Eulogizing

I hate graveside ceremonies. Not because someone has died, since as it happens I’ve never had to bury anyone I was close to. And to anyone else I’m indifferent. Still, I hate funerals. Against the background of someone’s death, any movement seems immoral. I hate funerals for their tone of beautiful, convincing sorrow. For the tears from people who are really strangers, alien mourners. For the suppressed feeling of gladness: “You didn’t die, it was somebody else.” For the secret excitement about the drinking that will follow. For the exaggerated compliments addressed to the deceased. (I have always wanted to shout, “He couldn’t care less! Be more tolerant of the living. Of me, for example.”)

—Sergei Dovlatov, The Compromise

Melancholy as the Beginning of Philosophy

From this perspective, the melancholic is not primarily the subject fixated on the lost object, unable to perform the work of mourning, but rather the subject who possesses the object but has lost his desire for it because the cause that made him desire this object has withdrawn, lost its efficiency. Far from accentuating to the extreme the situation of the frustrated desire, of the desire deprived of its object, melancholy rather stands for the presence of the object itself deprived of the desire for itself. Melancholy occurs when we finally get the desired object, but are disappointed in it. In this precise sense, melancholy (disappointment at all positive, observable objects, none of which can satisfy our desire) effectively is the beginning of philosophy.

—Slavoj Žižek, Melancholy and the Act

Touchéing Ezra Pound’s “Make It New”

For while one might presume that originality overrides any deficit of the recollective faculties, more often than not it marks memory’s return in an unforseen guise.

—John Keene, Annotations

Bloodying My Hands

Everyday that you get up and force your cards / You’re playing your story in fits and starts / You take your prospects and your pickax / And you trudge down to the steam / And you bloody your hands digging for your dream
—Indigo Girls, Digging for Your Dream

Something tells me I shouldn’t blog about this. But a friend reminded me that shauri ya Mungu is so important as a point of departure for African theorizing.

For those who do not speak Swahili, shauri ya Mungu “roughly” translates to: I don’t give a goddamn fuck.

Onward.
*

I’m forever defined by the schools I never got into, and the ones I got into but couldn’t go to.

Mang’u High
Lewis and Clark
Stanford
Grinnell
Yale

I wrestled a lot with whether or not to list these schools. Listing mistakenly and arrogantly implies that knowledge comes from attending particular schools. Listing suggests a protruding, wounded ego.

I visited one of these schools this week. The international students there were just like the ones Binyavanga Wainaina descibed in One Day I Will Write About This Place: they looked “very relaxed and international. Like Model UN club kids, but after they have had polite sex.”

I’m skirting the issue.

A significant number of the international students at that college are on full ride scholarships. I am not. After my visit, I went home wondering how one can write cleverly about envy. About rage.

I’m getting off track again. This is hard to write about. There are far too many things I can’t say—for legal and personal reasons. I’ve tried to write this far too many times and failed. Misquoting Beckett is of no use here. Let me try again.
*

Being an international student
is pulling rabbits out of a hat
then pulling hats out of that hat
and rabbits out of those hats.
And it’s never enough.
*

Being an international student
is playing rock, paper, dildo.
You are going to get fucked—
and not in a good way,
not if rock and paper
have a say in it.
*

A full ride might help. It would be welcome respite from life “under the table” and the threat of “falling out of status”. It would would relieve the peculiar exhaustion of having to constantly explain oneself (“Why don’t you apply for financial aid? Why don’t you qualify for that scholarship? Why don’t you take the term off?”). One tires of explaining the snug confines of “alien” status.

A full ride would bring an end to having to prostitute oneself—even as a friend reminds me that prostitution is more valuable as a metaphor than we tend to grant.

But it is too late now.
*

School was someone else’s dream
I got caught up in.
I’m growing very slowly.
I’ll walk into a right door
when things get less tangled.
*

I’m still wondering how to write cleverly about envy and rage. The way to overcome a protruding, wounded ego is to get over oneself. I’ve tried to write here about being an international student and I’ve undoubtedly failed again. Few people, if any, will understand this post. It is too referential, my writing too abbreviated.

Instead of explaining the epigraph on this post, like a good writer is wont to do, I’m going to reach for even more references. I wanted to write about the affective labor of being an international student. I wanted to use manual labor—working with one’s hands and body—as a metaphor. I wanted to invoke Keguro’s idea of the callus as:

a figure for the ongoing labor of feeling—to register not unfeeling, but the habit of feeling. Calluses make feeling easier, ritual.

I wanted to claim that my hands and feelings have become callused because I’ve been digging for this dream. I wanted to mark the ambiguity of never knowing if one is “striking rock but hitting gold.”

I wanted so much. I still do.

Wishing This Was Me

He’s…a classic case of the self-taught aesthete, and one of those touching, impossible, insecure, blustery, half-cooked geniuses, vainly grappling with the mysteries and injustices of life, whose intelligence exceeded his talents and who labored for decades over a unified aesthetic theory that would bind the old and new art he loved so deeply.

—Michael Kimmelman, Missionaries

Kenyan Dirty Talk Morphing

I keep wondering how “kadogo” meant (or still means) mistress in Kenya; while in Uganda/DR Congo it means child soldier. The etymology floors me.
*

And there is always “ndogo ndogo,” implying youth and small-size. Portability. The etymology continues to floor me.
*

And then! And then! There is “chips funga”. We have ushered our sex lives into the globalized McWorld of ordering to go and “I’m lovin it.”
*

Unrelated:

I have a huge Lexus umbrella. Over the phone, on rainy days, I tell people, “I’ll pick you up in my Lexus.” Boy are they always surprised.

Holi Festival of Color, India

Directors/Cinematographers: Jonathan Bregel & Khalid Mohtaseb @ Variable
Executive Producers: John Rule & Mike Sutton
Producer: Tyler Ginter
Line Producer: Viraj Velinker
Phantom Tech: Nick Midwig

Ophelia As Machine

I’m writing poetry again, in my sleep,
between uneasy dreams.

I wake to my bed smelling like onion
thinking, “It is not summer
yet,
and who is this?”

II

I continue to find it hard to explain
the two pairs of women’s shoes in my room.
I’ve been trying for tenderness

but

the lovemaking was a way
of apologizing for a lot of hurt
And in the end
it wasn’t enough
but I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.

When the Swahili comes
I put on the lilting cooing
moth-breath of my voice
with a light lisp.
“Nakutaka. Nipe. Unaniumiza.”

III

Sometimes the madness is domestic.
I listen to the tea kettle howling
a full minute, till my neighbor bangs
on the wall.

Sometimes the madness is domestic.
I paint walls over
again and again
again.

Sometimes the madness is domestic.
I fire one cold liquid
swirling in glass on its own
as it warms me up
going down
somewhere
bottomless.

IV

The days we used to meet
and do everything furiously
are gone

When the Swahili comes
you put on the shallow
undulating breath
of a furry moan.
“Sitaki uniguze hivyo.”

You resist the horror
of my teeth aching a hunger I trace
as the need to whistle on your back
You resist being sang to
amid capsizing sheets
You resist the round edge
of mindless small talk

When your Swahili comes
it is a long stretch
of razor barbwire
seeking flesh.
“Ku-ma-ni-na.”

The days we used to meet
and do everything furiously
are gone

When Swahili comes
he barges through double doors
in his motley threadbare suit
smiling his full gearbox of teeth
saying, “Ashakum si matusi
lakini—”

Season of Migration to the South

It was during my wasted time at think-tank salary hell in Pretoria that I fully realized just how far the drift toward commodification in South African politics and policy making had gone.

The rise of the post-apartheid neo-liberal mindset/state has imposed the entrepreneur as the driver of capitalized everything.

The state in effect obscures its inability to provide jobs and social services, among other mandates, by raising the specter of the entrepreneur—the individual that creates commodities out of nothing for consumption.

If you don’t have a job then become an entrepreneur. If you fail to capitalize as an entrepreneur there are examples of others who have; so ostensibly the failure to accumulate wealth is a personal one.

The entrepreneur is, of course, a myth of capitalist delusion. For every Gates or Branson or Huffington there are millions upon millions of people who will never even get close to playing the game of entrepreneur other than to be linked to the goods that are capitalized in its uneven processes.

—Ridwan, Commodification: The Essence of Our Time

“I accuse”: On Being Lost

My first name is an impossibility—I am human all too human, and lying has its uses. But my last name presents a limitless vista of opportunities. My last name means “foreigner” in Dholuo. Outsider. This name traces my father’s geohistory: he left his family out West—very early in his life—for Naivasha and later Nairobi, learning more Gikuyu than Dholuo along the way, so that conversations in Dholuo between my parents consist of my mother correcting what we call my father’s DSL: Dholuo as a Second Language.

As my father’s last name, “foreigner” registers the colonial work of making, unmaking and arresting ethnicity. By moving to Nairobi and not learning much Dholuo, my father was considered de-ethnicized. The passive voice is important here: ethnicity had its (active) interpellators. Ethnic associations routinely raised money to forcibly transport single women out of Nairobi “back home”—to the African Native Reserves. Nairobi was considered too deracinating, de-ethnicizing. Nairobi turned women into sex workers, so they had to be sent “back home”.

Like my father, I, too, came to Dholuo late. A number of circumstances colluded to make Swahili my first language. My Dholuo remains tenuous. While my father’s last name marks the very thing he was accused of—being an outsider—the same name signifies things I’m often accused of: whiteness, “being lost”. In truth, saying I’m “accused” is a catachresis here, but that word captures the violence of said accusations, even though they are usually leveled as friendly fire, in jest.

The accusations are various:

In Ilal (Dholuo).
Wewe umepotea (Swahili).
You’re lost (Kenyan English).
You’re so white (“excuse my French”).

My beloved Kenyan guests say “wewe umepotea” when social events at my house don’t include ugali on the menu, when lemongrass chicken soup is the main course. I’m told Kenyans—nay, Africans—don’t like soup.

“Wewe umepotea.”

In Swahili, accusation that one is “lost” is not that damaging. The WaSwahili have long known that getting lost has its redeeming qualities. “Kupotea njia ndiko kujua njia.” Tangents and dead ends have their uses.

And yet to be accused of being “lost”, here in the United States, has a personal history. Relatives have come here, stopped calling back home, stopped visiting, stopped wiring money. Relatives have been “lost” here. I have heard it blamed on white women.

“Wewe umepotea” registers more than disappearing ethnicity. Like the trope of the disappearing Indian, maybe there is a trope of the disappearing Kenyan. And sometimes, far too many times, “wewe umepotea” means one is breaching the borders of assumed Kenyanness.

We are a small nation.
We tend to assume
we should all be the same
think the same
want the same
fuck the same.

Assumptions turn violent. Some Kenyans don’t want to desire or fuck the same. They refuse to assume the same position. Assumptions turn violent. Kenyan men and women who desire and fuck differently know the violence of assumption. They know its erasure far too well.

I’d be disingenuous if I didn’t admit that I have long given up on being “Kenyan”. It is of so little use here, and there are so many ways to be Kenyan—this is a tired conversation. What I’m trying to say is that I refuse to participate in the exilic nostalgia required to perform Kenyanness here. And I continue to wonder how “whiteness” can be the opposite of Kenyanness.

You’re so white (“excuse my French”).

In the manner of someone who’s really lost, I don’t know how to end this blog post. I had an idea, but these things have a life of their own. And I now blog very quickly: no post takes longer than an hour to write. I now like my posts rushed, not too polished. In the middle of writing this post I called “home”. My mother answered the phone by saying, “Ilal manade,” meaning “you’ve been so lost.”

The register was different. Not violence, but love.