[censored]

ellipses:
Ellipses know too much, do not know what they know, know nothing, and produce knowingness. What is the knowledge economy of ellipses? What is the duration of the elliptical? What is knowledge after ellipses?

profiling:
Foucault teaches me that profiling is taxonomy: coding for threat. Perhaps all taxonomy has always been about coding for threat. What is most threatening? Who is most threatening? How can threat be managed?

visa:
My visa expires. It expires again. And again. I keep explaining that a visa is an entry and exit document. An expired visa is threatening. Few of those monitoring my visa dates know how visas work. I keep explaining to those who don’t need to know, to those who insist they know, to those who refuse to hear my knowing that I know what the law says. My visa is expired.

sayable:
To be in this now—this Kenya-U.S-now—is to navigate censorship. Things I cannot say as a holder of a visa. Things I cannot demand: equal protection under the law; a voice in how to read this moment; a claim to rights. Nothing has been said. Perhaps I misread the tea leaves. Things I cannot say as a particular kind of Kenyan: one who lives abroad, one privileged by ethnicity and education, one marked as dangerous. People with names “like mine” and backgrounds “like mine” are saying and doing terrible things. I do not know what to say, how to respond, how to forge alliances, how to undo the weight of privilege I did not earn, that my saying exercises, that my silence exercises.

U.S.A.:
I write U.S. or U.S.A., because I don’t want to cede “us.” To be here is to inhabit a strange provinciality where “we” and “us” is constantly invoked, as perhaps it is all over. Every time I hear “we” and “us” I shrivel a little. I have still not learned how not to flinch. How not to hear “nation” and “culture” and “not you” when I see US. That scream of unbelonging, the chant of patriotism. U.S.A.

accent:
U.S.A.: “where are you from”?
Kenya: “where are you from”?

attachment:
One is squeezed into place, adhesiveness produced by prolonged contact, sometimes not of one’s making. Attachment produced as habit, as refuge, as tropism. The crooked plant is seeking light. The stuck-in-place object is pressed on constantly. To be un-stuck, to be un-pressed, to be ripped from place. Even this causes pain. And might not be freedom.

now-here:
The imprecision of emergent forms, the vertigo of precarity, the fear of saying the wrong thing, the unwelcome thing, the dangerous thing.

habit:
To continue as before, to believe that repetition produces normalcy, to read the normative as the inevitable, to be habituated, to resist disruption, to pursue peace, to flee definition.

safe:
If you hide, stay silent, squeeze into a corner, stay in your house, refuse the endangering social, it might take them a little longer to find you, detain you, arrest you, monitor you, disappear you.

alien:
“where were you born”?
“when did you come here”?
“why did you come here”?
E.T. was a film about immigrants as tracked, trackable, monitored, and endangered. Discuss.

freedom:
How do the “unfree” discuss “the land of the free”?

In whispers and in silence.

Privacy: Disclosure

It’s possible to argue that the slogan “the personal is political” comes from a particular bourgeois version of personhood. However, if one starts from the moment of enslavement, then there is no personal and, indeed, no person, for the thingification of slavery takes away “the personal.” Things are not persons. But it is through the histories of slavery that the personal becomes political, as the quest for personhood requires disclosure, nakedness, revelation, confession. Slave narratives tell one horror after another: a beating, a rape, a mutilation, a catalogue of family separations, of things being disaggregated, of units collapsing and being re-joined. Of black male slaves used as studs to impregnate black women slaves.

How can language not collapse when things are gendered and compelled to reproduce themselves? (Thinking on “things” in philosophy, aesthetics, and political science fails to reckon with fungibility; the “unimaginable” “thingness” of those once human.)

The archives I know best tell me that certain bodies are minoritized through being “disclosed,” through being forced to “disclose” themselves. Show me your suffering, the injunction goes. Mark it on your body. Show it in your life. Those who live in Kenyan slums are routinely scrutinized: their sex habits, excretory habits, sanitation habits routinely broadcast on local, national, and international news outlets. Their homes invaded, photographed, described. Their sex lives narrated and re-narrated in whispers and shouts, in official reports and scandalous news stories. Privacy has unequal meanings.

In our disclosing now, it seems difficult to distinguish between the intrusive gaze that minoritizes and the intrusive gaze that demands reciprocity (and promises intimacy: “let’s share secrets”). Practically, of course, it’s not that difficult: one gaze emanates from the state and its agents while the other might be state-related, but is framed as the normative structuring of sociality. At a moment when the normative structuring of sociality blends so readily with the state’s gaze—the Kenyan government can monitor private phone communications without a warrant, it seems, and the newly passed CISPA in the U.S. takes away many privacy protections—it’s difficult to know what privacy is, who has it, who can demand it, who can be protected by it, who can never access it.

To be minoritized is always to have less or no access to privacy. My resistance to disclosure, my stubborn refusal to answer the most banal of questions as a condition of sociality stems from how I know the histories of disclosure. I disclose as a matter of strategy.

A certain bad reading of Foucault coupled with anti-feminist sentiment has dismissed “the personal is political” as a bad bourgeois strategy. It has claimed that “confession” and “disclosure” cannot be strategic. Nor can disclosure be considered “good” art or poetry. Rather, it is “lazy.” Lazy, I think, because all is “already known.” And nothing “new” can be discovered through such disclosures.

How did we come to know “all” about the minoritized? And might it not be useful to distinguish among sources? Might it not be useful to hear what the minoritized say about themselves? Might it not be useful to think of disclosure as a strategy? And, more: as a strategic risk.

For to disclose is always a risk. Especially when those already assumed to be fully known—or fully knowable—risk disclosure. One risks being dismissed as repetitive, boring, derivative, pandering, lazy. As though one’s risk has no particularity.

What does it mean to risk disclosure? And who gets to risk disclosure? And how is such disclosure a risk?

I might be talking about “coming out.” About what it means to “be” out, and what it means to keep coming out. About the worlds created by such disclosures and the worlds made impossible. About coming out as a strategy and a choice. About the desire to have a private life. About the desire to manage scrutiny, and to enable other lives.

Histories of blackness (and anti-blackness) and feminism (and anti-feminism) teach me to be wary of disclosure. Yet I could not be were it not for those who have risked disclosure. Those who understood—and sometimes didn’t understand—the risks they were taking to enable futures distinct from the pasts they had endured. Futures for strangers.

Perhaps I want to offer a simple claim: privacy and disclosure are unequal playing fields. Some risk more than others when they choose disclosure.

Here’s a simpler, more cryptic claim: A friend was interviewed. The published interview is heartbreaking in what it does not say. It’s even more heartbreaking in what it says.

selective empathy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As always, Fanon:

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

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

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

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

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

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

dissent:censor

First, Rancière:

Politics is first of all a way of framing, among sensory data, a specific sphere of experience. It is a partition of the sensible, of the visible and the sayable, which allows (or does not allow) some specific data to appear; which allows or does not allow some specific subjects to designate them and speak about them. It is a specific intertwining of ways of being, ways of doing and ways of speaking. (Dissensus)

Second, Kenyan Drama:
Citing concerns over the threat of “hate speech,” Ministry of Education officials have banned Butere School Girls from performing a play at the National Drama Festival. The play, “Shackles of Doom,” addresses economic inequality and nepotism. Adjudicators who evaluated the play claimed the “script” should “use more imagery, allegory and metaphor to achieve some persuasion other than be intrusive.” Ministry of Education officials suggest “Art” should not be “Activist.”

Third: Context
In African Writes Back to Self, Professor Evan Mwangi of Northwestern University describes how East African writers have used innovative formal techniques—he focuses on “metafictional” strategies—to produce political art under repressive regimes. Professor Mwangi is interested in how those not permitted to write openly develop formal tactics to critique repression. I doubt that Professor Mwangi would go this far, but one might suggest that the demand by Ministry of Education officials that plays should have “more” art(ifice) and should not be “intrusive,” recognizes a shift in the political climate.

A “paranoid” reading might suggest that we are now in a “new” age of repression. An equally “paranoid” reading might suggest we need to pay attention to sites of pedagogy as places where specific forms of discipline are produced, specific types of bodies created, and specific modes of subjection perfected.

Fourth: Small Events
Tea leaves are very small. It seems silly to read tea leaves. We are past superstition and in a new age of facts. Big data. Even though Kenya’s electronic systems are notoriously unreliable. To read the Ministry of Education officials’ actions as anything other than a small event, something idiosyncratic rather than representative, seems very silly. Small events needs not signal anything significant. My training in literary studies does not help, precisely because I am trained to read for the small. As Eve Sedgwick notes, literary critics are trained to be paranoid readers: we see “insidious intent” everywhere.

Small events might be small events. Not all butterflies create typhoons.

Fifth: Discipline
The most powerful censorship is never explicit. Discipline, Foucault teaches me, is about producing habits and dispositions, knowing when and how to act and move and speak as though by instinct. Knowing, as well, when not to act and move and speak. Discipline is knowing when to be silent before silence is demanded.

Sixth: Precarity

Precarity is the embodied experience of the ambivalences of immaterial productivity in advanced post-Fordism. The embodied experience of precarity is characterised by: (a) vulnerability: the steadily experience of flexibility without any form of protection; (b) hyperactivity: the imperative to accommodate constant availability; (c) simultaneity: the ability to handle at the same the different tempi and velocities of multiple activities; (d) recombination: the crossings between various networks, social spaces, and available resources; (e) postsexuality: the other as dildo; (f) fluid intimacies: the bodily production of indeterminate gender relations; (g) restlessness: being exposed to and trying to cope with the overabundance of communication, cooperation and interactivity; (h) unsettledness: the continuous experience of mobility across different spaces and timelines; (i) affective exhaustion: emotional exploitation, or, emotion as an important element for the control of employability and multiple dependencies; (j) cunning: able to be deceitful, persistent, opportunistic, a trickster.
—Vassilis Tsianos & Dimitris Papadopoulos

Seventh: Dissent
I grew up in a country where dissent was criminalized. Silence was not a habit. Whispering was. Whispered fear. Whispered rage. Whispered promises. Whispered desires. Whispered dissent. Walls, doors, and windows could not be trusted. I knew how to feel the threat of the threat. Repression does not mind whispers. In fact, repression craves whispers and silence. Dissent was a dirty word. No. That’s not right. Dissent was impossible. No. Dissent was bad. To dissent was to un-love Kenya. To dissent was to betray our loving national father-president. We were free to love our father-president. Because the greatest love of all is the freedom to love the father-president.

Dissent: Promiscuity

Our American Now

England was rolling moss and gathering buds and saving nines, Princess Di in a long dress, and First Aid English to fix our broken tongues. BBC Shakespeare with dowdy sets and James Bond the glamor of attachment. Pictures in an album, the silence we misread as enchantment. Now, the smiles seem a little sadder. Stiff upper lips.

We are different now.

Then: the excitement of speaking English properly. To be Eliza Doolittle. The strangeness of the U.S. accent. Exotic. Kiswahili by Lionel Richie. My father said no to the U.S., convinced it was still barbaric. No fit place to acquire an education. A country squire trapped in his peasant past.

America offered amnesia, unending mobility, accumulation that was not unseemly.

We are ruder now.

Tavia Nyong’o has argued that Barack Obama is the first postcolonial president in the U.S. Uhuru Kenyatta is the first U.S.-educated president of Kenya. If, as so many writers have argued, the U.S. is the great nation founded on forgetting, president Kenyatta’s U.S.-style inauguration following a U.S.-style Bush v. Gore court case has implications for Kenyan memory-work and historical reconstruction. This is not a matter of documentation or truth, but about the urgency and importance attached to memory-work in our ongoing state of crisis. (To be “under-developed” or “developing” or “third world” is to be in a perpetual state of crisis, one intensified by the “global war on terror.”)

The almost ritual invocation of Bush v. Gore during the Supreme Court hearings on the presidential election suggests that we have entered a newly Americanized frame of reference. It marked, I think, a certain departure from the promiscuous cultural mixings we see in popular culture: the adoption of U.S. spelling by Kenyan publications, the presence of more U.S.-style eating establishments, even as our bookstores remain heavily British. Since 2003, when president Kibaki assumed office, many U.S.-trained professionals have “returned” to Kenya or have been instrumental in setting up and engaging with local institutions. One could argue this has been true since at least the late 1960s, but the invocation of Bush v. Gore during the televised Supreme Court hearing formalized a transition in how Kenya is to be thought. (We aspire to be “like” the U.S. as it has grown increasingly repressive, domestically and internationally; that requires a different writing occasion.)

I’m interested in what it means to be “like” the U.S. for memory-work. James Baldwin is my guide here.

Perhaps no country is as anxious about historical memory and memory-work as the U.S. History books are scrubbed clean, public memory denied, the thing happening at the moment described as not-happening, the known classified, the unknown classified, the previously known classified, and memory trained to anticipate the future. The now-here is to be forgotten for a tense predicated on an ever unfolding expansive future. Save room on your camera-phone for what will unfold. Erase the past if you need to. Memory is what is to happen. Memory is desire.

In “Autobiographical Notes,” Baldwin writes, “About my interests: I don’t know if I have any, unless the morbid desire to own a sixteen-millimeter camera and make experimental movies can be so classified.” An interest predicated on a not-here, not-now, anchored in a desire to own something not yet describable, something “experimental.” How to read Baldwin’s desire in this early writing?

Baldwin understands white America’s desire, a “we” he inhabits and makes thinkable and impossible:

Time has made some changes in the Negro face. Nothing has succeeded in making it exactly like our own, though the general desire seems to be to make it blank if one cannot make it white. When it has become blank, the past as thoroughly washed from the black face as it has been from ours, our guilt will be finished – at least it will have ceased to be visible, which we imagine to be much the same thing. (“Many Thousands Gone”)

Who is this writing “we”? What act of forgetting must be undertaken to blank it and accept it as “we”? I must struggle to remember the “I” who is writing the (im)possible we.

He adds,

The making of an American begins at that point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land. This problem has been faced by all Americans throughout our history – in a way it is our history – and it baffles the immigrant and sets on edge the second generation until today. (“Many Thousands Gone”)

Kenya’s American Now is about a relationship to history and to memory and to feeling. It is present in Vision2030, a collective vision predicated on eliminating the unsightly and the unproductive from public view and collective memory; it is present in many shiny plans to develop an educational system predicated on producing appropriate “skills” for new industries that will transform us; it is present in the current attempts to depict the ICC as an imperial invader that took over a Kenyan process and marginalized Kenyan voices; it is present in (successful) attempts to criminalize IDPs, the “welfare mothers” of Kenya; it is present in the new accents on TV that erase traces of other pasts, other affiliations; it is present in the desire for forgettability; it is there in the enforcement of that forgettability.

Kenya’s America Now is about desiring the memory of tomorrow: what is to be made and who we will be constantly overwrites the who and where we have been, those things that “hold us back in bondage.” Kenya’s America Now is being produced by our politicians, our religious leaders, our business leaders, our intellectuals, and our artists, all looking away from here-now and then-there, the Egypt we left and the desert we crossed. We are in a new land of free computes and free maternity care and free secondary education and it is bright and shiny and new and only fools would dare try to look back.

Remember Lot’s Wife.

The Wound and The Scream

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the wound remains to be written.

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

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

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

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

Fragments on Bodies

Bodies are notoriously difficult things to think about. They press themselves on thinking, interrupt writing, and impose sensation on philosophy. They fragment style, giggle at logic, and seek pleasure in formulations that favor prettiness over intellectual rigor. And just when we think we are finally writing the body, thinking the body, feeling the body, bodies respond: “That is not what I meant at all; / That is not it, at all.”
*
The archives I know best, and not at all, those of the black diaspora, make bodies difficult.
*
Something happened on the slave ship.

Hortense Spillers tells us that what happened is “unimaginable” from our vantage point: humans were transformed into objects.

Not simply objects of knowledge, as Foucault has it, but into things.

Fred Moten writes, “The history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist.”

I hear Spillers and Moten as I read Nikolas Rose and Simone Browne on the contemporary management of bodies in real and virtual spaces through biometrics and other technologies of surveillance.

The archives I know best suggest that we need to return to the unimaginable then to apprehend our unbearable now.

We may have left that unimaginable world, where bodies were re-made by the constricted spaces of slave holds and the obscene logic of fungibility, but we still inhabit the precarious afterlife of slavery. Our bodies are marked by management and surveillance and exchange.
*
How can we think about the body in these precarious times?