s the context. She described walking near her ancestral home, on the way to visit a favorite uncle. A woman who was walking ahead of her slipped and fell and said, “fuck, fuck.” And so Chimamanda repeated, “fuck, fuck,” several times as she told the story. In fact, the story became the words, “fuck, fuck.”
I loved this moment of her session. It was perfectly pitched. Calibrated to manage our expectations of Africanité. With this one gesture, Chimamanda refused to assume the mantle of the sage-like African woman who knows a lot, but not enough to ever intimidate U.S. hosts, who are all too willing to explain local customs.
“And this is a coke.
It’s a soda.
We drink it.
Like this.”
Short sentences to accommodate African brains.
Chimamanda Adichie said, “fuck, fuck.”
She said “fuck, “fuck” to emphasize a modernity that Africans, even those educated in the West, are rarely granted, especially when asked to speak as Africans. At such moments, those of us trained in elite institutions are supposed to forget we have read Hegel and Habermas and Foucault and Derrida and Agamben and Mill and Sartre, and to distill our “world views” into pithy sayings that involve our grandmothers, an indigenous plant, and a large earthen pot.
“Ressentiment is the third stone under my mother’s cooking pot.”
A wiser mind than mine can parse that.
Chimamanda Adichie said “fuck, fuck.”
I hear, of course, Binyavanga Wainaina saying “fuck,” and I wonder if this is the new African lecture strategy: to start all talks by breaking the Kola Nut of “fuck.” Or, at some moment, to break the frame with a “fuck, fuck.” If this is the strategy, sign me up. Because if a good “fuck, fuck” will get me out of playing African for people who should know better than to ask me to play African, then so be it.
In the spirit of Chimamanda and Binyavanga, say it with me: “fuck, fuck.”
Inside Higher Ed has linked to a blogpost today on how to evaluate racism. This is only a slight mischaracterization. Here’s the section that interests me. GMP, “Tenured female prof at a large public research university,” writes,
I don’t have the right to comment on whether something is racist or not, but I do have the right to comment on whether something is sexist or not.
And writes again,
because I am not a racial minority, I completely allow that I am not qualified to talk about whether something is racially insensitive or not.
I call bullshit. In fact, I call massive, massive bullshit.
Here’s Audre Lorde from a much-cited essay:
[A]s Adrienne Rich pointed out in a recent talk, white feminists have educated themselves about such an enormous amount . . . how come you haven’t also educated yourselves about Black women and the differences between us – white and Black – when it is key to our survival as a movement?
Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of Color to educate white women – in the face of tremendous resistance – as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought. (“The Master’s Tools will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”)
The claim that someone who is not a racial minority cannot evaluate racism is a too-convenient alibi that makes the detection of racism into a minority affair. To ask a racial minority to examine whether or not something is racist, to refuse, in fact, to put yourself on the line for calling out something as racist, is massively, massively unfair. Because it is to return those minoritized through race to the experience of that minoritization: to ask them to risk hurt in the name of some experience-based empiricism.
I’ve written this before, but it’s worth repeating: to describe something as racist, to describe an experience as racist, is to name, inadequately, a deep, persistent hurting, to try to capture, inadequately, how it feels to be deemed less than. It is to risk ridicule, disavowal, and the ever-condescending “maybe it’s all in your head.” It is to risk something.
But racist acts are not nebulous. They are not fantasies. They are not beyond the reach and grasp of education. You don’t need to be a racial minority to “get” when racism has happened. You need to be educated, as Lorde writes. You need to learn how to apply that education. I am distressed that an educator would ever claim the most banal, experience-based disavowal possible: I’m not a racial minority so I cannot speak about racism.
I call bullshit.
That’s unacceptable.
Because being anti-racist ain’t got nothing to do with the color of your skin.
Taking the bus in Baltimore has convinced me that it’s time to start writing bus stories. These would articulate the same sense of awe, wonder, and disorientation available in the tourist-matatu genre. Available as “how to be white in Kenya” websites, “how I was white in Kenya” poems and stories, and “how I will be white in Kenya” student personal statements—“to fully immerse myself in Kenyan culture I will ride a matatu”—the tourist-matatu genre permits the fantasy of total cultural immersion via 20-minute rides. Refusing the myth of a fixed Africa, an “ungeographic” Africa to use Katherine McKittrick’s helpful term, the tourist-matatu genre features a mobile Africa, a helter-skelter array of voices, bodies, commodities on the go. Unmoored from Conrad’s dock(ing) imagination, matatu Africa promises real contact with real people living real lives.
Kenyan writers, too, are endlessly fascinated by the matatu. Including a matatu in a poem, song, video, or story demonstrates that one is in touch with where culture (as exchange) happens, with the contingent proximal publics that foster stranger sociality. Anything is possible in the matatu: we fall in love, break up, meet new friends, discard old ones, steal and are stolen from, affirm our savvy urbanities, and reveal our naïve suburbanities. Kenyanness is made and unmade, figured and refigured. Matatus transform us.
Baltimore buses are similarly transformative. This morning’s ride featured a busted electronic fare collector—free rides for all; a trio of black folk trading phone numbers, napping, and eating breakfast sandwiches—a ballet that had to be seen; middle-class and college-bound folk folding in on themselves to avoid dangerous proximities to the working and unworking uncolleged; and a slew of posters that, variously, threatened, prohibited, exhorted, cajoled, and reminded us that we live in a surveillance state.
The dark, unblinking eye at the front of the bus is Dalek-like. Threatening in its absolute refiguring of vision and eye-ness. Unlike the Dalek eye, though, it offers no sign of animation: a glow, a blinking light, some indication that it is working. The extensive codes of behavior listed on various posters—talk, but not too loudly; dress comfortably, but not inappropriately; mix well with others, but not too promiscuously—assume new weight as they are enforced by our fantasies of what that unblinking eye sees. Posted warnings about “unattended luggage” re-geographic the bus as kin to planes and trains, airports and train stations. Buses, perhaps the last public intimate space, have been joined to these other sites of surveillance. Our safety is at stake.
Our safety.
I buy into it.
Of course, this unblinking eye and the numerous posters guarantee my safety, alleviating my anxieties. They will help modulate excesses: unsightly clothing, unseemly eating habits, unbearable noise. If technologies of surveillance work, they will transform the bus into a polite salon. We will be civil, quiet, well-behaved. Properly docile bodies to invoke Foucault, occupied territories to cite Hemphill.
Modes of surveillance rarely succeed completely. Bodies are rarely entirely docile. We slip and slide among rules, learn to choreograph our bodies otherwise. Wear earphones to comply with rules and crank up the volume to sound beyond what is suggested. We eat surreptitiously and noisily, daring others to challenge our hungers. We are unseemly, as though the unblinking eye dares us to be our worst selves. Or mischievous, at the very least. On one memorable ride, a passenger rolls his joints.
But this, I realize, is not the story I want to tell. Bus marronage is fascinating. But not right now. Nor do I want to contrast the ostensible subject-making, subject-unmaking labor of matatus against the subject-disciplining labor of the Baltimore bus. Though I have, in fact, done so.
I’m intrigued, instead, by what feels like the transformation of a unit of mobility—and, here, one can extend the figuration of mobility in numerous ways—into a space of confinement. No doubt, I am working from a too-romantic view of contemporary mobility. Attending to a longer history of slavery would invalidate my claims. After all, slave ships were mobile units of confinement.
Still, the bus opens up vistas. Richard Onyango’s bus paintings promise exotic locations coupled with the unexpected of stranger socialities and stranger intimacies. Bus communities are not free from surveillance: we watch each other and watch each other watching each other. Sometimes this watching helps to avert disasters and at other times we fall prey to sly strangers.
The indifferent, unblinking eye promises unceasing surveillance, increased security. Even as crowded buses camouflage criminality. And, certainly, the unblinking eye does not determine behavior. All kinds of craziness happens in Baltimore buses.
*
I pause to note that it is considered bad form to write about taking U.S. buses. It demonstrates that I don’t have a car. I fail some elaborate immigrant calculus.
I was never very good at calculus.
*
The shorter bus story would discuss how bus travel has changed. It would describe how taking Greyhound taught me how to ride Akamba Bus. It would detail the fantasies enabled by bus encounters: intimacies envisioned, intimacies realized, intimacies fractured. It would ask about the relationship between an ethical watchfulness—which I learned from the old folk in Pittsburgh who sat on their porches and monitored traffic in the busy Southside neighborhood where I lived—and the indifferent stare of state surveillance. It might say something about anonymity and collectivity. It might dare to think beyond the terrifying indifference of the unblinking eye.
the psychology of the oppressed
where mental health is the ability
to repress
knowledge of the world’s cruelty.
–Audre Lorde, “Eulogy for Alvin Frost”
