Gukira

11 women and men were murdered in western Kenya because they were suspected of witchcraft. According to reports, most of them were over 70 and at least 8 were women. I am having problems processing this information.

The figure of the witch exists in many communities in Kenya, and this figure is, more often than not, the ambivalent object of respect and revulsion. But I am not interested in the ethnography of this figure.

Instead, I am interested in what witches and their counterparts, prophets, represent. I am thinking, here, of Thiong’o’s The River Between, and the tragic history it tells of prophets who were ignored and dismissed as crazy. I am also thinking, to indulge ethno-history for a moment, of the Gikuyu belief that introverted individuals were witches, that those who dared to think or dream or express themselves differently had to be destroyed.

It might seem counterintuitive if not silly to align witches, prophets, intellectuals, artists, and queers, but this kind of clustering allows me to imagine what might be at stake.

Witches are often accused of wishing ill on their societies, of re-forming those societies, imagining them differently. For some, the act of imagining society differently is akin to wishing it ill.

Yet an unwillingness to envision if not support bone-deep changes impoverishes who we are and who we can be.

Tell your God to convert
Me to the faith of the indifferent,
The faith of those
Who will never listen until
They are shaken with blows.
—Everett Standa, “I Speak for the Bush”

Those who know Standa’s poem in full will rightly consider it to be an odd choice as a point of departure. The full poem, after all, privileges the “bush” against “civilization,” praising the old ways, what some revere as moral tradition, against the perversity of the modern. It sets up precisely the kind of oppositions that I tend to oppose.

Yet.

This poem has stayed with me over the years. It was, in retrospect, one of the first poems that made class differences palpable. And, in the aftermath of the class-ethnic-generational violence in Kenya, at a time when, unfortunately, some in our political class have seemed to re-consolidate, to re-congeal with impurities, irrevocably tainted by their participation and silence, the poem seems even more relevant, but also, sadly, too optimistic.

For the poem imagines a kind of empathetic citizenship, in which blows on one body might resonate on another—this might be what we mean by body politic. It invokes, as well, the tradition of violent revolution that compels political change. Whether the political change of leadership translates into ideological and socio-cultural change is one of Africa’s ongoing problems.

It is a problem worth considering as we face what will be a major generation shift in political leadership over the next 10-15 years.

More immediately, Kenyan leaders are debating whether they should grant amnesty to the “youths” who perpetuated the post-election violence. The matter is touchy, especially given claims (supported by some evidence) that some of the very same political leaders provoked, supported, or, at the very least, benefited from the post-election violence. Shouldn’t those leaders also be held responsible? Shouldn’t a truly reformed politics develop a strategy to hold all those who circulated and participated in hate speech, in specious arguments (and I have been accused of such), as responsible in some way?

The recent lynching of 11 women and men in the western part of Kenya complicates the scenario I am trying to sketch. It offers eloquent, if tragic, testimony to the culture of violence that has, itself, been granted amnesty for too long, a culture that believes domestic violence and corporal punishments are not simply just but necessary ways to create disciplined populations, families, citizens.

It is a culture that documents, in shocking detail, acts of mob justice, but neither blames nor punishes these perpetrators of public violence.

Over the past year, I have become increasingly convinced that we must document all forms of violence (as Ushahidi have started); we must forge connections between the most banal and the most extreme acts of violence; we must be willing to refuse claims for cultural, regional, and historical specificity that justify violence.

We must deny our cultures innocence and our histories amnesty.

An article in the Standard informs us that “Sodomy” is “rife in prisons.” It opens with the startling observation that the director of Health Services in charge of the Prison Department “has admitted that homosexuality is rife in prisons.”

He laments the presence of the “anti-social” “vice” and argues that such “practices” can be combated through “discussion.” (Someone needs to lend him a copy of Foucault. Like, seriously.)

The vice is, of course, responsible for the spread of AIDS. And, worse, “Some prisoners pick the vice in prison and continue with it when freed.”

Broken Record Begin:

I have argued elsewhere on this blog that the historical and socio-cultural contexts through which we discuss sodomy-homosexuality (and I suture both for now) in Kenya shape how we approach it, in casual and institutional ways.

What remains fuzzy in the article, and therefore analytically interesting, is the implicit association between sodomy-homosexuality and the prison as an anti-social space. If, that is, the prison contains anti-social individuals and those same individuals practice homosexuality-sodomy (changing it up), then, at least implicitly, homosexuality-sodomy becomes anti-social because of its sociogenesis. It comes from an anti-social space and is thus anti-social.

There is a certain logic to this argument, if we are willing to go there. I am on a theoretical level, but not on any practical note. (Zackie Achmat has the BEST essay ever written on good prison sex in Africa.)

I do not have the brain space at the moment, but I want to bookmark the implicit synonyms that shape how we read the article: sodomy is equivalent to homosexuality is an anti-social vice. None of these are historically synonymous nor are they inevitably joined. The joining happens in the article.

Will “discussion” fix the problem?

Given how the “discussion” is always already skewed against sodomy-homosexuality, this “discussion” is really about the best way to exorcise this “vice.”

R.S.V.P.: I will not be attending the exorcism

Asymptote: A line which approaches nearer and nearer to a given curve, but does not meet it within a finite distance. (OED)

My dear friend Kibe spent many hours trying to explain geometry to me. I understood, in the abstract, that the sum of certain angles added up to 180°, and that, sometimes, those angles were in odd positions. There was a relation between, say, the line that extended out of a triangle and the angles within the triangle. (If you just winced, you are experiencing Kibe’s pain.)

Geometry requires magic.

No doubt, my sense that this most precise of disciplines consists of magic offends, but I want to hold on to it for now. I want to hold on the sense that it’s difficult, almost impossible, for some of us, perhaps all of us, to understand certain things.

Geometry is one thing, my inability to understand it another, but I have been thinking about what it means to “get” something, to “feel” something.

We often fault those who “fail” at what we consider “empathy.” We believe they do so out of some fundamental “wrongness” or “willfulness” and that if they just learned enough, heard enough, experienced enough, they might be convinced about the rightness or justice of a cause.

What if they just don’t “get” it? And what if their not getting it is actually foundational, not anomalous, to our political lives? What if our not getting it is essential to the political lives we lead and choose?

To begin from this position goes against the view that one’s reasoned position can and should convince others; that politics takes place on rational grounds.

And we come, finally, to the asymptote.

In my very non-mathematical way, it represents a gap that one must jump for congruence to emerge. In another one of my languages, it might be called a leap of faith. Were I to steal from Obama and, by inference, Jeremiah Wright, it might be the audacity of hope.

What if not getting it is central to political life in a more fundamental way than we have imagined? What if the political invitation is not that we should get it or feel it, is not fundamentally empathetic or rational? What if it is predicated, instead, on a leap of faith, a willingness to risk, even without knowing what it is we risk?

Politics as a gamble. Perhaps.

I am not sure I’m totally convinced by this idea, but I have been trying to work around the idea that people I know and love and trust don’t “get” the politics I support: race-based, feminist, queer. And I am reluctant to attach a bunch of “ists” to these people, mostly because I am stubborn.

But I also want to take more seriously defenses of those who say “odious” things and are then defended: x is not racist or sexist or homophobic. This requires a slight detour. As I’ve written before, the injured person feels pain: the driver of a truck that hits a pedestrian cannot say whether or not the pedestrian experiences pain. The “ist” statement has to be judged from the position of the addressee, not the intent of the speaker.

However, what if individuals just “don’t get it”? And should we rely on them to “get it” to prove something about them or about ourselves? And, here, let’s not forget the psychic satisfaction “we” get from being in the right.

What if we recognize that politics, or activism, might not rely on shared values or demonstrating the right kind of empathy? What if we acknowledge the seriousness, the scary, stuff-of-nightmare risk that we ask of each other? What if, to choose an issue close to home, GLBT activists did not dismiss the anti-gay marriage stance as hate, but engaged with the bone-deep fear it provokes?

This is not to say we abandon “getting it.” If so, then all pedagogues would be out of work—and I like my job, thank you very much. It is to say we recognize what we ask when we urge people who “don’t” or “can’t” get it to, somehow, get it.

This is why I like the idea of the asymptote as a model for collaborative world-making. In truth, I might simply have written about metaphor, since it similarly relies on the lack of congruence. But I like the idea of almost getting there, but not quite, a hopeful position that believes, ultimately, that people are good (WM has de-cynicised me), that they desire good for others.

To desire a shared good means asking for a collective leap, a jump across the political asymptote.

[I]f there is a truly Fanonian emotion, it is anger.—David Macey

There are, for instance, men who go to “houses” to be beaten by Negroes; passive homosexuals who insist on black partners.—Frantz Fanon

I have been struggling with the improper question of what it means for critics to desire Fanon’s anger. The question is improper for it imputes, via Fanon, a form of desire that is troubling. It suggests that a certain critical gaze wants black anger, wants to be beaten, wants flagellation. That, in fact, such flagellation helps to secure a certain subject position, a certain “this is who I am now in my pain and shame.” It is an ungenerous reading, but not, I think, entirely wrong.

One might approach this “ungenerous but not wrong” reading by examining Fanon’s semi-colon. In another of my cultures this might be called reading entrails. Here contiguity or, my preferred term, frottage, might provide a way in.

The semi-colon joins closely linked clauses but is not expository in the same way as the colon. Really, I know this is supposed to be a semi-serious post, but I can’t help giggling as I type. I need to stop watching boy tv.

I have been trying to figure out the role of the semi-colon in Fanon, not only what it joins but how it joins, not only what it suggests but how it suggests, to understand the role of frottage in Fanonian erotics.

Fanonian erotics, in all their splendid perversity, turn on the slightest of grammatical units, a comma, a semi-colon, a dash, a hyphen, each one might lead to the house visited at midnight, the whispered desire, the scream of pleasure-pain. Fanon is constantly turning corners and finding queers, as footnotes, as asides, as supplements, as though they are always waiting for him, on the corner, at that place, in his text. As for the queer desire for Fanon, I offer myself as evidence.

But, you ask, what is this Fanon I am professing? (According to Ward Churchill, professors profess. Really?) Isn’t Fanon the one who confesses his revulsion at the thought of finding another man sensual? (There is a too-clever reading that seizes on this moment to queer him. It is too clever for my vulgar tastes.) Or, we might say, I am more intent on following his asides, looking at furtive figures in thick shadows. (I have night blindness and must move closer, but not too close.)

In part, of course, I am fascinated by Fanon’s queering asides because of my own love for and abuse of the aside, the constant appositives that go elsewhere, the dashes, the parentheses, the asides that announce themselves as such. But I will also remark that the quick, sudden smile makes all the difference, as does the moment when we embrace playfulness as part of intellectual and ethical work.

And because I so often read for the smile, I disagree with Macey about Fanon’s “genuine emotion.” There must be anger in the face of injustice, and Fanon may not be quite as ambivalent as Bhabha might like, but there is also deep pleasure not just in political and social action (Fanon’s discussion of the veil has a sly smile in it), but also in the language through which that action is detailed. Recall, for instance, that Fanon wanted to turn in Black Skins, White Masks as his thesis, and it was turned down for being too unsystematic (it is—he tells us “methods devour themselves”).

I am interested in pleasuring Fanon.

And I am also wary, as Fanon was, of the interracial dynamics of anger, in which black anger is fetishized, understood to be authentically black, and arousing in its blackness. And here we cannot distance the ambivalent pleasure that accompanied the endless replaying of Jeremiah Wright’s snippets, a pleasure whose racial-fetish elements become clearer when we note the absence of similar snippets by homo-hating, New-Orleans-deserved-its-fate John Hagee. It is not simply that Wright is more attractive (he is, yes the statement is catty), but that the fetish value of black anger in the white dominated media trumps whatever Hagee’s “righteous” anger might suggest (of course, as the media has told us several times, the media loves McCain, but that’s another issue).

It might be precisely at the point of the “fetish” that we return to Fanon’s “houses,” those semi-private settings in which anger is permitted, solicited, desired. But here, note that anger is contained and given back to “the master” (let’s be Hegelian for a moment) in the form of pleasure-pain. It does not go out of the “house” to perform transformative work. (Black Skins, White Masks, is above all else, a text about interiors and exteriors, houses and minds, streets and roads.)

The “homosexual,” for Fanon, will be the receptacle for pleasure-pain. I cannot say that he is wrong on this. Though my reading of that pleasure-pain has a different “interest.” I am, after all, for the queer. Of course, the ambiguity of that description is part of what I aim to capture: the queer as the receptacle of pleasure-pain, even and especially at the hands of the carefully selected Negro. This is difficult to understand, and it moves into places we might not want to venture. And because I’m chicken, I recommend Gary Fisher and move on.

The direction, even with asides, is to press the relationship posited by the semi-colon and to make it useful for a certain kind of critical operation.

That critical operation asks about the desire (with all its connotations) for black anger, who wants it, how they want it, what it contains, and what it enables for the parties engaged in the transaction. From my vantage point, it is to ask about black complicity and pleasure in performing anger, to track or at the very least hint at the benefits and pitfalls of such a strategy, to understand, albeit in a limited way, the transformation of anger into strategy, or the strategic re-appropriations of anger, not least by academics.

I don’t know if he was what we call “gay” and this is not my story to tell. But the impossibility of who I was at that time requires me to borrow a story of what it meant to be a certain kind of desiring subject in a specific institution at a particular stage of development. Names need not be used.

The story itself is unexceptional and those who were there will recognize the characters.

: One day, a drunken 16/17 year old boy-man accosted a younger 16/17 year old boy-man and attempted to perform what the law might term “gross indecency.” Subsequently, the perpetrator was forced to change residences and we spoke about him, of him, over him, in the impoverished languages of sin, sensation, and sanction.

He became the embodiment of our fears and hopes.

For those of us “inclined that way,” his physiognomy and actions became a source of fascination and a cautionary tale. We learned that intoxication might betray us and disdained chemical traps. We haunted mirrors, anxious that our eyes, lips, cheeks, facial expressions might resemble his, and thus betray us. We displayed interest in the case, but never sympathy. We already knew how to pass, but we taught ourselves how to do it well: some of us turned to brothels, others to pornography, others to God, many of us to all three.

For him, there was no release from the “oppression” of the closet. Instead, he learned to inhabit the threshold, neither being nor becoming. Rumors had followed me. Gossip followed him. I lived in the interrogative. He lived in the indicative.

In what sense, then, did he embody hope?

Proximity to a body that desires otherwise opens possibilities. One need not desire as that other body does, but one begins to see the faint traces of little-walked paths. One realizes there is more than one path into the forest of desire. One follows bending grass, anticipating the surreptitious pleasures behind tall bushes.

I cannot return this story and so I cannot borrow it. Instead, I use it to tell a certain kind of story about a certain time in a certain place. What is specific has been approximated. It might be termed an attenuated history.

From this distance, it remains impossible to understand whether the impulse to perform “gross indecency” demonstrated a proclivity or whether it was purely due to intoxication. After all, the internets are full of “very” heterosexual men simulating same-sex oral and anal intimacies. Yet the question of his sexuality seems unimportant.

Were we to meet, the terms of the conversation remain ill-defined: would my confession elicit identification or disgust? Not disgust because of what I say, but because of the lateness of my saying it. For instance, I remain ambivalent about individuals who come out “too late” for it to make a difference. To say this is to state an impossible, retrospective hope about the implications of others coming out. It is to believe, without any evidence, that others’ vulnerabilities might mitigate mine.

It is not a story of courage or hope, not an example of what Heather Love terms “affirmative history.” However, this is not to say that it cannot be a “useful” history, as Nietzsche might suggest. It is not a cautionary tale in any traditional sense. I have no interest in asking young Kenyan men to stay closeted nor do I have any investment in promulgating the (sometimes true) myth that high schools can be incredibly normative and homophobic.

So, what kind of story is it?

My anecdotes, as I’ve indicated in the past, have to do with gender transgression and the ambivalence of desire. They have to do with winning awards for “best female,” feeling the weight of male lust as I dressed in my sister’s clothing, experiencing the burden of male disgust (disavowal) as I changed into my own clothing. They have to do with occupying a different threshold marked by the inchoate, even queer, teenage desire directed toward me only to be retracted in a collective moment of normalization. In fact, my anecdotes refuse the narrative of the closet, because they are not predicated on assuming or performing sexual identity in terms of gay, lesbian, or bisexual. Instead, they occupy the murkier realm of possibility and opportunity, of unfettered lust and teenage hormones.

Arguably, this world is much harder to write about. It refuses the certainty of moving from a threshold and insists, instead, on negotiating the flows of bodies and desires. One occupies the infamous “revolving door” in a literal way. If, in recent years, I seem to have moved away from the doorway, I am only a few steps away from it.

Aimé Césaire may have championed black pride, as so many obituaries claim, but he also made that pride difficult. As we reflect on his legacy, we would do well to attend to the complexity of his thinking on blackness, one that might surprise us. The phrase black pride has a distinct U.S. history, one whose complications are often lost. We assume it means a constant affirmation of blackness, a need to reclaim and assert black dignity and accomplishments. While all these might be true within U.S. histories, we cannot transpose this understanding onto Césaire, not if we aim to maintain any form of loyalty to his thought.

While a full-scale examination of this complexity is beyond the scope of this medium—I would recommend Nick Nesbitt’s fine study—it might be worth remarking on how Césaire makes black pride difficult. Unlike his compatriot, Léopold Senghor, Césaire rejects a mythico-romantic view of black history. He writes in Notebook of a Return to the Native Land,

No, we’ve never been Amazons of the king of Dahomey, nor princes of Ghana with eight hundred camels, nor wise men in Timbuktu under Askia the Great, nor the architects of Djenné, nor Madhis, nor warriors. We don’t feel under our armpit the itch of those who in the old days carried a lance. . . . I may as well confess that we were at all times pretty mediocre dishwashers, shoeblacks without ambition, at best conscientious sorcerers. (27-28 )

As elsewhere, Césaire writes in a double voice. On the one hand, he indicts slavery and colonialism for placing blacks into subservient positions. This is easy enough to understand. On the other hand, he refuses to value blacks based on histories of what they might have been or would have been if slavery had not happened. He refuses to value blacks based on their imagined genealogies of greatness and accomplishment. The value of black lives and bodies is not coded in gold-tipped genes. This is a democratizing gesture, insofar as it values all blacks, even and especially those Césaire describes as “the vomit of slave ships” (28).

But it is also a difficult position to take. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century histories of blacks often began by listing eminent men and women, accomplished people who had proved that blacks were not inferior. This tradition has continued in black diasporic culture. After all, it’s easy to be proud of our artists, our musicians, our writers, our Nobel and Pulitzer prize winners, our athletes. It is, arguably, less easy to take pride in “mediocre dishwashers” and “shoeblacks without ambition,” unless, of course, they are receiving Academy Award prizes for portraying such roles.

Can you imagine a BET award for mediocre dishwasher?

Césaire, in the tradition of Langston Hughes, challenges us to accept the ugly and the diseased:

I accept . . . I accept . . . totally without reservation . . .
my race that no ablution of hyssop mixed with lilies could purify
my race pitted with blemishes
my race ripe grapes for drunken feet
my queen of spittle and leprosy
my queen of whips and scrofula
my queen of squamae and chloasma (39-40)

What might it mean to accept rather than to challenge? To refuse to participate in the discourse/counter-discourse game that rarely unsettles the foundational terms? Simple inversion, after all, accepts the rules of the game. You call me ugly, I respond that I am beautiful, but we are still playing the beautiful-ugly game.

To return, finally, to a Kenyan shorthand, what would it mean if, following Césaire we looked at Wanjiku, really looked at her, and saw, in her poverty and struggles, in her subaltern silence, the possibility and realization of the histories we claim to inhabit? What might a black pride that emanates from the position of negativity be? (Stephen Partington will have a partial answer in the Nation at some point this week.)

For me, thinking along with Césaire has been incredibly generative for considering the ongoing politics of respectability in black U.S. culture and politics. But that is another discussion for another time. For now, we might continue to muse on the difficulty of Césaire’s challenge: to imagine black pride from the position of the mediocre dishwasher, to take this position as our starting point.

I used to dread Dunia Wiki Hii. To my mind, it represented news culture as a whole, and it was dull, boring, and poke-your-eye-out unwatchable. I could not understand my parents’ desire to watch news and dreaded that growing up meant I would acquire dull tastes, become dull, be dull all around.

Something changed.

I cannot claim to be a news junkie, but I go through my 5-6 daily news sources, ranging from the national (U.S. & Kenya) to higher ed (Inside Higher Ed, Chronicle of Higher Ed) to more opinion/lifestyle type sources (Salon, Slate). On an average day, I devote approximately 2 hours on news—this, of course, gets far crazier for “special” occasions.

But this is only obliquely about me. It’s not simply that I grew up and became dull (I am), but that news itself changed.

It is unremarkable to claim that news now considers itself to be competing with entertainment. Gone are the days of the dour, sour, and all-too-serious anchors. Today, they announce hurricanes with a smile and rival stars in looks.

What seems to be remarkable is that this happened within my lifetime. News became less dull, became entertaining and provocative. In some strange way, as I grew up, news regressed.

According to Nick Nesbitt, Césaire was the Toussaint L’Ouverture of the black Francophone cultural revolution in the 1930s and 1940s. It was a “revolution” that “proceeded . . . not through the redeployment of absolute terror, violence, and destruction, but via a reconstruction in human understanding and experience. This was a transformation whose weapons were the humanist arms of imagination, communication, and insight: poetry, literature, theater, philosophy, and polemical tracts” (Voicing Memory xii-xiii).

This revolution is most forceful in Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. One cannot summarize this work; one can only read and feel.

For Césaire and the dreams he continues to inspire.

And we are standing now, my country and I, hair in the wind, my hand puny in its enormous fist and now the strength is not in us but above us, a voice that drills the night and the hearing like the penetrance of an apocalyptic wasp. And the voice complains that for centuries Europe has force-fed us with lies and bloated us with pestilence,
for it is not true that the work of man is done
that we have no business being on earth
that we parasite the world
that it is enough for us to heel to the world whereas the work of man has only begun
and man must still overcome all the interdictions wedged in the recesses of his fervor
and no race has a monopoly on beauty, on intelligence, on strength
and there is room for everyone at the convocation of conquest
and we know now that the sun turns around our earth lighting the parcel designated by our will alone and that every star falls from sky to earth at our omnipotent command.

Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939)

John has been posting incredible poems this month, in honor of National Poetry Month, I believe. I don’t have the discipline to post or write as much. So, I’m digging this one out of the mothballs.

Of course, you won’t steal it. It’s mine. And, no you can’t reprint it without my explicit written permission.

Sonnets
I must confess, I had expected the clichés of my childhood
and miss them — Kathleen Fraser

1.

This next one, as I had promised
lends intelligibility
like the varied snorts of a boar
in heat
perhaps enjambment
provides an occasion—but
your Jewish nose kept intruding
and I kept making links
nose: shoe: finger:
your promised territory

2.

To write this must
be to write of love,
the pain of loquacious irritants,
or the subtle accents of your alienation

perhaps love being that
most alienating of discourses
like
mismatched shoelaces

3.

(sometimes to be a sponge)

4.

It was an acceptable mythology

– something
like a Billy Holiday remake –
“authentic with scratches”

5.

(a subtle mastering)
(a belief in mimicry)

dotted with so much whiteness

6.

I always hoped, through
those horrible reels, filmed
it seems, in another world,
the innocence of your face
would shine through – but
allegiances are divided,

though black pepper is inherently
pluralistic

7.

Greens, Oranges, Reds

I painstakingly learned
frangipani from hibiscus, jasmine
from morning glory, tuber roses from
avocado

but I still couldn’t see
the link between orchids and
testicles

8.

The word was extension but
standing on tip-toe couldn’t
add height – and hair
inevitably curled down –
and was painful,

a concealed
terror of vaginismus, a
pig rooting in filth

9.

Images were somehow uncertain
and I couldn’t afford small
machines,

10.

sandwiched pleasures, retold between
slots of allotted time,

what
one could generate as story
or truth