A Decade of Archives 7: 2006

This is the seventh in a series of posts leading up to this blog's tenth anniversary on August 18. In each post, I look back on one year, sometimes specifically and sometimes generally. All the posts can be found here.

Miami Vice

K: There are times when I'd really love to live in your world.
M: It's full of existential crises, but not a lot of headaches.
K: I've already got the existential crises, so it might be a nice change.
M: There's a reason the first album that ever made a strong impression on me was Stop Making Sense.
K: So that's your aesthetic credo?
M: No, I don't have a credo. It's just something I thought of and so I said it. It's probably not even true.

—"A Conversation After Miami Vice"

2006 seems to me an ideal year of The Mumpsimus, not because all of the posts are high quality (they aren't!) but because the diversity of posts covers just about everything I think of as Mumpsimusian. In other years, the balance has been in one particular direction or another, but if anyone were to ask me to sum up the most dominant ideas and concerns of this blog, I'd tell them to roam around in the 2006 archives.

I'm not one for taxonomy, but it's occasionally useful, so let's taxonomize.

Black Star Nairobi by Mukoma wa Ngugi

Last year, I wrote about Mukoma wa Ngugi's Nairobi Heat, seeing it as an interesting, if flawed, first novel. Now Melville House has released Mukoma's second novel, a sequel to the first: Black Star Nairobi, a political thriller that begins as a detective story and ends up taking us from Kenya to Mexico to the U.S. and then back to Kenya at the time of the election crisis of 2007/08.

The writing in Black Star Nairobi is more assured than in Nairobi Heat, and the plot and structure are more ambitious. The ambition is also the novel's curse, because the text is not up to the task of portraying and dramatizing the richness of its worlds and ideas — it's a book that needs to be twice its length or half its plot.

"On Quitting": We Need New Forms

Keguro Macharia has written an essay titled "On Quitting" that I've now read three times since I first learned about it this morning. So much of its subject matter sits close to my heart, and thus so much of it is heartbreaking.

I begin to wonder about the relationship between geo-history, the saturation of space with affect, and psychic health.

I want to
describe how
I come to
be here-now:
another
threshold
I start writing a linear story, winding, but linear, about psychic health and academic production, a story that tries to make sense of why I am resigning from a tenure track job from a major research university at the same time as I am completing a book manuscript for publication. Not only resigning but also changing continents, returning to a place I have not called home for a very long time. This, I realize, is a story about words and places. So let me start with the word that started it, or named its fractures.

As you can see from that little excerpt, it's a formally inventive essay, and magnificently so — there are sidebars, collages, fragments. It could not be otherwise.

I've loved Macharia's blog Gukira for a while, and have benefited from his scholarly articles (indeed, a year ago, two students, without any prompting from me, cited his "Girlhood in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's The River Between" in their final papers, which pleased me greatly), but this new essay is something else, something for which I have no better word than necessary. It birthed a phrase in my mind all day — We need new forms. New forms of writing, new forms of teaching, new forms of learning, new forms of governing, new forms of being.

"I am completing a book manuscript for publication." Those words fill me with hope, despite the essay's sadness and fury.

We need this essay.

We need more essays of similar honesty and intellect and poetry.

We need new forms.

Blogging the Caine Prize 2012: "Urban Zoning"

This is my second post for the great 2012 Caine Prize blogathon. (See my first post for some details.) I'm coming a little late to Billy Kahora's story "Urban Zoning" (PDF) because it was finals week at one school where I teach and the last week of classes at another, so I haven't had much spare time, and then when I did finally start writing this it kept growing, and I disagreed with myself frequently, and I couldn't make anything cohere, and finally I gave up and just tried to salvage some of the maelstrom of questions and doubts that plagued me as I wrote. There are some thorough and excellent posts about this story up now, so I highly recommend following some of the links to them, which this week I will put first rather than last, because really if you do want to know about the story, you should read those...

---

Other writers' posts about "Urban Zoning" by Billy Kahora:
Black Balloon
Stephen Derwent Partington
The Reading Life
Backslash Scott
Ikhide
Loomnie
ndinda
City of Lions
zunguzungu
Practically Marzipan
bookshy
Cashed In
aaahfooey

---

Thinking his way through (or toward) "Urban Zoning", Aaron Bady digs into a bunch of provocative questions about what it means for something to be an African story and/or a Kenyan story, and Stephen Derwent Partington, City of Lions, and Ndinda at Inkdrops, among others, have all placed "Urban Zoning" within its specifically Kenyan cultural context. It is a story very much of a particular setting: Nairobi (and, according to Kahora himself, a specific time: the '90s). That does, and should, raise the questions Aaron and others have asked about the story's resonance and even intelligibility to an audience that is not deeply familiar with the specific reality from which it is drawn.

In many ways, though, all fiction (all art! all everything!) depends on the knowledge, experience, and assumptions each audience member brings to it. This is also true for aspects of the story that have nothing to do with its setting — I think we saw with last week's story how each reader's assumptions about what a story should be and do affected people's appreciations for the actual story in front of them. My own preferences for fabulism and metafiction led me to notice, emphasize, and value those elements of the story more than other readers generally did, and my relative indifference to gritty realism in some respects got in my way with "Urban Zoning", a story I admired (there's some excellent writing in it) but was, after two readings, pretty much indifferent to.

It's entirely possible that my indifference stemmed from my having only superficial knowledge of Kenyan culture and Nairobi in particular. I've been there, but as a tourist, and not for an extended period of time. I've read more Kenyan fiction than the average American, but that's not saying much. Nonetheless, the setting felt less alienating for me than a story set in, say, Eastern Europe, a region about which I know almost nothing, have never traveled to, and have only occasionally read about. The characters, situations, and allusions were far easier for me to understand, or at least recognize, I think, than just about anything in The Illiad. At least with "Urban Zoning", I could think, "This feels like a sort of update of Going Down River Road..."

Nairobi Heat by Mukoma wa Ngugi

I read Mukoma wa Ngugi's Nairobi Heat (part of Melville House's International Crime series) a few weeks ago, but haven't had the time to write much about it, so what I say here is likely to be more general than it would have been before. Though I think the novel has some significant flaws, those flaws are mitigated, for me at least, by a number of real strengths, and in the weeks since finishing it, moments from the novel have scratched through my thoughts and memory. For that reason, I think it's a book well worth reading.

First, to get unpleasantness out of the way, here's what I see as the novel's flaws: Events often feel like they exist for the sake of the plot's convenience and not for any reason organic to the narrative; some moments that should evoke an emotional connection from readers are not set up in a dramatic way that would allow such emotion to come to the surface and are instead sped through (a particular fault in the romantic relationship that propels some of the major events of the second half of the book); some of the characters are little more than hardboiled detective novel clichés in their general outline, if not their particulars.

However, I would not write about a small press publication of a writer's first novel if I didn't think its virtues were greater than its flaws, and it is the virtues I think worth spending time with here.

Report Realism

At Gukira, Keguro has posted some provocative thoughts on "report realism" in Kenyan fiction:

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

The report aesthetic goes beyond citing NGO facts and figures. It is concerned, above all, with a search for truth and accuracy and is threatened by imaginative labor.

I cannot comment on the specific accuracy of Keguro's observations, because I'm not in Kenya reading aspiring writers' work. But I was interested in the observations because when I was in Kenya (over five years ago, now) and talked with some young writers there, the sorts of contemporary writers they cited as inspiring them were people like Stephen King and J.K. Rowling. Indeed, that's mostly what was available for fiction in the bookstores, with most stores putting Kenyan and African fiction, if they stocked it at all, in dusty corners. Yet the writers who cited these inspirations to me were, with one exception that I can think of (someone who'd spent quite a bit of time in the U.S., in fact), writing in a very realistic, documentary manner. That can happen anywhere, though, if you only talk to a limited sample of people; I hoped (and assumed) that there were other writers out there aspiring to different sorts of writing, whether fantastical in its content or experimental in its form, because aesthetic diversity makes for healthy reading-writing ecosystems. And there is some such work being written (heck, Ngugi's Wizard of the Crow is a good example); it just seems hard for it to get attention or to be celebrated in the way documentary realism is.

I'm a dedicated (if undisciplined) reader of African fiction, and particularly Kenyan fiction, but I'm very much an amateur and obviously an outsider, so I'm wary of saying anything other than, "Go read Keguro's post," because anything I say could easily be taken as a white American guy telling African writers what to write. My desire is not to tell anybody anywhere what they should write; instead, I would hope to encourage us all to do what we can to create the space for people to write what most compells them. Great writing of all types happens when writers find the forms and styles that allow them to express their own unique experiences and imaginings.

The danger of report realism is its normative power — if writers think this is what they should write, or this is the only type of writing that will get them an audience beyond their closest friends, then it is not just limiting, it is insidious and harmful.

Those of us outside of Africa who want to encourage more attention to African writing and more opportunities for African writers sometimes reinforce such harmful assumptions. The Caine Prize is a perfect example. In my Rain Taxi review of Ten Years of the Caine Prize for African Writing, I said that the Caine Prize judges' narrow tastes are helping to limit the possibilities for writing from the continent. That was born out again during this year's Caine Prize. I don't blame the writers for that.

J.M. Coetzee was criticized (rightfully, I think) for lending his name and fame to an African fiction prize/anthology that ended up including, it seems, only white writers. It looks like Coetzee only read the 21 finalists and then was tasked with choosing winners from that group, and that the reading was anonymous, so his opportunities for knowing much about the background of the writers was limited, but still, he's a hugely famous Nobel winner and could, at the end, have pulled his name or said something publicly. He didn't, but he did write the most reluctant introduction to such a book that I've ever read. The very first paragraph reads:

The 21 stories that made it to the final round this year are of a generally higher standard than the finalists for the last award, which suggests that the standard of entries as a whole may be higher. If so, this is a promising development. On the other hand, the kind of short-story writer we are all hoping that an award of this magnitude will attract, recognize, reward, foster, and perhaps even launch into the wider world — the newcomer with naked talent, a feel for language, and a fresh vision of the world —stubbornly fails to arive.

Ouch.

I don't know about "naked talent" (what does that look like in a text?), but the feel for language and fresh vision of the world are certainly things that have been, with some exceptions, lacking from the Caine Prize, too. The workshop stories presented in the annual Caine Prize anthologies, though, show that this isn't necessarily the fault of the writers, but of the type of writing that gets rewarded and encouraged.

And that, ultimately, is why I think Keguro's post is important, and why I hope it will not only be read and debated, but that it will help lead to an environment where report realism isn't the only option. Keguro says it better than I ever could:

I want to advocate for wild imaginations—wild forms of writing, non-linear narratives, an obsessive attention to detail, writing that strains at the edges, reaches beyond itself. I’m interested in writing that lives in secret folders on computers, scurries under beds and into drawers when friends visit, worries that it will be deemed obscene, crazy, impossible. I’m interested in writing that dares truth-the truth of feeling, the truth of form, the truth of seeking, the truth of language seeking byways and creating paths. I’m interested in writing beyond report realism.

Notes on Petals of Blood by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

In the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Petals of Blood, Moses Isegawa calls the novel "the definitive African book of the twentieth century". I would only disagree because I do not think there is any one definitive African book, nor should there be -- one of the problems African literatures face when sampled here and there is the tendency for one or two books to be seen as giving some sort of definitive portrait of a continent of over 50 countries, a billion people, and thousands of languages. Petals of Blood is capacious and brilliant, but it's not definitive.

A lot has been written about Petals of Blood since its publication, and it continues to incite interest both in its portrait of Kenya in the early years of independence and its (and its author's) politics. This was especially true at the time of its release, because it was difficult then to see beyond the novel's critique of Kenya's ruling class to its subtler aspects, and the fact that Ngugi was soon imprisoned without trial added to the political reading of the book. It is, of course, an overtly political novel, a novel that very clearly wants readers to see the government of Kenya as betraying the ideals of the liberation struggle in favor of capitalistic greed. But one does not need to be a Marxist to find great value in Petals of Blood, any more than one needs to be a visionary Christian to find value in Dostoyevsky's novels or a vegetarian to appreciate Tolstoy's.

One of the purposes Petals of Blood serves is to recuperate in writing an unwritten past. We might identify the central narrative of the book as the story of the murder of three prominent men, but amidst that story are many others, and the movement is hardly linear. Were we to create a graphic representation of the novel's many pieces, it would surely require a spiral or two, because the overall sense the various strands of plot and event give is one of moving deeper and deeper through the history of the village of Ilmorog, which is also, at least partially, the history of Kenya. The structure is so carefully constructed, though, that this history does not feel tangential -- indeed, it becomes impossible to see the solution of the murder mystery (the primary concern of the basic narrative) as separate from the history of Ilmorog and of Kenya generally: specifically, the history of its systems of power. This is perhaps one of the reasons why I constantly think of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy when I think of this novel. The murders in Petals of Blood serve similar narrative purpose(s) to the murders in Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, or the battles in War and Peace. While certainly this purpose/structure/effect can be interpreted as a result of Ngugi's Marxism (perhaps with reference to Lukács), it's not something we find only in Marxist narrative. It could come from any worldview that is not fanatically individualist.

Pep Talks

From Elspeth Huxley: A Biography by C.S. Nicholls (2002):

[David Waruhiu] was a padre at the huge Athi River Mau Mau detainee camp, run on Moral Rearmament lines. The MRA was influential in Kenya, Nell Cole and Tuppence Hill-Williams being among its original members, and had created the Torchbearers, an inter-racial society. At the Athi River camp, where Tuppence was in charge of five hundred women, Elspeth found the MRA workers very sincere and devoted, although she doubted whether they cuold really change black hearts. The inmates were rather fat, because they were fed on Geneva Convention rations four times as heavy as the normal Kikuyu diet. At intervals they were given pep talks and called to God.

From Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins (2005):

Former detainees scarcely recall Athi River as a site of spiritual awakening, perhaps because they were cycled through an endless regime of physical and psychological coercion. [Alan] Knight [leader of the MRA in Kenya and camp commandant at Athi River] himself insisted, "Rigid discipine is the keynote of Athi, and hard work the basis of everything....A man whose body is disciplined and subject to control, will be more open to subjecting his mind to control." Detainees were forced to work, and if they refused, their rations were reduced. They might spend days with no food and then, half starved and dehydrated, they could be subjected to hours of preaching and lectures on Christian ethics and the virtues of Britain's civilizing mission. Camp officials also imported scores of Home Guards from the Kikuyu districts, who took to the camp broadcasting system, denouncing the Mau Mau and publicly dividing detainees into "murderers, thugs, leaders, and fellow travelers," according to Father Colleton. Screening teams, led by Mtoto wa [David] Waruhiu, himself an ardent MRA convert, worked the detainees over as well, interrogating them incessantly.

Elkins quotes a man who was held at Athi River for over a year:

Waruhiu would stand outside of a compound and shout, "People who killed my father, you come with me." The person singled out would then be taken for screening. When my turn came, they beat me with kicks, a hose, and anything else they could get their hands on. They jumped on me, while Waruhiu would demand to know what I knew, telling me to confess. The whole time making fun of me and laughing at my suffering. After that I urinated blood for several days. Because I refused to talk, I was again forced out to work, which I did so they would feed me.

Miscellanea

I didn't intend to disappear from this blog for quite as long as I did, but I got busy with work on the manuscript of Best American Fantasy 3 (the contents of which we'll finally be able to announce next week!) and I've been teaching an online course for Plymouth State University, an interesting experience, since I've never taught classes entirely online before (nor am I all that sure it's a way I like teaching, but that's another story...)

I probably owe you an email.*

Readercon is coming up -- July 9-12. I'll be there Friday afternoon and most of Saturday. The great and glorious Liz Hand and Greer Gilman are guests of honor. The other guests ain't too shabby neither. Except for that Cheney guy. He's a putz.

Some things I've noticed out on the internets:

• Hal Duncan wrote a little post at his blog about ethics, reviewing, criticism, etc. A few people commented. Hal wrote another little post responding in particular to comments by Abigail Nussbaum and me. Then another related post on "The Absence of the Abject". And then two posts on "The Assumption of Authority" (one, two). They're wonderfully provocative and wide-ranging essays, but as the whole is now over 20,000 words long, I haven't been able to keep up with it. But I shall return to it over the course of the summer...
• Jeff VanderMeer has been working for what sounds to me like one of the coolest teen camps in the world, Shared Worlds, and as part of that asked a bunch of writers and other creative-type people, "What’s your pick for the top real-life fantasy or science fiction city?"
• I accompanied Eric Schaller and family to a magnificent concert by David Byrne a few weeks ago. Byrne's earnest dorkiness has been a balm to my soul since I was a kid. He's been on The Colbert Report a couple of times in support of his tour -- here, performing one of my favorite of his new songs, "Life is Long", and here performing "One Fine Day" (in which everybody seems a bit tired). The Colbert studio isn't quite Radio City Music Hall, but still...
• Tor.com has, in less than a year, become one of the best science fiction sites, and they've now launched a store that includes "special picks" from their great array of bloggers. (And, interestingly, though the site is allied with Tor Books, it's striven to be, as they say, "publisher agnostic", so it's not just about Tor's books.)
• Speaking of major SF sites, I enjoyed Charlie Jane Anders's post at io9 titled "4 Authors We Wish Would Return to Science Fiction" because it includes new comments from each of the four writers discussed: Mary Doria Russell, Nicola Griffith, Karen Joy Fowler, and Samuel R. Delany.
• I really loved Jeff Ford's post on the books he survived in primary and secondary school English classes.
• I seem to have written yet another Strange Horizons column.
  

Meanwhile, I've been reading a bunch of books I haven't written about. Some just for fun -- I went on a bit of an alternative history kick, reading C.C. Finlay's The Patriot Witch (available as an authorized PDF download here) and L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall. The Patriot Witch attracted me because I've read some of Charlie Finlay's short stories and enjoyed them, and the book is set during the American Revolution, a time period about which I will read almost anything. The fantasy elements seemed a bit bland to me, but the scenes of the battles of Lexington and Concord were well done, reminding me of Howard Fast's April Morning, a book that, along with Johnny Tremain, was a favorite of mine when I was young. I'll probably read the next book in the "Traitor to the Crown" series because now I'm curious to see if the fantasy element develops in less familiar ways.

Lest Darkness Fall is, as many people through the decades have said, great fun, a kind of Connectic Yankee for readers who want their protagonists to be endlessly resourceful, optimistic, and lucky.

Somewhere in there, I also fit in Jack Vance's Emphyrio, an engaging example of a certain sort of classic ethnographic science fiction, something halfway between Lloyd Biggle and Ursula Le Guin.

I did a bunch of that fun, light reading because on the side I've been delving deeply into various books about British and American colonialism and imperialism for a story I keep telling myself I'm going to write: a steampunk alternate history about a mad scientist, a U.S. and British fight over Nicaragua at the beginning of the 20th century, and the atrocities it all leads to. Among the various books I've been dipping into for my researches are Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction by John Rieder, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century by Daniel Headrick, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 by David Edgerton, Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule by Michel Gobat, The Eclipse of Great Britain: The United States and British Imperial Decline, 1895-1956 by Anne Orde, The Sleep of Reason: Fantasy and Reality from the Victorian Age to the First World War by Derek Jarrett, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest by Anne McClintock, as well as such books of their time as Winston Churchill's My African Journey (pointed out to me by Njihia Mbitiru, who's been a big help in goading me on to write this story that I keep talking about) and The Ethiopian: A Narrative of the Society of Human Leopards. Also a couple of books I've been familiar with for a while, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire by David Anderson and Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins.

Clearly, I don't want to write a story -- I want to write an annotated bibliography!

Now, though, it's time to stop procrastinating and get back to work...


*Speaking of email, I've severely neglected the email address once associated with this blog (themumpsimus at gmail) because it became massively overloaded with spam (partly because I had redirected some ancient addresses at it) and sometime at the beginning of this year I made a resolution to clean it out, find real messages I'd missed, etc. I removed the link to it from this site so that people wouldn't inadvertently use it, but I expected to get it back up and working within a week. Then I kind of kept procrastinating. Every time I thought about it I suffered trauma. Now cleaning out and organizing the inbox is such a Herculean task that I may just give up and start over with a new, clean address. I don't know. I will fight through my anxieties and figure it out soon, though.

Short Notes on Various Books

One thing I love about blogs is seeing people discover books that have become so much a part of my own life that I develop the sense that everybody else on Earth has also read them, and so there's no need for me to talk about them, because we all know these are great books, right? It's nice to be reminded that this is a fantasy -- nice to see people suddenly fall in love with books I've known for a little while already.

The great and glorious Anne Fernald just posted a list of some books she's read lately with joy and happiness, and the two books on the list that I've read are ones I recommend without reservation: Tropical Fish by Doreen Baingana and Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys.

I first heard about Tropical Fish when I was in Kenya for the SLS/Kwani conference and Doreen Baingana was part of a panel discussion; I found her captivating. Later, a Ugandan friend (who also told me about FEMRITE) exhorted me to read the book. I did. I exhort you to do the same.

I don't remember when I stumbled upon Good Morning, Midnight -- I feel like the battered, crumpled paperback I've got has been with me for years, but I know I read it only a handful of years ago. Few other books have affected the prose of my own writing as deeply. Much of what I've written, and even some of what I've published, I could call my pre-Rhys writing -- aspiring toward a sort of lyricism that now I have little interest in. Good Morning, Midnight offers, to my eye's ear, a prose that I would rank in its stark, precise beauty with that of Paul Bowles, J.M. Coetzee, and even, to some extent, Beckett.

Meanwhile, much like Anne, I've been reading a lot without writing about it. I've felt like I either didn't have much to say about what I've read, or what I'd have to say has already been said by plenty of people. Here, though, are some quick thoughts on some of what I've read over the last few weeks:

I was looking forward to Jedediah Berry's first novel, The Manual of Detection, with so much excitement that I may have slaughtered it with expectations. Some of Jed's short stories are among my favorites of recent years, and I had high hopes for the novel, but those hopes were never quite met. It was a brisk and sometimes exhilarating read, but ultimately felt whispy to me, especially in the last third, from which I ached for much more. Much more what? I don't know. But more.

Similarly, I think Brian Evenson is one of the better contemporary American writers, and so my hopes for his new novel, Last Days, were unreasonably high. It's an interesting and sometimes harrowing book, but again I wasn't satisfied with it in the last third or so. (Matt Bell has written a comprehensive and thoughtful take on the novel here.) It's not that I didn't like either The Manual of Detection or Last Days -- I read them both, and neither ever really felt like a slog to get through -- but both left me unsatisfied, yearning for more complexity and depth and nuance and implication.

Then one day the mail brought both The Letters of Noël Coward and The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929-1940. I wondered what the mail gods were trying to tell me (one friend replied, when I mentioned the coincidence: "I think it means you are either: an absurd gayist ... or a flamboyant abusrdist. Possibly both." I'll try for both). The Coward was a review copy, the Beckett a book I splurged on for myself. I tried reading the former for a bit, because I do have a certain weakness for good ol' Noël, but the letters are presented amidst a narrative of Coward's life, and I found it annoying, so couldn't continue.

The Beckett is a masterpiece of editing, a feat of scholarship, and utterly fascinating. I devoured half of the big book in only a few days (then stopped, ready to go again on the second half very soon). Gabriel Josipovici reviewed it, so I have nothing else to say.

Partly because of my "Murder, Madness, Mayhem" class, I happened to read some Robert Aickman stories and became obsessed. I had last read Aickman when I was about 17 or so, and I had hated his stories. I thought they were the most boring, pointless things ever written by any human being ever, ever, ever. Ahhh, youth! "The Hospice" and "The Stains" are now stories I am simply in awe of. I quickly hunted up the only two relatively affordable Aickman collections available on the used book market: Cold Hand in Mine and Painted Devils. They are full of exactly what Aickman says they are full of: strange stories. Beautifully, alarmingly strange stories.

Someone should publish an affordable paperback of Aickman's selected (or, be still my heart, collected!) stories. Tartarus Press published a two-volume collected stories, but it's going for at least $700 these days, and though I love Aickman, I can't spend $700 on him. Thus, I implore the publishing world to relieve my yearning and reprint a collection or two or eight of Aickman's stories in inexpensive editions! Someone? Anyone? Please? NYRB Books, I'm looking at you right now.....

Wanting to read some nonfiction about Aickman, I borrowed S.T. Joshi's The Modern Weird Tale: A Critique of Horror Fiction from a library and read the fairly astute chapter on Aickman. But I have to admit, my first thought on reading various parts of Joshi's book was, "What crawled up this guy's ass and died?" I know some people have thought the same about things I've written, so I didn't hold it against him. I was curious how Joshi is perceived within the horror community, though, because his rants against writers like Stephen King and Peter Straub seem so over-the-top to me that they actually work better as humor than as criticism, and he sometimes seems to get angry at writers for not fitting into his own narrow categories, for not agreeing with his (Lovecraftian) view of the universe, for not being more, well, Joshian. He has some fascinating things to say, but also ... not. Is he the Ezra Pound of genre criticism? The Cimmerian quotes Joel Lane (whose short stories I like quite a bit):

[Joshi's] Lovecraft biography is a serious classic. Joshi’s recent book The Modern Weird Tale is a mixed bag, highly idiosyncratic and unfair, but full of good insights. His new book The Evolution of the Weird Tale, despite its grand title, is basically a collection of review articles; but it’s enormous fun and less narrow than some earlier Joshi stuff. The Weird Tale, published in 1990 and covering the weird fiction genre from Machen to Lovecraft, is ambitious and dynamic but heavy-handed and too fond of extreme statements. Behind the veils of academic objectivity, Joshi can be seen to be a volatile, short-tempered, aggressive and highly intense young man. He has mellowed a little since, though his sarcasm can still wither at forty paces.

As I prepared my class to watch an episode of Dexter, I read around in Jack the Ripper and the London Press by L. Perry Curtis, Jr. and Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture by David Schmid -- both well worth reading, rich with insights.

Nowadays, I'm mostly doing research about British imperialism and its connection to mystery and adventure fiction. Fascinating stuff, which will, I hope, bring a new project to fruition...

Writing Queer Kenya

I'm stealing this call for submissions from Potash, because I think it's a hugely important project. Please spread the word to anybody who might be able to contribute or help out:

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Writing Queer Kenya

Editors: Keguro Macharia and Angus Parkinson

We lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex individuals, in a word, queers, have had the distinct un-pleasure of being told we don't exist—in official government statements, historical documents, and contemporary statements. Well, we do.

We want Kenyan stories by Kenya-based and Kenya-born queers. About everything. We want writing about the dailyness of our lives, the good, the bad, the weird, the indifferent. If you have lived it, we want to hear about it. We especially want to reach beyond Nairobi, Mombasa, and other cities to all corners of the country. And we know the rest of Kenya, Africa, and the world wants to hear these stories as well.

Formats

We have three distinct formats. Choose what appeals to you.

1. Interviews: Tell us your story. Get in touch with us and we'll arrange an interview. We value your time and your confidentiality. Not sure you want to meet us directly? We have phones and email and all manner of ways to make this happen.
2. Letters to Kenya: Write (or unearth) a 500-1,000-word letter. To whom? Parents, pastors, the government, best friends, former friends, present lovers, former lovers, the person you really want to tune. Get personal, get intimate. Say what you really want to say!
3. Personal narratives: Write (or unearth) a 2,500-3,000-word narrative about the dailyness of being queer. The high points, low points, the endless plateaus, the quick glances, indrawn breaths of desire, domestic thrills, sexual boredom, beginnings and endings. If you write it, we'll consider it.

All submissions should be typed, double-spaced, and submitted electronically to queerkenya AT gmail.com. If you can't type, don't want to, or can't get hold of an email program that functions, get in touch with us. We can help.

How You Can Contribute

1. Get the word out. Convince your friends with hidden manuscripts or stories that must be shared to un-closet them.
2. Send us encouraging emails. We need your good wishes, your fabulously good wishes.
3. Volunteer time! We need all the help we can get.
4. Take ownership. We're editing, sure, but these are our collective stories.

Important Dates

April 30, 2009: Deadline to Receive Submissions
June 30, 2009: Selected Contributors Contacted
Publication: December 2009.

Questions? We're glad to answer. Please contact us at queerkenya AT gmail.com

Kwani? and Binyavanga Get Blogs

Potash just let me know that there are two new blogs worth keeping an eye on.

First, the Kwani? literary magazine and organization now has its own blog (not to be confused with the Kwani? litfest blog). I was thrilled to see that Kwani? 4 has officially been published, and I hope copies find their way to the U.S. soon (the first three are available at various places, and are worth seeking out). I saw a preliminary edition of Kwani? 4 when I was in Kenya in December, and it's a big book rich with fiction, poetry, and nonfiction of all sorts.

Second, Binyavanga Wainaina has a blog. Actually, that should be Binyavanga Wainaina has a blog!!!, because it gives me great joy that one of the most astute writers I know is now going to be (at least occasionally) posting new material online. Binyavanga is presenting not only some of his own writing, but that of writers he knows and admires, including Jackie Lebo and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Kwani? Fiction Online

In writing the previous post about Sunday Salon, I realized I hadn't checked the Kwani? website for a while, and lo and behold -- they've got fiction from Kwani? 4 online! Not only that, but among the stories are "The Obituary Man" by Muthoni Garland and "The Other Side of Knowing" by Dayo Forster, both of whom will be reading on Sunday night at the Salon.

Going Down River Road by Meja Mwangi

Baby should not have drunk coffee. He urinated all of it during the night and now the smell lay thick and throat-catching, overcoming even the perfume of his mother's bed across the room. In the bed Ben lay with the boy's mother curled in his large arms, warm and soft and fast asleep. But Ben was not asleep anymore. The pungent baby urine stink had awakened him long before his usual waking up time. He released the woman, turned and reached on the bedside table for a cigarette to combat the musty smell from the baby's bed. There were no cigarettes in the packet. He lit a half-smoked one from the ash-tray and lay smoking in the early morning gloom. Wini breathed soft and low by his side. Her nude body lay stretched out against his, her hand resting on the inside of his hairy thigh. She would be waking up soon to make his breakfast. He did not stir her. She had her own clockwork system that first turned her over once or twice before she opened her eyes to complain about the shortness of the past night. In another half hour he would be on his way to work.

And so we are welcomed into the world of Meja Mwangi's Going Down River Road, first published in 1976. In Urban Obsessions, Urban Fears: The Postcolonial Kenyan Novel, J. Roger Kurtz says Mwangi's "urban novels remain the paradigmatic and in many ways most interesting examples of the urban genre from Kenya," and he calls Going Down River Road "the Nairobi novel par excellence".

I do not have the knowledge or background to judge how accurate Kurtz's perception of the novel's importance is, but it was recommended to me strongly enough that it become the object of a quest I and some friends went on when we were in Nairobi. A Kenyan had told us that the book is a fine example of how to write about a particular place and time, and that it evoked a lost Nairobi that was nonetheless familiar enough. The book was described with such passion that we became determined to find copies for ourselves. We went from one bookstore to another, but though they all had books by Mwangi (he's a prolific writer), they did not have Going Down River Road. The afternoon turned to evening and all the shops in the city center closed. We asked around, and someone told us that if anybody would have copies of the book, it would be a bookstore over in a mall in Westlands, and so we got into a taxi and sped off in search of the book -- and lo and behold, we found a pile of them. One for each of us.

It amuses and disturbs me to think that I bought Going Down River Road in a mall in one of the richer areas of Nairobi, because the book itself is so much about the traps and travails of utter poverty. It tells the story of Ben, who works at a construction job and spends most of the little bit of money he makes on alcohol and prostitutes, until one day his (ex-prostitute) girlfriend leaves him with her young son (known only as Baby) and never returns. Ben is often miserable, and just as often he is an observer of worse misery than his own. Becoming the caretaker for Baby does not turn him into some sort of saint -- he only barely takes care of the boy, though eventually he does pay his school fees and make sure he goes to school.

Ben is vehemently misogynistic, and after Wini abandons him, his misogyny becomes worse than it ever has been. He is not an appealing character, and yet Mwangi writes about him in such a way that we can feel some sympathy, and so we care about his fate. I found myself becoming frustrated with him in the way I would become frustrated with a friend whose opinions seemed ridiculous to me and whose actions even more so, but who nonetheless possessed enough elements of goodness to make me want to remain in his company for at least a short time. Mwangi avoids both cliche and sentimentality by making Ben such a difficult character to like, and yet there is enough to like -- an intelligence that gets fiercely beaten down but won't disappear completely -- that the book doesn't slide into frigid cynicism. Though the narrative verges on fetishizing the squalor and reveling in the misery, it never quite descends to that (in my eyes, at least) because Ben's intelligence does occasionally prevail, and he recognizes not just the pain he feels himself, but the pain of other people -- including pain he causes. He is incapable of escaping this world for himself, but he holds out hope that Baby might, and he tries as best he can to maintain the friendship most important to him so that he doesn't sink into a bleaker world of his own making, a world of only himself.

Going Down River Road is, indeed, a good example of a novel that is as much about its setting as its characters, because the characters are so inextricable from the setting, so entwined with it. The book grows repetitive at times, perhaps to indicate the borders of the life Ben has made for himself. The writing varies in quality from sometimes breezy and a bit thin to evocative in its descriptions of physical sensations -- at its best, this is a novel that assaults all the senses.

There is a political element to the book, too, as Ben watches people try to solve problems around him and address the political situation of Kenya. The book does not offer much hope here, as in this passage twenty pages from the end:

There are many things Ben knows that Bhai will never understand. Machore can never raise the necessary deposit to register as a candidate. And even if he could raise the money he would then have to find a consituency to contest and convince the constituents to vote for him. And who would listen to him? Only the labourers, and only at lunch time when there is nothing else to do. And he would still have a certain amount of trouble. The labourers are a tired hungry people. They don't believe in anybody or anything anymore. They do not even believe in the building anymore. Now they know. Just as a man will turn his back to you, a building gets completed and leaves you unoccupied. The hands just do not believe. If he bought them beer, Machore might convince the hands to listen to his promises. But they would still not vote if they got up with a terrible hangover or the weather became lousy on polling day or the queue got too long or something. To the hands it makes little difference: just another name in the newspapers, another face in the headlines, a voice on the radio, more promises...

We are left to decide for ourselves what such feelings amount to. Ben, clearly, has not been helped by politicians, and his growth, such as it is, is from leave-me-alone individualism to a recognition of his need for something other than himself, even if everything else -- the government, Baby, his friends, his employers -- seems to be an impediment or a threat. The novel ends with a small moment of connection, a moment that shatters the profound and futile loneliness the city instills. The ambiguity of this moment, its inability to be summed up as a simple moral and its many implications within the context of the story, makes Going Down River Road so much more than a simple portrait of a particular time or group of people -- it is a scream against the waste that life allows.

Coming to Birth by Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye

While at the SLS/Kwani? conference in Kenya, I was in a workshop led by M.G. Vassanji, and one day when we had some extra time, he walked with a group of us to the city center in Nairobi. Our first stop was Prestige Book-sellers on Mama Ngina Street, because it was, we were told, a good source of fiction and poetry published in Kenya. As we were looking through the books, someone in the group noticed that Marjorie Macgoye had come into the store. "I'm just here to get some Christmas presents," she said.

I was, I think, the only one of the Americans in the group who knew who she was -- I had begun reading her second novel, Coming to Birth just before I left for Kenya, but I hadn't had time to finish it, and it was a library book, so I just figured it was something I would eventually get back to on my return.

I grabbed a copy of the East African Education Publishers' edition of the book from the shelf, quickly paid for it, and brought it to Mrs. Macgoye, who seemed quite amused to find a bunch of writers randomly hanging out in downtown Nairobi, led there by Vassanji. I asked her if she would mind commemorating the moment for me by signing the book. "Oh," she said, "but I don't have my glasses!" I said I'm not an autograph hound of any sort, and rarely ask for books to be signed, so it didn't really matter to me if it were legible -- this just seemed like such an odd and wonderful moment that I wanted some sort of tangible proof of it. She chuckled and signed the book for me, in perfectly legible print, while I held it in my hands.

I decided not to finish reading Coming to Birth until I got back, though, because for reasons that continue to be somewhat mysterious to me, I didn't want to read any African literature while I was in Africa. Books were the only souvenirs I bought, and I bought a lot of them, but it felt somehow wrong, somehow self-conscious, somehow pretentious and precious to read them while there. (Or maybe I just wanted to save them as special objects and aids to memory.)

In any case, I have now read Coming to Birth, and I've also read the critical, biographical, and historical material included in the library copy I have, published in 2000 by The Feminist Press as part of their "Women Writing Africa" series (a series that includes another Macgoye novel, The Present Moment, as well as a favorite of mine, the sublime You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town by Zoe Wicomb). In a review for the Village Voice, Thomas McGonigle said the ancillary materials "bloated up" the books:

The publishers insist on [the novels'] political and social significance, treating them like textbook descriptions of the social and political life of Kenya. Africa is far too often seen as just a case study in hopelessness, and freighting the novels in this way threatens to sap the pleasure in reading these works.

I haven't looked at The Present Moment yet, but I appreciated the afterword by J. Roger Kurtz for its detailed biography of Macgoye and its careful critical reading of the book. Kurtz is the author of Urban Obsessions, Urban Fears: The Postcolonial Kenyan Novel, a good survey that reveals how much more breadth and depth there is to fiction in Kenya than someone from outside the country, or even inside, might suspect. He knows his subject matter, and he does not try to pigeonhole Macgoye's work in the way McGonigle suggests. The historical essay by Jean Hay is short and basic, but it helps contextualize some of the events that might be otherwise difficult for most readers to learn about. Historical context is important to Coming to Birth, because it is a novel about both an ordinary woman and about Kenya over the course of nearly forty years. Indeed, how Macgoye uses historical details is one of the most interesting elements of the book. You don't need to know the history to appreciate the book on a first reading, but it certainly helps, particularly with one of the most important moments in the protagonist's life, which is confusing if you don't understand the clues that suggest the event it is part of.

The novel primarily tells the story of Paulina, a young Luo woman who is sent from her village to Nairobi to live with her husband, Martin. The novel follows her through the next few decades, as her relationship with Martin changes, as her conception of herself changes, and as Kenya gains independence from Britain and lives through Jomo Kenyatta's reign and then the first couple years of Moi. (The initial circumstances of the story, and some of the plot's progression, reminded me of Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood, but Coming to Birth is less bleak and much less painfully ironic.)

Macgoye's technique is to use a generally free-floating point-of-view to move from characters' actions and thoughts to almost journalistic notes on major events. For instance, a conversation between Martin and an old friend ends:

Amina promised to call at the shop next day and by the end of the month it was all settled. She didn't exactly get anything out of it but she enjoyed pulling strings and getting to know other people's business.

By this time man had actually landed on the moon. The landing took place ten days after Tom's funeral and few Kenyans had any thoughts to spare for it, although President Nixon declared, in a record that was soon selling cheap in Nairobi's supermarkets, that eyes and hearts all over the world were directed to that spectacular feat. Perhaps he was already more nearly tuned into the launching pad than to minds and hearts. A lot of the world still saw the USA as a land of gadgetry where you could watch a president's assassination on TV without being able to do anything about it. A week later the papers were reporting the death of Mary Jo Kopechne in Edward Kennedy's car.

The Tom whose funeral is mentioned is Tom Mboya, an assassinated political leader, and he is only one of the actual people woven into the narrative. The mix of real people with fictional characters could have felt awkward or clumsy, but Macgoye gets away with it (at least for me) because Paulina is such an unprepossessing woman. She's no Forrest Gump, but she travels through various environments, and the people who are mentioned in passing in the story are people who seem natural to those environments -- of course if she is working in the home of a member of the new Kenyan parliament, she's going to encounter some actual politicians, and she's going to be aware of some of the major political events of the time. There is an off-handedness to the presentation of these "major moments" that gives them credibility -- they are among the things the characters are aware of while we are observing their thoughts.

Though Coming to Birth is very much concerned with who does what when, such details are elements of the plot structure, and what meaning the book conveys comes more vividly through the characters' perceptions. Indeed, it is the changes in their perceptions, offered alongside the changes in Kenya's society, that provide the most sustained interest, and the most lasting insight.

Though I don't think biographical material is at all necessary to an appreciation of Coming to Birth, it is nonetheless interesting, because Macgoye has led a fascinating life. She was born in England, went to Kenya in 1954 to work for the Church Missionary Society, then six years later married a Luo medical officer, Daniel Oludhe Macgoye. Aside from four years working in Tanzania, she has lived in Kenya since first moving there. "Because of this background," Kurtz says, "Macgoye is an unusual, perhaps even unique, figure in the literature of Kenya and of Africa."

She certainly does not fit any of the typical categories of African writers. She is naturalized rather than native-born, so that while she is undoubtably Kenyan, and while her marriage into a Luo family gives her special insight into that community's experience and sensibility, Macgoye clearly occupies a position very different from that of Kenya's indigenous black writers. At the same time, while there is a large community of white Kenyans -- many of them former settlers or their descendants -- this category seems even less apt, if only because Macgoye has consistently rejected the privileges that go along with being white in a place like Kenya. Writers from this group, who produce what is referred to in Kenya as "expatriate literature," include Elspeth Huxley, whose work describes growing up in a settler community in central Kenya, and Isak Dinesen, the pseudonym for Karen Blixen, whose book about her experience as an unsuccessful coffee farmer outside of Nairobi was made into the popular film of the same name, Out of Africa. Literature of the type produced by Huxley and Blixen is written from an outsider's point of view, with outsiders' concerns in mind, and it displays a consciousness of being part of a European colonial diaspora. Macgoye, by contrast, writes from a fundamentally different point of view and with radically different ends in mind. As a result, she is a Kenyan writer, but sui generis.

Macgoye began as a poet, and when she moved to Tanzania she found herself received somewhat differently than she had been in Kenya, for, as Kurtz writes, "In Kenya, Macgoye's poetry had at times been criticized for being too political; in this more radical climate it was deemed insufficiently committed to a progressive political agenda." Such a reception seems to me enviable -- too political for some, not political enough for others -- and it is one I expect Macgoye's novels have encountered as well. (Indeed, Kurtz does a good job in his afterword of showing Macgoye's uncomfortable relationship with the term "feminist" -- she writes books that can easily be seen as espousing a feminist viewpoint, but seems to desire no label for herself other than "writer".)

Macgoye is not always a graceful writer -- even Kurtz admits that dialogue is not one of her strengths -- but there are moments of tremendous grace in Coming to Birth, scenes of unsentimental and complex humanity, moments of lyricism. I'll end with a passage I particularly liked from the final chapter, where syntax and tense seem to struggle to reconcile memory and present life:

Paulina had spent years enough alone not to be worried by silence. She hugged her thoughts to herself. She was at home now. And at home, though news comes to you of meetings and proclamations, of trials and conflict and achievement, home does not change for that, Nairobi does not change for that, whisper, whisper, whisper, the hum of traffic and the undertones of bargaining, the quick breath of pushing carts and the slow breath of sleep, the unbroken round of terms, of seasons, of fashions, of celebrations. There is always something to do, always something to talk about, if you gave yourself time to learn, always something to depend on too and to live by.

Some Thoughts on Kwani? LitFest from Beverley Nambozo

I asked fellow Kwani? LitFest/SLS 2006 participant Beverley Nambozo for some thoughts on the experience, and she provided the following...

Nairobi.
The performance poetry class began like a secondary school literature lesson. Thankfully, it escalated to a mature discourse. The students did not get the opportunity to perform before others but it was a good learning ground. There was genuine enthusiasm in the class and some students also had a chance to visit other workshops. With more training material and a stronger communication network, much more work can be covered for next year. The Heron Hotel: Stiff necked writers, editors and librarians concealing their huge breakfasts with manuscripts, note pads and journals. Hmph! Timid students milling around the Tin House editor, Farafina Magazine editor, Sable litmag editor and Kwani? editor wondering if their works had hopes of existing off their worn out looking manuscripts into the above mentioned finer established magazines. An orderly disorderliness marked the routine at the Heron Hotel. Meals, workshops, meals, bus trips, payments, checking in and checking out, busy lobby, intellectual interaction. In the dining area, the literary fanatics would ogle the damsels from other continents wondering if they should ask if she could share her manuscript with them or share her body with them. Biding their time, they waited and waited and waited…

Lamu
Human beings are incapable of such equanimity. The wonders lay in the sand. Numerous. Each grain a potion to feed the egos of lustful tourists, idlers and children. The winders lie within the Muslim prayers echoing with comic earnestness. I was hypnotised. I was enchanted. I walked into Lamu at night blindfolded as the beach boys led me through the alleys whose stone walls veiled the secrets of the coastal girls. I held on. Trusting. Running. The blindfolds came off and danced before my eyes tempting me to dance with them. Standing in the ocean, the fluorescent algae swam around me daring me to join them in their aquatic frenzy. I plunged in washing away my urban burdens. Time, urgency and promptness are but luxuries in Lamu. With extended breakfasts, exaggerated desires to swim and sluggish exits from the hotels, Lamu is an island that detaches itself from international dialogue, reason and common sense which is why it is the most imperfect place for writers who need to exist in a real world. In Lamu, the best way to engage with the Island is to talk and watch. Talk to the island folk, talk to the squeaky voiced henna artists, talk to the red skinned tourists, talk to the orange and black haired beach boys, talk to the ocean, talk to the donkeys.. and when the conversations end…(which they never do) go back to your hole called home and write. I am wary of writers who go to far away islands to write. They are just show offs who are suffering from identity crisis and so need to pollute an island with ink from pens that never dry.


Beverley Nambozo is a Ugandan writer born in 1976. She has been a member of Uganda Women Writers’ Association (Femrite) since 2000. She is currently working on a collection of erotic poetry and a novel, Two Lives. She has also written a few academic papers on gender, media and literature.

Beverley has worked as a radio show morning host of two years at 104.1 Power FM in Kampala. She also served as an Audience Relations Manager, conducting regular market surveys. Before that she was a teacher and dance instructor at Rainbow International School in Kampala. Since 1999, she has been in an active dance group that usually holds concerts in and around church and the community. Beverley has also been involved in several HIV/AIDS sensitization campaigns amongst youth in secondary schools and universities.

Answering Questions

I've wanted to write about Kenya, but haven't known quite what to do -- I don't really want to write only about who I saw and what I did, because that feels very limited, yet I'm wary of writing about all the things I'm thinking about in terms of Kenya, writing, writers, and publishing, because I don't feel the authority to be able to write about those things in a way that would be useful to somebody other than me. I haven't really adjusted to being back in the U.S. and doing all the stuff I was doing before Kenya. I don't want to make the trip out to be some sort of grandly illuminating and life-changing thing, the tale so often told by colonialists and racists (often with the best of intentions and biggest of ignorances) of the rich white guy with existentialist qualms going off to the dark continent and discovering A.) his humanity; or B.) the inhumanity of the "primitive" world. It was an illuminating trip; it was life-changing, but I don't know how to convey why and how yet. It may take years.

In the meantime, I have a few things planned. First, I'm inviting some Africans to write about whatever they want here, because one thing I think we all need is more access to African writing, and since I've got this here weblog thingy and an audience, the least I can do is offer some of the writers I met the opportunity to meet this audience. We'll start things off tomorrow with a post by Beverley Nambozo.

Right now, though, I thought I'd give you some of the answers I have been offering to people who ask about the trip.

Q: How was Kenya?
A: Warm, Kenya. Well, Nairobi was warm but not exactly hot. Lamu, an island off the coast, was very hot. I was swimming in the Indian Ocean on Christmas Day.

Q: How long was the flight?
A: I spent about 18 hours in the air, plus time in various airports.

Q: Was there running water in your hotel?
A: Yes. I've been less comfortable staying in a village in France than I was in Kenya. Nairobi may be a bit dirty and not exactly safe at night, but it's a city. Lamu is quite different, being a small island, but it's an extraordinary place. What I got tired of there were the constant attention from people offering rides on donkeys or dhows, and the inescapable smell of donkey shit.

Q: Were there any cannibals? [Yes, I've been asked this question.]
A: No. I know it's hard to believe, but Africa is not a Tarzan movie.

Q: What did you eat?
A: I stopped being vegetarian a month or so before I left, because multiple people told me it would be difficult to get much purely vegetarian fare in Kenya. This was only partly true. I had friends who remained vegetarian there and had only a bit of trouble in Nairobi, but found the choices on Lamu pretty limited. I embraced my newfound carnivorousness wholeheartedly and sampled such things as goat and ostrich. The barbecued goat I had was similar to what I imagine a shoe might taste like, but the ostrich was a tender dark meat, and quite good. Mostly, though, I ate chicken, fish, vegetables, rice, and fruit. The fruit juices were particularly extraordinary.

Q: Did you get any writing done?
A: A little bit. I started a new story that I'm not sure I'll ever finish. Wrote a lot of journal entries.

Q: What was your best experience?
A: There were many great experiences, actually. The experience of hanging out with so many talented writers from all over the world was the greatest benefit of the trip. The best day, though, was when Njihia Mbitiru's father and mother drove me all around Nairobi and then to various towns and sites outside the city. They were determined to show me all the different levels and iterations of Kenyan society, and the stories they told of various places and people helped me get a sense of where I was in a way that nothing else during the trip did.

Q: Would you go back?
A: Given the opportunity, sure. I hope to visit Nairobi again, certainly, and there are lots of places throughout the continent I would like to see. There are people I very much hope to meet again, as well.

And We're Back

I am now home, having returned safely from two weeks in Kenya. My friends up here in New Hampshire very kindly ordered a big snow storm for my return -- a few days ago, I was in the intense equatorial heat of Lamu Island, and yesterday I drove up from Boston and saw one car after another off the road, felled by snow and ice. (Indeed, a friend of mine was in a big pile-up that closed a section of the highway for two hours. He's not hurt, but his car was totalled.)

I've been trying to figure out how to write about all I did and saw and learned in Kenya, but right now it's such an undigested mass of experience in my head that I distrust much of anything I might say about it all, for fear of generalizing too much, for fear of blathering on, for fear of ranting. I've been dreading the inevitable questions such as, "How was your trip?" because there is no way to sum it up succinctly. The best thing to come up with is to say that if I were able to go back in a time machine and tell my earlier self if it was worth the time, expense, and anxiety, then I would certainly tell myself yes, go for it, do this. I would certainly warn myself of a few things, though -- be ready to be more outgoing than you are normally comfortable being, be ready for many hidden expenses, don't expect too much from the organized events (because "organized" is not what most of them were, and the best experiences were the most spontaneous, anyway), be prepared to be suspicious of everything anybody says, and though you won't regret not going on safari you may want to limit your time on Lamu more (the smell of donkey shit will become tiresome, as will the constant attention from locals wanting to offer their services for one thing or another -- they are friendly in a way that, for a lifelong New Englander, is both amazing and wearying).

I came home with a pile of books and magazines, and will report on them as much as I can, because one of the things I would like to do is find ways to bring more attention to some of the African literature that is difficult to find outside of Africa. A consortium of literary journals from Africa, the U.S., and elsewhere are working now to create ways to bring more of what has been published from Africa to readers throughout the world, and I hope be to be able to help bring more attention to these efforts as they progress.

Meanwhile, I have hundreds of emails to catch up with, various writing assignments to complete, jet-lag to get over, and that full-time teaching thing that I'm also supposed to be doing...

I'll be posting some links to various things that appeared while I was away, and I'm also moving this blog to the new version of Blogger -- no change in address or anything, but there will be some tweaks to the template and functions, and inevitably I'm sure there will be some moments when things look a little weird or out of place.

Ships in High Transit

Below is a discussion by Njihia Mbitiru of "Ships in High Transit" by Binyavanga Wainaina.

Thank you to everyone who so kindly wrote of their anticipation of the following:

Around the age of twelve I took a highly significant shit. The actual shitting was not that special; what gave this otherwise banal episode an aura of importance was what happened after: as I pushed down the handle, I noticed for the first time, painted on the side of the porcelain tank in faded bold print: Made in Sussex.
That same evening I told my father of my discovery, expecting as children typically do that parental enthusiasm for the banal would be equal to or greater than their own, not understanding that by the time older folk have started having kids, the exotic origins of the downstairs crapper are as banal as the shit they were made to move.
Matano's boss may very well have his toilets made in Sussex and shipped to Kenya and all parts of the Commonwealth. I went on to peg most every toilet I saw and used with identical features as of British origin. Though I can’t fairly say I make a conscious association, hydraulic disposal of personal waste has an air of Albion stronger than say, wearing shirts and pants my ancestors would not consider proper clothing.
How interesting then, to read this excellent story, which extends the metaphoric potential of waste production and disposal into a meditation on history, identity, and the vagaries of negotiating both. (Spoilers start here).

Armitage Shanks, one of that class of not-quite Brits, has decided he should perhaps aspire to the “heroism” of his ancestors, of shipping "heavy ceramic water closets around the world".

So he decides to make shit up (Note: I can't promise I'll stay away from all the easy excremental puns--please bear with my enthusiasm). Enter the Maa, a piece of fakery both rank and grandiloquent.
The story of the Maa People niftily synthesizes the most common stereotypical narratives about Africa, and draws on that reliable saw of everyone from Edgar Rice Burroughs and Rider Haggard (whose brother, by the way, was for a time a colonial District Officer stationed in Kenya) to Leo Frobenius: a group of isolated primitives is somehow in possession of ancient wisdom, which they have intuitive (and therefore degenerate and inferior) access to. Typically there's a pile of old stuff to go along with this mystical power, tied to it in some ineffable way. While this intuition is beyond the pale, so to speak, simply unacceptable as the route to that legacy, it takes the right person to come along and use his superior faculties in claiming that antediluvian prize.
It's also this apparently innate superiority that turns primitive intuition, itself a mask placed on the "Other", into a non-threatening artifact (Matano’s astute disappointment with the desire of Westerners to turn a person into an index of exotic features, for example). And the story is full of these ostensibly non-threatening artifacts, like Matano, Abdullahi, Otieno a.k.a Ole Lenana, and the "Maa" women arrayed in the hotel courtyard to sing for Armitage--I mean Ole um Shambalaa's guests.

All involved in the local end of the charade understand, like um Shambalaa, that making shit up pays. And all are prepared to go to the necessary lengths (i.e. “making a white man your pussy” as Otieno does, getting in business with Nigerians— Matano’s secret sex tape) in order to realize profits.

No desires—especially the sexual kind—are ever anything but part of a sales pitch. Everything is a hustle. Everything has a price, and the rapacious hunger for profit is only successful in the degree to which it identifies and secures an equally rapacious desire for what is on offer.

I’m thinking of the pitches in the story, first Shanks, then that of Prescott and Jean Paul (as seen through Matano’s eyes), Abdullahi’s, the anonymous panting-into-the-receiver monologue for the “SugarOhHoneyHoneyMommy” in Germany, and the unwittingly self-parodying macho bluster of the beach boy. The story could even be seen as a parody of a sales pitch, pointed bitingly at its own absurd debasing premise. Everyone has something to sell. The goods are a body and history is a marketing strategy.

On the other end are the Jean-Paul and Prescotts, themselves in search of an angle, of something to sell and a way to sell it, and the working class European tourists taking a vacation from twelve months spent in “some air-conditioned industrial plant”, availing themselves of the pleasures their history has prepared them to seek after, again and again, and that the locals are working overtime to convince them is really their hearts’ desire.

There is plenty in this single story to think over, and it’s a testament to Wainaina’s acuity and skill that he is able to suggest in just a single story about tourism the devastation wrought on a whole continent by the relentless application of the pernicious logic underlying this sad business.

Earlier I told a story about my early experience with a toilet, and if I may, I’d like to take a cue from Wainaina and, at the risk of being excessive, tie that encounter more firmly to the story.

The promises and injunctions of colonialism are those of the toilet. With independence came the realization that, in fact, both the revamped toilet and the shit it was supposed to disappear could still provide an entertaining spectacle (the secret raison d‘etre of tourism?), if only because the nation-state-toilet was now a caricature of its former pure, guided-by-the-enlightened-European self, a thing now made of shit. Shit disappearing more shit; developed, highly industrialized others may come attend the museal proceedings, and for a hefty price, extracted by the locals with cynical resignation, indulge in purging themselves into various flavors of delight.

Shanks’ efforts are ironic in their production of the very thing his family devoted itself to making disappear. His desire to sanitize his past is simply more bullshit proffered in the hopes of making money. Matano and the rest chase that money, and find themselves laboring to produce shit facsimiles of their history, their selves, for the pleasure of others. It is still possible to do things like provide for one’s own, to make sure that “things will appear in the household” and “school fees…mysteriously paid”, but these minor victories cannot be weighed decisively against the logic to which all efforts are finally bent.

And so the wheel turns as before, a sad dirty secondhand joke laughing mirthlessly at itself. For money.

Topical exegesis aside, the story is put together well enough, and I’m looking forward to that promised novel. I suspect Wainaina’s will find the novel a more amenable form than the short story.

I do wish the story were leaner. There are extraneous bits whose variant repetition of thematic concerns does not seem to add to the story. For example, the paragraph about the village is a distraction and should have been left out. Same goes for the one featuring the Texan.

Otieno is an interesting character, particularly in the context of an aggressively homophobic society, who should’ve had more space in the story. The lamentably common stereotype of coast-dweller as more susceptible to the foreigner-introduced “perversion” of homosexuality receives comparatively little treatment for a story so deftly concerned with the production of stereotypes. Wainaina could have gone further.

Jean Paul’s view of the proceedings would have made for a satisfying counterpoint to the well-handled treatment of Sixty Minute Lady. I also wanted to hear more from the “Maa” women, who always appear as a group. Why not as individuals? Isn’t there one local woman—Giriama femme to Matano’s homme—who might have featured with the same prominence as the other more visible characters? I’m not interested in the reproduction of social inequities in the structure of a story purportedly about those inequities; I am unlikely to learn anything interesting if this is the case.

In this sense the writer appears to share the blind spot of his main protagonist. This is less a negative criticism than the recognition by an artist that one is always working within the parameters of a received discursive imperative, and whether or not we hew to the injunction that we must obey this imperative, I find the most rewarding literary experiences (reading, writing, and discussion) come from an investigation of the marginal and “distasteful”.

Some little things, such as a Swedish man named Jean Paul, I found mildly distressing.

Marechera references are always a plus, and I encourage those unfamiliar with this extraordinary Zimbabwean writer to read Black Sunlight, from which the line “ and the mirror reveals me, a naked and vulnerable fact” is taken, as well as House of Hunger, The Black Insider, and Cemetery of Mind, all of which are readily available in the US. For those in Zim, send me a copy of Mindblast!

This is a longer post than I intended, but honestly it doesn’t feel long enough. I hope this story receives the attention it deserves, for its merits as a fine piece of fiction that is part of what Borges might have called our universal patrimony, and also as one of the best short stories to have been written by a Kenyan in a long time.