Inchoate

Strings of language extend in every direction to bind the world into a rushing, ribald whole.
—Donald Barthelme, The Indian Uprising

I have writer’s block.

Is writing about writer’s block in any way subversive? It is a form of writing after all, innit?

I often scoff at those people who say writing is therapeutic. I envy those who can write from a stream of consciousness. I think Anne Lamott captured best what writing is (for me) when she said that writing is like a latent mental illness: the moment you sit down to write, all your symptoms come out of the woodwork.

Amnesia. Anxiety. Low self esteem. Gnawing doubt. All manner of OCDs. And, of course, restless leg syndrome—is this really even a disease or does it manifest retroactively, precisely when one becomes conscious of the existence of such a condition and goes looking for it?

I am stalling. Smoke mirrors.

What I want to write about here is language, particularly the way it collapses on itself as the world around it comes crashing down. I’m also going to attempt stream of consciousness writing (mama na nagai!).

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That my father speaks both Dholuo and Gikuyu fluently has always fascinated me. More than English vs. Kiswahili, those two languages map the false dualism of Kenyan history and politics. I have often wondered what it feels like for my father to inhabit those two universes.

To my father, English is the language of bureaucratic cruelty. He believes—naïvely—that if we spoke only Kiswahili we’d be a little less inclined to murder people in the name of implementing policy; to justify demolishing homes by saying their inhabitants had been issued notices; and to exterminate truth through our many commissions of inquiry.

As I’ve watched the Kenyan government demolishing the homes of its citizens and saying it had issued eviction notices to said citizens, I wonder: would it matter, after all, if those notices were written in Kiswahili instead of English. Would that have mattered, after all?

****

Someone once asked me: which language do you dream in?

Americans, who are fiercely monolingual (“speak English, por favor”), are fascinated by multilingual people. Kenyans—Africans in general—on the other hand think speaking three or four languages is banal. No, I’m lying: they don’t even think about it (“ati she decided amechoka na yule sugardaddy—the one with the big hao in Karen”).

I digress.

When I’m dreaming I’m hardly ever aware of language. There is a certain telepathy in my dreams. It’s a lot like when you’re drunk and your mind-body barrier dissociates and you’re thinking: it would be really nice to just reach out my hands and hold those huggaz. And some woman asks, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

And you thought you were only thinking.

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I take offense whenever some US government document leaves me no option other than to declare myself a non-native speaker of English. But maybe it’s time I conceded that English is like a cousin twice removed.

Take cursing, for example.

The reason I curse so much is because saying “shit” in English does not summon the image of feces in my mind. Sure, I experience the same mental recoil-and-pop that cursing in any language provides, but my image register remains blank.

But soon as I curse in Kiswahili—my first language—my psychic economy cowers and collapses. The image is too much.

Kumanina!

Ku.ma.ni.na

****

My Sheng is so five years ago—you could say it is two-thousand-and-late. Someone once referred to my Dholuo as “serviceable”. I hate someone, but, again, I digress.

I like to imagine that Sheng arose from the constitutive noncoincidence within us; from the far too many slippages in our identities (“are we Anglophone?” “Is Kiswahili really our national language?”). I like to think Sheng arose from our misrecognition of ourselves in the many stories we were told about ourselves (“Kenya has 42 tribes”), stories that were particularly compelling because of rulers to the back of your hand and that “disk” you got in primary school if you spoke any other language besides Inglés. That disk meant you had to mop the whole classroom by yourself that day.

Sheng may even have risen from our misrecognition of the stories we told ourselves about ourselves (“my name is Jared Harrington Obuya”).

Sheng is evidence that we Kenyans have always lived in-between identities, in the interstices between ourselves and ourselves.

****

I’m spending way too much time in my room reading and trying to write. The walls of language are slowly but surely starting to collapse around me. Motherfucker is now a noun—an adjective—an adverb—a pronoun. Motherfucker is goddamn everything.