Notes Toward a #kenyasyllabus

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A syllabus is generative. The framework of readings and activities creates a shared space for thinking and creating. Objects of study produce shared frames of reference—those assembled by those objects may disagree over how those objects mean and work, but the objects create a ground from which to begin and a space to which to return. These processes of beginning and returning, subtended by difference and enriched by interpretation, guide imaginative possibilities. These processes lead to co-imagining, even when difference makes co-imagining difficult and even impossible. Impossibility is often a function of a time-lag: the uneven interval between encounter and transformation.

Shall I be idealistic and say that all co-imagining encounters leave their trace?

*

I learned the phrase “dream of a common language” from Adrienne Rich. Before I encountered it, primary school had taught me the difference between official languages—Kiswahili and English are Kenya’s official languages, the languages of governance and administration—and home languages—in polyglot Nairobi, these included multiple ethnic languages inflected by the experiences of urbanity; the varieties of Swahili spoken across accents, never sanifu, always functional; and Sheng, the language of urban youth culture. Vernacular was an odd word, a word we learned early in primary school that purported to describe what was not official.

In Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s hands, vernacular was a decolonizing tool—but we are no longer in Kenyatta’s 1970s and Moi’s 1980s, and the decolonizing potential of vernacular languages has been co-opted by Kenyan ethnonationalisms.

From Ngugi’s experiments with community-based vernacular theater, I learned to think about vernacular arts—perhaps vernaculars, in general—as calls to assemble and co-imagine. From Rich’s work, I learned to think about the space of difference in language—those extended white spaces between words in her poems. To think of vernaculars as calls                 to assemble that succeed                 to the extent that they recognize their incomplete nature and always leave                 room for the changing call                of the political. From the varieties of languages spoken in Nairobi, that stew of official and home, functional and invented, I learned to think about creating the languages that are needed, bending and twisting and borrowing and weaving to generate possible worlds—worlds that make us—those assembled—more possible.

*

When Kenya promulgated a new constitution in 2010—and in the process leading up to this promulgation—those people designated as “stakeholders” encouraged the rest of us to read the constitution. At the time, I wondered what made a document created by legal experts and NGO bureaucrats legible to those of us not familiar with legal and NGO vernaculars. It was disingenuous to expect non-experts to understand what experts had crafted, especially because non-experts had not been involved in the process of crafting the constitution. Consider, for instance, if the draft constitution had been peer reviewed by primary school students (Std. 6 or 7). Consider if it had been tested in the low-income neighborhoods that make up most of Nairobi. What might those experts who drafted the constitution have done differently if they had made it speak to those it was meant to serve?

The constitution, a legal document full of bureaucratese, was offered as a Kenyan vernacular: a syllabus, if you will, that would guide our imaginations and create possibilities for living and a common language that would provide our differences with a common frame. On the very day it was officially promulgated, it was violated. A few years later, when then-ICC indictees Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto were permitted to run for office, it was violated again. I cite only two instances of ongoing constitutional violations. Those who fought for a new constitution continue to insist that it is the “most progressive” constitution in Africa, refusing to acknowledge that a constitution is only as valuable as the promises it enforces. For now, we are saddled with a lumbering, cumbersome document full of bureaucratese that the majority of Kenyans can neither understand nor navigate. The constitution is offered as a vernacular, but it cannot fulfill that role.

The other vernacular offered to Kenyans is human rights.

In the 1980s, Moi singled out Amnesty International as a dissident organization. Dissident was one of Moi’s keywords. Every critique of Moi’s regime from a human rights organization was dismissed as supporting dissidence and attempting to undermine the peace, love, and unity we enjoyed under Moi. Human rights entered Kenya’s vernaculars as a foreign tool—Moi and his propaganda machine described it as foreign—designed to undermine Moi’s regime and something described vaguely as traditional values—a stew of religion and invented traditions. By the early 1990s, human rights assumed a more local face: a signal moment is 1991, when the Kenya Human Rights Commission was established in Washington, DC. It was registered in Kenya in 1994. This movement from DC to Nairobi might seem minor, but it continues to mark how human rights is apprehended in Kenya: as a foreign import.

Kenya’s independence-era government was intent on what was called “Africanization”: to build a skilled, educated labor force that would take over the administrative and professional jobs that had been withheld from Africans. The most significant blueprint for this process was Sessional Paper No. 10: African Socialism and its Application to Planning in Kenya, authored by a young Tom Mboya. In the opening section of the Paper, Mboya outlines the objectives of societies:

The ultimate objectives of all societies are remarkably similar and have a universal character suggesting that present conflicts need not be enduring. These objectives typically include—

    1. political equality;
    2. social justice;
    3. human dignity including freedom of conscience;
    4. freedom from want, disease, and exploitations;
    5. equal opportunities; and
    6. high and growing per capita incomes equitable distributed

These objectives were to be grounded in African Socialism:

In the phrase “African Socialism,” the word “African” is not introduced to describe a continent to which a foreign ideology is to be transplanted. It is meant to convey the African roots of a system that is itself African in its characteristics. African Socialism is a term describing an African political and economic system that is positively African not being imported from any country or being a blueprint of any foreign ideology but capable of incorporating useful and compatible techniques from whatever source.

Whatever African Socialism was—Mboya’s tautological definition does not help—it was to be African, not imported. Indeed, the entire passage hinges on the distinction between African and foreign.

Human rights is not a key term in the 1965 Sessional Paper and, in fact, the emphasis on African Socialism embedded in African values and “not being imported” casts a long shadow over the reception of human rights in Kenya. African Socialism does not survive long—it is certainly not part of the vernacular that circulates in 70s and 80s political, academic, and popular cultures. But the African/foreign distinction lingers.

Human rights frames were essential to challenging Moi’s regime and creating new ways of imagining ourselves. They have continued to provide legibility for many minoritized Kenyans—poor, queer, sex workers, refugees, stateless—who may speak and be recognized as human rights activists and defenders. At the same time, the transformation of human rights into an industry in Kenya (and elsewhere), most often supported by donor funds from abroad, and now conducted in donor-mandated vernaculars (buzzwords) has made it a difficult frame. Instead of domesticating human rights, finding ways to make UN and donor bureaucratese speak in Kenyan accents, the human rights industry has made learning its buzzwords and bureaucratic procedures a condition for engaging it. Moreover, because human rights frameworks have not been domesticated—made available for popular, everyday use—they remain open to the charge that they are foreign and elitist.

If the constitution and human rights fail to be effective vernaculars, what is circulating in their place? By which I mean, what circulate as shared objects—visual, aural, and written—that assemble Kenyans in ways that generate interpretation while making space for difference?

*

What are our shared objects of study? What objects provide the ground from which we depart and to which we return, with our varying interpretations that make space for difference? What objects generate our vernaculars? What objects shape our imaginations?

These questions may seem irrelevant in an era dominated by data. We have data and more data and more data and graphs and charts and statistics and infographics and facts. So many facts. And we are hungry for even more facts.

Forgive me, I hear 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!

I worry that the data-ification of our lives means that even when presented with disparate objects—history, fiction, poetry, music, photography, sculpture, anthropology—the impulse will be to extract data from it. I worry that our imaginations have been so badly trained and damaged that all we can do is produce more and more data: more reports, more charts, more statistics. From what I’ve observed, the circulation of data does not generate transformative vernaculars.

*

Instead of shared objects of study, I think two things circulate: bureaucratic processes and affects.

Bureaucratic processes circulate as the demand for solutions to problems. Those solutions come wrapped up as commissions, committees, task forces, working groups, reports, and endless recommendations, and a key recommendation is always that more study is needed, so more commissions, committees, task forces, working groups, reports, and recommendations, setting up yet another cycle. You cannot complain that nothing is being done, even as you wonder what this thing being done actually is.

Affects circulate, mostly frustration, anger, and exhaustion. As they circulate, they attaches to different bodies and situations: the anger directed toward an indifferent and murderous state finds targets in workplaces and domestic spaces and public spaces. Anger and frustration are gathered and dispersed by ethnonationalisms, generating temporary catharsis while also accumulating more energy.

*

Without shared objects of study that might become a #kenyasyllabus—sounds, images, words—we are incapable of creating shared vernaculars that matter to the possibility of a we-formation. We are unable to remain tethered to each other by those objects, even as we co-imagine away from them. We trade data and opinion and quote the constitution and human rights frames at each other, but I am not sure what this produces.

*

What might a #kenyasyllabus look like? I don’t know. I assume it will vary across regions, as different objects have different weight for local populations. I assume that its genres will be varied, as it must make room for difference. I assume that as it circulates it will create shared vernaculars—guided by diverse interpretations and open to difference. I assume that it will assemble people and, as it assembles, it will change. I assume that the process of assembling it will model what it means to learn from each other and to share with each other and to live with each other. I assume that the range of objects assembled will be as broad as those who are assembled by those objects, and that the process of studying the assembled objects will take seriously the lifeworlds those objects occupy.

Love Chronicle XIII (for G)

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I want to understand the link between cum and tears

I had been looking for you and when you did not
show, the leaves changed their patterns, losing their
vibrancy in an unexpected deluge

What falls and cannot be un-broken

I find you beautiful, also, a suitable addition to my
collection of mummified love objects

When you said you researched images of AIDS, I
wondered if you played echo or narcissus

But line figures keep obscuring my vision, refusing
to grant me the sanctity of maleness,

Men, you see, have lateral placing, which means
astigmatism bends gender

The tragedy of going blind

I wanted to play Tiresius but you kept drawing me
to Dionysus, so we compromised that vestal virgins
might be interesting, if overrated

I confess to being envious of your beauty, your
colossus-like stride, even as I patched your broken
toe

Blushes and Giggles

Something quiet passes between us, my fear of
intimacy, my desire for infection, the unspoken,
unconsummated

You stopped writing and I keep waiting, living
between love and obsession

To remember, in perfect sentences

Political Imagination

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If your political hopes and dreams for Kenya were to be realized, how would you experience that Kenya?

  • Describe a typical day in this transformed Kenya in as much detail as possible, from waking up to going to sleep.
  • Describe a typical week in this transformed Kenya in as much detail as possible.
  • Describe a typical month in this transformed Kenya in as much detail as possible.
  • Describe a typical year in this transformed Kenya in as much detail as possible.
  • Describe a possible trajectory for your life in this transformed Kenya in as much detail as possible.

*
It is easy to name what is wrong with Kenya: corruption, impunity, historical injustices, violence against women, land grabbing, poverty, police brutality, negative ethnicity. If you probe a little more, you will hear the problem is a lack of political will to implement laws and policies. The solution, then, is to implement laws and policies.

My sense is that “the problem is implementation” does not have a way to think about the everyday, what political theorist Wambui Mwangi describes as the ground you are standing on, the ground from which you must start. I suspect, also, that “the problem is implementation” crowd cannot translate implementation into quotidian practice.

What would be the ordinary experience of a Kenya in which all the proposed laws and policies and report recommendations were implemented?
*
After posing the above questions to an organizer with whom I was co-thinking, I attempted to answer them. I couldn’t. I have been trying to account for this failure.
*
Imaginations are rooted—they do not float free from the worlds we inhabit and the worlds that inhabit us. As much as Jomo Kenyatta’s Kenya damaged our imaginations, it was still too close to the freedom dreams that imagined a free Kenya to halt all dreaming. Those who came of age during the struggle for independence and under Kenyatta’s regime had the memories of transformations they had created and experienced to draw on. They could imagine beyond what Kenyatta insisted was possible. Their imaginations were not unimpaired by his ethnonationalist, ethnopatriarchal, neocolonial, and anti-intellectual rule. The writing from this period is filled with disappointment and betrayal—but it had not yet hardened into the cynicism of the Moi years.

Generations overlap.

Those of us born into and raised in Moi’s Kenya had a different experience of the political. Mainstream Kenyan histories mark the attempted 1982 coup as the turning point in Moi’s Kenya, the moment the state became more explicitly authoritarian. I think that’s a nice fantasy—the colonial penal code and the constitution imposed on Kenya by the British and the structures of administration created by the British still ruled Kenya. We were born to the disappointed and betrayed—their sense of time and possibility had changed. I think this was the moment when “this is Kenya” took hold.

“This is Kenya” is a hold: stuck firmly in an ongoing present, it does not know how to retrieve the freedom dreams of the independence era and or how to look beyond current repression to imagine something that might be called freedom. This inability to look to past freedom dreams and to imagine a future freedom demands and produces inevitability.

If you pay attention, you will hear the inevitability that elections will not be credible; that the elected will be corrupt; that violence will erupt; that gender equality is impossible; that historical injustices and multi-generational damage cannot be redressed; that the police and prisons cannot be abolished; that corruption cannot be eradicated.

Stuck in the inevitability that “this is Kenya,” we cannot—dare not—imagine anything else

(This “inevitability” enables Kenyans NGOS looking for money abroad to demonstrate ongoing need. It is impossible for NGOs to imagine themselves as unnecessary, because Kenya no longer requires them. They need “this is Kenya.” I will note the paternalistic white supremacy that needs “this is Kenya,” and move on.)

“This is Kenya” names stuckness, the impossibility of imagining it could be otherwise: “let us vote for different thieves.” It traffics in unimaginative pragmatism—a bureaucratic language that derives its power from diagnosing and recording failure: “choices have consequences.” It names the class consolidation that creates a buffer between those whose futures can be imagined, and those deemed disposable.

“This is Kenya” names something that damages and impedes imaginations. I name it, here, not as something I have escaped, but as something we, collectively, might be able to dismantle.
*
Feminism and Black studies have taught me how to think of the political as the quotidian, the everyday, the daily, even, at times, the banal. Reading Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs and then reading those who have written in their wake—Michelle Cliff, Cedric Robinson, Hortense Spillers, W.E.B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen. Pauline Hopkins, Walter White, Anna Julia Cooper, Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, Pumla Dineo Gqola, Wambui Mwangi, Katherine McKittrick, John Keene, Frantz Fanon, M. NourbeSe Philip, Dionne Brand, Nalo Hopkinson, Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, John Murillo III, Grace Ogot, Claude McKay, Christina Sharpe, Alex Weheliye, James Baldwin, Essex Hemphill, Sofia Samatar, Rebekah Njau, Yvonne Owuor—I learn how intimacy and kinship and community are invaded, arbitrarily, by property relations, by state repression, by the afterlife of slavery.

We know these stories in their Kenyan accents: the lists of the disappeared, the missing, the exiled, the murdered, the tortured, the raped. The political vernacular for this is “historical injustice.” I fear using the word “historical” relegates what happened to the past. I now use multi-generational damage, to indicate ongoing harm and vulnerability. This multi-generational damage is material: diminished life chances, increased exposure to environmental toxicity, higher risks for police brutality, higher chances for sexual violence, lower rates of education, and higher rates of child mortality from preventable diseases. Just as importantly, this damage extends to the ability to imagine something different, something not this, something that might be called freedom.

It is a mistake to believe that our imaginations and desires are not rooted in the here-now we inhabit. Indeed, it is precisely the here-now we inhabit that can only imagine cessation, first, as the necessary stopping of pain and, second, as ethnocidal and genocidal logics and practices—burn it all down, get rid of everything, fagia wote.
*

It is easier to write about damaged imaginations—we experience them daily—than it is to ask how to work with and beyond them—how to imagine beyond what we think we can imagine. I suspect that the kind of remedial thinking that circulates as NGO wisdom—all those buzzwords that boil down to white supremacist paternalist bullshit with an extra helping of heteronormative patriarch—thrives precisely because it encounters no imaginations that can counter its developmental logics. More needs to be said about NGOs in Kenya and their neoliberal strategies and practices—I leave that to someone else.
*
I return to my initial questions.

If your political hopes and dreams for Kenya were to be realized, how would you experience that Kenya?

  • Describe a typical day in this transformed Kenya in as much detail as possible, from waking up to going to sleep.
  • Describe a typical week in this transformed Kenya in as much detail as possible.
  • Describe a typical month in this transformed Kenya in as much detail as possible.
  • Describe a typical year in this transformed Kenya in as much detail as possible.
  • Describe a possible trajectory for your life in this transformed Kenya in as much detail as possible.

*
On further reflection, I realized that a different Kenya has to be co-imagined, precisely because it has to be a shared Kenya. Shared imagining creates a ground on which to work; it provides a world to build; it anchors and provides energy when we are tired and weak and frustrated. Shared imagining creates measurable goals. It might even shape strategies.
*
This co-imagining has to start from the quotidian—from the ordinary ways we make and inhabit daily life—if it is to matter. I think this is difficult, especially during an election year.

Election years encourage us to think in big abstractions: 42 against 1, Kenya, the nation, the state, the party, the ethnic nation. The work of the voter is to support and sacrifice and show up. And while vague election promises point to some shared good that will happen—a new road, a new school, a new project—those promises are rarely, if ever, anchored in what those being addressed need or want. In part, because those promising do not know how to listen. Nor are they interested in co-imagining with those they claim to want to represent.
*
Imagining and co-imagining are difficult and might even seem impossible in a Kenya where the already vulnerable are becoming even more vulnerable and more groups are being added to the category of the vulnerable. If we can start from how we would like to experience daily life, we might formulate demands we can make of those who seek to represent us; we might create strategies for living together that diminish vulnerability; and we might practice creating the worlds we would like to inhabit.

Moonlight

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Water is another country.
–Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return

At first, the sound of water.

Residence time.1 Black time. Black untime. The memory of water—the memory water has—the memory water is. We keep returning to the water. We keep being returned to the water.

screen-shot-2017-02-28-at-17-25-27

A face plunges into ice.

screen-shot-2017-03-03-at-17-55-07

Again.

screen-shot-2017-02-28-at-21-16-03

my mouth be a reminder,
how saltwater suppose to stop the tongue from swelling.

how teeth be bones too
how my voice sounds of a needed haunting

—Jayy Dodd, “Eloquent,” in Mannish Tongues

Little:

Disquiet: What is it about Moonlight’s depiction of black boy vulnerability—black boy pain, black boy suffering, and the very rare moments of black boy joy—that has made it so amenable to some viewers?

Before I saw the film, I saw all the acclaim that Mahershala Ali was receiving for his work in the film. He is tender. He is loving. He is accepting, especially when he tries, clumsily, to explain the difference between “faggot” and “gay.” Learning from Christina Sharpe and John Keene and Joseph Beam and Essex Hemphill and Gloria Naylor and Randall Keenan and Marvin White and Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston, I am unsurprised by this care between a man and a boy. I am unsettled by the acclaim this “ordinary note of care” has received.

And then, there are Little’s silences.

Because so many have insisted on teaching us, we are now learning how to see and celebrate and think with #blackboyjoy. What are we to do with #blackboysilence?

The words “moving” and “lyrical” have been used many times to describe Moonlight’s silences. The sound of the world as it moves—the surf that always returns. Residence time. I think of Audre Lorde, asking, “What are the words you do not yet have?” Yet, I think, that is a misreading. It is unnecessary to populate Little’s silences. They are unsettling.

What does his gaze want? What do his silences want?

screen-shot-2017-02-28-at-19-05-06

If this body is a boy & all boys know death
& death bodies Black:
          Then this body knows how boys die.

—Jayy Dodd, “Black Philosophy # 3,” Mannish Tongues

Chiron:

Ashon Crawley wrote a wonderful piece about what it means to be young—to be a teenager—and to desire touch.2 Sharon Holland writes, “Though touching a person may seem simple, it is anything but.”3 Some young queers want sex, as Samuel Delany’s Hogg teaches. Others want touch that acknowledges their erotic desires: “you do, in fact, have these desires—you can exist in the world with these desires.” As I read Ashon, I thought that it is easier to discuss Chiron’s desire than it is to think about Little as desiring.

Perhaps what’s difficult about discussing Little as gay—discussing why the label faggot is applied to him—is that we see little of the gender transgression we associate with young children being called gay/faggot/queer/funny/strange. Unlike in Empire, there is no scene of Little dressing in his mother’s clothing. He does not play with dolls. His wrist is distinctly not limp. He reads as quiet. Too quiet. Shy. Too shy. Though I’m not sure if shy is the word. I want to resist diagnosing silence. Even as I’m convinced silence wants something.

Because Moonlight is so elliptical, it’s difficult to tell what makes Chiron’s classmates—and bullies—mark him as gay. Perhaps it’s something about how he performs or fails to perform teenage masculinity. Perhaps it’s something about how he performs or fails to perform teenage desire. Perhaps it’s something about his gazes and his silences. Perhaps—and this is terrifying to contemplate—it’s his loneliness. Darius Bost teaches me to think about black gay loneliness, about what often subtends and escapes declarations about community and kinship.

Perhaps it’s vulnerability. That softness that bullies seem to scent. That softness that gender policing notices. That softness that so many of us hide behind things we call wit or reading or shade or meanness. (How easily we bruise and callus.)

By the time we meet Chiron, in the second act, he is already wary. The quiet Little is now wary. His downward glances—he’s always looking down—designed to ward off attention. Kevin sees him. Kevin names him Black. Kevin explains why he names Chiron Black—a nickname, a move to recognize him, to touch him.

I need Sharon Holland:

Though touching a person may seem simple, it is anything but. Both physical and psychic, touch is an act that can embody multiple, conflicting agendas. . . . In fact, the touch can alter the very idea as well as the actuality of relationships, morphing friends into enemies and strangers into intimates. For touch can encompass empathy as well as violation, passivity as well as active aggression. It can be safely dangerous, or dangerously safe.4

I needed Holland—I needed the break—because it’s difficult to think about what happens to the touch between Chiron and Kevin, as they move from the beach, to the car, to the school.

Each movement depicts Chiron’s body opening itself more to Kevin’s: from sitting down hunched over at the beach, during the jerk-off, to Chiron’s more open posture as he sits in the car and as he leaves the car, smiling, to Chiron standing, fully open to Kevin’s punches.

In the final shot, before the final punch, when Chiron is fully erect—I don’t have the stomach to use a screenshot—Chiron is fully closed off. I wonder about the work of surviving that encounter—the work of experiencing the hand that grants recognition and generates pleasure turn into the hand that causes pain. Does Chiron know—can he know?—that Kevin is also fighting for his own survival? Is that a too-generous interpretation of Kevin’s actions? Of the care—the ordinary care—that says, “Stay down, Chiron”? Is it that care—the promise of that care—that allows Chiron to drive from Atlanta to Miami in the third section of the film?

Black

Black is stasis and return, a name offered as a promise of care, reclaimed by the film as Chiron, now grown, but arrested, returns to the promise of that care. Black, John Murillo III, writes, is untime. Untimely. By arrest, I gesture to the school-to-prison pipeline dramatized by the film, and to the psychic-physical arrest the adult Chiron confesses: “no one else has touched me.”

We know enough—too much, perhaps—about sexual violence in prisons to question Chiron’s confession. Touch—physical and psychic, what makes and unmakes us. We would like—I would like—to believe that he was safe from sexual violence while locked up. If we want that fantasy—if I want it, and I do—Moonlight offers it. It is an ellipses that allows us to fantasize about something that might be called “the one” or “monogamy” or “true love” or “soul mate.” If I fail to punctuate that ellipses, I will not leave it unmarked. We might ask what it means to touch and to be touched—but not by ignoring the quotidian violence that accompanies vulnerable boy-men who are locked up.

Kevin is the only one who calls Chiron Black, as far as I remember. If others use it, it is not with the, at first, benign friendship and, later, tender care. (I don’t have the stomach to see what Kevin calls Chiron while punching him—I think it is Chiron, not Black. If so, Black remains locked away, an intimate term. A term that touches.)

I like that Little grows into Black, the idea of Black as what can be grown into, claimed with tenderness, with and by an ordinary note of care.

screen-shot-2017-02-28-at-21-54-17

Are Black’s silences Chiron’s silences? Are they Little’s silences?

Because Darius Bost has taught me how to think about loneliness and because Samuel Delany has taught me to think about black gay sociality and because Marlon Riggs taught me to think about finding black gay community and because James Earl Hardy wrote a series of books on black gay friendship and because there are now multiple YouTube videos of drag balls and because Noah’s Arc exists, I wonder about the couple form at the end of the film. I offer this not as a point of critique—though how can it not be?—but as something that is sitting in me, on me, with me, about the impossibility of black gay sociality in homonormative times.

I wonder if black gay loneliness and the private black gay couple are objects of desire. I think of how James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin circulate, not as gay men who loved and desired—it matters who you love, Essex Hemphill says—but as deracinated, free from anything that might be called gay sociality, so that we need never think about them inhabiting and creating gay worlds and enjoying gay worlds.

What kind of object is black gay loneliness? Who desires it? Why?

We are returned to the water. Residence time.

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We are returned to the water and, through it, to a man named Juan from Cuba. We are returned to the water and, through it, to black boys looking out over the water, seeking something that might be called freedom.

1. “What happened to the bodies? . . . They were eaten, organisms processed them, and those organisms were in turn eaten and processed, and the cycle continues. . . .The amount of time it takes for a substance to enter and the ocean and then leave the ocean is called residence time. Human blood is salty and sodium . . . has a residence time of 55 million years.” (Christina Sharpe, In the Wake) ↩
2. “Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself?” (Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks)↩
3. Sharon Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism. ↩
4. Sharon Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism. ↩

Reading Ras Mengesha & Joyce Nyairo

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The first section of Ras Mengesha’s The Other Experiment is titled “What We Were Not,” and it moves through scenes of ethnic, gendered, and sexual making and unmaking—declarations of identity in an impossible register (the Somali-named figure who claims to be Kenyan), rituals of intimacy truncated by violence (two men declaring they love each other before a mob descends), and practices of failed gendering (a man confessing that he does not know how to address his abusive partner). Here is the complete first paragraph:

One. Beginnings. Firsts. Newness. It is the beginning, the start, the commencement. The first of many. I am Salim. Salim. I am my beard and my kaftan. One. I am the person in the mirror. I am the tie they make me tie around my neck. Around my neck. Hang-man noose. Hang man. I am Hang Man: super power, hanging . . . to death. Perpetual death. Over and over I hang, over and over I die, over and over I am in hell, over and over, over and over, over and over. One. I am beginning. Beginning, starting, commencing to see truth, life, world, love – nothing. One is hope, one is death, one is possibility. Maybe after I walk out of here I will go back to the original beginning. But no. This is a new one, a new start, I am an alien again, I am now who they say I am. I am who I am not. I am what I am not. I am plane in sky . . . fly, fly, fly, turn, fly, fly, fly, descend, fly, fly, fly, bang! I am building, crash, smash, burn, bang! I am gravity, pulling down things, pulling down heaven, I am hell. I am car, I am matatu, I am loud bang. I am Salim.

Another beginning, this time from Joyce Nyairo’s Kenya@50, which grapples with how to remember Kenya:

Maybe sometimes. That was the legend inscribed above the door of a remodeled Peugeot 404 that used to ply the City Center-Kawangware route, via Hurlingham, in 1986. I would stare at it very often on my daily runs across the city, I tried to work out whether that legend was grammatically correct. Did it need a comma to separate the two words? Or did it need a full stop between the two words? I also pondered the numerous ways in which it could be interpreted, never mind its questionable grammar. That legend was a literary delight because there was nothing fixed about it except the place where it sat—across the door. Its mobility at a cognitive level was replayed as a physical journey as the matatu coursed up Valley Road and down Argwings Kodhek Road.

Ras and Joyce (permit the familiarity) engage the problem of writing from Kenya: in Ras’s work, that problem is one of being, the unstable ways one with the name “Salim” is and is not possible within a Kenyan imaginary, while in Joyce’s work, that problem is one of embattled memory, how one enters into and inhabits the contingent space of Kenya. Joyce writes, “the biggest challenge to the work of forging a more inclusive, less oppressive, more equitable and just Kenya is, it seems to me, constantly undermined by memory—by the lack of it.” She continues, “The confluence of recollected narratives is the only thing that will save us from the twin pitfalls of dangerous ignorance and hazardous half-truths.”

Let me use the coincidence of the matatu to think with these works—I cannot do this as fluently as Kenda Mutongi and Mbũgua wa Mũngai, but I can try. I’m interested in how these works—and these writers—position themselves in relation to the matatu. Historians of the matatu teach that the first matatus were made of bits and pieces and were mobile bits of scrap metal used for public transport. They were cheap. And quickly became popular. Today, we talk about matatu tycoons in Kenya or, in our new vernacular, matatu cartels. From here, where the matatu represents a form of accumulation and power, it’s easy to forget—or never learn—the idea of the matatu as an assemblage of metal scraps bound together by grit and ingenuity.

I think Ras points to this history in the figure of Salim—“I am matatu.” Salim is an assemblage of fantasies and desires, so impossible that the signature gesture of presence—“I am”—must be deferred. The word “I” is the seventeenth in the passage. It is impeded—and facilitated—by “One. Beginnings. Firsts. Newness.,” origin stories that create difficult ground to stand on, difficult ground from which to announce, “I am Salim.” But note, even visually, how long it takes before “I am Salim” can be uttered again. Note how the assertions of self become embattled: “I am my beard and my kaftan.” One hears Fanon, “I am given no chance. I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the ‘idea’ that others have of me but of my own appearance” (Black Skin, White Masks 116). One also hears a Kenyan politician saying, “your name betrays you.” For Salim, post-Shifta Kenya meets post-9/11 world. It’s difficult not to hear, “I am loud bang” as the destructuration that permits a final statement, “I am Salim.” We—those gathered by this writing—might wonder about the (zombie) figure that so identifies itself.

Where Ras’s “I am Salim-I am matatu” invokes the I-matatu as assemblage, Joyce’s matatu begins life as a “remodeled Peugeot 404,” and it is only toward the end of the passage I have cited that this vehicle is named as a matatu. I cannot, now, construct or even reconstruct the meanings that attach to Peugeot in 1980s Kenya—the brand spoke about class and class aspiration, about labor and masculinity. As far as I can recall, it was not a brand associated with women. (I am mostly uninterested in cars, so that’s as far as I can go.) It was a “remodeled” car, and I do not want to lose sight of that, and of the distance one moves from the matatu as assemblage of scrap parts to the matatu as a remodeled car. I can mark these moments, though I do not know how to think about them.

Unlike “I am Salim—I am matatu,” Joyce’s “I” stands outside the matatu. It catches glimpses of the matatu as it travels across space, as it moves from the city—the seat of government in the 80s—to Kawangware—sometimes considered one of Nairobi’s informal settlements—while passing along and through Valley Road and Hurlingham—close to elite hotels and popular churches and the president’s official residence. All these spaces produce and attach meanings to the matatu. Maybe sometimes. Too, the matatu inspires moral panic: for as long as I can remember, matatus have been accused of corrupting morals and endangering lives. It might be that this danger stems from the cross-class contact matatus permit (Maybe sometimes). We would hear stories of what young men in matatus—the infamous makangas—did to young women. Beware. Class snobbery met—or more precisely used—sexual conservatism. These young urban men—men from slums or slum-adjacent-areas—threatened class mobility. Let’s be clear here: super-rich Kenyans do not use matatus. It was the aspirational classes threatened by the matatus, the aspirational classes who took as common sense that one should marry well, someone with a future, someone presentable.

Openings. Beginnings.

My tentative plan is to dedicate a few blog posts to reading Ras and Joyce together, to see how their works imagine and weave Kenya. I think we need to read each other with care, to listen to how we are co-imagining Kenya, especially at a moment when co-imagining feels so threatened by ethno-nationalist forces, on the one hand, and by bureaucratic pragmatists, on the other. We extend beyond ethno-nationalist desires and imaginations and also beyond rule of law pronouncements and constitutionalisms.

Thanksgiving

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Thanksgiving TV is terrible: families gather from far-flung places; there are predictable anxieties over whether this or that family member will show up; fights break out over many unreconciled issues; tears flow; and, whether at the beginning, middle, or end of the show, families sit down to eat a meal and someone, usually the matriarch, says, “we can all eat a meal together.” Or, “we can be civil during a meal.” Langston Hughes’s poem, “I, Too,” teaches us that the question of who gets to sit at the table during a meal is never innocent. It is, in fact, one of the key ways that one’s belonging is affirmed. It doesn’t matter if the meal is left uneaten or is disrupted; one has been invited to sit at the table.

I have been thinking about something I am calling white reconciliation after Trump’s win. White reconciliation names the range of ways ideologically and politically divergent whites are gathered by and into white supremacy by being offered a seat at the family table. As Christina Sharpe points out, white kinship is a political and affective vernacular that subtends and operates alongside white supremacy (I’ll add the link when it’s available). White supremacy uses white kinship to sustain itself: “for our wives and children”; “for our families”; “protect the family”; “protect our children.” This kinship is both filiative (by blood) and affiliative (by choice). And while the language of white supremacy sounds political (and angry—those who use it are accused of being angry), the language of white kinship is taken as apolitical or, to use Lauren Berlant’s term, juxtapolitical: driven and sustained not by political battles to be won, but by feelings and values. Family is important. Family values. White kinship.

White kinship works through white reconciliation or, rather, it requires rituals of white reconciliation. U.S. Thanksgiving is the festival of white reconciliation.

If you’ve been following the election coverage, you might have seen some efforts at white reconciliation. Before the statistical breakdown (incomplete) was available, white reconciliation wanted to claim that Cousin Pookie (those black people who only voted because of Obama) would not vote and had not voted. The narrative had taken shape prior to the election—Obama named Cousin Pookie—and many of the white progressives who supported Hillary Clinton were waiting to use it. (I am speculating, but the history of white progressives railing against “those terrible  black homophobic people” guides this speculation.) The problem was the black misogynists. But, as the (premature) numbers emerged, the narrative was impossible to sustain—over 90% of black women and about 80% of black men had voted for Hillary Clinton. White reconciliation predicated on antiblackness needs alternate strategies.

Despite all the evidence, despite everything Trump said during his campaign, despite all the terrible antiblack people he has recruited and who support him, those invested in white reconciliation—in the promise of a seat at the Thanksgiving table—insist on saying that Trump should be given a chance. I suspect this is a conversation happening across Family WhatsApp Groups (for those in them), and in family group chats, and in family emails. As Thanksgiving approaches, white reconciliation will enter high gear: “I know you’re not getting along with your brother/sister/aunt/uncle/cousin/grandfather, but you’re still coming for Thanksgiving, right?” Some will be guilted into it: “Don’t you have the decency to spend ONE MEAL with your family?” “How dare you let politics divide us?” “We are stronger together.” “Family comes first.” These strategies work.

Once gathered around the table, one is reminded that the relative who voted for Trump is not so bad: they like a certain sport or team; they like music you like; they volunteer with underprivileged people; they have a respectable profession; they tell very funny jokes; they are very good at charades or basketball; they are, in a word, human. They may have “strong political opinions”—note, the rhetoric will shift from “hateful” and “bigoted” and “unhumaning” to “strong”—but they are fundamentally “decent.”

I learned how to think about the word “decent” by reading my friend Praseeda Gopinath’s work. Decent appears to be a neutral term: it does not signal total approval or even liking. It does not mean good or pleasant. It is slightly above bearable—decent, someone you can watch a game with, eat a meal with, drink a beer with, smoke a cigarette with. It appears to be an ethically neutral term. Praseeda’s work showed me how the idea of the decent Englishman masks white supremacy and patriarchy: “he doesn’t beat his wife” is decent;“he doesn’t use overtly racist language” is decent; “he doesn’t object to my gay/lesbian/gender-non-conforming partner” is decent; “he is not burning crosses on the lawn” is decent. The idea of the decent person will serve white reconciliation. (I suspect “not as bad as we expected” will also serve white reconciliation when it comes to Trump.)

Right now, many people are saying, rightly, that normalization should be resisted. They are turning to Nazi Germany to find examples of how normalization happened. I am not a scholar of Europe or WWII. I learned how to think about normalization from feminist activists and scholars and from queer activists and scholars. Audre Lorde taught me how what she calls heterocetera creates shared ground. Adrienne Rich gave me the language of compulsory sexuality and Gayle Rubin taught me how to consider hierarchies of acceptable and unacceptable intimacies. Cathy Cohen and Rinaldo Walcott taught me how to think about punks, bulldaggers, welfare queens, and nation. Christina Sharpe gave me the language of monstrous intimacies, about the production of white kinship in one direction and property in the other. Katherine McKittrick and Dionne Brand taught me how to think about blackness and geography, about the places black bodies bear and are displaced from. Sara Ahmed taught me how to think about tables, about who gets to sit around them. And Simone Browne taught me to think about the race-work of biometrics, about the not-quite-human (Sylvia Wynter and Alex Weheliye) that marks our shared absence from the human-as-whiteness. (I cite to provide others to think with—there are many more.)

I think about intimate sites of normalization—the Thanksgiving table, the PTA meeting, the church fellowship, the grocery store, the gym. It will be the guy from grindr who merits Red Lobster. It will be the new friend with exquisite taste in cheese. It will be the neighbor who baked too many cookies and has to share them. It will be the local farmer who has the best produce at ethical prices. It will be the neighbor who helps shovel the walk after a snowfall. It will be seductive encounter after seductive encounter. For some. For white reconciliation. For the length of a Thanksgiving meal, and beyond.

Michelle Cliff & Cedric Robinson

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What truthtelling are you brave enough to utter and endure the consequences of your unpopular message?
—Melvin Dixon

I have gathered books around me—Essex Hemphill, Ceremonies; Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider; Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return; Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck; Audre Lorde, Our Dead Behind Us; Agha Shahid Ali, The Country Without a Post Office. I grieve by gathering books: I cannot imagine a greater tribute to writers than to gather books in their names.
*
When my brother fell
I picked up his weapons
and never once questioned
whether I could carry
the weight and grief,
the responsibility he shouldered.
I never questioned
whether I could aim
or be as precise as he.
He had fallen,
and the passing ceremonies
marking his death
did not stop the war.
—Essex Hemphill, “When My Brother Fell”
*
Michelle Cliff’s If I Could Write this in Fire and Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism are open on my desktop. I’m skimming through them as I write, hoping to find ways to describe the black radical tradition they embodied and practiced.

Looking back. To try and see where the background changed places with the foreground. To try and locate the vanishing point: where lines of perspective converge and disappear. Lines of color and class. Lines of history and social context. Lines of denial and rejection.—Michelle Cliff, If I Could Write this in Fire

The triangle trade: molasses/rum/slaves. Robinson Crusoe was on a slave-trading journey. Robert Browning was a mulatto. Holding pens. Jamaica was a seasoning station. Split tongues. Sliced ears. Whipped bodies. The constant pretense of civility against rape. Still. Iron collars. Tinplate masks. The latter a precaution: to stop the slaves from eating the sugar cane. Under the tropic sun, faces cooked.

A pregnant woman is to be whipped––they dig a hole to accommodate her belly and place her facedown on the ground. Many of us became light-skinned very fast. Traced ourselves through bastard lines to reach the duke of Devonshire. The earl of Cornwall. The lord of this and the lord of that. Our mothers’ rapes were the things unspoken.—Michelle Cliff, If I Could Write this in Fire

The Black Radical Tradition was an accretion, over generations, of collective intelligence gathered from struggle. In the daily encounters and petty resistances to domination, slaves had acquired a sense of the calculus of oppression as well as its overt organization and instrumentation. These experiences lent themselves to a means of preparation for more epic resistance movements.—Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism

*
“Our mother’s rapes were the things unspoken”

Saidiya Hartman writes,

It has proven difficult, if not impossible, to assimilate black women’s domestic labors and reproductive capacities within narratives of the black worker, slave rebellion, maroonage, or black radicalism, even as this labor was critical to the creation of value, the realization of profit and the accumulation of capital.—“The Belly of the World”

Strategies of endurance and subsistence do not yield easily to the grand narrative of revolution, nor has a space been cleared for the sex worker, welfare mother, and domestic laborer in the annals of the black radical tradition.—“The Belly of the World”

Audre Lorde framed black women’s lives and experiences in terms of survival. In her hands, survival was more than simply enduring. It was not about resigning oneself to a fate and hoping to make it through. It named the strategies of care and knowledge that made it possible to imagine, make, and transmit how to live and how to love and how to be across generations.

A few years ago, I attended a talk by Amina Mama about African women’s strategies of survival: she spoke about women knowing what to eat and where to look for food during wars, about the secrets women passed on about bitter herbs and drought food and food on the march. Prior to that talk, I had read Nalo Hopkinson’s post-apocalyptic Brown Girl in the Ring and it, too, spoke about the survival knowledge women transmit.

Consider the survival work of knowing how to dig for bitter, life-sustaining roots. Consider the radical work of survival.
*
We tend to think that those we esteem as radical have figured it out. Our task, then, is to operationalise (to use a very ugly word) what they’ve figured out. This is a dangerous fiction. In an interview, Michelle Cliff said, “I’m coming into myself as I write,” adding that she was no longer the person who wrote Abeng, her first novel. We know that, as readers, we take books and authors places they could not have anticipated. Reading Judith Butler or Audre Lorde or Dionne Brand or M. NourbeSe Philip or Yvonne Owuor from Nairobi is very different from reading these figures from Baltimore or Delhi or Cape Town.

Geohistory changes how we read survival and precarity and grief and violence and disposability and silence and memory.

We stretch in new ways—pseudopodia is the only image I can generate.
*
For the realisation of new theory we require new history.
—Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism

If we are to survive, we must take nothing that is dead and choose wisely from among the dying.
—Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism

Time scrambles: this writing started in India and is being completed in Kenya—accretions and deletions have happened and geo-history is entangled.
*
Tallying loss is always an incomplete endeavour, especially tallying the loss of a catastrophe that is still unfolding.
—Dagmawi Woubshet, Calendar of Loss

In our current historical moment—the afterlife of slavery (Saidiya Hartman), on the way to prison abolition (Mariame Kaba), the ravages of neoliberalism (Stuart Hall, Lisa Duggan), the proliferating sites of black disposability (the sea, the prison, the street, the school, the hospital), the resistance and possibility that is black lives matter, the ongoing work of black students in South Africa, the protests by Dalit groups in India, the fierce contests over the meaning of the political across multiple spaces—

I’m not sure what I can say about “our current historical moment,” about those gathered by that “our” and those willing to be gathered by it. When I read Jayy Dodd and Rinaldo Walcott and Neo Musangi and Sylvia Wynter and Sofia Samatar and Samuel Delany, I am convinced we are in a moment when the human overrepresented as Man is approaching exhaustion, and when I turn to the work being imagined by Christina Sharpe and Dionne Brand and Yvonne Owuor and Mariame Kaba, I see difficult and possible worlds coming into being, worlds where black radicals can be and belong.
*
as a scholar it was never my purpose to exhaust the subject, only to suggest that it was there
—Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism

There is no ending to this piece of writing. There is no way I can end it.
—Michelle Cliff

I started this writing a few days after learning about Michelle Cliff’s death. I had followed the remarkable outpouring of work about Cedric Robinson and I wondered—I still wonder—how Michelle Cliff would be mourned and remembered, and where. As I look across the sites of mourning, I am sad to see that the two are not mentioned as part of the same tradition. I do not mean this in a biographical way. I mean within the world of imagining and creating freedom dreams.

I knit their names here to mark the capaciousness of the black radical imagination, and to thank them for what they allow us to imagine and to make.

As part of that making, I conclude with Leigh-Ann Naidoo, who, from South Africa, draws a map of possible futures:

We are in the midst of an intense politics of time. It is not easy to accept the burden of a living, prefigurative politics. Immanence is difficult. The fear is intense, and the threat of failure is everywhere. How do we sit, collectively, in the middle of that discomfort, prepared to not know quite where we are going, but be convinced that we have to move?

Audre Lorde, implores us to understand the worth and the purpose of anger. In her words, “Anger is loaded with information and energy. . . . Anger, expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future, is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification.” And here, in Lorde’s words, lies the challenge for the student movement. If we are to be custodians of a future that will have dismantled the violence of the past and its stubborn hold on the present, then we cannot get stuck in a politics of shut down. Shutting down is indeed necessary for the arresting of the present. But if we do not use the space that shut down grants to work, seriously, on our vision of the future, if we do not allow ourselves, too, to be challenged and pushed, to read, and talk to each other, to work out our strategies, to doubt, and to find a vision of a future world in which the many oppressions that beset this one are in sight, then the door that we have opened will be closed again.

May we live in a time of difficulty, of critical immanence, and always, always towards justice.