Alien vs. Immigrant

She asks if I’m an alien. For a moment, I am rendered silent. We are looking at a legal form, so the question has a context. Still, it is not a question that one is asked regularly. I mention that it is a strange question, and she replies that she was once an alien.

She prefers alien to (non)immigrant.

Within a few sentences, I glean that immigrant connotes criminality for her. Immigrants are a cluster of associations, none of which she wants to claim. Proximity is contagious, and categories leak.

This is also a conversation about constructing whiteness, and about an invitation extended to me to ally myself with whiteness against the racialized, criminalized (because racialized) immigrants.

I wonder, and will not pursue this thought here, how the ongoing discourse on immigration over the past many years has shaped forms and practices of identification. It seems strange to me that one should prefer “alien” to immigrant.

Alien. Immigrant. Foreigner.

We talk long enough for me to know that she is politically conservative. Lou Dobbs flashes across my mind. He has provided a language and framework that joins whiteness to anti-immigration sentiments, and urges white immigrants to distance themselves from brown immigrants, in her case to embrace alien over immigrant.

This distaste for immigrant now can live comfortably with the patriotic sentiment that America is a nation of immigrants. Because, back then, immigrants “looked like us.” Angel Island has yet to become as famous or recognized as Ellis Island, after all.

I remain struck by the claim “I was once an alien,” and what it suggests about citizenship and belonging, about assimilating and being assimilated, about passing—isn’t it striking how white illegal immigrants are “put on the road to citizenship” on tv? How whiteness enables aliens to become unalienated. Not immigrant. White.

Playing Sex & Safe Sex

The phrase “playing sex” lives at the junctions of class, age, geography, and education. My parents’ generation—those rural to urban pioneers, provincial to cosmopolitan mediators, history makers and consumers—use it. It is also a phrase found among domestic workers, rural to urban migrants, younger children. It conveys the difficulty of translating across life-worlds: from rural languages to urban stutters, from sensation to language, from pleasure to function. It allows for a deceptively simple binary: sex for play and sex not-for-play, a simplistic binary because it cannot quite distinguish between “play” and “not-for-play” and so must retain the term “play.”

I have just started reading Tim Dean’s Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking and, as always, I am provoked and enriched by his writing. I have yet to complete and process the book, at which time I might have something more coherent to write. I will note, though, that I’m thrilled Tim has taken on sexual spaces and practices seriously without sacrificing the sex—queer studies has become far too asexual for my taste. I am, of course, as guilty of this as anyone. There are, of course, questions of time and space: it’s harder to read semen stains in colonial archives. And while the historian’s insistence that “it’s undeniable” or “highly likely” or “logical to assume” sounds nice, it’s not really what interests me. Digression.

Tim’s book is stirring an old Foucauldian-flavored cauldron on what we mean by “safe” sex and how “desirable” such sex might be. It’s a peasant cauldron, chock-full of concepts and ideas, debates I have with myself and other wiser interlocutors. Tim argues, for instance, that we can destigmatize the notion of bareback sex if we think of it as condomless sex, a strategy that allows us to include many heterosexuals who do not use condoms. (I must admit, the hetero-conceit that “pregnancy” is the “only” thing out there continues to drive me nuts.) At the same time, I am not yet convinced that condomless sex or raw sex or sex “kimwili” is necessarily more intimate. It might be “faster” or “more convenient” or might shave a few seconds off an act. But condomless sex can be just as frustrating, a clumsy, as aggravating, as condom sex: that hyper-tight bottom will still need a jar full of lube and 30 minutes to prep.

Safe sex, and here, I admit, I use an outdated term, as these days we talk about safer sex practices, sounds like a more boring proposition. And Tim’s use of psychoanalysis to think about “risk” is welcome. It is all the more welcome because he thinks about the deliberate choice to forgo condoms, and here, there’s a useful bridge to be forged between Tim’s work and Robert Reid-Pharr’s recent thinking on choice for African Americans. (The conceptual labor involves bridging a method between Tim’s anti-psychological, psychoanalytic approach and Reid-Pharr’s political, a-psychoanalytic method, not here, not now.)

Space becomes crucial in registering how “boring” safe sex practices can be. Be it in an ABS or a bathhouse or sex store or in a public park or the porn theaters Samuel Delaney describes so lovingly or even the multiple semi-anonymous hookups some of us prefer (there’s choice) to pursuing relationships: the frisson of meeting, fucking, and leaving is incalculable. And while I’m still skeptical about claims to greater intimacy, the silent invitation to fuck a stranger, an ass pressed up against a gloryhole, for instance, has a certain psychic value. Or the sensation of a blowjob turned into a fuck, the change in texture and wetness, this bears its own thrill.

I am trying to think, here, of how the idea of “playing sex” captures something quintessential that might be put in useful tension with “safe sex.” I am also trying to be disingenuous about “safe sex” by taking it as a metonym for “managing sex.” I think, for instance, about Kenyatta’s claim that sex among the Gikuyu is “orderly” and “organized.” And how this “stance” (pun intended) colors his discussion of a group jerk-off. It is neither messy nor homo, simply young boys “practicing” for married life. Group masturbation among boys trains for married life—like how to join the all-male jerk-off group for married men, limited touching allowed. (Look online to find your local chapter.) Yes, I’m slightly distracted.

On and off over the years, I have thought about how “playing sex” allows us to re-think sexual feel and what we do, and how we do to feel and feel to do. I am no longer as interested as I once was in “contesting” identity categories. I am more interested in how categories bend and flex, accommodate more than we think possible even while creating exclusions at points of bend and flex and bulge and extend. That I return where I “started” many years ago, to “the body” and its movements to provide material and metaphor is both fortuitous and thrilling—the map is not totally strange, though its territories have expanded.

The ever-prescient Essex Hemphill writes, (I misquote) “Now we think as we fuck / this nut might kill me.” My question has always been why the fucking continues given the “risk.” When I dare, I ask how can the fucking not continue.
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I have abstained, here, from a set of rhetorical gestures that would “acknowledge” how “dangerous” and “unthinking” and “politically damaging” this post and its implications might be. I abstain because I am interested in pursuing a kind of dangerous honesty, of “daring” an embodied truth-seeking and truth-telling, no matter how partial.

The politics of outing

Recent news that Kenyans are being outed online has me thinking about outing as context, and how one comes to occupy the political.

Within the context of outing, one’s individual wishes and political stance are subsumed by another narrative. One is positioned as a homosexual, hailed as such, and must respond within the structure so created, a structure in which non-response is not possible. One need not respond to one’s accusers, but one responds to those who know one: family, friends, even to the email that offers information and sympathy.

Those who have been placed within the context of outing are now, for better or worse, the faces, names, and lives affiliated with homosexuality. Being outed—and, here, the “fact” of one’s actual sexuality does not matter—colors one’s past and present, rewrites histories of friendship and intimacy, and changes, as well, the meaning of space. One’s convenient “local” might become a “gay friendly” space in some re-tellings.

At the same time, one’s friends, acquaintances, and family come under renewed scrutiny. I am told, for instance, that whispers about me continue to circulate—all the more, I suspect, when I am in Nairobi. I am paranoid enough to believe this.

Once outed, one is drawn into a political space one might not have wanted to occupy. It is not only the space created by what one says or wants to say, but also the space created by those who wrestle over one. Those who agree, those who disagree, those who propose, those who oppose. One is caught in tangles not of one’s making.

One becomes co-opted. One is marked as a “queer” Kenyan or a “gay” Kenyan or a “lesbian” Kenyan, and then asked to speak for that collectively imagined identity. Dear X, what do gay Kenyans think about y? Some of us have accepted this position, others of us have viewed it skeptically, yet one’s words, particularly if one writes, can always be taken as “evidence” of widely held sentiments. One can start feeling responsible to others.

In fact, rather than outing telling the “truth” about a person, it creates a context around a person, a space-place-time that is suffused with multiple forms of desires. A very drunk neighbor who had never really paid attention to me once made a clumsy pass when he discovered I was “that way.” It was, I suspect, less my charms that overwhelmed him and more the chance for him to tell another kind of story about himself. (I must say that his clumsiness made me wonder about all the women he supposedly “bagged.” Was this how he “tuned” them? Or was this yet another example of how gay men don’t need “tuning” because we are “more direct”? Seduction still happens in bathhouses and bookstores.)

It is this cluster of desires around one that I term “the political,” borrowing from Lauren Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism. To be outed in a country that provides no official spaces or languages for recognizing outing is to become subject to a host of desires, some friendly, some not, some lustful, some not. One becomes marked. Many years ago, when I first came out, my mother composed a grand narrative of my life that, in retrospect, sounds like something from Austin Powers. I was a mad party animal bottom. Her terms, not mine. When I asked how I found time to study as a mad party animal bottom, she replied, quite rationally, that I was a mad party animal bottom from Friday through Sunday. (In truth, I went out Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and was relatively asexual, which I made up for in that glorious year I turned 24. Ahhh, 24!) (A confession, happy now?)

It is, of course, a very different thing to be a relatively anonymous blogger (though I use my real name) writing from the states (though I visit Kenya) when one has not lived in Kenya for many years (14 this year!). I do not have the webs of affiliation that run through Nairobi, the people met through work and clubs, the people who know people who know people, and thus my being “out” remains abstract, and will probably do so until I get booked on a tv show in Nairobi to talk about being queer. Interesting prospect. Will never happen.

In contrast, those who have been outed are embedded within Nairobi (I presume), are known enough that their names being made public begins to realign spaces around them, begins to rearrange desires around them. Desires from those who now malign them, those who now desire them, even to desire more about them, desires that move erratically, creating a field we might term “the political.” Now, it’s really quite irrelevant whether those “outed” had already been out before. As any queer who has done queer 101 knows, one is always being placed in a situation to come out—my mother’s friends are asking to see my wife. This I take as a joke. And one struggles to navigate attachment and obligation. What will it cost to “out” myself? What will it cost my mother? Even as she knows and disavows. That’s another narrative.

One is drawn into a political in which one’s presence, one’s life, serves as “evidence,” not least to international allies. At such moments, one realizes that one is haunted by afterlives.
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It has been necessary, here, to construct a “one,” to defer the (auto)biographical that would become intrusively and unnecessarily pedagogical. The politics of outing are never simple, never uncomplicated, and never easily resolved. It is less a single, singular process than an ongoing negotiation in which one negotiates others’ wishes, desires, fears, hopes, and expectations.

I confess this post feels belated—the “outing” took place weeks ago, and so far I have learned nothing new, but I have also not been looking. To track “outing” as anticipation is impossible—I have not yet learned to see around corners.

I have written, previously, about the dangers of homophobic discourse within a space that does not have any homosexual discourse. In such a space, outing becomes impossible as an affirmative gesture. Yet, isn’t it precisely in such impossible spaces that we have become possible?

Samuel Delaney writes that “coming out” used to mean coming out into a homosexual community, not as a performance of truth to gazing heterosexuals. I do not use the word community much, and do not trust it. But it can be a powerful thing to imagine, and wonderful to belong.

Such belonging might be one necessary, useful, and pleasurable afterlife.

Defending Human Rights

Over the past few months, I have found myself in the strange position of defending human rights activists to leftist/progressive Kenyans. It is a strange position because it feels so out-of-fashion, so out-of-date, so yesterday. And it indicates that yesterday’s poison lingers in our collective bloodstream. I get ahead of myself. Let me choose an arbitrary starting point.

Dissident was a filthy word in Moi’s Kenya. Those people wanted to destroy the Kenyan family that was guided by baba Moi. (We cannot overlook what happens when kinship relations supersede political ties, even and especially through metaphor, and the dire consequences for constitutionally defined rights and protections.) And they were funded by Kenya’s enemies: not Uganda, not Tanzania, not even India, (I choose arbitrary countries), but those terrible human rights people. My childhood memory tells me Amnesty had a terrible reputation in Moi’s Kenya. Human rights were “western impositions.”

I should explain, here, my continual return to Moi’s Kenya. I am not arguing that every current Kenyan framework derives from the Moi era. Such an argument truncates the multiple histories that feed into Kenya today. Instead, I am interested in the persistence of attitudes and ideas, and their subsequent appropriations and transformations. And, given my experiences over the past few months, it’s quite clear that we need to interrogate our attitudes toward human rights and other human-service organizations.

Let us not forget Moi’s ongoing claim that human rights organization and individuals were funded from abroad and were corrupt and corrupting. Ironically, this belief continues to circulate in various forms today, and leftist/progressive writers and thinkers disavow human rights organizations and individuals, claiming that they are tainted, “in it for the money,” in bed with power.

Unfortunately, this claim, predominantly hinged on “I have seen and I know,” authorizes a lazy dismissal of all human rights organizations and individuals, who are all “tainted.” And when human rights groups try to mobilize action or stage protests, we can then dismiss them as performing “stunts,” because they are “well funded” from abroad.

I am left to wonder how much money is given so that human rights activists can be arrested and assaulted, as happened with my friend, Philo Ikonya; how much is given so that activists can be arrested and held in secret locations and separated from their children, as happened with Jayne Mati; how much is available so that activists can sit in their cars and be executed; how much money is available so that activists are forced to go into hiding, afraid for their lives.

Leftist/progressive Kenyans distrust human rights actions and activities, and, in doing so, they sacrifice needed coalitions and lose potential allies.

One reply I have heard when staging this argument: “we don’t need those kinds of allies.” And this reply worries me a lot.

It is a reply that drinks deeply in Kenyan cynicism, wallows in political depression, sighs dramatically about the “state we’re in,” and demands untainted purity from potential “allies.” This reply justifies apathy in the name of wisdom, laments the absence of “good people” while flinging mud on everyone around.

It is an impossible demand couched as a reply, and I am interested in what it makes impossible, and also what it licenses.

To begin with the latter, what it licenses: it is not simply that all human rights activists are dismissed, but that a scale of value is created in which class status distinguishes between the “good” and “bad” activists. Those from the middle and upper-middle classes, those with advanced degrees, and, arguably, greater cultural capital, are suspect. In contrast, community workers with “bona-fide” credentials of the “I was born and work with ‘the people’” become lionized, not simply lionized, but fetishized. Thus, we who disdain middle-class activists readily speak with great eloquence about “real activists” doing “real work” in Kangemi and Kibera and so on.

That “we” who speak with such approval are invariably middle-class is its own particular irony, as we keep searching for “authentic” spokespeople, ashamed of ourselves and skeptical of our own motives and abilities, except as “champions” for those who “need championing.” There is something incredibly disingenuous about this position. And dangerous, for this is not a “learning from below” so much as it is a fetishizing of class origins and status.

Such championing of others “not of our class” also absolves us of any need to put ourselves on the line: after all, why get involved when “born and bred there activist” already knows the terrain so well?

Of course fetishizing class origin helps to police class status: if we cannot trust ourselves, as the middle and upper-middle classes, to work with altruism for human rights, then we shouldn’t work in human rights at all, and should leave such labor to those who are “real” and “genuine.” The logic is perverse, pervasive, and self-serving.

As part of this perverse logic, the only space available for middle and upper-middle class human rights activists is as martyrs. At such a moment, class protectionism melds with class-based fear, and we grudgingly allow that human rights work in Kenya might be dangerous for us. (A criminally irresponsible article has recently suggested that Kenya’s human rights activists should be executed. I mention it but cannot link to it because it is criminally irresponsible.)

To some extent, human rights activism also suffers from a problem of tone: Kenyan commentators have perfected satire. And we have come to understand satire as the best kind of critique. Against satire’s sharp bite, the earnest tone of much human rights activism elicits sneers and yawns.

Why aren’t activists more entertaining? And shouldn’t all activism be satire? I cannot, here, begin to outline the limits of satire as critique, and will leave that task for another person, or another day.

To return to an earlier question: what is made impossible by the demand that human rights individuals and organizations be free of taint?

I am not, here, justifying corruption or cronyism or nepotism. Instead, I am interested in the formal operation of metonymy to discredit all human rights activism. Metonymy is when a part stands in for a whole, and it is pervasive in dismissing human rights activism.

Yet another irresponsible article, not criminal, but irresponsible, demonstrated such metonymy when it claimed that it’s possible to see a vehicle belonging to a human rights advocate parked outside the houses of known criminals. Metonymy: one vehicle represents all vehicles, one presumably corrupt activist represents all activists. I need not continue. You see the (ill)logic.

I have no answers, no recommendations, and have certainly not posed all the questions that need to be posed, but it’s vital that we re-think our positions toward human rights activists. A lot is at stake.

The Tragedy of Bantu Mwaura

Update: Shailja Patel has details on memorial/funeral arrangements

Breaking news that Bantu Mwaura has been found dead.

Bantu was a human rights activist and university lecturer. He received his Ph.D. in performance studies from New York University. He was a poet and had published in English, Gikuyu, and Kiswahili, and was also a thespian, director, and storyteller.

I have yet to confirm the circumstances of his death. Assassination and suicide are the two competing narratives.

There are many tragedies here, and I choose an idiosyncratic one: human rights defenders have been assassinated in the past few months, allegedly by government forces. As a result, every single suspicious death of a human rights activist is clouded, and the tag cloud is dominated by government-funded figures.

A few weeks ago, I was on a panel with Dr. Wangui wa Goro, and she drew a parallel between the Moi-era exiles of intellectuals (to which she belongs) and the current Kenyan migrants abroad (to which I belong). I resisted the comparison. I wanted to say it was not applicable, that the Moi-era exiles had been exceptional. After all, they were the Nyayo-house generation: freed from the British to be tortured by the Kenyans.

Now, I am less certain about my resistance.

Under Moi, we survived through a necessary paranoia—the rumors and whispers that allowed some to leave their homes before government agents came for them.

I had thought, mistakenly, that paranoia was no longer necessary. I had thought, wrongly, that life-saving gossip was a no-longer necessary Kenyan genre. While I know Kenya is impossible for me, I had thought others like me, intellectuals, artists, dreamers, and visionaries, could flourish, create art, transform society, as only intellectuals can. I thought that human rights activists could help create a more just Kenya.

It is difficult to let go of this dream. And it is difficult to watch friends and loved ones continue to make themselves visible and vulnerable, because they believe in the promise of Kenya, and they believe their actions can make a difference.

I did not know Bantu Mwaura, but I have close friends who did. Some agreed with his politics, others didn’t. And I repeat, again, I don’t know the exact circumstances of his death.

Bantu, do not rest in peace.
Haunt us.
Whisper to us in our dreams.
Give flesh to our visions and urgency to our actions.

Kenya’s Marriage Bill

In a recent article, Judy Thongori advises Kenyans to read and understand the Marriage Bill, which was introduced into parliament in 2007. As she rightly notes, “Marriage affects all of us at one time in life, whether it is our marriages, our parents’ marriages, or those of our children.” This bill, Thingorip continues, will be the first time that Kenya’s marriage laws have been reconsidered since 1962.

Before explaining the content of the law, Thongori argues, “Our family values and experiences must enrich this law.” Indeed they must.

The Marriage Bill privileges heterosexual marriage as the ideal union that receives recognition and privileges within the law. For instance, Part IV, Matrimonial Rights, Liabilities and Status, notes,

either spouse is presumed to have authority to pledge the other spouse’s credit, or to borrow money in his or her name, or to use any of his or her money which is in his or her possession or under his or her control, or to convert his or her movable property into money, and use it, so far as that credit or money is required or used for the purchase of necessaries for himself or herself and any children of the marriage, and so far as is reasonable having regard to the other spouse’s means and way of life.

Although this section of the bill protects both men and women by providing them access to jointly shared and created assets, it also discriminates against the many Kenyans who share households but are not married. It discriminates against those men and women who live with their parents, those siblings who share houses, and friends who live together. After all, bills are bills, whether owed by a married couple or siblings who live together.

We cannot presume that marriage is based on a commitment so profound that it trumps other kinds of social attachments. Many of us are pledged to take care of our parents, siblings, friends, and other loved ones, and those pledges are not recognized by a system that recognizes marriage as the privileged social bond.

Family values in Kenya are not restricted to monogamous marriages, nor even to marriages. They are drawn from our extended families, the obligations we have for distant cousins and adopted relatives, the habits of care that we extend to each other as citizens. Family values cannot and should not be an excuse to discriminate against other Kenyans.

The Marriage Bill discriminates against Kenyans with same-sex partners and companions, who cannot get married.

We need to remember that this Marriage Bill was introduced into parliament shortly after the contentious Sexual Offences Act passed. An earlier draft of the Sexual Offences Act had to be revised when conservative members of parliament argued that the Act seemed to decriminalize homosexuality.

Moreover, Kenya is not immune to world forces, and we have followed debates over homosexual marriage in South Africa, where it is legal, and the United States, where it is available in some States, not all. Homosexual marriage has been debated by various church organizations, creating fractures in both the Presbyterian and Episcopalian churches.

Let us be very clear about this: this bill is for heterosexual marriage and against homosexual marriage. After all, it defines marriage as “the voluntary union of a man and a woman intended to last for their life time.”

In fact, this bill is so threatened by the very idea of same-sex marriage that it does not even prohibit homosexual marriage!

Out of sight, out of mind. If it cannot be mentioned then it cannot exist. Apparently, Kenya has no homosexuals, and certainly none who are interested in establishing long-term relationships that would receive the same marriage benefits as heterosexuals.

As written, the bill is discriminatory.

Yet, as Thongori notes, it is an important bill, and one that will help Kenyans by providing legal guidance about marriage.

If Kenya is to become a more just society, a fairer society, a place where individual rights are not sacrificed on the altars of conservatism and bigotry, then we must re-think this Marriage Bill.

We must understand that so-called family values should not trump the obligations we have toward each other to act as ethical citizens, bound together by the constitution that guarantees our rights. When we privilege “family values” over the constitution, we fragment into ethnic enclaves and class-protected cocoons, eager to defend our own against external threats.

To amend Thongori, then, we need to consider how our values as citizens should inform this bill. Not our family values, but the values we share as Kenyans. This, I suspect, is a far more difficult question to answer. What values do we share as Kenyans? What do we wish for each other? How do we enhance each others’ lives?

A marriage bill based on these questions would be, I suspect, a radically different beast. It would look at how we actually live, not idealize marriage as the form we should inhabit. It would note, for instance, the many young people who have longstanding relationships that do not culminate in marriage. It would look at homes composed of parents and children or siblings or friends, and consider them equal to the marriage home. It would look at different sex and same-sex relationships, and understand that love and passion are not limited by the sex of one’s partner.

A marriage bill based on the values of an ethical citizenship would ask about the obligations we owe each other as Kenyans. As Kenyans, we owe each other the rights guaranteed by the constitution. We owe each other the right to pursue freedom and even happiness. Our goal as Kenyans should be to expand freedom for each other, not to create needless, discriminatory barriers in the name of family values.

Meet the New Dissidents: Activists

Children growing up in Moi’s Kenya knew their basic words: cat, dog, man, woman, dissident. A dissident was a “bad man or woman” who “did not love Kenya” and wanted to do “bad things” that might give “baba Moi” pain. Dissidents were un-Kenyan.

In fact, the label dissident was applied indiscriminately, and strategically so, to anyone who departed from the party line, who refused to follow “nyayo” and to uphold law and order. Dissidents were disorderly, wanted to cause chaos, spread foreign ideas like communism, and dared to criticize the government.

Once accused of being a dissident, one lost whatever constitutionally guaranteed rights existed. The dissident became an object of fear in the popular imagination.

It’s important to write this from a child’s perspective. It was not clear what dissidents would do. They were like irimu or ogres, creatures in folk tales who wreaked terrible havoc on the worlds they visited, breaking up families, eating children, destroying resources. Dissidents, to borrow from feminist Sara Ahmed, were objects of fear and anxiety, though it was unclear what they would actually do.

It was precisely because we did not know what they would do that they became capable of anything. University lecturers, such as Maina wa Kinyatti, were tortured and imprisoned for teaching about class struggle and for critiquing the government, ideas that might infect students who might then demand forms of social and economic justice from the Kenya they inhabited.

The rhetoric of dissidence turned citizens on one another: we adopted what Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling terms “constant vigilance,” fearful that our proximity to would-be dissidents would implicate us in their actions and so willing to turn on would-be dissidents. We learned how to offer the thinnest, meanest pieces of evidence against each other and, like the hood-wearing Gikuyu who turned on their friends, family, and neighbors by identifying them as Mau Mau collaborators, we adopted hoods to abandon each other.

Dissidents had to be controlled. Dissidents had to be purged. We had to protect our families. We had to protect Kenya.

As a literary scholar, I study how ideas sediment and remain available to be used later. Thus, for instance, we have found that ideas used to describe class relations in sixteenth-century England were later adopted to describe race relations. The poor were described as dirty and lascivious, unwilling to work and wasteful. These ideas became key to describing non-white individuals that white Europeans encountered as they traveled to other parts of the globe.

Ideas do not fade from history. They move between bodies and histories. They circulate, now attaching to this body now attaching to that one. In our most recent histories, we have seen how ideas attached to the poor and foreign—they are socially dangerous, they bear threat—have attached to brown bodies in the aftermath of 9/11. Racial profiling, once restricted mostly to black citizens in the U.S., is now also attached to brown bodies, and even black citizens adopted techniques of surveillance against brown bodied subjects.

While we may not use the word “dissident” right now, the idea of the dissident continues to circulate and to shape our social imaginaries. Dissidents destroy Kenya. And are especially threatening to the upper-middle and middle classes who survived the Moi years by learning how to watch each other and laying low.

Activists are the new dissidents.

They are “disorderly” do not “know how to behave,” threaten “peace,” and are “funded from abroad.” They are objects to be feared and hated, precisely because they want “to destroy” Kenya.

A recent newspaper report claims that a demonstration by university students was peaceful until “activists” joined in and disrupted it.

The message: Beware of Activists.

The very same ideas once used about dissidents are now being used to demonize activists and activism. And we are drinking the kool-aid, as the Americans would say.

In part, this is because ideas do not fade from history. They live in our minds and bodies and once re-watered by the rain of familiar language bloom and flower.

Indeed, it is striking that during these years of multi-party rule, we have not had any sustained discussion of how the idea of the dissident circulated and helped to create us as fearful citizens, willing to turn on each other to maintain order. In this supposedly new era, the dissident remains an object of fear and ridicule, a disordered and disorderly jigger in our nyayo-following feet.

And because we have not yet deconstructed the idea of the dissident, the ideas of dissidence, what it is and what it does, remain available to be re-used by the State to control our actions and make us turn on each other.

It is sad that in a Kenya that we all supposedly want to change, the very individuals willing to stake their lives and bodies, our vocal, proud, courageous activists, the very individuals who are dying for us, are among the most maligned and misunderstood. They are “disorderly,” lack “reason,” should “know better,” and “threaten Kenya’s peace.”

Why do we believe this? Why are we willing to stand back and buy into this rhetoric? Why are we so willing to embrace the fear of change that was fed to us in our nyayo milk?

Even those of us who claim to be progressive malign activists and activism. And this is a tragedy.

We are still haunted by the fear and paranoia that the Moi era produced, and getting rid of it will require more than one exorcism.

We cannot wait until our activists become martyrs for us to get upset and demand that “government do something.” And we must question our distaste for activists and our love for martyrs, yet another painful legacy of the long colonial and post-colonial era: many of us would, no doubt, have hated Dedan Kimathi during his period of activism. But his image has become an object of reverence precisely because he can be contained in the past.

Activists are our new dissidents. We fear them because they might disrupt our nice lives, nice lives in which we can complain about the government while attending “functions” at nice places and eating nice meals. Those silly activists threaten the niceness of our lives.

Change will come, of course. There’s no need to be loud and disorderly. Change will come in a nice way that will not disrupt our nice lives.

This dangerous fiction of niceness enables social and economic inequality. Feeling bad for others who “have problems” is nice. It shows we care. And we can feel good about ourselves because we have the ability to feel bad.

Feel bad for those who deserve it. Malign activists.

Changing Kenya requires action. It requires activists. It will be loud. It will be disruptive. And I continue to hope that, this time, we stand on the right side of history: with the activists

Missing Moi?

In her wonderful poem, “A Gifted Almost-Fifty,” Sitawa Namwalie mourns the “angry young poetry” she could not write “at twenty.” She could not write this poetry because the “political regime,” under Moi, “did not tolerate vocalization.” When he left, “poetry erupted, spewing on its own, brimming.” And those of us who have been privileged to watch Cut Off My Tongue or to read its finely wrought lines both mourn the loss of that “angry young poetry” and celebrate the new “spewing.”

Sitawa writes a painful truth. Politically repressive regimes can kill expression. We become too afraid to write and publish truths, especially when we know the fates of those who have dared and have now disappeared into exile or early graves. Arguably, poetry has been one of the hardest hit arts, as the Moi years produced little that was worthy of note, certainly little that burrows deep under the skin and captures hearts and minds.

Given the gift of Sitawa’s writing, I am troubled by Mutahi Ngunyi’s latest act of political revisionism. His first sentence reads, “Sometimes I miss mzee Moi.” Now a de-fanged old man, a retired grandfather, Moi can be missed, if only “sometimes.” And why does Ngunyi miss Moi? He writes, “Even Mungiki was scared of Moi. Not as commander-in-chief, but as Moi.”

He misses Moi because he misses being afraid.

This puzzles me.

Yet, it shouldn’t, for it’s the same “devil you know” mentality that kept Moi in power through the first few years of multi-party rule.

But what state are we in that we miss being afraid? And what kind of histories are we constructing where the repressive, political-exile-creating, poetry-silencing, political-opponent-torturing regime of Moi is in any way preferable to Kibaki’s bumbling silences and awkward speeches?

It is troubling that Ngunyi equates order with fear, that he subordinates the formal and informal social contracts we create and inhabit to rule by intimidation and terror.

Ngunyi is not exceptional.

Over the past few years, many Kenyans, from both liberal and conservative sides of the political spectrum have admitted they miss Moi. They miss the order he represented and resent the current state of disorder. Moi, they assert, would never have countenanced activists being rude and disrupting national meetings. Moi, they say with longing, would have kept noisemakers quiet and Kenya running. Moi, they sing with admiration, was a real leader, a real man, one who kept his family in check. Moi, the redeemed, the renewed, the beloved one.

Moi returned as a benevolent Frankenstein.

A few months ago, we learned that Kibaki sought advice from Moi, and now Moi has returned to the political arena in the role of learned counselor. And we welcome him, because we prefer the devils we know.

Others can detail Moi’s acts against Kenyans. I focus not on what he did, but on how he made us feel. And this returns me to Sitawa’s poetry.

“24 years of blundering terror,” she writes, “stole my fuming twenties.” But not just her twenties. The theft of her voice extended to her thirties and she “gave up” in her “forties.” At “Almost-fifty,” Sitawa has discovered her “angry overdue gift.”

How many others had their twenties, thirties, and forties stolen and silenced? How many others remain silent, still afraid of walls with ears and friends whose smiles cannot be trusted? What have we continued to lose because of Moi’s regime? Might we have lost more than one generation of artists, singers, prophets, soothsayers, visionaries?

We have yet to calculate the psychic costs of Moi’s presidency, what it meant, and how it continues to endure. Our psychic and material lives continue to be impoverished by his repressive reign. He lingers in the absent spaces, on our walls, in our minds, in our theaters.

Politics is not just about governance. It is also about creating what the Marxist critic Raymond Williams called “structures of feeling.” Through their actions, politicians create psychic and emotional atmospheres that shape the kinds of art and writing we will produce. And while some brave dreamers can escape the poison of repression, many others find themselves silenced, their gifts stolen, and our collective lives made the less rich.

I receive the gift of Sitawa’s poetry with mixed feelings. Happy and excited that she found her stolen voice, thrilled that her poetry found her and “spewed.” Yet sad because I worry that other would-be artists have not been as fortunate, that their voices remain buried, their poetries muffled, their songs unsung. Like the many millions that were stolen under Moi and may never be recovered, our artistic treasures are lost to us.

I do not miss Moi. How can I when the consequences of his actions surround me everyday? How can I when the songs that should fill the air remain unsung? When the poetry that should flow from our mouths remains unwritten? When the art that celebrates our lives remains unpainted, undrawn, hidden, buried, stolen?

I do not miss fear. I do not miss terror. I do not miss being silenced.

I do not miss Moi.

Not even sometimes.

Listen to Us

Raila Odinga and Martha Karua are outraged. They have made speeches and written statements. They claim to share our frustration. Here’s my advice.

Stop talking. Stop issuing statements. Stop making speeches.

Listen to us.

Don’t show up in helicopters or in an entourage or in fancy cars. Don’t show up with the press. Don’t show up with microphones. Don’t make a production of yourselves. Don’t call big, fancy meetings. Don’t make our lives into an excuse for you to express your frustrations and score cheap political points.

Get cheap notepads and pens. Travel around the country. Go to those places whose names you know and the ones you don’t. Sit in cheap classrooms that sway when the wind blows. Sit outside under trees. Share home food, not food for visitors. Stop in the fields where women are working. Stop at kiosks where out of work young men hang out. Get out of your cars and walk for an hour with pastoralists.

Don’t talk. Don’t propose an agenda. Don’t tell us your vision.

Listen to us.

Don’t interrupt. Don’t ask us what we want. Don’t interview.

Listen to us.

Listen.

Listen.

At the end of each session, pledge to continue listening. Nothing else.

Dare to become leaders who learn from your fellow citizens.

The Kenya I Want

A year ago, I was sending emails to friends and family to ask if they were okay. If they were safe.

Today, I’m sending emails to new friends and activists asking them if they are okay and urging them to take care of themselves.

In the Kenya I want, these emails would be unnecessary because I would not worry whether Jayne Mati or Philo Ikonya or Dipesh Pabari would be safe.

That’s the Kenya I want.

What Kenya do YOU want? What are you doing to get us there?