The Whitney Soundtrack
February 13th, 2012 § 1 Comment
I grew up listening to Whitney Houston. Not simply in the sense that she was famous as I entered adolescence, but that the affect-world she created saturated and colored my sense of what it meant to live in the world. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller†was fun, Prince was nice to like, New Edition appealing, but Whitney’s “Greatest Love of All†felt transformative. Along with my best friend then—I claimed him as a best friend while he tolerated me—I memorized and sang the song, performing it, if memory serves, for a school assembly. I might be misremembering this. I do remember how affirming it was to believe, as a child, that children were “the future,†and how, as I entered my non-rebellious adolescence as a very religious person, I embraced the possibilities of living “as I believed,†determined not to “walk in anyone’s shadow.â€
I want to register the importance of these sentiments. Today, I might sneer at everything that young Keguro did not know. But, as I note in recent writing, “I am learning to treasure the ecstasies of my youth.†Not nostalgia, but a deep respect for the intuition of youth—a moment when, to use Whitney, I was “living on feelingsâ€
Amid what feels like a flood of sneers about Whitney’s “banal†songs—great voice, but terrible lyrics and style, I’ve read—I keep thinking about what it means to lose the soundtrack to one’s life. About the worlds of loss and desire Whitney enabled: she was my gateway to Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith and Abbey Lincoln, all very different vocalists. The foundation she laid let me spend a heartbroken two weeks in Seattle playing Bessie over and over and over.
But I’m trying to get to something else.
As I watch and re-watch her videos, even those I have not seen for a long time, I’m reminded that I *know* Whitney’s voice—the runs, the catches, the slight shifts, the trembles, the hand gestures, the shoulder movements, the eye rolls. I *know* Whitney. She stamped my life in ways I will probably never be able to recognize.
What does it mean to lose the soundtrack to one’s life?
I’ve tried collecting music before, but I am terrible at it. I yearn for the familiar. I am mostly indifferent to the new. And despite efforts from good friends to diversify my tastes, I incline toward particular sounds, particular singers, particular styles. Whitney is my one constant. In my years of collecting and purging music collections, I have always collected her. I don’t have a Whitney habit—I don’t listen to her all the time—but I like knowing she’s around. I like to glide on her voice.
It is, after all, the voice that ushered me into adulthood. In the late 90s, I spent more time dancing to Whitney dance mixes than to anything else. She was my “welcome to America†figure: I didn’t know much about rock, had to discover about Janis Joplin, but Whitney was familiar. I lack the language to describe the effect of her voice, the “vibrations†of her presence—the wide, wide smile; the playful grin; the candy colors of her first videos. She was fun. And, what some call “over-processed†and “commercialâ€â€”can I pause to say how much I dislike music critics who sneer at “popular†taste—I found enabling.
I keep coming back to the word “enabling,†perhaps because I have been thinking about love in Fanon, thinking, that is, about racial life that is not a Greek tragedy. Perhaps this is why I so resent the idea that many British shows champion: Othello is the best role for black men. See Idris Elba in Luther. At times, many times, I have craved the quotidian.
Over the past ten years, the “quotidian†has been one of my critical foundations—I don’t have a theory of it and I don’t know that I need one. I think about what might be termed the “black ordinary†when I’m in the States and about the “Kenyan ordinary,†when I’m in Nairobi. I want to register not simplicity, that’s not what it is, but the thickness of daily living, of encounter and solitude, stasis and movement, flavor and sensation. Whitney has been part of my quotidian—my experience with feeling and being—for as long as I had taste that was not borrowed or simply available. (Some might question “taste,†especially those who remember my daisy dukes or, earlier, my maroon moccasins, as we termed them.)
I chose Whitney.
As I watch and re-watch her, I remember the little queer boy who sang soprano for far too long and found refuge in Whitney’s vibrations. My vocal chords remember patterns, move silently, aching to chase notes I lost a long time ago.
Her not being in the world makes those notes more elusive.
Love in Fanon
February 9th, 2012 § 5 Comments
My (lightly edited) comments at GWU today. I’m not sure where this particular avenue is headed, but it helped me clarify some thinking about race and the academy and the role of the minority professor.
*
Today we believe in the possibility of love, and that is the reason why we are endeavoring to trace its imperfections and perversions.—Frantz Fanon
Frantz Fanon is not someone we turn to for advice on love. Far from it. His biographer, David Macey, claims that if there’s a “truly Fanonian emotion†it’s “anger,†and Alice Cherki insists that Fanon was “a thinker about violence.†While we can certainly talk about the range of emotions in Fanon, from rage to ecstasy, and from despair to hope, love seems to be a stretch. For love, we turn to Barry White and Marvin Gaye and Luther Vandross. Never Fanon. Indeed, while Fanon claims to take love seriously in Black Skin, White Masks, by the end of Black Skin, Fanon has turned to Hegelian recognition and a deep-rooted bodily skepticism, as noted in his famous closing “prayerâ€: “Oh my body, always make me a man who questions.†Against the possibilities of love, Fanon embraces the inevitability of skepticism. What has happened to love? Why does it appear in Black Skin only to disappear? And what might be useful in thinking about Fanon and love?
Because Fanon is foundational to black studies, black diaspora studies, and postcolonial studies, he is the gateway for scholars working in transnational black queer studies. However, Black Skin, White Masks, his major contribution to black ontology and epistemology, has posed a major stumbling block for black queer scholars. Today, I want to move away from the problem of Fanon’s homophobia to consider strategies through which black queer studies can engage Fanon. I will suggest that love is a crucial, understudied element of Fanon’s thinking and an essential component of his vision for an anti-racist, anti-colonial world.
In Black Skin, Fanon explores love in a two-chapter sequence focusing on interracial relationships. The first chapter condemns Martiniquan writer Mayotte Capecia for her “self hatred†while the second empathizes with the Martiniquan author René Maran. I’ll focus on Fanon’s engagement with Capecia. As is well known, Fanon condemns Capecia for desiring a white man, which he misreads as her desire to be white. In a moment of strategic misreading, he argues, “Mayotte loves a white man unconditionally. He is her lord. She asks for nothing, demands nothing, except a little whiteness in her life. And when she asks herself whether he is handsome or ugly, she writes: ‘All I know is that he had blue eyes, blond hair, a pale complexion and I loved him.’†Fanon continues, “If we reword these same terms it is not difficult to come up with: ‘I loved him because he had blue eyes, blond hair, and a pale complexion.’†It may not be difficult to reword Capecia, but note here that Fanon changes coincidence to causality. Capecia’s inability to control how she loves demonstrates her self-alienation. All interracial love is suspect. Perhaps all love is suspect.
Feminist scholars have rightly critiqued Fanon for how he depicts women, but few have asked why Fanon doubts Capecia’s love. This scholarly absence can be attributed, in part, to how we have inherited Fanon. Within the U.S., Fanon comes to us from a predominantly U.S.-based black studies. Rooted in the political and aesthetic radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s, black studies privileged a binary understanding of racial feeling: one experienced pride or self-hatred. Literary and political works were revolutionary or assimilationist. Love was a bourgeois emotion. Given this paradigm, Fanon’s claim that Capecia was self-hating went unquestioned.
Let me suggest that we set aside Fanon’s indictment of Capecia as an individual, and focus on the larger conceptual problem he lays out: authentic love can neither be experienced nor sustained under conditions of oppression. Here, I take my cue from anthropologist Jennifer Cole and Historian Lynn Thomas. In their introduction to a wonderful book called Love in Africa, they argue, “contemporary discourses, sentiments, and practices of love are the product of complex historical processes and intersections.†In their work, love is not a method of disengaging from the difficult labor of politics or removing oneself from the complications of history. If anything, the complications of history and the labor of politics make love more difficult to recognize and realize. To return to Fanon’s indictment of Capecia: the problem with her declaration of love is that it is abstracted from its historical condition. Fanon believes that Capecia does not grant enough weight to the role of history and politics in matters of the heart. She believes, wrongly, that love is a refuge from the complexities of colonial modernity.
But this is not simply a problem for Capecia.
Toward the beginning of Black Skin, Fanon claims, “In our view, an individual who loves Blacks is as ‘sick’ as someone who abhors them.†As Fanon will later clarify, he objects to the idea of anyone loving “Blacks†because the “black†is a constructed fiction, an abstraction that ignores the lived experiences of individual subjects. To love “Blacks†requires one to believe racial fantasies about irreducible racial difference. Put otherwise, it requires one to believe in the existence of the black as a distinct category, something Fanon challenges when he concludes, “the black man is not.â€
At this point, it might seem that I am conflating two very different definitions of love: love as individual psychic and libidinal experience and love as an expression of goodwill and affection for a collectivity. That is, the love one might have for a lover versus the love one might experience for one’s political, religious, or ethnic community. However, if, as I have suggested, love takes root and flourishes within the material circumstances of politics and history, then it becomes very difficult to distinguish between the two kinds of love. To extend Fanon’s thinking: all love becomes impossible to experience or sustain under conditions of oppression.
At this point, you might be wondering why a discussion of love in Fanon matters. In fact, as I was looking at the poster for this event and noted the range of topics—the Algerian revolution, decolonization, Occupy Wall Street, Malcolm X, and Edward Said—I experienced palpitations. I worried that talking about love felt too frivolous. I worried that I would be the literature professor who proved, once again, that literary scholars are removed from reality and inhabit an ivory tower filled with tea and poetry and violins.
Yet, over the past few years, I have been stunned by how often we talk about Fanon and black scholars in general in terms of resistance and revolution, anger and rage, resentment and bitterness, disappointment, and for a very brief moment a few years back, hope. We who work in black studies and related fields are tasked with discussing anger and rage and survival, asked, always, to discuss struggle and pain. And while all of these are necessary, I have wondered about the price we pay. It is difficult to sustain a career that focuses exclusively on negative emotions. And it is strange to believe that black scholars and activists spent their lives wandering around in a haze of rage and anger, unable to think about love and tenderness, unable to understand or theorize why these facets of human experience matter.
When Fanon declares, “Today I believe in the possibility of love,†he gestures toward a future that is unmarked by the paranoia of racism. More than that, he suggests that political resistance and social revolution have, as one of their goals, the cultivation of love. Simply, love flourishes under conditions of freedom and equality. This kind of love, this kind of free love, should be one of the goals of political labor.
However, when he wrote and published Black Skin in the early 1950s, this ideal of love was only a possibility: he did not believe it existed or could exist in the world as it was then.
When I started writing this series of reflections, I hoped to suggest the importance of love in Fanon by embedding his statements within their historical context. I hoped to suggest that understanding love as a historical formation and as an end-goal of politics would add richness to discussions about political freedom and economic equality.
Yet, I find myself stuck.
Like an annoying character from a movie, I keep wanting to ask, “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?â€
I have no answer.
We no longer inhabit the world Fanon described in 1952.
Much of Africa is decolonized, if still largely neo-colonial; while the shadow of racism continues to haunt Africa, often transforming into a destructive poltergeist in the guise of global policies and aid, many Africans nations act with self-determination; and while many across Africa continue to pursue various freedoms and equalities, these do not seem as impossible as they once did.
If we no longer inhabit Fanon’s world, then it might be time to take love seriously, time to ask whether we are closer to realizing its possibilities.
Teaching on Lynching
February 7th, 2012 § 1 Comment
While the scholarship on lynching has proliferated over the past 10 or so years, the memory of lynching seems more elusive than ever. Lynching has lost its force, so much so that lynching has become a common metaphor for having a bad day. Curiously, not since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have images of lynching been more readily available. One wants to account for the erasure of the available. For the fantasies that erasure sustains. For the activity of erasing through silence. For the conversations that we are told should not happen because they will spread bitterness. In our Disney world, there are no more strange fruits. And rainbows describe happiness, not the shades of death-ripened bodies.
*
I saw images of lynched U.S. blacks before I saw images of lynched Kenyan blacks.
*
I do not know how to teach about lynching.
I played a movie.
I asked my students whether they would teach about lynching and how they would teach it. They were silent for a long time. The class could have remained silent. We could have left then. But we had to push through, to create speech and conversation, to refuse the comfort and risk of silence.
How, I asked, could we think about the labor of representation? What language and in what form can render (render: the smell of burning fat) the lynched as human, all too human, with desires, appetites, smiles.
One does not dare use a question mark.
How, I asked, could we approach lynching as scholars. What languages could we create. What strategies to discuss those who were once human—the body grotesque, and not through special effects. The grotesquerie of rotting flesh juxtaposed against beaming smiles. How does one think about the banality of dehumanization. About the righteousness of racism.
It is easier to forget. Easier not to teach. Easier not to think about.
*
I wonder how many of my students, if any, will return to images of lynching. I wonder how many will allow themselves to be haunted. Is this my job. To speak about history and literature.
We are reading Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel, an anti-lynching play. We need context. No, that’s not right. We need to experience, if only partially, the horror of writing about precarious life. Of experiencing precarious life.
*
Is this relatable?
*
Repeatedly, authors on lynching challenge what we think we know.
Here is Paul Laurence Dunbar:
Oh, the judge he wore a mask of black,
And the doctor one of white,
And the minister, with his oldest son,
Was curiously bedight. (“The Haunted Oakâ€)
And Grimké:
[Your father and brother were lynched]—by Christian people—in a Christian land. We found out afterwards they were all church members in good standing—the best people. (Rachel)
*
The violence by “the best people.†This stays with me. Perhaps because of the ICC. Perhaps because of our belief that foot soldiers wield machetes while shadowy generals sit in plush rooms.
The threads are getting snarled.
*
A student worries that teaching about lynching will lead to racial hatred, to animosity between white and black. Easier, or more convenient, to allow the lubrication of silence.
My people suffered too.
We have all suffered.
*
A student says that all responsible books declare slavery “America’s shame.†Perhaps even “America’s sin.â€
“We†are all implicated.
There is no racialization to the history of slavery, no attribution of guilt or shame or culpability. The entire nation blushes before slavery.
Is this too convenient?
*
Dunbar again:
Did Sanctioned Slavery bow its conquered head
That this unsanctioned crime might rise instead? (“The Monk’s Walkâ€)
*
Is screaming in rage and grief a pedagogical method?
*
One can open a door in teaching or point to a doorway; one cannot compel another to cross a threshold. One can hope that a question might direct interest—be an ethical act.
I am stuck in this period—I claim to have chosen it. I dwell in it. A scavenger hunting for stories.
*
It is a strange thing to live out of time—to wander around thinking about why forgetting lynching matters. Maybe it’s better to forget. To believe in the amnesia of Oak trees. In the now-fashionable flavor of strange fruit. One feels out of step, unfashionable, not quite, not right.
One’s language of feeling is awkward.
I ask, “how are we supposed to feel about these images†to students forced into an encounter that, despite my warnings, they could not have anticipated. They probably did not seek out. They would probably prefer not to handle. At least this is what I am thinking. I don’t know what to think. And so, I spur debate, hope that the apparatus of teaching will provide a way in, a move away from silence, a way to distance oneself from shock and horror and anger and guilt and shame.
I do not know what my students are feeling.
It feels cruel to ask.
It feels cruel not to ask.
We struggle to find languages appropriate to this situation.
*
Increasingly, I wonder if teaching is always about this struggle to find language appropriate to a situation. I opened this semester by talking about the Occupy movement: at this moment in history, I cannot and will not pretend that the literary is a refuge from the world.
I am more hesitant. I stumble more. I shelve cleverness. I want to model something about intellectual inquiry, something about inhabiting the fractures of what Hemphill called ass-splitting truth.
Course objectives cannot name this.
No doubt, some would consider this bad teaching. Or no teaching.
Far from elevating minds, I am risking something else: alienating feeling.
Ass-splitting truth.
A course objective: by the end of this class, students will have encountered ass-splitting truth.
*
I do not know how to teach about lynching.
I hope that an encounter with the nakedness of history does something.
Coming Up
February 4th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
On Thursday.
I’ll post a draft of my paper as soon as I have something that feels substantive. I’ll be talking about love in Black Skin, White Masks, and also touching on Wretched of the Earth.
Here’s the abstract:
Love in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks
Today I believe in the possibility of love; that is why I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions.—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
Frantz Fanon is not someone we turn to for advice on love. Far from it. His biographer, David Macey, claims that if there’s a genuine Fanonian emotion it’s “anger.†And while we can certainly talk about the range of emotions in Fanon, from rage to ecstasy, and from despair to hope, love seems to be a stretch. For love, we turn to Barry White and Marvin Gaye and Luther Vandross. Never Fanon. Indeed, while Fanon claims to take love seriously in Black Skin, White Masks, love understood as psychic and bodily abandon, by the end of Black Skin, Fanon has turned to Hegelian recognition and a deep-rooted bodily skepticism, as noted in his famous closing “prayerâ€: “Oh my body, make me always a man who questions.†Against the possibilities of love, Fanon embraces the inevitability of skepticism. What has happened to love? Why does it appear in Black Skin only to disappear? And what might be useful in thinking about Fanon and love? More precisely, what might black queer studies have to say about love in Fanon?
Because Fanon is foundational to black studies, black diaspora studies, and postcolonial studies, he functions as an inevitable gateway for scholars working in transnational black queer studies. However, Black Skin, White Masks, his major contribution to black ontology and epistemology, has posed a major stumbling block for black queers, as outlined by Kobena Mercer, Fanon’s most prominent black queer critic. This presentation moves away from the problem of Fanon’s homophobia to develop other strategies through which black queer studies can engage Fanon. It argues that love is a crucial, understudied element of Fanon’s thinking and an essential component of his vision for an anti-racist, anti-colonial world.
School is in Session
February 3rd, 2012 § Leave a Comment
If the six hours I’ve spent reading and evaluating undergrad and grad work are any indication, school is back in session.
Looking forward to a further 10 hours of this joy over the weekend.
(And that seminar paper to write for a presentation on Thursday.)
Are We Civilized Yet?
January 31st, 2012 § 5 Comments
Kenya’s media is obsessed with civilization. Repeatedly, we are told that we “not yet†civilized. Lest I be accused of making up stuff, here are a few samples:
In spite of our national consensus that we want to live together as a united nation, our tribal tendencies still haunt us.
. . .
[We want to be] a truly civilised society. Dominic Wamugunda
In civilised nations, people respect and accept the judgement of others even where they may not agree.—Paul Muite
In what civilised country would [ICC suspects stay in office]?—Makau Mutua
Machetes have no place in a civilised society that is founded on the principles of justice and the rule of law.—Nation Editorial
In a truly civilised and democratic society, anybody who is under investigations, or who has been indicted for crimes against humanity should never be allowed to stand for any elective public post.—William Ochieng’
The South African Constitutional Court famously declared in the 1995 case of S v. Williams that the State must be foremost in upholding those values which are the guiding light of civilised societies, including respect for human dignity… even the vilest criminal remains a human being possessed of common human dignity.—Ababu Namwamba
Bad behaviour is everywhere, and it is worsening every journey for everyone. Simply making drivers behave like civilised human beings is now the burning issue. I hope someone will step in to address it.—Sunny Bindra
It is pointless to engage the government in civilised conversation when it comes to improvement in terms and conditions of work in the public service.—Lukoye Atwoli
The examples can be multiplied.
What is this obsession with being civilized?
My sampling is not random: I have included at least three academics (Mutua, Atwoli, Ochieng’) because they should be familiar with longstanding critiques of “civilisation†within African studies and postcolonial studies.
But, my interlocutors would say, we are well past the point of colonialism. Haven’t those terms taken on new meaning?
To which one might respond that we need to turn to Fanon. In Wretched of the Earth, Fanon warns that post-independence governments risk replicating colonial-era abuses:
The colonized . . . roar with laughter every time they hear themselves called an animal by the other. For they know they are not animals. And at the very moment when they discover their humanity, they begin to sharpen their weapons to secure its victory. (pg. 7)
More directly:
The national bourgeoisie, which takes over power at the end of the colonial regime, is an underdeveloped bourgeoisie. Its economic clout is practically zero, and in any case, no way commensurate with that of its metropolitan counterpart which it intends replacing. In its willful narcissism, the national bourgeoisie has lulled itself into thinking that it can supplant the metropolitan bourgeoisie to its own advantage. . . . The business elite and university graduates, who make up the most educated category of the new nation, are identifiable by their small numbers, their concentration in the capital, and their occupation as traders, landowners and professionals. This national bourgeoisie possesses neither industrialists nor financiers. The national bourgeoisie in the underdeveloped countries is not geared to production, invention, creation, or work. All its energy is channeled into intermediary activities. Networking and scheming seem to be its underlying vocation. The national bourgeoisie has the psychology of a businessman, not that of a captain of industry. (pg. 97-8; my emphasis)
Independence does not bring a change of direction. The same old groundnut harvest, cocoa harvest, and olive harvest. Likewise the traffic of commodities goes unchanged. No industry is established in the country. We continue to ship raw materials, we continue to grow produce for Europe and pass for specialists of unfinished products.
Yet the national bourgeoisie never stops calling for the nationalization of the economy and the commercial sector. In its thinking, to nationalize does not mean placing the entire economy at the service of the nation or satisfying all its requirements. To nationalize does not mean organizing the state on the basis of a new program of social relations. For the bourgeoisie, nationalization signifies very precisely the transfer into indigenous hands of privileges inherited from the colonial period. (pg. 99-100)
Sorry. Got carried away. I could happily transcribe Fanon all day.
It is now over 50 years since Fanon made these observations. Those once tenuously perched as the national bourgeoisie are entrenched as such. In weight-loss parlance: their job is now maintenance. It’s getting harder to enter Kenya’s middle and upper-middle classes. The children and grandchildren of those who went to Alliance and Makerere, and who, in turn, attended elite national and private schools, police their borders jealously. It’s striking, for instance, how many of the people I grew up with in Loresho married other people from Loresho (or Lavington or Muthaiga and a handful of other neighborhoods; Alliance marry Alliance, St. Mary’s ditto). We do not stray far from the protections of class and education.
Given class entrenchment and policing, being civilized takes on other connotations. The civilized are those entrenched in class privilege (which, at this point in time, is rapidly becoming divorced from actual income—Kenya has its shabby genteel). Their task as the civilized is to police the uncivilized. They have no real intention of letting anyone else join the rarefied ranks of the civilized.
Simultaneously, colonialism continues to cast its long shadow: we still believe there are “civilized countries,†often defined as European or American (I include Canada here), who have “figured things out.†Who act in “civilized†ways. Often, it boils down to their having more power—the technological ability to bomb folks from long distances. One might rightly ask whether I am trying to rescue the word civilized, to cleanse of its associations and histories, and claim there is something valuable about it.
Not at all.
I’d like to jettison the word civilized from Kenyan discourse. It means nothing. Less than nothing. We could talk about equality and fairness and justice. We could talk about corruption and impunity. We could talk about living together in harmony. None of these need to be anchored to “civilization.â€
I’m not very interested in becoming civilized—though, to be honest, a measure of class privilege means I’m not really at risk of being considered uncivilized. But only in Kenya. Being in the States is good for me—my uncivilized African-ness keeps me in check. (Sometimes I wonder if my colleagues believe I will arrive on campus with an ivory horn through my nose—the Gikuyu don’t do this, of course, but I could smear my body with rancid animal fat.)
Fuck civilization.
There are richer, more valuable ways of talking about who we are and who want to become.
Bad Activist Women! Bad!
January 29th, 2012 § 7 Comments
The Nancy Baraza-Rebecca Kerubo story dominated Kenyan minds prior to the ICC ruling that now consumes our time. I want to think about the context of the case against Deputy Chief Justice Baraza, more specifically, the role of women activists and the much-debated gender requirements of the constitution.
To give the quick and dirty, DCJ Baraza is accused of pinching Kerubo’s nose and, later, threatening to shoot Kerubo, who was trying to perform her duties as a security guard at one of Nairobi’s most exclusive malls, the Village Market. Baraza reportedly told Kerubo that she should “know [important] people†and, implicitly, not trouble them with the minutiae of mall security procedures.
Since the case broke, public comments on newspaper articles have highlighted Baraza’s status as an activist and reformer:
What an embarrassment to the women’s movement, FIDA, and women lawyers as a whole! Lady up madam and act with the decorum that deserves that office you hold!
Ms. Baraza, Power! Power!
Kenyans, it is now my pleasure to present to you the so-called reformers.
We are getting what we asked for. We have chosen to have radicals as our judges. We have chosen to have ‘born stubborns’ as our referees. We thought we could change them, but here we are. Once stubborn/radical, always one.
One more reason why I cannot vote for a woman to be president. It is not a male chauvinism but just an age old observance of African ladies who have power over their subjects. Sorry if I have hurt the feminists and the politically correct individuals.
The real issue as mentioned here is the quality of vetting for these jobs. All the plum jobs are going to members of a small “club” of civil society players whose main claim to fame is globe-trotting, Ivy league education and support for Western values especially gay rights. But these guys are untested in the real world of work. Worse, as in the case of Baraza and MM they are or are perceived to be arrogant and out of touch with “Wanjiku”.
Critics have blamed Baraza’s behavior on her gender. Murithi Mutiga, for instance, describes the courtly behavior of leading lawyer Pheroze Nowrojee when faced with a difficult situation to suggest that men know how to handle power. As he notes in an aside, “If it’s any consolation, though, at least [Baraza’s] boss [Willy Mutunga, the Chief Justice] is . . . one of the most easygoing judicial officials you will ever meet.â€
We will be saved by our men—perhaps even by those accused of crimes against humanity.
It is worth remembering that the Kenyan parliament—or whoever is in charge of these things—has not yet come up with a formula for complying with the gender rules of the constitution—no more than 2/3 of seats shall be occupied by more than one gender, even as presidential appointments of ministers and senior leaders continue to ignore gendered considerations. In the meantime, Kenyan women continue to undergo scrutiny: newspaper and magazine articles continue to emphasize their natural roles as wives and mothers: wives and mothers are too busy to stretch their minds. And those who do are unnatural and have unhappy husbands or boyfriends. Week after week, the newspapers print yet another disciplinary column instructing women to act like women if they want to get and keep men.
Successful women are described as arrogant—DCJ Baraza is now, unfortunately, the poster child of the arrogant woman who cannot handle power. Many fingers have been wagging in versions of “bad woman, bad!†Others, “bad activist, bad!†Others, “bad reformer, bad!†And the lesson we are enjoined to learn is that women cannot handle power. Activists and reformers are hypocrites.
Women activists are the worst hypocrites!
Meanwhile, we have yet to ask persistent questions about class politics: what is alleged to have happened between Baraza and Kerubo represents quotidian interactions between Kenyan employers and employees. One need only walk into Nakumatt or Uchumi or Chandarana to see any number of wealthy women striding around followed by their uniformed maids pushing heavy carts or, at times, carrying the two light items that employers dare not deign to carry. It’s not uncommon to enter stores in town where employers openly insult employees. And domestic workers in Kenya are, to borrow Zora’s language, the “mules†of the world.
While I do not want to ignore the specificity of the Baraza-Kerubo interaction, I’m interested in how we might use it to frame and enable other discussions about labor practices and politics in Kenya. (I totally had no idea this post was going to head this direction—I thought I was writing something else. I’ve been thinking a lot about the occupy movement and how it might speak to Kenya, where our version of the 1% are comfortably situated within government positions or in near proximity to office holders.)
The conflation and condemnation of women-activists-reformers upholds the myth of a benevolent, gentlemanly patriarchy while obscuring substantive discussions of class privilege. Those who have critiqued DCJ Baraza’s “arrogance†have ignored class and labor and focused on gender and activism, that is, Baraza does not represent the moneyed elite to which she belongs, but, rather, women activists. (I’m splitting hairs for strategic reasons.)
DCJ Baraza is our contemporary Wangu wa Makeri, a leader who, in some versions of the story, got drunk on power and misbehaved in public. The lesson of Wangu wa Makeri, one taught in primary schools when I attended, is that women cannot be trusted with power. They will always misuse it.
In treating the Baraza-Kerubo case as a lesson in “when women misbehave†we ignore the very real conversations we need to be having about Kenya’s version of the 1%, who have thrived under Kibaki, and the many others who struggle to survive in a country that barely acknowledges they exist.
Magic Numbers: 20+40
January 28th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Since the publication of Richard Arum and Josipa Roska’s Academically Adrift early in 2011, 20+40 have become “magic numbers,†evidence of “academic rigor.†The study (which I haven’t read, but which has been much discussed) claimed that 32% of the students they studied did not take courses with more than 40 pages of reading a week and that 50% did not take a single course in which they wrote more than 20 pages during a semester. As I haven’t read the book, I cannot comment on how these numbers relate to course rigor—I’m sure there’s some great explanation. And as my semester has started and the volume of stuff to do has multiplied, there’s a good chance I won’t be able to read the book to understand how these particular numbers exemplify academic rigor.
Magic numbers seem to offer appropriate tools in an age of assessment: are you assigning 40 or more pages a week? Your course demonstrates rigor. Are your students writing up to or more than 20 pages a semester? Your course demonstrates rigor. Magic numbers can become easy solutions, or at least convenient ones. They are also deeply seductive. One can assign a novel a week, a common practice in upper-level English classes, and pick up a merit badge. Since many of us assign multiple writing assignments, ranging from one-minute paragraphs to 30-page papers, we also get a gold star. If numbers tell the story of our teaching—and of student learning—then English instructors must be somewhere at the top of the pile.
Except when we are not.
Some of us—I confess to being one of them—assign one short story a week or, even worse, 2-4 poems. In my earlier teaching days, I regularly assigned one poem per class in an Intro to Poetry class. I believed then, as I do now, that close reading, the foundation of literary analysis, demands a deliberate pace: one learns to slow down, to unlearn skimming, to read what is on the page. To consider slowly and carefully the relationships among parts: text to white space, punctuation to words, words to sentences, sentences to stanzas, stanzas to white space, punctuation to sentences, and on it goes. Something important happens when students spend one or two 75-minute class sessions on Phyllis Wheatley’s 8-line “On Being Brought from Africa to America.†Something about learning to pay attention, to listen, to consider, to reconsider. To complicate not only what one knows, but how one knows.
Even in upper-level classes, one must be deliberate about teaching. One can certainly teach a class in, say, queer studies, that focuses on one major book a week—a standard Freud through Foucault, Butler, Sedgwick, Bersani, Berlant, Somerville, Cathy Cohen, Eng, Ferguson, Delany (okay, standard for me)—but it’s not clear that the class will benefit anyone apart from the instructor and two or three exceptional students. Granted, the bar could be lower if one teaches fiction, but I want to be careful about such a claim: James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man merits just as much time and care as Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.
Mindful teaching attached to specific goals and objectives is always more than a numbers game. It has to be. I don’t buy the 40 pages a week paradigm as evidence of rigor.
As for the 20 pages of writing over the course of a semester.
Many years of experience have taught me to substitute word count for page count. Given that my students submit their work electronically, word count simply works better. No more guesstimating. 500 words is 500 words, no matter how fancy the font or creative the spacing. Also, one teaches specific things. In a class focused on writing, for instance, I can envision a very deliberate process of working from sentences to paragraphs to pages to a short paper of, say, 4-5 pages over the course of a semester. And this not as a remedial class, but as a class deeply focused on how language works and on how argument proceeds. Spending two weeks or more on thesis statements would help many students.
Effective writing is revised writing. A few people, very few, are one-draft geniuses. But one can’t base pedagogy on the achievements of the exceptional.
In other words, different kinds of writing have different goals. It might be that students produce many pages of low-stakes writing—journals, impressionistic writing, reports of reading experiences—and a few pages of high-stakes writing—a 5-page paper, say. One might want to emphasize that writing is more than one thing: a process, a space, a practice, a discipline, a pleasure. One might want to alleviate anxiety over writing. One might want to exacerbate it.
Different goals, different strategies.
One’s writing styles and strategies shape pedagogy. I am, for instance, a concise writer in a long-winded profession. My typical reaction to most presentations, articles, and books is that they could be shorter. I also understand how difficult it is to get to the core of an idea—many of us write until we find the idea. By that point, we are so attached to the process of finding that idea and to our labor (rightly so) that we feel injured when asked to eliminate either or both of those: I spent 20 years working on that 2,000-page book, the scholar claims. And you want it cut to 200 pages? Never!
Many years of writing abstracts—condense your idea to 250 words or to 50 words—and, perhaps more importantly, many years of blogging and writing for non-academic audiences have taught me how to write relatively concise, readable prose. And while I like many kinds of prose, including the luxurious and the luscious and the obscure and the decadent, I try to model for my students a transferable skill: write lucid, concise prose. I am not disputing that students should write a lot—students in my classes write anywhere from 15 to 120 pages a semester, and this is not counting the drafts that I do not see. Instead, I’m interested in thinking more deliberately about magic numbers.
It might be that there’s valid research that establishes 40+20 as the magic numbers to establish rigor in college classes. What makes these numbers magical, however, is their being abstracted into a measure through which accomplishment is assessed all the while bypassing actual teaching strategies and learning goals.
That is bad magic.
When Women Meet . .
January 27th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
A wonderful set of meditations.
And the rest of the Audre Lorde poem I had touched on:
What do we want from each other
after we have told our stories
do we want
to be healed do we want
mossy quiet stealing over our scars
do we want
the powerful unfrightening sister
who will make the pain go away
mother’s voice in the hallway
you’ve done it right
the first time darling
you will never need
to do it again.
Thunder grumbles on the horizon
I buy time with another story
a pale blister of air
cadences of dead flesh
obscure the vowels. (“There are no Honest Poems about Dead Women”)
Kweli on The Whitney Soundtrack
keguro on Love in Fanon
James on Love in Fanon