Dirty Laundry

there is nothing more alienating than having one’s pleasures disrupted by someone with a theory.
– Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love

spectacle
Last week, Kelly Rowland released “Dirty Laundry” and Kanye West released “New Slaves.” Kelly’s song was released as a vocal track, disembodied, to the stranger sociality of the digital world. Kanye’s song was released simultaneously in multiple locations, projected in public, his face prominent, his body as much the song as the lyrics and music. On Saturday, he subsequently appeared on Saturday Night Live to perform his song live. Kelly’s song remains a disembodied vocal track. Or, rather, the track bodies her absence. I’m left wondering who can appear in public and how.

collectivity
Kelly’s song opens with an “us”: “let’s do this dirty laundry.” The metaphor is domestic, collective, as Omise’eke Tinsley’s work reminds me. Women washing in public. An occasion for sociality, where the public:private dissolves. To be in public about the effluvia of everyday life. Kanye’s song proclaims “we the new slaves.” An assertion of fact. I’m struck by Kelly’s invitation and Kanye’s assertion. By the genderwork of invitation and assertion. How collectives come to be.

reception
Digi-commentary on Kelly’s song has focused on how intensely personal it is, how confessional, even as many women have written they “know” and “feel” what she is saying. A chorus of voices who know what it means to “wear pain” and to hide in shame. A chorus of voices. Digi-commentary on Kanye’s song has focused on the “truth” he tells about our minoritized now. He speaks to and for us. His song is not understood as confessional, even though it pulses to “im’ma.” His “I” is understood as our “I.” He is the contemporary race man.

interface
Kanye’s song fantasizes about evading surveillance: “I move my family out the country / So you can’t see where I stay.” Kelly’s song discusses being isolated and ashamed by that isolation:

Nobody can know this
And I was trapped in his house, lyin’ to my mama
Thought it could get no worse as we maximize the drama
Started to call them people on him
I was battered

Family can be an alibi: a form of isolating and disciplining women in the name of protecting them.

representation
Whose stories get to be our stories? Whose stories are understood to have the weight, the force, the urgency that demands collective action? How does anger work? How does pain work? What kind of work must women do for us to understand “women’s work” as “our work”? The “dirty laundry” of racework is that it’s gendered and gendering, distinguishing between those taken to speak for themselves and those taken to speak for us and as us.

invitation
What would it mean to accept Kelly’s invitation? To “do dirty laundry” as a collective practice? What would it mean if we accepted that gendered violence is not an anomaly, that it is a collective problem, that it demonstrates lovelessness, and that anger is never enough?

Let’s do some dirty laundry.

Fragments on Love

“What’s love got to do with it?”
- Tina Turner
“You’re Gonna Love Me”
-Effie White

Black women singing anti-love and love-demanding songs written by white men. Tina Turner in my childhood memories, scandalously dressed, teaching me how to think about love.

Teaching us how to think about love:

I love you honey / was the dribbled caramel / of Hollywood
movies / . . . / words that / cost nothing / meant nothing
- Shailja Patel, Migritude

This is my darkest hour,
Write me off your list
There’s nothing left to say, and my glass is empty – anyway,
Just like the seat where you’d once been.
And I’m starting to doubt, even the things that I’ve seen.
So it’ll be easier, to pretend we never met.
Given time we will surely forget.
Fear not though, don’t despair,
I’ve still got your name tattooed on my blood
And I’m still here, and I’m cursed.
Cursed like you, dear.
-Tony Mochama, What If I am a Literary Gangster?

I understand love as callused and unspoken and lost. The thing whose loss is mourned, the thing always known and named in retrospect.

Objects in the rear view mirror.
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Of course I had to start with Tina. Don’t we always start with Tina?
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There are more poems celebrating parents loving their children in Kenya than there are poems about “romantic” love; we also have many other poems
about desire
(before love?)
and loss
(after love?)
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Today I believe in the possibility of love; that is why I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions.
-Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

All the great movements for social justice in our society have strongly emphasized a love ethic.
-bell hooks, All About Love

Fanon and hooks teach me that love cannot exist under conditions of inequality. In hooks’s terms, “There can be no love without justice.” I am finding this very difficult to understand.

Why is this so hard to understand?

Fanon and hooks are writing about romantic love (eros) and familial love (storgos). Both offer sociogenic views on love—sociogeny is Fanon’s term for the mutuality between the social and the psychic. A sociogenic view of love ruptures an idea of love as a refuge from the world’s depredations: love as something that happens in private, away from the eroding public, something that protects and salves and heals, something protected from a dangerous out there.
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What did the PEV do to love?

If we want to protect love, we might claim that the friends and lovers and spouses who abandoned each other did not truly love each other, because love “endures all.” This is what I’ve been thinking of as a “hygienic” view of love. Love cleansed of its “impurities” and “perversions.”

A hygienic view of love allows us to manage how love disorganizes: how we “should not feel” for “improper objects.” Even feeling can seem “improper.” From Sara Ahmed’s description of the stranger as the person who is known in advance as strange, I am thinking of how certain objects and scenes and occasions are labeled as lovable. And what happens when we turn from these scenes and objects of lovability to love elsewhere, to love “wrongly.”

What does it mean to think of love as a disciplinary capacity: “I don’t know why I love you.” “You are not what I expected.” “I’m surprised into loving.” All these statements register love as sociogenic rather than uniquely individual.

(“the heteronormative love plot is at its most ideological when it produces subjects who believe that their love story expresses their true, nuanced, and unique feelings, their own personal destiny,” Berlant, Desire/Love)

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I started by thinking about slave and colonial histories where the capacity to love was hierarchized: the enslaved did not value their kin and friends and sex-partners as much, the story goes, and so they could be readily separated. The work of love and unloving. It has always mattered who can love. Who is granted the capacity to love.

The capacity to love is racialized and racializing.
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Romantic love is a sticky web. One cannot write about love today without encountering it. It is the most dominant notion of love. It saturates everything.

Romance ideology . . . [depicts] sentiment or feeling as the essential and universal truth of persons. Feeling is what people have in common despite their apparent differences.
-Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love

Berlant ends somewhere I am inclined to go and so, perversely, I resist it.

Many people argue that love of the other is a powerful tool for bringing marginalized groups into the dominant social world; on the other hand, sentimental identification with suffering created by national, racial, economic, and religious privilege has long coexisted with laws that discriminate among particular forms of difference, privileging some against others.
- Berlant, Desire/Love

Cherríe Moraga writes, “I have sometimes hated my lover for loving me.” But then,

Loving in the war years
calls for this kind of risking
-Moraga, Loving in the War Years

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Against a hygienic view of love—love cleansed of “impurities” and “perversions”—or a cynical view of love as impossible because always tainted or doomed to fail, I have been wondering about “loving in the war years,” about the kinds of incoherent attachments we make and that happen because of and despite ourselves.

What is this thing I want to believe about love and why do I want it? Why do I think thinking about love matters? And why can’t the ideas line up properly?
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“What is Love”?
-Haddaway

Why not dance to a track associated with a comedy skit? Surely there are more important things to consider than love? Not to mention, as Berlant argues, “there is nothing more alienating than having one’s pleasures disputed by someone with a theory” (Desire/Love).
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I wanted to write on love from minority discourse, to see what had been said, who had said it, how they had said it, and how they came to say it.
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And I had fallen in love.
- James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

Compare this remarkable line from Baldwin’s 1984 Preface with how love appears in the “Autobiographical Notes,” the first essay in this 1955 collection of essays.

I hated and feared white people. This did not mean that I loved black people; on the contrary, I despised them, possibly because they failed to produce Rembrandt.

I love to eat and drink

I love to argue with people who do not disagree with me too profoundly

I love to laugh

I love America more than any other country in the world, and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually

Love is not absent in 1955; it is simply differently present. Its objects defined in careful, precise, unobjectionable ways. In 1955, Baldwin could not say he had “fallen in love.” He could in 1984. It makes a difference when love happens, how it can be narrated, and when it can be narrated.

But what kind of difference?
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One could say love is political. But this is not what I want to say. I’ve been trying to say love is sociogenic. And to figure out what it means to think of love as sociogenic: as registering the always porous traffic between the social and the psychic, as caught in the whirls and whorls of history, as flavored and tinged and hued by the now-here. One might imagine gauze or cheesecloth, though I’m not quite sure what this barrier is (psychic-skin). If we are to follow Fanon’s sociogenic prompting – he tells us how difficult this is: “There is a point at which methods devour themselves” – then it might seem necessary to construct a love archive (“The example is always the problem for desire/love”), but that, I think, is not quite right.

I have no interest in mystifying love. Nor am I particularly interested in defining it in some hygienic way. I am interested in its possibilities to index our present, in how to read its impress on our ongoingness. And how to read it as more than simply indexical.
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Love, Wambui tells me, is not opposed to anger. Love cannot thrive under conditions of domination. Love cannot thrive without justice. And I wonder what it means not only to love within the war years, but to fight for loving in the war years.

Feeling Thinking

Here’s James Baldwin:

I knew about the south, of course, and about how southerners treated Negroes and how they expected them to behave, but it had never entered my mind that anyone would look at me and expect me to behave that way. I learned in New Jersey that to be a Negro meant, precisely, that one was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of one’s skin caused in other people. I acted in New Jersey as I had always acted, that is, as though I thought a great deal of myself – I had to act that way – with results that were, simply, unbelievable. (“Notes of a Native Son”)

Baldwin’s “I” is rarely confessional, if by confessional we mean emotionally expressive or tending toward the sentimental. Most often, he writes as a recorder: “I went,” “I did,” “I experienced,” “I said.” Or else he writes about “the Negro” as an ethnographer. He wants to see what description will do, a description that will go beyond “statistics” but will not rely on the easy training-into-emotion that saturates U.S. life.

He knows—and I learn from him—the risk of the “I,” though I wonder to what extent the “I” that he will not risk is masculinized. It is not that an “I” is never risked; instead, that “I” is very controlled, very measured, even at its most condemning or exhorting.
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Men avoid women’s observations by accusing us of being too “visceral.”
– Audre Lorde, “Sexism: An American Disease in Blackface”

I have wondered what it means to risk “feeling thinking” (my debt to Sedgwick’s “touching feeling” is evident). Is thinking allowed to feel and is feeling allowed to think? Or, rather, how does feeling think and how might the thinking of feeling compel us to reassess what we mean by, and value as, thinking?

Gender cannot be absent here: what kind of feeling is understood as thinking and how is it valued depending on one’s embodiment? Is feeling recognized as thinking when issued from male-embodiment in a way that is denied to female-embodiment? Also, what kind of feeling counts as thinking and how is this tied to gender?

As Lorde reminds me, women who risk feeling thinking tend to be devalued while men who risk feeling thinking might get a hearing. The man who cries or shouts merits thinking, the story goes, because such feeling has weight, consequence, meaning. Women who cry or shout are understood to be expressing gender “properly.” Critique cannot take the form of feeling thinking. Or, rather, critique that takes the form of feeling thinking risks being dismissed depending on one’s gender.
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Literature 101 teaches that we cannot control the stories we tell, and perhaps least of all when those stories circulate. To write is to risk ceding all control over one’s story. It is no longer one’s story. It becomes available for other uses. But those uses have histories.

I have been thinking and writing about form, power, and affect for some time. I think a lot about formal strategies, about how the “I” functions, about the shape and nature of language, about how emotion circulates, about how it attaches to certain bodies and not to others. I have written quite a bit about race and feeling, about black disposability and the desire for black anger or black sadness. And, at the end of the day, I consider myself a theorist, someone who risks thinking. And, increasingly, someone who risks feeling thinking.

Fanon teaches me that minoritization functions by transforming feeling thinking into feeling. Feminism teaches me this lesson as well. The angry or sad or joyful or despairing or ecstatic minority is abstracted from the world, understood as an object of, variously, fear, resentment, compassion, sympathy, or pleasure. And, at least in the U.S., habits cultivated since at least Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin kick in.

Yesterday, while on campus, a white woman I’ve never spoken to had finally learned how to see me, with such overwhelming compassion that I felt sure another Uncle Tom’s Cabin was being composed. Because now I can be safely classified as “damaged.” There was a story. Or rather, a genre had made itself available. It’s intriguing to see oneself being placed within a genre.
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No math can ever begin to imagine or approximate the ongoing damage of racism. It is the U.S. condition. It is the subtext for school closings in Chicago, immigration discussions in Congress, internet memes, and profit-driven ecocide in the U.S. and abroad. And its effects are amplified across all spheres: the lesson of black disposability is that all other minoritized lives are equally disposable. To be minoritized is to be disposable.

To experience oneself as minoritized is to work within and against that disposability, whether through claiming respectability or staging a revolution. In either case, this is hard, tiring work that takes place against ongoing damage registered as exhaustion (at the end of the workday) or relief (when with friends and family). I am interested in the ongoing psychic work of living with racism and minoritization. In what “registers” in ways we are often unable to name or believe we have managed not to see. But ways that cut across and cut deep.
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Feeling thinking risks being dismissed as “complaint” or “noise”: “you people are always complaining,” the refrain goes. Or, in the register I now seem to be in, “I’m so sorry you are so damaged,” the sympathy goes. A sympathy that sees a single object, rather than what Lorde terms the “histories rallied against us.”

The risk of the feeling thinking “I” is that it will always be taken as singular, unusual, rather than multiple, representative. One is praised for the eloquence of collective pain and wonders how one was isolated from the group. One attempts feeling thinking and is apprehended as damaged feeling.

Reading Shailja Patel & Love

I am enthralled by the love poems in Migritude. By these too-brief moments of suspended forever:

You licked houmous
off my fingers
which is one way
to win an argument (“Love Poem for London”)

In this room, for one hour
let’s be easy in our skins
observe ourselves
with gentle curiosity
proffer and accept
selected morsels of our lives (“First Dates in Utopia”)

What the pleasures of the past offer to the future: the “houmous” in the past a promise about futures when “selected morsels” will be exchanged.

To claim Migritude is “about love” seems like a bad misreading, an attempt to escape the violent histories of “pain and joy,” the “battle cry for justice,” the desire for “testimony” and “survival” cited by those who blurb the book. It is all those. A cry from the depths of an unending now—the prolonged scream of Afghanistan, the unceasing sorrow of mothers, the bomb-changed landscapes once called home. But it is also about love.

“Eater of Death” is about a mother’s love. About a mother who calls her children’s names, who howls them in anguish, who whispers them into tiny crevices, who croons of love given and love ripped away, who does not know how to unlove the children ripped away from her. It reveals what a certain old-fashioned English calls “terrible love,” the anguish of love fully given, of a heart opened in ways science will never know.

But now I’m being disingenuous, because what I really want to write about is love’s deliciousness. And about playful love. And about world-building love. Also about pleasure.

It would be a mistake, I think, to answer the “why” that Migritude asks with “because of love” or “for love,” if only because love, terrible love, creates more than simply pleasure. Yet I think Migritude risks love in a way that brings me back to Delany.

As I recently confessed, I have been staring at this particular line from Delany for a year now: “You give me so much pleasure, why should I ever want to hurt you?” This line came back with particular force in reading this line from Migritude: “Give this pain to no one else.”
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Give this pain to no one else
-Shailja Patel, Migritude

If “love” could be paraphrased, I think it would be that: “Give this pain to no one else.” Wambui Mwangi reminds me constantly that women experience violence disproportionately, whether that be the quotidian violence of sexism and misogyny or the more spectacular violence of war and neoliberalism. And I think that line from Migritude is one of its most profound: Give this pain to no one else.

As uttered in Migritude, it is a prayer, a hope, an expectation, uttered to a distant transcendence, and perhaps it can only be uttered to a distant transcendence, because it asks for what seems impossible. But as Audre Lorde and Judith Butler remind me, a world-changing politics dares to dream the impossible, dares to question what is often considered unthinkable.
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(detour)

Alain Badiou describes love as a “cosmopolitan, subversive, sexual energy that transgresses frontiers and social status” (In Praise of Love). Let me dwell with Badiou for a little.

In Praise of Love opens inauspiciously, by tethering love to marriage and the heterosexual couple. And this: “inasmuch as love is a pleasure almost everyone is looking for, the thing that gives meaning and intensity to almost everyone’s life, I am convinced that love cannot be a gift given on the basis of a complete lack of risk.”

(“there is nothing more alienating than having one’s pleasures disputed by someone with a theory”)

[T]he conventional narratives and institutions of romance share with psychoanalysis many social and socializing functions. As sites for theorizing and imaging desire, they manage ambivalence; designate the individual as the unit of social transformation; reduce the overwhelming world to an intensified space of personal relations; establish dramas of love, sexuality, and reproduction as the dramas central to living; and install the institutions of intimacy (most explicitly the married couple and the intergenerational family) as the proper sites for providing the life plot in which a subject has “a life” and a future. (Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love)

“The second threat that love faces is to deny that it is at all important.” (Badiou)

The world is full of new developments and love must also be something that innovates. Risk and adventure must be re-invented against safety and comfort. (Badiou)

[L]ove really is a unique trust placed in chance. (Badiou)

The reduction of life’s legitimate possibility to one plot is the source of romantic love’s terrorizing, coercive, shaming manipulative, or just diminishing effects – on the imagination as well as on practice. (Berlant)

Love involves two. (Badiou)

Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world. (Badiou)

One has to understand that love invents a different way of lasting in life. That everyone’s existence, when tested by love, confronts a new way of experiencing time. (Badiou)

The fantasy forms that structure popular love discourse constantly express the desire for love to simplify living. (Berlant)

[A]s long as the normative narrative and institutionalized forms of sexual life organize identity for people, these longings mainly get lived as a desire for love to obliterate the wildness of the unconscious, confirm the futurity of a known self, and dissolve the enigmas that mark one’s lovers. (Berlant)

When I first read Badiou’s In Praise of Love, I was so infuriated by its couple-centric heteronormativity that after having read the kindle version, I subsequently deleted it. It could live on the “cloud,” not on my “device.” Berlant’s Desire/Love speaks back to Badiou, even though I note that she doesn’t cite him. But she doesn’t have to, because he simply exemplifies the problem of the romance plot when it is taken as “love.” In Desire/Love, Berlant is interested in the love plot or the romance plot, but I wonder if there’s something else, something more useful to be said about love, something more interesting that can look at the edges and beyond the edges of the love plot (or romance).

Can there be other narratives?

(re-route)
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I tell you this because I love you, and please don’t you ever forget it.
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

One can love.
- Richard Bruce Nugent

I have been thinking about love and the radical black tradition—one that includes innovative aesthetic practices and committed political actions. One recent (or recurrent) strand of black thinking insists that blacks have always participated in the love plot: romantic love and forms of hetero-commitment have always been central to black life, in slavery and in freedom. While I understand the value of this scholarship, I’m not very interested in it. If only because I take as banal, as ordinary, as unexceptional the facts of black love and commitment.

I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousand of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. – James Baldwin

We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived. – James Baldwin

Away from, and alongside, the love plot: love as survival.
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What is the work of pleasure?

I turn to “First Dates in Utopia” to find a glimpse of the possible: the “one hour” of being “easy” in one’s skin. What that one hour permits one to dream. How that dream enables other dreams. How dreams unfold into possibilities. How possibilities become tethered to risk. What it means to risk love when faced with evidence of life’s disposability. And to continue risking it.

I return to previous writing on love:

Loving creates scars, and those scars can turn into keloids. Loving produces blisters, and these blisters can turn into calluses. In fact, many of us believe that love wounds, and so we approach it callused, cynical, dismissive, considering it a game in which the winner is the ‘dumper’ rather than the ‘dumpee.’ Listen to young Kenyans discuss love, and you will often hear a profound cynicism, in which there are “no good men” and “no good women,” and so one has to “settle” or get someone “financially secure.”

We rarely hear about love, about the kind of love that makes us vulnerable, that dares us to risk our hearts, our lives, our commitments. We rarely hear about the love that allows us to transcend divisive ethnic politics. We rarely hear about the intimate, risky forms of loving that have the power to transform our social and political worlds simply by being public and daring to exist.

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I am experimenting with love. With making the word public, trying to make it circulate, insisting that it can do something. I am insisting that it must be part of any radical politics. And that the pull of radical politics must do something to our conceptions of it, our desires for it, our claims on it.

Incoherent Attachment

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.
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Perhaps I’m writing about Rihanna and Chris Brown.
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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.

On Possibility

It was done from a desire to live, to make life possible, and to rethink the possible as such.
– Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

I keep re-learning queer theory. More precisely, I keep learning from Judith Butler. I came to queer theory seeking a method through which to live. It offered one of the few spaces that something named as “me” could be, lost in wonder, amazed by the possibilities, the infinities of thinking beyond what was around me. Abstraction opens spaces, creates new worlds that can be thought and inhabited. I have stayed with queer theory because the “not yet” of the “could be” anchors a way of “being here.” (This impulse drives José Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia.)

What might it mean to think about possibility? What is possibility between and across lifeworlds?

Despite my best efforts—and perhaps because of them—the lifeworlds I imagine tend to be off-balanced, away from certain worlds I can’t inhabit. “Gay” is a lifeworld I can’t imagine or inhabit. And so I struggle to imagine what possibility might be for that particular lifeworld and those adjacent to it.

That struggle matters, if only so I can acknowledge the limits of my desire for other possibilities, my desire for thriving to happen in lifeworlds I do not know how to imagine.

I have been thinking about my reaction to Jason Collins coming out: I don’t get it. I sincerely do not get it. Partly, this is because I don’t follow sports and so I don’t really know much about sports culture. Partly, this is because the lifeworlds that interest me rarely intersect with those in the public eye: I’m interested in forms of unintelligibility and precarity that barely register as “living.”

Because of where my eyes turn, because of how my ear is tuned, because of the peculiar tracks my mind follows, I do not know how to think about “mainstream” U.S. life. I don’t know how to think about celebrities and their effects on young people. I don’t know how to think about the kinds of possibilities Collins has opened for others. And I’m not even sure I know how to value them.

This is a limit: there are places my imagination cannot go. There are worlds and possibilities I cannot imagine. And, perhaps, dare not.

If I had the ability, perhaps I could trace how illegible, unvalued, and undesirable lives and bodies have made Collins’s coming out possible. And I could also trace a story about the gay and lesbian celebrities in sports and entertainment whose lives in the spotlight have made Collins’s life possible. There are, of course, aspects of his decision to be public that are lubricated by the convention of coming out: truth to self, truth with the world, freedom from silence. Convention performs valuable labor.

Because, for better or worse, “gay” now marks a convention, even “black gay,” and because I don’t know how to inhabit that particular lifeworld (I’ve never learned its rules, languages, practices, habits, conventions, desires, imagination), I can only react to Collins’s announcement as an alien might experience on being told how to react to an unintelligible convention.

I write this because what I wanted to write felt too conventional, too automatic, too ungenerous in the mode of a certain predictable queer critique.

Learning from what I take to be the best impulses of queer thinking, what I now recognize as the difficulty of queer ethics: I’m grateful for the lives that Collins’s announcement has made more possible, including his own.

Privacy: Disclosure

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.

selective empathy

Following the explosions in Boston, Glenn Greenwald asked about “selective empathy.” He asked whether compassion could also be extended to victims of U.S. military aggression. The question has become more urgent as we learn more about who died in Boston, as lives are narrated and mourned, and we are asked to feel for a range of strangers, now made less strange through biography. Greenwald’s question is, broadly, about how strangers are made less strange, how feelings are mobilized to produce affiliations with strangers, how life is given value. It is also, I think, about indifference and pleasure.

Empathy is generally considered the capacity to put oneself in another’s situation through an act of the imagination. Its call to action is, “how would I feel if I were in that position?” Greenwald’s notion of “selective empathy” suggests that we choose when to extend this imagination. But what would compel such an extension? The ordinary facts of bad events and quotidian practices of oppression suggest that we are always choosing when to extend empathy. When is feeling called forth to extend the imagination?

In “Notes of a Native Son,” James Baldwin recounts his experiences working in a factory in New Jersey in 1942: “I learned in New Jersey that to be a Negro meant, precisely, that one was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of one’s skin caused in other people.” Baldwin’s writing on race relations—I think we need to emphasize the word “relations” more than we do, for race is a relation and is, of course, haunted by sex—tracks through a strange archive of feeling: anger and resentment, yes, but also love and indifference. He is interested in how “race” produces or fails to produce particular forms of relations. In the passage above, he is interested in how feeling becomes reflex or, rather, how to read feeling back into reflex.

How does one read the smile, the frown, the hug, the punch, the tensed muscle, the slack jaw that “marks” the race encounter or, more precisely, that racializes the encounter? How does one read the “reflex” of saturated histories that are not often acknowledged as histories? Or the saturation of affect produced as “race” today, be that through avowal, disavowal, hate, love, knowledge, ignorance, study, uninterest, disinterest, investment? How might one read or unread or reread those micromuscular movements that index race as bodily reaction? How might one track the peculiar pedagogy of minoritization that trains one to read such micromuscular movements?
*
“I don’t hate anyone.”

We tend, I think, to believe racist acts or statements are “intentional” and reveal a “deep” structure within someone. I am inclined to believe those who say their statements are “not intended to be” racist. This belief comes from an ongoing engagement with psychoanalysis, where the “slip” does not reveal the “truth” of self so much as the chaos of the unconscious.

Increasingly, especially because of teaching many students who proclaim we are “post-race” and so we don’t “think that way,” I am interested in race as a relation of indifference. What does it mean not to think that way? Or not to think of “that” at all? I am interested in the surprise expressed by so many students when they hear an action or statement described as “racist.” One might call this “privilege,” and perhaps it is, but I wonder if thinking through indifference might yield something else.

To be indifferent, I learn from Sara Ahmed (in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Queer Phenomenology, and The Promise of Happiness) is to have a certain affective disposition.

I find these definitions of “disposition” from the OED to be useful:

a. The state or quality of being disposed, inclined, or ‘in the mind’ (to something, or to do something); inclination (sometimes = desire, intention, purpose); state of mind or feeling in respect to a thing or person; the condition of being (favourably or unfavourably) disposed towards.

b. A frame of mind or feeling; mood, humour.

c. Physical aptitude, tendency, or inclination (to something, or to do something).

How might feeling have a disposition? How might it be oriented toward one thing and not another? How is imagination extendable to one thing and not another? How might race be a relation predicated on the disposition of feeling and the extension of imagination? How might a racist act be described as the absence of this imaginative extension and the muting of this disposition of feeling? Or, conversely, might a race relation be about saturated imagination and affect? In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison demonstrates the aesthetic effects of this imaginative failing: she argues that Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl is poorly developed because Cather is unwilling to extend the full capacity of feeling to her black characters.

Indifference traffics as: “I did not think you would mind”; “I did not think that was hurtful”; “I did not find that hurtful”; “you’re being too sensitive”; “I did not think”: “I did not know”; “I did not imagine”; “I could not imagine”

It is this last that captures indifference: I could not imagine.

As always, Fanon:

To speak gobbledygook to a black man is insulting, for it means he is the gook. Yet, we’ll be told, there is no intention to willfully give offense. OK, but it is precisely this absence of will—this offhand manner; this casualness; and the ease with which they classify him, imprison him at an uncivilized and primitive level—that is insulting.

If indifference is one element of race relations, then I think pleasure is an equally important one. Scholarship on slavery and lynching has demonstrated the immense pleasure taken in spectacles of black pain and suffering and death: the grinning faces of souvenir-bearing good folk at public lynching festivals should always arrest us (but see “indifference”).

But the pleasure of the relation of race is more: it is pleasure in black suffering and black death but also pleasure in black anger and black resentment, pleasure in oppression and pleasure in resistance. Race relations might, in fact, be about scenes where relations are produced as pleasure. This pleasure, as Baldwin demonstrates in Another Country, is, variously, shared, withheld, acknowledged, created, destroyed, melancholic, or future-directed. It is a pleasure that comes from being acknowledged, ignored, fetishized, voided. It is the pleasure that constitutes a “relation” and is “relation” in all its strange politics.

How does this “pleasure” relation relate to “selective empathy”? Are we inclined to extend empathy to those who pleasure us?

In Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand, Samuel Delany writes, “You give me so much pleasure, why should I ever want to hurt you?” I have been staring at this sentence for close to a year now. I don’t know what to do with it. Is this part of the radical politics a queer focus on pleasure can produce? I think Delany’s sentence demands something that my attachment to Fanon might not allow. I put it here to interrupt my (un)certainties about race relations.

Thinking about indifference and pleasure as key elements of oppression demands, I think, a stretch of the imagination. It means we can no longer presume (if ever we did) that disclosing systems of oppression or naming them will produce a moment of moral or ethical arrest, let alone reflection. I think that we must pay closer attention to the “it was a joke” response to critique, because that directs us to examine the pleasure of domination and the pleasure of indifference and what happens when those pleasures are threatened.

The Wound and The Scream

The complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound.
—Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”

The patience of the scream has no limits.
—Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions

I have been writing the wound and the scream. Possessed by the thing I invited to haunt me because it needed a habitation, a place from which its scars could be traced through language. It is a long-memoried thing, a deeply pained thing, a scream comprised of a chorus of echoes long believed to have faded. But the wound remains and the scarring is partial, and it pulses with the anger of being forgotten, refuses to remain silent, screams persistently, patiently, longingly.

I have been writing the sounds of whispers from deep night conversations, whispered so softly they barely exist, with such hesitation that language fractures, with such pain that meaning cannot bear the weight of the word “is.” I have been writing the sounds of whispers issued so reluctantly, and so insistently, whispers I am urged to forget, whose tellers look away rather than admit the truths they dare not inhabit.

I have been writing the tearing of grief, the flesh held together by thorns. A song beyond the registers of hearability, in the microtonalites of grief, hums persistently. It presses on the now with its insistent, arrhythmic beat. In the abyss there is madness. In the void there is losing. In the darkness there is threat. One risks being unraveled. I am disorganized. And still the scream persists.

I have been writing fragments I was never supposed to know and stumbled upon in the petrified bark of long-forgotten trees. I chase after minims in passing winds, quavers in whirling dust, and dare to promise I will listen to the chorus of patient screams. I search for notes long enough and deep enough and strong enough to index loss. I look for scores that will not crumble when confronted with screams lingering as echoes, instruments that will not shatter when playing impossible screams.

And the wound remains to be written.

The wound in its persistent wounding. The wound that will not heal. The wound that is continually wounded. The wound that is layered by the impossibility of scarring. The wound as fresh now as it was in a then that cannot be remembered. The wound of time in time. The wound that is now and seems to have always been.

We have forgotten the time before the wound. Are unable to imagine the wound has not always been. Are afraid to imagine a world without the wound. Fear losing the wound we have always been carrying around.

I have been writing the wound whose persistence we crave and fear. I have been writing the persistent wound we dare not admit exists. The wound whose collective forgetting allows our collective being. The wound that stitches “I” to “we.”

I have been writing the wound and the scream, the precarious “we” and the unraveling “I.” I am gazing into the void, and I am still scared.

Wailing

A man in Kisumu is wailing. He will have to be my proxy as it’s easier to write about someone else’s tears. He is not wailing because Raila Odinga lost this election. That is what a cynical, narrow view of Kenyan politics would say. He is crying because, along with all the other Kenyans who watched the proceedings of the Supreme Court, he saw compelling evidence that the elections lacked credibility. As Kethi Kilonzo argued in court, the process was flawed. Consequently, we cannot trust the results.

He remembers, I think, that the most damning claim from the Kriegler Report was that widespread rigging made it impossible to determine who had won the election. We needed this election to be credible. We needed to move on from the 2007 election by believing that our voices had been heard. That we could trust the electoral body and its processes. The IEBC might have been cleared by the Supreme Court, but they lost whatever trust we had in them. I do not trust their processes. I do not trust their results. I am not willing to entrust them with Kenya’s future.

This man is crying, also, because he believed in the Supreme Court. He believed that presented with compelling evidence that cast doubt on the credibility of the election, the justices would try to assuage our radical doubts, would try to reassure us that we could trust our electoral processes, no matter how long it took to get to the truth.

In their arguments before the court, the lawyers for Africog, of whom Kethi Kilonzo was one, argued that they were representing Wanjiku. Wanjiku represents the ordinary mwananchi, the one most vulnerable to fluctuations in power. Wanjiku is not protected by armed guards and fierce dogs and gated communities. When hell breaks loose, Wanjiku is caught in it: as the injured, the killed, the raped, the dispossessed, the disenfranchised. Wanjiku’s voice is rarely heard. And if it were, it’s not clear that it would be understood.

This man from Kisumu is Wanjiku. He saw evidence of a flawed process presented on television and wanted the court to know that he saw this evidence and he demanded an accounting. He wants the fragile faith he had invested in Kenyan institutions—the electoral body, the Supreme Court—to stay alive.

Instead, something was killed.

He was wailing—is still wailing, as long as that video clip exists—to mourn the death of something he needed to believe in: a process that made sense to him. A process that was not governed by an arcane maze of rules and processes, so arcane that Wanjiku can never negotiate it.

He is wailing because he discovered, as I did, that the law is not set up to give voice to the disenfranchised. The law is set up to follow rules.

And this is what I find most wounding.

I have no doubt that when the Supreme Court releases its judgment it will have followed all the rules. I have no doubt that it will be legally sound and might even become a famous case study for legal scholars across the world. I have no doubt that those invested in the minutiae of the law will find this case endlessly rewarding.

I simply can’t care about that.

I care because, along with many other Kenyans who followed the elections and monitored the results, I doubted the credibility of what was being announced. I care because, along with many other Kenyans who followed the case in court, I heard and saw compelling evidence that the elections were not credible. I care because, along with many other Kenyans who have invested their energy, their love, and their devotion to this country, I want to have institutions we can trust, and want to believe that after 50 years where Wanjiku has had no voice, she can finally be heard.

We wail because Wanjiku has been told what she sees, what she hears, what she feels is irrelevant. We wail because Wanjiku has been told that arcane rules trump the truth she knows. We wail because a faith we wanted to have has been decimated.

Something has died.