Magic numbers seem to offer appropriate tools in an age of assessment: are you assigning 40 or more pages a week? Your course demonstrates rigor. Are your students writing up to or more than 20 pages a semester? Your course demonstrates rigor. Magic numbers can become easy solutions, or at least convenient ones. They are also deeply seductive. One can assign a novel a week, a common practice in upper-level English classes, and pick up a merit badge. Since many of us assign multiple writing assignments, ranging from one-minute paragraphs to 30-page papers, we also get a gold star. If numbers tell the story of our teaching—and of student learning—then English instructors must be somewhere at the top of the pile.

Except when we are not.

Some of us—I confess to being one of them—assign one short story a week or, even worse, 2-4 poems. In my earlier teaching days, I regularly assigned one poem per class in an Intro to Poetry class. I believed then, as I do now, that close reading, the foundation of literary analysis, demands a deliberate pace: one learns to slow down, to unlearn skimming, to read what is on the page. To consider slowly and carefully the relationships among parts: text to white space, punctuation to words, words to sentences, sentences to stanzas, stanzas to white space, punctuation to sentences, and on it goes. Something important happens when students spend one or two 75-minute class sessions on Phyllis Wheatley’s 8-line “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” Something about learning to pay attention, to listen, to consider, to reconsider. To complicate not only what one knows, but how one knows.

Even in upper-level classes, one must be deliberate about teaching. One can certainly teach a class in, say, queer studies, that focuses on one major book a week—a standard Freud through Foucault, Butler, Sedgwick, Bersani, Berlant, Somerville, Cathy Cohen, Eng, Ferguson, Delany (okay, standard for me)—but it’s not clear that the class will benefit anyone apart from the instructor and two or three exceptional students. Granted, the bar could be lower if one teaches fiction, but I want to be careful about such a claim: James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man merits just as much time and care as Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.

Mindful teaching attached to specific goals and objectives is always more than a numbers game. It has to be. I don’t buy the 40 pages a week paradigm as evidence of rigor.

As for the 20 pages of writing over the course of a semester.

Many years of experience have taught me to substitute word count for page count. Given that my students submit their work electronically, word count simply works better. No more guesstimating. 500 words is 500 words, no matter how fancy the font or creative the spacing. Also, one teaches specific things. In a class focused on writing, for instance, I can envision a very deliberate process of working from sentences to paragraphs to pages to a short paper of, say, 4-5 pages over the course of a semester. And this not as a remedial class, but as a class deeply focused on how language works and on how argument proceeds. Spending two weeks or more on thesis statements would help many students.

Effective writing is revised writing. A few people, very few, are one-draft geniuses. But one can’t base pedagogy on the achievements of the exceptional.

In other words, different kinds of writing have different goals. It might be that students produce many pages of low-stakes writing—journals, impressionistic writing, reports of reading experiences—and a few pages of high-stakes writing—a 5-page paper, say. One might want to emphasize that writing is more than one thing: a process, a space, a practice, a discipline, a pleasure. One might want to alleviate anxiety over writing. One might want to exacerbate it.

Different goals, different strategies.

One’s writing styles and strategies shape pedagogy. I am, for instance, a concise writer in a long-winded profession. My typical reaction to most presentations, articles, and books is that they could be shorter. I also understand how difficult it is to get to the core of an idea—many of us write until we find the idea. By that point, we are so attached to the process of finding that idea and to our labor (rightly so) that we feel injured when asked to eliminate either or both of those: I spent 20 years working on that 2,000-page book, the scholar claims. And you want it cut to 200 pages? Never!

Many years of writing abstracts—condense your idea to 250 words or to 50 words—and, perhaps more importantly, many years of blogging and writing for non-academic audiences have taught me how to write relatively concise, readable prose. And while I like many kinds of prose, including the luxurious and the luscious and the obscure and the decadent, I try to model for my students a transferable skill: write lucid, concise prose. I am not disputing that students should write a lot—students in my classes write anywhere from 15 to 120 pages a semester, and this is not counting the drafts that I do not see. Instead, I’m interested in thinking more deliberately about magic numbers.

It might be that there’s valid research that establishes 40+20 as the magic numbers to establish rigor in college classes. What makes these numbers magical, however, is their being abstracted into a measure through which accomplishment is assessed all the while bypassing actual teaching strategies and learning goals.

That is bad magic.

And the rest of the Audre Lorde poem I had touched on:

What do we want from each other
after we have told our stories
do we want
to be healed do we want
mossy quiet stealing over our scars
do we want
the powerful unfrightening sister
who will make the pain go away
mother’s voice in the hallway
you’ve done it right
the first time darling
you will never need
to do it again.

Thunder grumbles on the horizon
I buy time with another story
a pale blister of air
cadences of dead flesh
obscure the vowels. (“There are no Honest Poems about Dead Women”)

Over the past 15 years and more specifically the past ten years or so, Kenyan writing has been shaped by NGO demands: the “report” has become the dominant aesthetic foundation. Whether personal and confessional or empirical and factual or creative and imaginative, report-based writing privileges donors’ desires: to help, but not too much; to save, but not too fast; to uplift, but never to foster equality. One can imagine how these aims meld with traditional modes of realism and naturalism and also speak to modernist truncations and postmodern undecidability. However, report realism names a more historically accurate way to name a genre indebted (very literally) to NGOS in Kenya.

The report aesthetic goes beyond citing NGO facts and figures. It is concerned, above all, with a search for truth and accuracy and is threatened by imaginative labor. One hears Dickens’s Mr. Gradgrind:

NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!

Genres that strain realism—the gothic and neo-gothic, fantasy, science fiction, horror, romance, and so on—are conspicuously absent in Kenyan writing, even as they are incredibly well represented in Kenyan book consumption. We are not writing what we are reading; even the very popular Christian-themed fiction about fighting demonic forces, which is really a variation of the horror novel, remains relatively sparse in terms of what we write or, perhaps more accurately, what we choose to make public of our writing. The believable and the realistic are bounded by NGO narratives and perspectives. And too many writers believe that the only writing worth anything is the believable and the realistic: to be a “committed” writer requires adhering to report realism.

Report realism believes in the power of “truth,” whether contemporary or historical, with a faith that borders on fundamentalism. In report realism, the truth will set us free. Report realism confirms objective NGO reports and affirms what Kenyans feel to be the truth of a particular condition. In report realism, for instance, the Kenyan prostitute is always a morally degraded figure looking for a way out to a respectable moral life. This realism is celebrated and supported by the NGO organizations who fund writing competitions and publish winning entries devoted to describing the real Kenya and by mainstream publishers who have the conservative mission of producing appropriately moral literature.

Yet, the “truth” of report realism is an imaginative one. NGO proposals and reports do not simply narrate what “is”; instead, they create scenarios of what is and what could be. While brainspace does not permit any extended thinking at the moment, the fictionality of NGO facticity merits closer attention.

Report realism emerged as a dominant form in the post-Moi years. The rise of digital communication coupled with the Kibaki government’s more open communication policies enabled government reports to circulate in previously unprecedented ways—we could all read and cite Waki and Kriegler and Akiwumi and Ndungu. These foundational reports, in turn, generated additional reports. Every NGO meeting I’ve attended has produced and circulated some kind of report. Creative writers are often asked to write and edit reports. The figures and causes that form the object of those reports appear in our fiction.

Report realism is buttressed by a salvific zeal. Writing that is not cause-driven is dismissed as westernized or detached. For instance, a review of Binyavanga’s book in the Economist complained, “Too many African writers are co-opted by the American creative-writing scene only to be reduced by prevailing navel-gazing.” Kenyan reviewers echoed and elaborated on this comment. Writing in the Daily Nation, Silas Nyanchwani argued, “It is time we began to pursue literature that celebrates our culture as well as the emerging challenges,” and offered this prescriptive view of literature: “The youth are grappling with unemployment, population explosion, and urban issues of sexual orientation and hyper-consumerism.” An otherwise positive review by Joseph Mwella urged Kenyans to “meet” Binyavanga” to “encounter his geo-politics and ideology,” as they are “radical and cutting-edge.” Binyavanga’s writing may not have a cause, but Binyavanga does.

Report writing generates and fosters aesthetic practices—perhaps “habits” is a better word. How does the report imagine and deploy setting? Narrative movement? How does it figure rumor, gossip, story? How does its reliance on testimonies and interviews (not always) coupled with numerical statistics shape character development? (Many Kenyans write very flat characters, and I think there’s something to be said about the effect of report realism on such writing.) How does the cause-driven agenda of NGO labor blend with and modify the cause-driven agenda of a political literature? What strange hybrids are produced?

These are tentative thoughts so I don’t have any real answers. Here are some tentative formulations. In an earlier draft, I had argued that report realists believe they are continuing Ngugi’s tradition of political protest but are, instead, engaged in a genre of complaint. The endless citation of life’s depredations creates its own echo chamber that far from spurring political action, merely inhabits an affective form of stuckness (you will recognize my indebtedness to Berlant). While report realism dominates Kenyan fiction (though one could trace its effects in poetry), it is based on an attenuated relationship to imaginative labor: the demands of reality based on NGO figures and settings and situations take precedence over the possibilities of wild imaginations. Workshops (sponsored by NGOs) and readings (sponsored by NGOs) continue to smother wild(er) imaginative labor. Formal innovation is a massive no-go. And here I do not mean attempts to imitate Euro-American literatures; rather, the resources offered by our languages and music and patterns of living become subordinated to strict chronological timelines, strict forms of cause and effect, strict moral lessons, strict life lessons. Even forms that seem to depart from believability—allegory and satire, for instance—return to report realism in their didacticism.

A curious NGO structure now enters this musing: meant to be descriptive, it has turned diagnostic. Trained by the numerous reports I have read, I want to ask, “what is to be done?” I think it’s a fair question. I want to advocate for wild imaginations—wild forms of writing, non-linear narratives, an obsessive attention to detail, writing that strains at the edges, reaches beyond itself. I’m interested in writing that lives in secret folders on computers, scurries under beds and into drawers when friends visit, worries that it will be deemed obscene, crazy, impossible. I’m interested in writing that dares truth-the truth of feeling, the truth of form, the truth of seeking, the truth of language seeking byways and creating paths. I’m interested in writing beyond report realism.

The black unicorn is restless
the black unicorn is unrelenting
the black unicorn is not
free.
–Audre Lorde, “The Black Unicorn”

Audre Lorde’s poetry is infinitely quotable. While claimed for a largely confessional feminist tradition, Lorde reads more as a late modernist: hard-edged, crystalline, difficult. This unacknowledged difficulty reveals itself in the dearth of criticism on Lorde’s poetry. A lot has been written on Zami (though not enough); her essays are cited all the time; but her poetry remains neglected. Lorde will not let language turn into chant or slogan. In reading her poetry, one is forced to wrestle with the complications of breaking silence. Lorde is known, after all, for the slogan, “Your silence will not protect you.” Yet, her poetry suggests that breaking silence need not lead to liberation. Silence has a far richer life in Lorde, and breaking silence carries with it “the weight of hearing” (“Outlines”).

History is not kind to us
we restitch it with living
past memory forward
into desire
into the panic articulation
of want without having
or even the promise of getting. (“On My Way Out I Passed Over You and the Verrazano Bridge”)

Lorde’s “want” unsettles me. A “panic articulation” of the unrealizable, it inhabits the neighborhood of failure, but a failure that we cannot do without. When I taught her work a year ago, I kept wondering what it meant to fail to read her, how to think through her impossible syntax, the race-queer-feminist labor of impossible syntax. It was easy to fall back onto discussions of queer ineffability, but even those did not quite work—they were too easy and not quite right, not embedded in the right histories. At the time, I told my students that Lorde’s readers had used her essays to explain away her poetry—we were going to try to inhabit its fractures and gaps, its hard lines. To understand how, for instance, “Coniagui women” feed their sons “yam soup / and silence” to turn them into “men.”

The difficult lessons of silence:

Harriet there was always somebody calling us crazy
or mean or stuck up or evil or black
or black
and we were
nappy girls quick as cuttlefish
scurrying for cover
trying to speak trying to speak
trying to speak
the pain in each others mouths
until we learned
on the edge of a lash
or a tongue
on the edge of the other’s betrayal
that respect
meant keeping our distance
in silence (“Harriet”)

Respect, and yet, to give that up, to abandon the “vanities of silence” to “war and weep” (“For Assata”). Even as,

When we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid (“A Litany for Survival”)

In retrospect, I was trying to teach about silence in Lorde. But how does one teach about silence? Or teach silence? And what is the value of silence in Lorde? We have been so insistent on breaking it, ignoring it, shelving it, silencing it, that we have risked missing it. Missing its awkward demands. But what are the demands of silence? What might it mean to inhabit its space-time?

This is too hard.
*

I am tired of holy deaths
of the ulcerous illuminations the cerebral accidents
the psychology of the oppressed
where mental health is the ability
to repress
knowledge of the world’s cruelty. (“Eulogy for Alvin Frost”)

I marked this up in my book; we read the poem in class; I could not talk about the part I’ve emphasized. Published in 1978, it felt much too raw to become part of a classroom conversation. Reading Lorde was too hard, exposing scars I thought long healed. One might talk about vulnerability in the classroom—but the psychic costs of it are unbearable. One manages. Somehow. And learns not to teach Lorde again.

One cannot anticipate the minefields of the classroom. For certain bodies—black, queer, foreign—the vulnerabilities embraced in U.S.-born professors rarely translate. The affective tax is too high, the ideological demands impossible, the experiment bound to fail. One remains professional, theoretical, detached, cold.
*
In the silence, one hears Lorde’s echoes. Listen.

Our labor
has become more important
than our silence.

Our labor has become
more important
than our silence. (“A Song for Many Movements”)

Labor is not “speech.” It can be. And Lorde’s echoes—there are so many of them. Who is being persuaded? What conditions enable the echo? What silences are needed by the echo?

The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being
ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children. (“Power”)

*
I was looking for an argument about silence. But I find myself “rushing headlong / into new silence” (“Smelling the Wind”). Knowing (or believing) with Lorde,

There is a timbre of voice
that comes from not being heard
and knowing you are not being
heard noticed only
by others not heard
for the same reason. (“Echoes”)

*
That is not quite right. But I don’t know how to continue. Perhaps that is the lesson of silence.

Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka at Eldoret North MP William Ruto Karen’s residence in Nairobi. He joins Ministers Samuel Poghisio, Ali Mwakwere and other Members of Parliament allied to the newly formed United Republican Party (URP) who have also converged at the residence. 12:56 pm.

Are any of our leaders at IDP camps? Or at sites where bodies were burned? Buried?

With the people (and the ghosts) this process is supposed to be about?

Highly recommended!

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
–T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

A skeletal hand scrabbles though the muck of forgetting. This year the maize tastes richer. Grazers seem more intelligent. They make terrified noises at night. The wind wails. We have yet to complete funeral rites. The ghosts are waiting.

I am seeking ghosts.

This is risky.

Ghosts lack clear memories, are outlets of emotion, repositories of bad affect. They do not know where to direct their anger. To the ghost, I am as culpable of murder as the hand that lifted the machete, set fire to the church, stood aside and watched.

It’s dangerous to face the anger of ghosts.

It’s even more dangerous to face the truths ghosts tell, “tongued with fire.”

Burning Kenya again.

Kenya.

Burning.

Raising the temperature on our perpetual simmer. Creating hot spots that cannot and will not be governed by police forces who were silent and absent and complicit in 2007/8. The sizzle of then.

From the right angle, a whiff of rotting flesh.
*
Tomorrow the ICC judges rule on something that is by now irrelevant: whether the so-called Ocampo Six will face trial. It is irrelevant because two of the six are running for president—they have supporters and machinery—and have said, boldly, that the ICC’s ruling will not affect their presidential aspirations. It is irrelevant because Kenya, in its treatment of Bashir and its actions during the ICC process, has signaled its willingness to shield the six on the grounds that the ICC is racist and anti-African. It is irrelevant because at least four of the six are so intimately connected with Kenyan power that their downfall threatens root structures we can only imagine. It is irrelevant because the creation of the six as six erased the dead and displaced. We started talking about the six and, as our leaders implored, we forgot about the rest. We forgot the Kenya of rotting flesh and focused on the Kenya of gleaming cars. We were dazzled. Distracted. Forgot why the ICC mattered. Ignored the haunting ghosts.

I am seeking haunting ghosts.

They frighten me.

I am not brave.

This must be done.
*
After Samuel’s death, King Saul consulted the Witch of Endor and asked her to raise Samuel’s ghost. On rising, Samuel asked, “Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?”

The ghosts I seek come in waves of anger and rage—angry they have been forgotten, angry they died too young, angry that I refuse to let them rest. And still I seek them. Need to seek them. Listen for them in winter winds. Taste them in Kenyan food.

I am seeking ghost raisers—mediums who will risk their sanity, witches who will risk their lives, artists who will face the darkness. Kenyans who will face the darkness.

Not with the certainty of “never again.” Not with the bravado of “next time we will be prepared.” Not with the anxiety of plane tickets in hand to escape. Not with the comfort of faith or family. Not with the habits of living through troubled times.

Open.

Open to the madness of ghosts.

Open to memories that should never be owned.

Open to the lingering cries of the dying.

Of those we once called ours.

He has a wonderful series of posts on the Nigerian revolution.

Highly recommended.

Enter Books4Cause: an organization that collects books from the States to distribute in Africa and similar regions. It is crush-worthy.

Except we learn: Older books that are a few years out of date are perfect for Africa. Newer books are often sold to raise money and cover the cost of shipping and running the book drive.

Poor Africans. Not quite now.

Do folks who write these things know that we have internet in Africa? And that we actually read what they write?

I’m too exhausted by this shit to be pissed.