Tenderness is not about complete disclosure, saying what one really means, getting closer and closer. It excludes absolute possession and fusion. It defies symbols of fulfillment and is not very goal oriented. In the words of Roland Barthes, “Tenderness…is nothing but an infinite, insatiable metonymy” and a “miraculous crystallization of presence.” In tenderness, need and desire are joined. Tenderness is always polygamous, nonexclusive. “Where you are tender you speak your plural.” The reciprocal enchantment of exiles has a touch of lightness about it. And, as Italo Calvino points out, lightness does not mean being detached from reality but cleansing it from its gravity, looking at it obliquely but not necessarily less profoundly.
—Svetlana Boym, “On Diasporic Intimacy: Ilya Kabakov’s Installations and Immigrant Homes.”

Is what I learn far from you worth what I forget about us?—Abderrahmane Sissako, Life on Earth (1998)

Playing (a version of) himself in his 1998 film “Life on Earth”, Abderrahmane Sissako, a young man in Paris away from his family in Mali, poses this question in a letter to his father. It is something similar to this exilic yearning for home in Sissako’s question that I recently expressed to Mama over the phone as my “tiredness” with “here”.

What are the costs of being here? What is gained and what is lost? Is suffering among one’s kin easier than in isolation? How do I reconcile this yearning for home with the knowledge that I came “here” precisely because I was “tired” of “there”. Yearning has become the obverse of fatigue.

I recently read Tayeb Salih’s Seasons of Migration to the North, a lyrical novel about desiring home. In Seasons, home—in the (dis)guise of Wad Hamid, “the small village at the bend of the Nile”—functions as the Lacanian l’objet petit a, the object cause of desire. Because desire aims not at satisfaction but rather at keeping itself alive, l’objet petit a structures desire precisely because it is always already lost. It wasn’t there to begin with.

It might even be, as Keguro aptly pointed out to me, “that ‘home’ is created retroactively as the object cause of desire; that is, desire precedes ‘home’ as it were, which is counterintuitive.” (I’m on tenuous ground here because I’m familiar with Lacan’s work as paraphrased in Žižek’s books, which makes my citations here twice removed and leaves me feeling like this reading is tucked-on, but I think it is useful nonetheless.)

It doesn’t take a genius to know that one can never return to anything. Sexual jokes of how one can never dip one’s hand into the same river twice come calling. Having never gone home since I came here, I have written before that I can never go “back” home. Now I question not only the time travel implied by going “back”, but also the mirage that is “home”, that shimmering hot air that shimmies as long as I keep my distance.

Just as the unnamed narrator in Seasons wonders whether his PhD, attained for studying “an Obscure English poet”, can be of use in the newly independent Sudan—where he is told agriculture, engineering or medicine would serve better—I have often found myself thinking of whether or even how the fluencies I have gained here would translate there. Most of the fluencies I brought here with me from there have become vestigial.

My analysis on here and (t)here is too either/or; I was hoping for something more both/and, something more nuanced. And, as always, reading anything through Lacan is risky. The question of whether Lacan illuminates or completely chokes most readings remains open, continually ripping me a new asshole every time I engage it. This is how a blog post dies, this is how a blog post dies: not with a bang, but with Lacan.

I don’t remember when Ma’s daughter also started working at the university. I just saw them walking around campus together looking like that’s how it had always been. Memory is like that: it forgets itself often; blanks get filled and it seems they were never there to begin with. Ma’s daughter is awfully shy—she’s never said hello when her mother’s not around, and even with her mother there she stands back a little. “You’re from Ghana, eh?” Ma asks. I smile. Her daughter stares nervously at the ground.

I saw Ma’s daughter walking into a bank the other day. I was on my way to work, but I stood outside and stared through the glass windows as she walked up to a teller and reached for something inside her purse. “This is my daughter,” Ma said way back when she’d introduced us, like it made complete sense to omit names. Her hand, when I took it in mine, was soft, reminding me of a plump Liberian woman who walked up to me at a bus stop years ago, handed me a pen and paper and asked me to write, “First build the house and then make the plan.” That woman’s hand was soft also.

My interaction with that woman at the bus stop made no sense at all. I knew she couldn’t write, but what did those words she’d made me jot down mean? Seeing the confusion on my face, she said, “I am from Liberia,” like that explained everything. I nodded, smiled. Back then I particularly hated complete strangers who’d walk up to me on the street and make claims on me just because they come from the same continent as I do.

And yet, standing outside that bank the other day, I wanted to go in, tap Ma’s daughter on the shoulder with a smile and say, “I don’t really think I got your name. And what’s your mother’s name?” What stopped me was the thought of the Somali store I go to every now and then in the Northeast part of town. The store clerks speak Swahili fluently, and yet every time I go there I never give a sign that I know or even speak the language, preferring instead to be a fly on the wall listening to all manner of talk while remaining practically invisible.

At that store I speak only English. My accent, a pastiche of many crisscrossing geohistories, throws the Somalis off, making it hard to plot me on a map. The food I buy at the store marks me as East African, but my insistence on speaking English complicates the obvious. I like things as they are: I like listening to them speaking Swahili without getting drawn in.

Maybe if I waited outside that bank or ran into Ma’s daughter some other time all alone without her mother there she’d say, “I’m Ma’s daughter. You’re from Ghana, eh?” I’d just nod and smile and her hand would be soft as clay in mine. But maybe the best thing to do if I run into her alone would be to say nothing, because she probably also hates complete strangers making claims on her just because they come from the same continent as she does.

Chris Abani, Graceland (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004)

Tayeb Salih, Seasons of Migration to the North (New York: New York Review of Books, 2009)

Audre Lorde, The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997)

it’s no news to anyone
who’s truly lived
how much we abuse our hearts
fouling them up with cocaine nights
tequila shots
and cheap fucks,
we’ve all had that long car drive
leaving a city
by ourselves or with a love
cigar box filled with drugs
thinking we were starting our life over,
that around the next curve our fate awaited us
when we could live the life we were meant to live
with a companion who would never lie, never betray,
never go out on us,
a job that allowed us to dance, write poetry, meet
interesting people working on their lives—
but false starts abounded in my life
and the cottonwood trees tell the story
of the life I always wanted,
being true to themselves,
always there for the hawk, the crows,
offering their branches with unquestioning compassion. (“29″)

*

Baca’s poetry is in part a cartography of pain. He writes lucidly of the many rough roads taken:

In the past,
I used drugs to ease the dread
that gripped my stomach, spread through my arms and legs,
burned in my breast,
pain from the sorrow I couldn’t move past,
and if my life were a map you could point blindly
to any spot,
there’d be pain, pain rivers, pain mountains, pain roads,
a topography of pain ridged, hilled, valleyed,
and posted with No Trespassing signs everywhere,
where old loves smoldered
and promises and dreams moldered in decaying heaps: (“14″)

*

And yet time and time again, there are life-affirming moments:

I am here, scared, loving, helpful, brave,
graying hair, meditative brown eyes, kind
smile, angry eyes burning for equality,
I am here. (“I am here”)

*

The lure of the past, the insidious familiarity of dark alleys, is never far:

Men I once was want me to return to their skins,
want me to fill their bodies,
again. (“Dream Instructions”)

*

In Baca’s poetry, redemption almost always lies in love:

I’ve shared with you
various moments of blinding love,
a grainy freedom of emotion from Billie Holiday’s voice,
the pig’s mud sty grunting up mud-love, horse-froth,
where I devoured your ass, your legs, your breasts
your
nipples,
where I consumed your heart with a feverish appetite
wave upon wave of your stormy love.
You took my soul and wrapped it around you like a sheet,
walked out into the forest with your voice my voice,
your heart my heart
your naked hungering my naked hungering
your wet sex my wet sex,
lost, not knowing where to turn. (“15″)

*

I am reading Jimmy Santiago Baca again. I found him lying here beside my bed in one of the many piles of books that make it hard to see the wooden floor in this room.

In a recent conversation, Hanif Kureishi was telling me about his new novel, whose narrative is different from what he wrote hitherto; I ironically asked him: “But the hero is nonetheless an immigrant with a Pakistani father who is a failed writer…” He replied: “What’s the problem? Do we not all have Pakistani fathers who are failed writers?” He was right—and this is what Hegel meant by singularity elevated into universality: the pathological twist that Kureishi experienced in his father is part of every father, there is no normal father, everybody’s father is a figure who failed to live up to his mandate and thus left to his son the task to settle his symbolic debts. In this sense, again, Kureishi’s Pakistani failed writer is a universal singular, a singular standing in for the universality.

This is what hegemony is about, this short-circuit between the universal and its paradigmatic case (in the precise Kuhnian sense of the term): it is not enough to say that Kureishi’s own case is one in the series of the cases exemplifying the universal fact that father is yet another “impossible profession”—one should make a step further and claim that, precisely, we all have Pakistani fathers who are failed writers… In other words, let us imagine being-a-father as a universal ideal which all empirical fathers endeavor to approach and ultimately fail to do it: what this means is that the true universality is not that of the ideal being-a-father, but that of failure itself.—Slavoj Zizek, A Letter Which Did Arrive At Its Destination

J Majik, Wickaman, and D Freer made this video for their single “In Pieces”. The video features dancers from Kigali in Rwanda and Bujumbura in Burundi. I believe this video was also feature on AIAC a while back.