Banal Misogyny

We live with unrelenting, terrible, normative misogyny. Indeed, the misogyny we inhabit is so pervasive and so unrelenting, that, as I remarked to a friend, Audre Lorde’s essays from the 70s and 80s feel much too present, much too relevant. It is not simply that we are dealing with an ugly remnant that every so often reminds us of an even uglier time. Rather, it is that the ugliness of then, cloaked in masculine benevolence, is too much with us. And we seem to have lost the ability to recognize it, to name it, to respond to it.

At least this is the way it feels.

I use “banal misogyny” because I want to register something about the moment we inhabit. Something about our ability and desire to see gender work, to see gender differentiation insist on diminishing, infantilizing, and degrading women. It has become too easy to be a man, too easy to understand women as quirky girls with charming habits and idiosyncratic style. It has become too easy to forget and un-learn all the lessons of feminism.

To speak of something like “the oppression of women” one must ignore nuance and specificity. One must accept the shame that speaking in such broad terms is now meant to invoke. This shame interests me, for while part of it stems from necessary critiques against universalizing impulses, a more insidious part stems from patriarchy’s sneer at the very concept. The danger is that the ethical injunction not to universalize can meet patriarchy’s sneer, and one wanting to feel responsible can feel ashamed, coerced into the impossibility of choosing from a range of unimaginative options.

I realize, belatedly, that when I write “banal misogyny,” what I really mean is “banal.”

Banal means dull, boring, uninteresting, unremarkable. What passes without comment. At once background and foundation. What can be taken for granted. I am interested in how misogyny backgrounds banal—how it becomes banal, expected, unsurprising, the thing that need not be named. Indeed, the ground on which choices about, for, and by women can be made. Misogyny is dull.

How did misogyny become dull?

By dull I mean unremarkable and uninteresting. Unable to “cut” through the social.

Misogyny, like racism and homophobia, is a word (concept-metaphor) designed to “cut” through the social. To arrest an action, create a space for reflection, create a route to action. The “dulling” of misogyny is not an accident. Patriarchy actively works to dull concept-metaphors that arrest its action, to render such terms laughable, dull, banal, impossible.

Yet the banality of misogyny should not blind us to its active, hyper-active life: misogyny is not inert. It is dynamic and active, always working to shore itself up, to make itself felt and invisible, always working to hide in plain sight. Always working, especially, to recruit young women to its cause. And so the young, too many of them, sneer at the idea of misogyny. Or, rather, sneer at the idea of feminism. There are many ways to read this too-common scene: I read it as a symptom of misogyny’s labor to recruit women so that they will be against feminism.

I tell a friend that I want to see the word patriarchy used more. Used often. I want to hear its harsh syllables “cut” across the social. I want it to labor, to work on unmaking the ordinariness with which patriarchy masks itself. Unfashionable as it might be, I want to talk about the oppression of women. Not in our too-polite languages that say women are getting more choices today. I want to “cut” across the social, to make visible patriarchy at work. To refuse its sneer and its grin and its cocky walk and its hatred for and exploitation of women. To refuse its wink and its nod and its casual invitations to join “men’s clubs” where we shake our heads at “women” and marvel at their shrillness. To refuse its laugh and its glazed eyes when it’s confronted with its violence.

And because she helps me think this way, I give the final words to Shailja:

Because you never know enough / but you can learn / you’ll never be / ready but you can fake it / because the when and where / are here and now the answers / to who and what / are you and this is the how / and why will reveal themselves / in the making.

Because ready / is never a question just a reminder / to breathe / and jump (“The Making”)

Wanjiku?

Wanjiku is sovereign. She has rights to services. She has the right to access justice. She has the right to condemn those who abuse and steal from her.

She is no longer a dummy. She is a leader as Mama Mboga, farmer, teacher, painter, executive, mother, scientist, preacher, doctor, computer specialist, etc. She must be paid fairly.
—G-C.M. Mutiso, Daily Nation, November 14, 2012

Wanjiku was always a dangerous fiction. Created through dismissal—Moi’s infamous claim that she could not, could never, read the constitution—she quickly became a symbol of resistance against what was perceived as Moi’s elitism. Moi was many things, but never a snob. Following Moi’s dismissal, a chorus of voices arose to speak for (and as) Wanjiku. She had to be defended, protected, supported. Wanjiku was everywhere and, as Wambui Mwangi has suggested, nowhere at the same time. Flesh made into figure, figured beyond recognition. With Wambui I wondered: does Wanjiku have a body?

But if a male-conjured Wanjiku was not real, those of us who came to her through our deep commitments to feminist and class politics seized on her public circulation, as figure, to speak to and for a gender-class politics. We attempted to materialize her concerns where figuration might allow, even, and especially, when such efforts seemed to fail. Still, there appeared to be a space to enflesh her, to inhabit her, to think about the violence of speaking for and speaking as, but also to consider what such enfleshments might accomplish. We asked, repeatedly, what the constitution could do for Wanjiku. It seemed, for a while, that while the constitution might not fix anything specifically—constitutions are aspirational documents, I believe; they create opportunities—its long occasion—from debates about it, to votes for it, to its promulgation, to its extended implementation—might keep Wanjiku alive, as a spur for us to do better, think harder, work against abjection, work toward her active enfleshment.

But just as quickly as Wanjiku was conjured through a stray comment, she has disappeared from view. Wanjiku’s spectral presence in our political discourse once tried to nudge us toward a politics attuned to class:gender, the gendering of class and the classing of gender, and those figures unaccounted for and made illegible: her disappearance (she has been “disappeared”) should trouble us. For the disappearing of figuration has material implications: those not available to be thought of and with, even as figures, cannot stake claims on our imaginations, our practices, our lives, our politics.

Yet, my epigraph seems to tell a different story. Far from being “disappeared” from public discourse, it appears that Wanjiku is everywhere. She is “mama mboga” and “computer scientist, etc.,” so vast her accomplishments that they cannot be listed, “etc.” And how quickly Wanjiku assumes leadership in all spheres of life: she leads as “mama mboga.” To which one wants to query: where does she lead the “mboga”? I understand the rhetorical attempt to make meaningful the multiple ways women lead across all social spheres; but this is a dangerous fiction because it evacuates the problem of class stratification that abjects Wanjiku. Wanjiku, if a male fantasy, becomes Wanjiku within a class:gender politics in relation to other women. Inequality, Wanjiku-fication, is as much an intra-gender problem as it is an inter-gender one.

In Mutiso’s utopic vision, Wanjiku is no longer abject, never subaltern: she no longer represents the wretched of the earth who coalesce around a radical politics determined to reshape the political order. Wanjiku is a worker who “must be paid fairly.” Now that she has a constitution that guarantees her rights, Wanjiku should work and should be paid fairly.

I’m for “fair payment.” But to believe that “fair payment” will solve the problem of Wanjiku—this figure who cannot be imagined except as absence, as abjection, as subalternity—is to misread Wanjiku and to silence whatever radicalism her circulation, as figure, might have suggested.

Wanjiku has been disappeared from Kenyan political discourse at a time when gender parity, always a threatened element in the constitution, has become increasingly precarious. Constitutional provisions have been deemed impractical in the short term and deferred to an indefinite future. Indefinite because “tomorrow never comes” in Kenyan politics. An election season that had promised to feature at least a few women running as presidential candidates has been turned into a spectator sport between men, with women as convenient adjuncts, their roles being to support their menfolk. And Wanjiku, now a rights-bearing subject, has been told to step up to the plate. If she does, “gender parity” will pay her “fairly.”

Because Wanjiku is a rights-bearing subject, we need not think about her.

She is strikingly absent from contemporary political debates. And it seems we are done with her. She need no longer nag us, irritate us, bother us. She might still not be able to read the constitution, but it gives her rights! She only needs to step up to the plate.

The dangerous fiction has become discarded fiction. We now inhabit a post-Wanjiku world. Done with her insatiable, illegible demands—doesn’t she know how to write a proposal?—we can now move on to the political things that matter. And to the economic things that matter.

Does the disappearing of Wanjiku matter? If she was always a too-convenient, dangerous fiction, isn’t it better to embrace a politics of the real, a politics of the legible, a politics of the achievable? What, after all, can we do about those figures who remain in the shadow of the political? What can we do for those figures who remain illegible within our political imaginations? What can we do for figures who are “disappeared”?

If, as I have suggested, Wanjiku was a male fantasy, she was also available for feminist labor, and I think her disappearance, her being disappeared, registers a profoundly patriarchal anxiety about feminist labor. For all that Wanjiku might have been a misrecognition, she circulated as a name that could be called and invoked and re-named, as Kezia, Atieno, Miriamu, Scholastica, Sitawa, Sera, Wangu, Mshai. Wanjiku was a naming that assembled women in public, offered a space from which to speak to and against patriarchy. And patriarchy wanted to erase this name.

I have skimmed through the available websites for Kenya’s presidential candidates and respective political parties. Wanjiku is not there.

Dear Kenya:

Somehow, two men accused of crimes against humanity, have been nominated to run for president and vice president in next year’s general election. I say “somehow” because it happened while we were awake, while we were watching, and even with our approval.

These men declared themselves African patriots and identified the ICC as an imperialist agent. Their nomination is understood as a fight for African justice against Western interference. They are our flag bearers. Our warriors. Our heroes.

Something happened in 2007-2008. Between December 2007 and February 2008, many people were killed, many others displaced, while conspirators capitalized on this instability to create a political system they could inhabit and control. Contrary to what we have been told, we have not moved to a new generation of rulers. The foot soldiers have moved into the throne room. And they know the value of money and violence.

We have been told that deals were made, talks were had, discussions were staged. Away from the public eye. We have been told that such deals will avert violence. Deals made in private rooms will save Kenya and will help to implement a constitution that is, supposedly, by and for we the people.

We were taught that our cosmology consists of the living, the unborn, and the ancestors. If we respected the ancestors, then the living and the unborn would be safe. This cosmology has nothing to say about the dead, the murdered, the raped, the immolated, the killable, and the dead-dead. Killed once by election violence and killed again by our forgetting.

Elections are for the living. They are not for the dead-dead.

Something happened.

Once, we hoped that the dead would find justice, or be remembered. We hoped that we could help them move from the limbo of the violated-forgotten to the world of the ancestors. That they might come to forgive us in time. We believed we owed them something.

Something happened.

Two men accused of crimes against humanity are running for the highest political offices in Kenya.

Somewhere, a choir of ghosts is keening.

Karibu Kenya?

In reviving the traditional meaning of an expression and in restoring a memorable heritage to its former dignity, we have been eager to propose simultaneously, beyond the old word, an original concept of hospitality, of the duty (devoir) of hospitality, and of the right (droit) to hospitality. What then would such a concept be? How might it be adapted to the pressing urgencies which summon and overwhelm us? How might it respond to unprecedented tragedies and injunctions which serve to constrain and hinder it?
—Jacques Derrida, “On Cosmopolitanism”

All refugees and asylum seekers living in urban areas have been directed to move to camps in North Eastern and Rift Valley provinces.
—Dave Opiyo, Daily Nation, December 19, 2012

What is the status of Kenyan hospitality?

At first blush, the question might seem impertinent, if not unimportant. After all, who diagnoses “hospitality” and what does it mean to diagnose “hospitality”? Yet, I think this question must be asked, as must the question of who “deserves” hospitality. I want to start from the question of hospitality to reflect on the place of Somalis in Kenya today. I want to think about Somalis within Kenyan practices of, and beliefs in, hospitality. I want to ask about the status of that karibu we seem so willing to extend to the right kinds of visitors.

Karibu is in trouble.

But perhaps karibu has always been a troubled practice, withdrawn as easily as it is granted, and sustained only within a market logic: to extract money. Like hakuna matata, karibu might be a tourism-inspired fantasy. The welcome is not insincere, but it is strategic, and limited. Extended only until the money ends. I have started from a false place, by presuming a welcoming us and a welcomed them. This is not the place to start with Somalis in Kenya, but it might be the only place left now.

Accretive anti-Somali rhetoric has effectively de-nationalized all Somalis: birth certificates, national IDs, and government-issued passports are no longer enough to certify Kenyan Somali-ness. An intensified xenophobia has already marked such forms of documented belonging false: they were bought, faked, stolen. They document a lie—an impossible identity. If this seems too abstract, consider this scenario: anti-Somali vigilantes will not pause to check whether those phenotypically or culturally identifiable as Somali are “legal” before they attack. Once the first blow has landed, one can never be Paul before the Romans: one can never claim to be a citizen before a court that must recognize that status.

I am tracking a logic that, along with friends, I have been terming a “genocidal imaginary” that, borrowing from and in league with a “developmental imaginary,” frames the world within a problem:solution model. The development imaginary diagnoses and frames problems and proposes solutions. This is the dominant imaginary in Kenya today. One can no longer diagnose a problem without prescribing a solution. Within the development imaginary, the social is a problem to be solved, even as the impossibility of the problem guarantees a speculative market logic. Investing in unsolvable problems creates and sustains multiple economies.

The problem:solution model of the development imaginary slides, too easily, into a genocidal imaginary. In the genocidal imaginary, those identified as causing problems are eliminated. Made ungeographic and unthinkable. Even as that disappearance is figured as an act of (exhausted) compassion. We have given until there’s nothing left to give.

Yet, exhausted compassion is only one avenue to erasing karibu.

Over the past few years, the terms Somali, Refugee, and Terrorist have become synonyms, creating Somali:Refugee:Terrorist. I have noted this previously—repetition is necessary and useful. Something has happened to our karibu: it has been unmasked and attenuated.

We pride ourselves on our hospitality. Listen to Binyavanga describe dancing the dombolo:

If you ask me now, I’ll tell you this is everything that matters. So this is why we move like this? We affirm a common purpose; any doubts about others’ motives fade if we are all pieces of one movement. . . . Our shells crack, and we spill out and mingle.

Listen to Shailja chastise a lack of hospitality:

We cringe in silent shame for you when you don’t offer
food or drink. Eat before us without sharing. Serve
yourselves first. Insult us without knowing.

Two white Americans said to me, when I shared my
doughnut with them:

We’ve never seen anyone cut a doughnut into three pieces.

We calibrate hunger precisely. Define enough differently
from you. Enough is what’s available, shared between
everyone present. We are incapable of saying, as you can
so easily:

Sorry, there’s not enough for you. (“The Making [Migrant Song]”)

The examples can be multiplied. Across a range of spaces, we have described ourselves as the karibu people, the people of hospitality. We are “friendly” and “warm” and “welcoming.” Karibu Kenya.

Karibu means welcome, or we use it that way. It can also mean “close,” when describing proximity. To be close to something or someone. It is an invitation to proximity. An invitation to the intimacy created by proximity. An invitation never extended to Northern Kenya and never to Somalis.

If we approach karibu (welcome:closeness:intimacy) from Somalis in Kenya, karibu becomes quite strange. Perhaps karibu is a tourist fiction, created to lure those who want to spend money. If this is so, then shouldn’t the rich economy of Eastleigh be welcomed? Friends and family frequently show off goods from there. If karibu is, borrowing from Binyavanga, a dance where “we spill out and mingle,” then how do we explain our continual othering of Somalis as those whose “shells” cannot “crack”? As those who are inassimilable to project Kenya? How do we explain a Kenyan-ness that guards its borders jealously against Somalis already-always identified as border-people?

Does starting from Somali-ness expose the gaping chasm beneath karibu? Indeed, must we get rid of Somalis to maintain the fiction of our hospitality?

What does it mean to protect Kenyan-ness and, more specifically, urban Kenya and Kenyan-ness from Somalis? For whom must these ideas and spaces be protected? And how does a genocidal imaginary undergird attempts to “remove” Somalis from “urban centers.” I’m tempted to say that “genocidal imaginary” is a stretch. But Nazi Germany must be invoked. And not in a gratuitous way. Nazi Germany has taught us to flinch when a government, any government, juxtaposes “removal” or “repatriation” and “camp.”

What does it mean to claim that Somalis have outstayed their karibu? Given our ethno-nationalist and ethno-regional obsessions with ethno-cide, what does it mean to “clear” Somalis from urban areas? What does it mean to “manage” others by moving them to “camps”? What must we forget to believe that such a “solution” makes sense? What must we desire to justify such an action? What does it mean to claim Somali-ness now if one is in Eastleigh?

Karibu is troubled. Welcome and hospitality, closeness and intimacy, these are threatened. Perhaps they have always been. Perhaps starting from Somali-ness merely exposes karibu’s fictionality. Just as the post-election violence exposed karibu’s fictionality. It, too, must be invoked, because we continue to inhabit its ethnocidal logic.

Put more simply: what the Kenyan government is doing is wrong.

Conjugal Rights: Prisoners’ Rights: Prison Homo-sex

Saturday 27 [October 1984]: No woman. No sex. As months develop into years, the desire for sex becomes almost unendurable. The deprivation of sex, of a woman’s love, becomes the greatest sense of torment, next to the everpresent, anguished longing for freedom.
—Maina wa Kĩnyattĩ, Kenya: A Prison Notebook

Kenyan prisoners are not granted conjugal or partner visits. Nor are they provided with condoms. The two issues are related, but not the same. A recent report by KTN news broached this issue through the backdoor: by framing conjugal rights in relation to prison homo-sex, defined, variously, as “homosexuality,” “sodomy,” “rape,” “secrets,” “sin.” The argument for conjugal rights, which is approximately two minutes out of the fifteen-minute video, was a thinly-veiled excuse to peer into the “secret” world of male-male prison sex.

This world is, of course, not so secret. It features prominently in several Kenyan prison narratives by authors including John Kiriamiti, Wahome Mutahi, and Maina wa Kĩnyattĩ. Indeed, it’s almost impossible to read a contemporary Kenyan prison narrative without encountering some version of homo-sex. Readers of Foucault will recognize the structure I am describing. An “explosion of discourse” is framed as a “secret” to create what Foucault terms “the speaker’s benefit”: those who “break” the “secret” of sex imagine their acts as transgressions, modes of resistance. And, in the KTN video, what can be more “transgressive” than a woman discussing homo-sex with prisoners?

Prison homosexuality has a relationship to prison sodomy and prison rape and prison love and prison intimacy and prison hate and prison resentment and prison survival and prison suicide. And on it goes. It has a relationship to the structural conditions of Kenyan prisons, to their histories, their presents, and their futures. It has a relationship to the worlds brought in to the prison from diverse geo-histories and psycho-socialities. It is not one thing. It is, as Binyavanga might put it, a many-thing.

This many-thingness is evidenced in the obvious disjunction between the English-language report with its sparse translations from Swahili and the rapid-fire Swahili and bodily movements of those interviewed, especially the two figures who identify as queer. As one says, “sometimes you want it, and sometimes you don’t want it,” going on to add, “the prison guards are indifferent to how queers are treated in prison.” An eloquent bodily testimony emerges of prison brutality: bite marks linger as scars, a body ravaged by a system that does not protect its queer prisoners. But “sometimes you want it, and sometimes you don’t want it.” That’s important.

Whereas one version of the narrative that KTN wants to promote seeks to collapse all prison same-sex encounters into “rape,” “sin,” and “perversion,” alternate narratives emerge of desire and negotiation, of prison economies where sex is a form of currency. In pointing this out, I do not mean to overlook the very real sexual violence in prisons. That would be irresponsible. Instead, I want to register the complexities in prisoners’ testimonies that are erased through bad and absent translations into English (for those who don’t understand Swahili) and through equally bad and misleading framing by KTN.

I am interested, as well, in how the figure of the homosexual becomes legible within Kenyan media and the uses to which this figure (as metonym and sediment of/from prison sex) is put in political discussions. Against the logic suggested by the KTN report, which argues that conjugal rights should be provided to “prevent” the scourge of prison sexual violence and prison sexual activity and sodomy and homosexuality (these are not the same things), I would suggest that one can be for prison reform, for prisoners’ rights, for conjugal and partner visits, for queer prisoners’ rights, and for prison health reform. These are not all compatible, of course: in my ideal world, prisons would not exist. Humans should not live in cages. Nor should animals. And so when I think about “prison reform,” I’m really thinking about abolishing prisons.

In the here-and-now, the durative present, I can be, must be, for prisoners’ rights, conjugal and partner visits, and queer prisoners’ rights. To be more precise, I can be, must be, for prisoners’ sexual rights, regardless of taste, desire, orientation, or preference. I have insisted on conjugal rights and partner rights because if prisoners are going to have consensual sex with non-prison populations, it should not be dictated by marital status or relationship longevity.

I am happy to support conjugal and partner visiting rights and to support prisoner sexual health and to advocate against prison sexual violence. I am delighted that the Kenyan parliament is discussing prison sexual rights and prison sexual health, albeit at a pace that is much too slow. And I think it’s way past time to have a national conversation—and activism against—prison sexual violence.

But prison sexual violence should not become the metonym, the figure, for male same-sex intimacies or homosexuality. And it’s troubling to see a news report that so easily, casually, and lazily uses “homosexuality,” “rape,” and “sodomy” as synonyms, implicitly suggesting that “homosexuals” are the biggest threats to decent Kenyans. Toward the end of the video, a prisoner (we assume) is interviewed. Unlike many others in the video, he is dressed neatly in new-looking clothes, a far cry from the many other rag-clad prisoners the camera has shown us. And he proclaims his (voyeuristic) disgust at prison sex, because he is a Christian. The camera—and interviewer—invite us to identify with this man who, though in prison, has turned to religion. He is, in fact, what a certain Kenyan Christian imaginary hopes will happen to prisoners: not that they will be released or granted rights, but that they will find religion, atone for their sins, and accept imprisonment as a just consequence.

This Christian prisoner can represent “decent” Kenyans because he looks the part. And, through an imaginative act that erases his materiality, one fostered by the camera, we can identify with him: we are “all prisoners” on this ungodly earth, the narrative goes. This (misguided) identification enables a further one: his disgust at prison same-sex acts (all conflated as sin and deviance) is supposed to mirror and represent our disgust. He is, through a sly trick, the “decent” Kenyan we claim to be. The Kenyan who must be—and should be—defended against prison sodomy. His reassuring masculinity is juxtaposed against, and comes after, the disturbing gender-bending presented earlier in the video which, it is suggested, repeatedly, both precedes and emerges from imprisonment.

Conjugal rights will save good Christian Kenyan men from turning into fags. Good Kenyan masculinity is decent, Christian hetero-masculinity, and it must be saved.

The Kenyan prison has been—and will continue to be—important to how we understand Kenyan sexual cultures and, in particular, same-sex cultures. Reforming prison sexual cultures to provide health and care and comfort should begin from a prisoner’s comment. And I give this comment the last word: saa ingine waitaka, saa ingine hautaki.

Still Listening For James MacArthur

We must . . . guard against the erasure of our experience and our lives.
–Melvin Dixon

If you visit James MacArthur’s blog—please do so, I urge you—you will notice that there have been no new posts since he was arrested on December 1, 2012. Friends have asked where he is, and I cannot answer. I don’t know how to negotiate the legal sites and databases that might provide a partial answer. His twitter handle, @baltospectator, is similarly silenced. The final note, “THANKS,” to those who cared enough to listen and support him as he was being arrested.

His final blogpost, dated December 1, has the ominous title, “Freedom Under Fire – I Will Die Free!!!” Those three exclamation marks perform defiance and prophecy. But prophecy is rarely agreeable. In “I’ll be Somewhere Listening for My Name,” Melvin Dixon writes, “I am troubled by the power of prophecy inherent in art. One becomes afraid to write because one’s wildest speculations may in fact come true.” Echoing Dixon, MacArthur writes in his final post, “Anyone Can Be Erased.” Those technologies we use so often and so thoughtlessly, taping over old cassettes, reformatting disks, deleting files, erasing hard drives: these are metaphors for what can happen to “Anyone.”

Given MacArthur’s silence, the concerns expressed by his family, that his “continued incarceration may be retaliation for his habit of observing city police at crime scenes and regularly criticizing their activities,” and their further concern that his judicial process is being unduly prolonged, I have been wondering how to return to MacArthur, how to “still listen” not only “to” but “for” him. And about the need to listen “to” and “for” him.

At the moment, his website still features the extended conversation he staged with the police negotiator. Listen to it. Download it. Circulate it.

Consider the kind of testimony it provides. Consider, also, the silence about him that has taken hold. In my (admittedly limited) search for news, I found one website that has updated news. Most of the news dated within the last week rehashes the events of December 1, 2012.

This re-hashing merits some attention, especially to “the last word.”

A follow-up article in the Washington Post claims,

Police say Yerg didn’t alter his tactics even as his every utterance could be heard across the Internet, though they also concede that the negotiations were prolonged as commanders tried to avoid using force.

“This will go right into the training scenario,” said Elbert Shirey, a retired Baltimore deputy police commissioner and former commander of the tactical unit. “They will discuss this in classrooms and go through everything to try and determine how everybody reacted.”

Situations in which suspects take to digital media during fast-moving situations are not unprecedented. This fall in Pittsburgh, a man who took a hostage in an office building posted about his ordeal on Facebook until police cut off his access, fearing it was interfering with their negotiations. But such measures are becoming increasingly difficult.

Notice, first, how this “scenario” becomes incorporated into police training, assimilated into a paradigm that teaches police how to be more efficient. Notice, also, that MacArthur is aligned, by comparison, with a man who “took a hostage.” A strange inversion happens, where, implicitly, MacArthur, trapped inside his house by a SWAT team, is imagined to be holding the police captive.

And then look at the last sentence in the WAPO article:

Yerg said, “We want you to come out.”

The police get the last word. The final word. The word that counts. It matters who gets the last word. It matters, also, how we understand who gets the last word. It matters how we listen for echoes and repetitions.

If you haven’t, go to MacArthur’s website. Listen to his conversation with the police there. Better yet, if you can, download it. And then listen to it. Listen to it as the echo that remains, the voice that persists, the fierce resistance that, in its repetition, refuses to let the police have the last word. The fierce repetition that reminds us there is always another last word.

James MacArthur’s story, the story of that prolonged negotiation and arrest, is not a story of how social media is complicating arrests; nor is it a story about police persistence when faced with unruly suspects; and it is not a story about police improving their training techniques. It is not, in other words, the story mainstream sources have suggested. If you listen to MacArthur, you understand the ecology of the story: it’s a story about Baltimore, about race relations, about living in Waverly, about observing the police, about the pedagogy of race, about the racialization of power. It is a story about how to speak when power surrounds one, when power demands compliance, when power demands silence. It is a story about how criminals are made. It is a story about what Tavia Nyong’o has beautifully described as “the uchromic darkness we inhabit.”

But James MacArthur is not Glenda Moore. Even though both face, in different ways, the question Tavia poses: “What does it mean to be abandoned to life?” And with Glenda Moore, MacArthur also represents “the violent relatedness into which blackness and whiteness are thrown.” One surrounded by a SWAT team, the other abandoned by her white neighbors, but both caught in a world that can only be described through water metaphors, through the afterlives of slavery: the one who jumped the ship-the one who stayed in the hold. These, too, are metaphors. And histories. And memories. And enfleshments of blackness that contour our daily lives.

It matters who gets the last word. But this is not only about who speaks. It’s also about how we choose to listen. Who we choose to listen to. MacArthur reminds us that black voicelessness is as much a function of power as it is about how we learn and choose to listen. His voice exists.

Listen to it.

Internally Displaced Kenyans

[F]rom the perspective of the bracketed, the problem is how to endure the material conditions that compose their limbo.
—Elizabeth Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment

To go back was harder and to go further was hardest, so at last we made up our mind and started to go forward.
—Amos Tutuola, Palm-Wine Drinkard

In early October 2012, the Kenya Parliament passed the Prevention, Protection and Assistance to Internally Displaced Persons and Affected Communities Bill, 2012. Reporting in the Daily Nation, Caroline Wafula noted that the Bill was designed “to manage internally displaced persons.” This word “manage” is very important. Management took shape formally and rhetorically, through the renaming of the bill, and emerged as a key strategy in parliamentary discussions through a process of bureaucratic erasure. I am interested in how we think about Internally Displaced Kenyans, the strategies we use, the worlds we imagine, the possibilities that emerge, the impossibilities we assume. I want to ask how Internally Displaced Kenyans matter and materialize and how they are, simultaneously, de-materialized and cease to matter.

Until October 2012, the Prevention, Protection and Assistance to Internally Displaced Persons and Affected Communities Bill, 2012 had been known as the Internally Displaced Persons Bill, 2012. This earlier, shorter naming permitted the fantasy that the bill was owned by Internally Displaced Persons, that they were, to use Kenyan parlance, important stakeholders in shaping Kenya’s histories, memories, presents, and futures. Within this fantasy, the state would serve the needs of Internally Displaced Persons: they would be “managed,” of course, but also granted some measure of agency through the fantasy of ownership. Moreover, the short title embedded Internally Displaced Kenyans within the post-election violence, as necessary metonyms for other displaced populations in the country—more on those later. As metonyms, they could demand a specific response from the rest of the country, as the most visible victims of state neglect, and as incarnations of failed nation-making.

The shift in name refuses that fantasy.

Perhaps the most interesting word in the new title is “Prevention.” “Protection and Assistance of Internally Displaced Persons and Affected Communities” makes sense; but what is being prevented? And what is the relation between prevention and protection? Prevention and assistance? Prevention assumes a clumsy prophylactic function, delaying (perhaps indefinitely) access to the Internally Displaced Persons, who are now conveniently sandwiched in the middle of coercive and intrusive state procedures (prevention, protection, assistance) and an idea of “affected communities” so broad as to be meaningless. We are all “affected communities.” In the version of the bill I have, the term “affected communities” is not defined, though the term “affected” recurs with alarming frequency, referring to those displaced as “affected” and those in relocation habitats as “affected.” Let me shelve “affected” for now.

This “disappearing” or “burying” of Internally Displaced Kenyans in the title of the bill, and a certain urgency drives me to focus only on the title for now, mirrors their broader erasure from public consciousness. An erasure that has focused our attention on those deemed responsible for the post-election violence; driven us to startling and troubling ethno-nationalisms and ethno-regionalisms; created new public intellectuals who absent Internally Displaced Kenyans in the name of rigorous debate; exacerbated quotidian militarization as an ethno-regional, ethno-national, and national-regional project tied to neoliberal demands and aspirations; and foreclosed rigorous thinking in favor of liberal socio-ethnographic projects that promise empirical and cultural “solutions.”

I want to think a little more about this erasure by looking at an exchange in Parliament. I take this from the August 1, 2012 Hansard. As always, my deep appreciation to Mzalendo for making this—and many other documents—available.

Esther Murugi, Minister of State for Special Programmes, answered questions about the settlement of IDPS posed by Peter Njuguna Gitau, Erastus Mureithi, David Kibet Koech, Peter Njoroge Baiya, Luka Kipkorir Kigen, and Millie Grace Akoth Odhiambo.

Repeatedly, the questions emphasized the “fuzzy” nature of the IDP problem. First, as a problem of numbers. Murugi claimed that the government had resettled 5200 IDP households; was in the process of settling another 2,593; and would then turn its attention to the remaining 1,778 households. But what exactly is a “household”? What does it describe? What configurations of sociality and collectivity? What does it register as loss and violence? In other words, what kind of work does the term “household” perform to affirm and erase the materiality of post-election violence—the deaths of kin and friends; the re-shaping of social units; the ongoing fractures of lived sociality? What kind of confusion does the term “household” produce? This confusion was evident when Koech asked about the 1,778 IDPS still to be resettled, which seemed to translate household into individuals, an equation that is still too easy to make.

Complicating the numbers game, Kigen raised the problem of IDPs at Alco:

Luka Kipkorir Kigen: Mr. Speaker, Sir, there are a number of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) who were told to decamp from their camp at Alco. They are about 472. What is happening to them because they are not in the camp and have not been given any settlement? What arrangement does the Government have to resettle them?

Esther Murugi : Mr. Speaker, Sir, I am not sure whether I know about these IDPs. Could the hon. Member clarify a little bit on who they are?

Luka Kipkorir Kigen: Mr. Speaker, Sir, Alco is one of those camps which were captured by the Government and it had 759 families. A number of them were taken to Trans Nzoia and 472 families were left behind. The Minister assured them that they would get accommodation by June this year. What is happening now since she has not given them accommodation? What is the arrangement to settle those IDPs?

As with the term “household,” the term “family” here complicates actual numbers and configurations. More interesting is Murugi’s claim not to know—to see as legible—what Kigen describes.

Indeed, Murugi often makes IDPs illegible—to be clear, I am not interested in chastising her; rather, I think her responses exemplify something systemic about the making illegible of Internally Displaced Kenyans. Two more exchanges are worth noting.

Baiya asked about the conditions under which IDPs live:

Peter Njoroge Baiya: Mr. Speaker, Sir, I wish to draw the attention of the Minister to the fact that there are some IDPs in Kieni Forest here in Kiambu who, actually, have been involved even in tracing land. They have identified a piece of land somewhere in Laikipia, but the Government, for one reason or another, is unable to assist them to acquire it. They are over 800 families settled in a parcel of about six acres in really squalid conditions. What is the Government doing to ensure that they are helped to buy that land and assisted to resettle out of the forest?

Esther Murugi: Mr. Speaker, Sir, I am aware of the Kieni as well as the other forest evictees. They are all being resettled together. The technical committee has already gone to visit the land. After inspection, they will furnish me with a report. But in the meantime, they are being looked after and they will be resettled as we resettle other forest evictees.

Murugi does not answer the question. Or answers it by making conditions irrelevant. IDPs are to be herded into a space, whatever space is available; the conditions under which they occupy that space do not matter. Cannot matter. The IDPs living in “squalid conditions” are “being looked after.” It’s difficult, here, not to think about the long histories of space-making—as the slave hold, the slave ship, the concentration camp, the detention camp, the slum—through which populations are “managed,” “looked after.” As though to place humans-bodies within a space is to “look after” them. We know from the long histories I’ve listed that placement in space is also about deracination and commodification and dehumanization and, following Elizabeth Povinelli, “making die” and “letting live.”

What does it mean to be legible? How is one made available to the state? In what state? And does that matter?

This question comes to the fore in the last recorded exchange of this particular parliamentary session between Odhiambo and Murugi:

Millie Grace Akoth Odhiambo: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker, Sir. You have just heard the hon. Minister say very clearly that they have not covered integrated IDPs within their programme and that they will be covered under a policy. A policy does not actually talk about compensation or anything like that. Is the Minister, therefore, in order to deliberately discriminate or confess that the Government is deliberately discriminating against a category of IDPs?

Esther Murugi: Mr. Speaker, Sir, my mandate was very clear. I was given a data of the people who I was to settle. So, if that is discrimination, maybe it is, but I do not know. However, those are the people I was given to resettle, and that is exactly what I am doing.

For Murugi, Internally Displaced People are those included in the “data” she was “given.” If that “data” has gaps, elisions, erasures, that is not her problem. It might be “discrimination” not to consider the meaningfulness of the term IDP; it might be “discrimination” not to think about how the category IDP is conceived and functions; it might be “discrimination” not to think about the conditions under which those “resettled” actually live.” But this is largely irrelevant to a bureaucratic procedure of managing populations. Murugi is “doing” her job.

By the end of 2011, Kenya had an estimated 250,000 IDPs. In March of 2011, around 20,000 Kenyans were displaced from Mandera in the Kenya vs. Al-Shabaab war. A recent report from the Institute of Security Studies argues that displacements of pastoralist communities in Northern Kenya have been absent from national conversations. These displacements have taken place over decades—that is, over a temporal span that far exceeds the spectacular event of the post-election violence—and in that time, between 200,000 to 400,000 people have been displaced.

Northern Kenyan pastoralist communities risk becoming illegible—I’m being too cautious, are actually rendered illegible—by how the term “internally displaced people” is defined in the bill.

“internally displaced person” means a person or groups of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, large scale development projects, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized State border.

“and who have not crossed an internationally recognized State border.” In other words, pastoralist communities, you are shit out of luck. Northern Kenyan pastoralists become illegible as Internally Displaced Persons, that is, as people the state can accommodate within its frameworks of care, or, rather, management.

In my (admittedly brief) reading of parliamentary discussions focused on IDPs, I am stunned by how much they seem not to matter—materialized and de-materialized as “data”; made legible and illegible through their geographies and lines of ethno-descent; produced as variously human and inhuman through the conditions of their existence; fictionalized as an effect of a cause that is itself absent from discussion; framed as public and national nuisances, reminders and remainders of a time now deemed necessary in our contemporary ethno-national discourses, where the post-election violence is now framed as “teaching us” about the need for ethno-regional unity.

And if the lesson of the post-election violence and efforts to re-settle IDPs is that large populations can be managed into small spaces, into what historians of the prison term spaces of confinement, materialized as data and de-materialized as people who matter.

I’m sorry. I’d prefer not to finish that “if” sentence. But let me try.

It would be a mistake to believe that the unlearned lesson of the post-election violence and the “making” of IDPs has to do with displacement and re-settlement. Instead, I want to suggest that the making of IDPs as data, as material and immaterial, as legible and illegible, offers a fruitful way to think of how class and region function in Kenya, how space, to invoke Katherine McKittrick’s work, produces people and is produced by them.

Since the post-election violence, it has been easier to focus on grievance rather than grief, to pursue “those responsible” than to engage with those left behind as reminders and remainders. Indeed, our response to those reminders and remainders has shifted rapidly, from sympathy and empathy to irritation and annoyance. We want them managed, removed from sight, or, in this election cycle, used as evidence of ethno-regional conflict to marshal ethno-national sentiments.

Now that we have a nicely named bill, it’s tempting to believe that we are “done” with the problem—just as we seem to believe that producing nice long reports solves problems. What would it mean to make Internally Displaced Kenyans a Kenyan problem? How might this shared problem re-orient our geo-histories, compelling us to think as much about Northern Kenya’s pastoralist communities as we do about famers and traders in other Kenyan regions? It seems silly to ask, now, belatedly, what we can learn from the ongoing management of IDP populations, but it also seems urgent as they incarnate ongoing deracination under state management.

Killing Kenyans: One Strike at a Time

Kenyan health professionals—nurses, medical technicians, pharmacists—are on strike. Predictably, the newspapers are featuring stories of the many patients who are dying because of the strike. Health professionals, we are told, lack compassion. Crass materialists, they dare to put their own material comforts above the urgent needs of the most vulnerable: sick women and children. The claims are familiar, uttered in similar tones during the doctors’ strike in 2011.

I prefer not to simplify complex situations, but polemics have their uses.

During the doctors’ strike, we learned about their labor conditions: they worked in under-funded, equipment-deprived conditions catering to massive populations. Their hours were long and their compensation poor. These issues compound: overworked doctors  lacking proper equipment and medication can only improvise for so long. At some point, ingenuity gives way to exhaustion, innovation to depression, experimentation to despair.

Poor labor conditions create material and affective obstacles.

Patients die.

Doctors detailed what it felt like to watch patients die. Kenyans tend to downplay psychic life: we know how to mourn at funerals and how to be angry at politicians, but we are very bad at discussing depression and discouragement, at thinking about the affective life of our labor conditions. And so, when doctors discussed how it felt to watch patients die, we ignored them, spoke of service and duty, claimed that they needed to show up, as though showing up is enough to compensate for the absence of resources.

Doctors said: patients die when we show up because we don’t have resources to treat them. We said show up anyway, refusing to appreciate what it means to watch patients die. To borrow from my pal at Roxie’s World, we demanded excellence without money.

Worse, the mainstream media led the demand for excellence without money. Medical professionals who did not show up caused death. While the presence and expertise of medical professionals *might* prevent death, this *might* becomes ever more precarious without proper resources. And it is a terrible thing to believe that health professionals should go to work to watch patients die.

We learned, also, that doctors were dying: they could not afford the services they were supposed to provide to others. They were also casualties of a system that lacked resources. Doctors could not save themselves.

In response to the recent strike, the government has sacked 25,000 health professionals, including nurses. Excellence without money has been supplemented by excellence without personnel. Apparently, retirees and interns can perform the job of trained health professionals.

Whereas health care professionals are insisting that the material conditions of labor matter for patients and those who provide care, the government is insisting that material conditions do not matter: health professionals should be magicians and professional mourners, able to effect cures without resources and to prepare the sick to approach death.

Regrettably, I am not surprised that the government ignores the recommendations of health professionals. I am not surprised that the government stands by and watches Kenyans die because it refuses to provide resources. I am not surprised that politicians who regularly increase their perks do not believe that Kenyan workers deserve fair labor conditions. I am not surprised that the government stands by while Kenyans die.

Predictably, the government is aided by a mainstream media that ignores the patients who die because of inadequate resources and chastises health professionals for refusing to watch over the dying.

Practically, the government has abrogated its responsibility to create conditions that allow Kenyans to thrive. Comprised of the 0.5%, the government will watch Kenyans die during an election year and do nothing. I suspect that the strike will not last long. I suspect that the health professionals will be forced to return to work. I suspect that, as before, they will watch patients die as those in the government award themselves generous raises and stipends.

The Kenyan government: killing Kenyans, one strike at a time.

Post-Patriarchal: Eulogy for Michuki

Daddy, I have had to kill you—Sylvia Plath

Let us now praise the dead old men. Let us now praise our desiccating fathers. Let us now praise our well-preserved corpses. Let us now praise our obsolescent regimes. Let us now praise our dead old men.

Dance for the dead old men. Dance on and around their graves. Pour libations to the dead old men. Dance for the dead old men. Do not fear their flaccid passions. Dance. Dance. Dance.

Let us now bury the dead old men. Let us dig beyond graves. Dig beyond the earth. Seek graves beyond resurrection. Where clarion calls cannot penetrate. Where worms cannot eat. Where flesh cannot fertilize. Let us now bury the dead old men.

Let us now cherish our dead old men. Hymn their praises. Aria their achievements. Cantata their brutalities. Oratorio their biographies. Benga their benevolence.

And when we are done singing—let us gargle with salty tears.

Let us embalm our dead old men. Seal them beyond memory. Pyramid them beyond excavation. Marble them beyond recognition.

And pray their poison does not leak.

“We Have Chosen To Be Gay”

An anonymous African gay man says,

We have chosen to be gay, that is what we want, and that is what we like. That is what we have chosen and we want to display it.

What does it mean to “choose to be gay”? What does it mean for an African man to “choose to be gay”? I am not interested in claiming that “gay” is a “Western” term so I can privilege alternative terms—kuchu, basha, and so on. Instead, I am interested in “gay” as an object of desire and as choice and as spectacle: “we want to display it.” Because, arguably, what is at stake in most anti-gay legislation is precisely the relationship between choice and spectacle: the making public of what Foucault terms “a way of life.”

Some old ground: In Facing Mount Kenya, Kenyatta claims there was no homosexuality among the Gikuyu. I have wrestled with this statement for a long time. Was he simply homophobic? Was he so removed from the Gikuyu that his statement carries no weight? (Kenyatta left his rural home at 9 years of age and never “returned” to it.) Was he responding to theories of sexuality in anthropology? (For answers to these, wait for the book, where I address them in complete sentences.) In more generous moments, I have absolved Kenyatta of homophobia and considered his statement a comment on homosexuality in the U.K. Re-framed in this way, it would read, there is no homosexuality among the Gikuyu as exists among the English in 1930s England. This is, perhaps, too generous, but it allows a necessary way of thinking about the geo-histories of homo-sentiment.

All the African anti-homosexuality legislation I have seen and the various reports I have followed focuses on homosexuality as public spectacle: the problem of chinkhoswe for Stephen and Tiwonge; the circulation of queer-friendly material in the form of pamphlets, film, books, posters, music; the public appearance of queer intimacies—same-sex individuals holding hands, kissing, displaying affection. Implicitly, anti-homosexuality campaigns are, more precisely, campaigns against public homosexuality. (I set aside, for the moment, the question of whether homosexuality can exist as private.)

Indeed, Kenya’s minister of justice, Mutula Kilonzo, has followed a Lawrence v. Texas paradigm by arguing that the state has no business monitoring same-sex consensual acts performed in private. In other words, be a gay on your own time, away from innocent African publics.

Practically, we know this doesn’t work. Rowdy homophobes break down doors, invade private residences and rented hotel rooms, leave nasty facebook and email messages, scrawl trollish blog comments (I don’t get this, and if I figured out why, I might offer advice to those who do). The public always breaks through to the private: and one might argue that at least since Oscar Wilde’s trial, homosexuality has been constituted as the making public (through humiliation) of the private.

To “choose to be gay” is not the same thing as “coming out,” even though they both intervene into a public. Here, I use a Foucauldian distinction. Today, coming out is understood as an expression of identity, an “I am this.” And it is troubling, as Samuel Delany explains:

The rhetoric of singular discovery, of revelation, of definition is one of the conceptual tools by which dominant discourses repeatedly suggest that there is no broad and ranging field of events informing the marginal. This is true of science fiction versus the pervasive field of literature; art as compared to social labor; blacks as a marginal social group to a central field of whites; and gay sexuality as marginal to a heterosexual norm. That rhetoric becomes part of the way the marginal is trivialized, distorted, and finally oppressed. For what is wrong with all these seemingly innocent questions—which include, alas, “When did you come out?”—is that each tends to assume that the individual’s subjective field is one with the field of social statistics.

Sexual interests, concerns, and observations form a broad and pervasive field within every personality, as broad a field in me as it is in you, as broad within the straight man as it is in the gay woman. When we speak of burgeoning sexuality, that’s the internal field we speak of—not the social field defined by what percent of us are gay or straight, male or female. The discourse behind that same rhetoric of singularity is, of course, the discourse which stabilizes the belief that a single homosexual event can make an otherwise straight person gay—or that the proper heterosexual experience can “cure” someone gay and turn him or her straight. (“Coming/Out”)

To “choose to be gay” is to contest the singularity of definition, to engage and re-organize the social. It is to shift the air, to pluck at vibrations, to unsettle the low hum of heteronormativity. To bring attention to the silence that passes for normativity by exposing its fiction, disrupting what Elizabeth Freeman terms its “chrononormativities”: the middle-aged gay man who goes out dancing and drinking and fucking instead of staying at home with the wife and kids or cheating on his wife with his mistress. The unattached who trouble our belief in adult heteronormative attachments with their illegible and promiscuous attachments to objects, animals, friends, fictive kin.

To choose to be gay is to contest dominant narratives about life trajectories: school, work, marriage, children, grandchildren death. One acquires, instead, and perhaps, tricks, lovers, cum-encrusted souvenir jock straps, an STI or two, dildos, cockrings, massive porn collections, open relationships, a houseful of cats, poetry. One accumulates a narrative that requires narrating, complicating the unspoken scripts prepared for us to follow.

One notes, to the state’s consternation, that the unspoken script is damaged: soaked in floods, rubbed through mud, eaten by termites. Words are illegible, the language foreign, the instructions unfathomable. That to live is to innovate, to practice what John Stuart Mill called “experiments in living.” Such experiments trouble the ostensible stability envisioned by the state and privileged by tradition. They trouble the narrow trajectories that manage “population.” They trouble the quotidian heteronormative, heterocetera interactions that lubricate the social. They make “trouble.”

Those who “choose to be gay” offer the disturbing possibility that attachments and affiliations can be chosen outside of state-sanctioned norms. That there are ways of living not envisioned in school textbooks. That how we choose to live matters just as much, if not more, than how we are supposed to live.

To choose what one “likes” over one’s “duty.”
So much depends on the latter.
Too much.