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ebogjonson's February 2007 archive

February 26, 2007

pop quiz

According to The Independent, one of the folks above is one of Africa's Top 50 artists and the other is one of Africa's top novelistic up-and-comers.

I dunno about all that, but they're both the best traveling company you could ever wish for!

(Hint #1: the names of the folks pictured above can be found within close proximity to the word "kwani" in the Independent write-up)

Posted by ebogjonson in Kenya at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

February 16, 2007

I guess it really is Miami

While I was on the phone outside Saint Anne's hospital, these two ladies nonchalantly performed what I am assuming was a santeria ritual, this between chatting with various passers-by and yelling at a gangly grandson/nephew. (Young dude was both sulky and fascinated by their magicks.) The steps of the ritual as I saw them included (in order):

pulling a cigar out of a materials pouch and giving it to the kid to light (is this like letting him lick the batter bowl when making a cake?), pulling out an egg (hard boiled?), blowing smoke on said egg and absently saying a few words, pulling out a bottle of clear liquid and sucking some of that liquid into your mouth (holy water?), blowing a big spray-y raspberry onto the egg using said clear liquid, putting the egg into egg-sized burlap sack, saying a few absent words over the sack and putting the whole in your purse.

The ladies struck me as generally under-enthused about their ritual and largely unconcerned about their privacy, maybe becuase they were just preparing mats (that's enchanting materials for those of you who don't play WoW) for later use. The kid was completely kid-like: his antennae waving curiously even as he was annoyed at being stuck with the old ladies.

I paused for a few moments while taking and uploading the above image to consider whether I was violating these women's privacy and decided, yes, maybe and "oh well." On the one had they were just chilling out in the open and could have easily found a more secluded spot, so I don't think they cared who saw what. On the other hand, I doubt the possibility of being recorded and mass-distributed on the internet tubes factored into their thinking

(The worst possibility, of course, is that photography nullifies the magic, which means I might have - gulp! - just kilt somebody!)

Someone suggested to me that I was courting a certain kind of wrath with these ladies but I will take my chances. When I would get my hair cut as a kid Saint Anne would grow mysteriously vibrational with concern, something that I have always attributed to her fear that all that discarded hair could be put to nefarious use against me. She grew up in the hills overlooking Port-au-Prince during the 1940s; I figure (or is that "I like to imagine"?) she knows a few defensive tricks and buffs of her own.

Posted by ebogjonson in places at 9:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

February 12, 2007

best laid plannery

So no sooner do I (kinda) (plan to) get back up on the proverbial blogging horse than I find myself rushing off to Miami all in a tizzy, all my plans for a powerfully focused and active ebog February falling to the proverbial wayside somewhere between LAX and MIA. What happened is that the 89-year-old Haitian woman who raised me and my sister, who has lived in my parents' home since I was born as an occasionally confusing combo of grandmother, nanny and companion (to my mother since Dad died, that is) had a series of mild heart attacks starting two Thursday's ago. Since then her prognosis, diagnosis and planned course of treatment has been flipping from cloudy to underdetermined and back on a daily basis, so I'll likely be in Miami until the dust clears one way or the other. As a result I haven't really been able to focus on the blog until today.

After the initial heart attack (described as mild, in so much as any 89 year-old's ticker trouble is mild), my big fear was that I wouldn't get to FL in time. I got on the first LAX>MIA flight I could, completely freaked out and convinced that I'd arrive to find Saint Anne (dig those crazy rural Haitian first names!) already quite cool to the touch and stiff on a slab in a morgue, much as I found my father after getting the "come right away" call. I have no distinct memories of those last moments with my (un-embalmed) dad, my first moments of being, as my shrink put it, "fatherless in the world," but I do vividly recall the morgue attendant, who was this gigantic, Ruben Studdard-looking gent. There in the middle of my shock and grief at finding my father a corpse, dude starts humming and singing like he's in church, this before abruptly jumping up from behind his desk, launching himself across the few feet between us and throwing me in an inescapable bear-hug. He quite literally cooed at me, going, "It's okay, big man. No shame in a grown man crying for his daddy," and after struggling in vain to get away for a few seconds, I, needless to say, gave in to his embrace and bawled like a baby against his chest. That incident has since morphed into a favorite anecdote of mine, and in the process it has rather completely overwritten memories that should have been filed under "last moments with father," leaving me instead with a file marked "first/only moments with Ruben Studdard-looking morgue-attendant." Which is obviously neither here nor there when it comes to the question of fathers and fatherless-ness.

(Although, not quite. There is likely a short story somewhere in the above, where the state of living without a father begins with the protag's surrender to the loving embrace of a brother who happen to be bigger and stronger than he is. I'll give the story away open-source-ish to the group blogmind, but the stipulation is that whoever takes it has to write the same story three times: once as a queer love story, once as a kind of afrocentric-journey story, and once as a black frat pledge story.)

Anyway, when I got to Miami I learned that Saint Anne's condition is an attenuated kind of dire wherein she is in no particular pain, doesn't seem to be in danger of dying within any given, coming 48 hour span, and yet also manages to present something of a mystery to her doctors. They've switched her blood pressure meds this way and that, and then they put a pacemaker in (a freshly minted cyborg!), this on the theory that the paced ticker would allow for more aggressive treatment of her hypertension. They let her out of the hospital a day after her surgery, too soon perhaps as she was back in the ER a few days later complaining of chest pains. Now they are keeping her for extended observation and talking obstruction, cardiac catheterization, radioactive dye, clots in her legs and so on. There is blood in her urine and they are worried about her kidneys. They have detected anemia, want to check the color of her stool. No one has said the C-word, but the docs seem to think something is putting additional strain on her heart and organs. They say everything really, then they cap it off by saying "she's 89," like this should explain something.

The doctors and nurses also keep insisting she's a fighter, which I guess is true although it strikes me that that what she's actually doing is closer to maintaining. Saint Anne is already in her 50s and 60s in the bulk of my conscious memories of her, I can recall her nimbly darting into traffic after my toddling sister when she must have been almost 70. Even now she could pass for a hard-living recent retiree. I could picture her living a thousand years, is what I'm saying, shaking her head the way she does whenever she settles down to some annoying (yet integral) task of caretaking, putting her shoulder to 900 more years of arthritis, implants, diabetes, eye surgery, complaining high yellow brats and so on. "Fighting" to me suggests clawing one's way towards the better, whereas Saint Anne's energies have largely been directed towards the maintenance of a never-ending steady state. Her favorite show is Matlock, her only vice is decaf coffee, her favorite verbal interjection, this for use once she's stopped listening to you and needs to get on with her day, is (in kreyol) "have courage, my brother/sister! Have courage!" Maintain it is.

It's actually enormously difficult for me to write about Saint Anne without worrying that my words are going to fail her, that I'm going to get her story wrong. I feel that in addition to sitting at her bedside and interrogating doctors I owe her some or another accurate form of, well, analysis. Her life with us has always seemed to me as having built into it a broad range of inequities, so getting her story all fuck wrong would be insult added to injury, not what you want to do for someone during their (maybe) last days. My main fear isn't so much error as self-service, self-protection. I worry that I'm trying to alternately/simultaneously extract absolution and an exquisite, related form of indictment from her story. My relationship to her binds up so many of my most thorn-laden life strands that I have a hard time mustering much enthusiasm for taking them in hand and untangling - that is, until there's a need for me to stand a particular kind of tall, to show the (reading) world my palms and bleed from them in public, to display various forms of bravery, clear-headedness, insight.

Another problem about writing about Saint Anne is that doing so makes my mother somewhat uncomfortable and unhappy. She once came across an essay I wrote in college that seemed (to her) to question her unitary maternal primacy, this in favor of the notion that Ebog (kinda) had two mommies. (Not because anyone was particularly dyke-ish, but because someone was born lighter and richer than someone else.) The spectacle of my mother's persistent confusion and hurt in response to thinking about Saint Anne in certain ways has always given me an inordinate amount of satisfaction, suggesting to me that I clutch my version of Saint Anne's story closer my breast precisely when I want to indict my biological mother for something, for being a certain kind of uncritical Haitian, say, or for not buying me that TCR racetrack I wanted.

I worry that I scrutinize Saint Anne's lot in life not to improve it but in order to make myself feel different from and better than my parents and their generation, which is a bit of a pickle, as this "better" and "different" thinking also involves my feeling, well, kind of white or, at least white-ish. I find myself immediately converted into a kind of cliché, a light child protesting that the dark woman who cared for him really was a member of the family, that his love really is a mitigation of the ways she's been screwed by various histories and people, some of them his blood relations. Even if I take myself at my word about the love and family and mitigation thing, the scenario is still a tornado of wild, often unfortunate association, something that is liable at any moment to lift me up and away from my usual zones (fantasies?) of solidarity and community in order to deposit me in nabes (shoes?) where the white folks live, some of whom I have likely been berating for various, taxonomically similar and often circumstantial sins since god knows when.

Of course, quite literally billions of people have been mothered by poorer, darker, whatever-er women since time immemorial, several hundred million such pairings at least producing bonds of genuine and mutual adoration that neither sum up to nor reduce to the circumstances/conditions of the caregiver's employment. My own such relationship has instructive nuances, but when I was a freaked-out, over-thinking kid, I had no idea what a nuance was, no predisposition to look for one as a neat, counter-intuitive way to navigate a situation. (Did I even have a predisposition for the counter-intuitive then?) I had to feel/think the whole thing through on the fly for myself, blind, under-educated (that is, young), all of that under the most stressful circumstance possible, i.e., under the hot spotlight of some kid asking exactly who that person living in our house was who didn't look like us and seemed to be doing all the woman's work. That kid might not have known shit, but unconvincing BS? Verbal laziness? Shame? Fear? All that, dudes could smell.

Because I was a teacher's pet-type, I proceeded from the foundational premise that there was a "right answer," something that would be true, (2+2 equals 4 under all meaningful circumstances, sorry) but that would also get me out of the social bind implicit in the question, its allegation of difference. Cube the above by the fact that I had distinct home (a middle-class African American block), school (a white Catholic school), and family (multihued bourgie Haitian) constituencies and my answer both called for and instilled in me a certain measure of (if I say so myself) clinicism and conceptual virtuosity. (Or is that another name for good bullshit?) For example, "the maid" was overly blunt, cruel and inaccurate, whereas "babysitter" implied that I was a "baby" and was also inadequate to the scope of how Saint Anne and my family had become intertwined and interpenetrated. And while the words "my nanny," are today liable to roll effortlessly off the tongue of every black media-hipster brat in Park Slope, such affectations didn't exist for me in 1970s Queens, calling for a discussion of class, Haitian history, diaspora, exile and so on that I technically wouldn't be able to moderate until I was, predictably enough, at Yale. (Or, as I would put it for a few too many years, when I "went to school in New Haven.")

"My aunt" or (as the years rolled on) "my grandmother" was wrong but it did get me closer to a few useful ideas, like how my family in Haiti ran a bakery and has a congenital, self-serving tendency to blur the line between "relative" and "employee." This genre of answer, though, risked my interlocutor doing a quick phenotype check and bringing things back to the initial, foundational instability about what it was I "was." A real stumper, that. Just as my parents had cornered me exactly once to talk about sex, they had had exactly one conversation with me about race, this to rather mysteriously explain that I should NEVER let any white American talk down to me seeing how there were thousands of said white folk living in Appalachia with six fingers and six toes on each and every hand and foot. ("Primitives, really," my father would say, peering over his copy of Popular Science.)

My sister can keep me honest on this, but my super-light, Haitian exile parents arrived here with a foreign and largely inapplicable (to Queens) racial self-concept, so I've always fantasized that I was the one who contracted the local strain of "race" from the kids (black and white) on the conceptual mid-70s street and brought it home the flu, promptly infecting everyone else in our house. Everyone, of course, except for Saint Anne, whose very presence in our home suggested everyone at the address had survived earlier, un-discussed pandemics, that actually there was more at play at 116-68 227th than just immigrant ignorance about US racial history/hang-ups, like complicity, self-denial, desire and fantasy. A mass of completely native history and ideology and personal bullshit so huge (and so growing!) that eventually my schema had no choice but to fall in on itself, collapsing into a mixed-metaphor of such density and gravity and strangeness that it proceeded to eat my entire life, sure, but in the process also opened up, you know, wormholes, some of them leading to quite wonder-filled (and profitable) zones of thought and experience that I would never have had access to otherwise.

In so much as I have a (wackjob) thesis about race and identity in America, it's the product of the compression and fireworks that went off in my head every time the street/school-yard forced me to come up with answers about who I was in relationship to Saint Anne. Like I said, that answer that had to serve many, many masters and highest among them was, of course, Saint Anne herself. A good little Catholic boy to the core, I tended to become most desperately afraid of disappointing people precisely at the moment I was sure my choice would safely escape their notice, and, for simple reasons of scale, I was therefore constantly afraid of disappointing Saint Anne. The high hedges of age, language, nationality, immigration, temperament, literacy, class, color and so on meant that the zone of free will created away from Saint Anne (the zone where I would literally show my true colors) seemed to my child's eye to encompass the entire world of "American" people, places, ideas and things outside our home. I was a normal enough kid (meaning I did the expected share of dirt), but whenever I found myself explicitly pondering moral dilemmas "WWSAS?" (what would Saint Anne say?) was an early litmus test that has never failed me, fuck teachers, mentors, theorists, peers, therapists and so forth. I have espoused countless ideas precisely because I figured my parents would disapprove of them, but with exception of, well, vice (the proverbial drinkin', druggin' and fuckin') I can't think of a single thing I believe in or do that if sat down to talk to her about it would bring that sad look of disappointment into her eyes. (Well, when I was 11 or so I once pranked called the house from down the block and said I was immigration, but she recognized my voice.) Her pride in me has been so consistent, her belief that I will do the right thing so intrinsic (in that she has little lived connection with the particulars of much of what of I do, like make blackface charts) that all I can do is be humbled and grateful for her faith in me, make sure I carry my imagined sense of her take on things with me everywhere I go.

(WWSAS about say about blackfacing on blogs? "Don't you have something better to do with your time?" "Did somebody tell you to put all that stuff on your face or did you decide to do that on your own?")

And WWSAS also explains, I think, the difference between me and John McWhorter. I attack the McWhorters of the world for using the hatred of black people as a kind of horrific balm for the pain of completely banal and common childhood traumas, but I have to admit that underlying my disgust with them there has always an undercurrent of "there but for the grace of god (or at least grace of Saint Anne!) go I!" Because there was clearly no black angel of better nature perched on McWhorter's shoulder during that formative moment when he was attacked for "talking white," no one black-talking person to whom he was beholden and whose loving counterpoint could have given him a way out of his subsequent, lifelong spiral of shame and self-erasure. (WWSAS to John McWhorter about talking white? "Is that what you're talking? Because you see, I don't speak a lick of English so you are basically just flapping gums at me. But: have courage, my brother!") As a result of this condition of being Saint Anne-less, the poor, unhappy lonely boy that I imagine McWhorter must have been grew up to be a self-hating, mediocre, bought-and-paid-for liar who very simply loves white people and what they represent in the racial schema more than he loves anything in the world. Me, I had the Saint Anne and I can't begin to explain or enumerate how grateful I am to her for that, this even as I acknowledge that given her druthers, there may have been something else she'd have preferred to do than look after me.

(This is an aside, but unlike McWhorter, I'm also grateful to the 70s and 80s street that both hosted and forced the crises described above. Among the many things about himself that McWhorter hates is the popular culture of his era, which is why instead of running home after his ass whipping desperately quoting Conan the Barbarian - That which doesn't kill me makes me stronger! That which doesn't kill me makes me stronger! Hey! Who said that again? - he was instead blubbering about how awful and black those kids were, thereby ensuring he would never risk confronting them again without the full support of all of whiteness, never risk winning or losing or being stronger or forgiving or seducing or anything that might transform both their relationship or his to the issues that structured the encounter.)

If there is anyone I feel bad for, it is, of course, Saint Anne's real, biological son. Back in Haiti, Saint Anne had spent her entire life caring for my family's various yellow brats, invalids, dysfunctional households and so on, and when she was sent in middle age to care for one more, she left behind a boy of her own. When I was a kid, I always imagined her son as my dark Haitian twin, a feral child running wild, abandoned and deprived in Port-au-Prince while I sat fat, pale and soft in NYC. It turns out that he was already grown when she left, that he now lives in Canada, has children of his own, and seemingly spends very little of his day plotting any form of revenge. When I was a kid, though, I figured Saint Anne's son must by definition hate me, creating elaborate, Cape Fear-like scenarios where she died and I brought her body back to Haiti for burial and he ended up chasing me through the countryside like Rutger Hauer chasing Harrison Ford around at the end of Blade Runner, one replicant eager to give another (if you buy into that reading) a taste of what his life had been like. In some versions I survive, in other versions he kills me, claims my passport and my life, and in some versions our lifeless bodies fall together onto Saint Anne's coffin, our family finally together and at peace. But when he calls to check in (largely with my mother) the conversation is mostly to review his mother's condition and his non-revenge-related travel options. He has visa issues that might keep him in Canada. He might be able to swing a quick visit when she's alive but worries he might not be able to afford to come to her funeral. He is worried about timing. If he gets the call soon enough he thinks he might be able to catch her just before she dies, see her buried and be back up north in a week, tops.

("That's what happened with my father," I offer, helpfully. "I didn't get the call in time." He murmurs sympathy. We may yet be siblings after all.)

But if I was telling all this to Saint Anne she would have said "have courage, my brother!" a few thousand words ago, my cue to shut the fuck up already. I can think and I can think and I can think, tell stories and make connections, but none of it has anything to do with figuring out how to keep her heart beating until her son can get to her. I am the lucky one again, I made it in time and now I have the freedom to look at the life we lived together, I can write words about that life, develop and elaborate theories, feel sorry for someone not myself. But in the end all this yack about color and class and memory is just a way of denying this moment wherein I find myself forced to face losing her. It really is like my dad all over again. There is a hole burned into my memory where he should be, dead, me leaning over him, my tears cooling on his face. But I don't remember a thing about that specific moment, none of it at all. I just literally remember everything else.

Posted by ebogjonson in blood relationshaitimemory at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

February 2, 2007

so I guess i'm back

hey, friend. Nice to see you again. I figure I need to get this "where I was" post out of the way before I can to move on to other business, so I'd like to tell you about a few things that happened to me last year. But first:

1 - Happy Black History Month. You know, writing about BHM just doesn't offer the same zip now that I no longer work in corporate media. Go figure.

1.5 - I was just watching a tivo of The Stephen Colbert Show, and he was going on about how we need a Black Future Month. I actually tried that back when I was running BlackPlanet.com and it didn't catch on, but maybe the white dude will have better luck.

2 - So one way to think about what I was doing for all of Decemember 2006 is this:

LAX to BOS; BOS to LHR ; LHR to NBO; NBO to LAU.

And then back again.

3 - Like I somehow managed to say earlier, I took pictures while I was away.

4 - According to my traffic logs from December, people seem to have been mostly interested in my blackface chart. The advice that white people are advised not to fuck around with the blackface seems to be the sort of gift that just keeps on giving.

4.5 - And while I'm here, I'd like to thank mom and dad (who knew the deal). And I'd also like to thank the folks who nominated that chart for a Koufax award. That was super swell of you!

5 - rips james brown, rips Uncle Tony. rips Molly Ivins.

(I feel like I am missing another December-January draftee into the army of the dead.)

But I have this to-do list in my Treo about a Haiti documentary that I'm always planning to get working on (someday), and one of the items is "talk to Uncle Tony." I'm sorry I was late; I know you would have had great, amazing things to say.

6 - I technically got back from Kenya about a week or so [ebog note: I wrote that, like, three weeks ago, this before I had fully grokked to how broked my blog was.] It's been hard readjusting to the US and also kind of a weird explaining exactly what I was doing for most of December. The short answer is that I was attending a meeting called "Spreading the Words," which took place place in the shadow of the Kenyan edition of Summer Literary Seminar. My particular set'o'meetings concerned an international collective/publishing alliance being assembled by a globe-trotting set of literary magazines, one of them being our hosts at Kenya's Kwani. (There were a bunch of other folks there as well, but considering that the proposed collective will involve some tinkering with things like member-mags' contributor contracts, I don't want to put any editor's business in the street prematurely. But it was a pretty sweet set of people, places and literary magazines. )

The three threads weaving all the participants together are Mike Vazquez (of, among other things, Transition fame), Kwani's Binyavanga Wainana, and writer/copyright expert/man-about-town Achal Prabhala. Between the three of them they have edited, contributed to, written for, or are buds with all the mags/editors involved. But, as Achal often pointed out, their web of activity and connection is invisible to the, like, web (i.e., Google) because none of these publications maintain kitted-out web archives or (in some cases) even websites. Achal is, for example, a rather nicely published gent, but because he works in a particular zone google doesn't reflect the full extent of his wonderfulness.

My role in the meet was (quasi-obviously) related to the web issues, and moving forward I'm going to be building out a set of templatized, web-based content management and archiving tools for use by collective members. The content management part will involve some heavy lifting, as will be wrangling and digitizing everyone's back issues, but the part I am most looking forward to thinking about is the collective's e-commerce engine. Not every credit card issued by a sub-Saharan African bank works online or outside the region, so I'm going to spend some time communing with some microcredit folks who are doing some nifty things with SMS transfers. (So, for example, we could imagine a Kenyan subscribing to Kwani or paying for a back issue using their phone.)

Under Mike V's direction the collective is also going to create an online magazine that will produce new, web-only content, as well as re-publish/re-contextualize old edit from the participant journals. (Given the participants, this is always timeless and worth re-reading.) Lastly, we are thinking the site should be able to do the standard stupid-smart internet tricks, like provide group blogging functionality for the editors (something along the lines of HuffPost for non-celebs), as or online community for readers, fans, writers and the like. Maybe a writer's workshop or a hard-copy best-of anthology. We'll see.

Our meetings went pretty well and some cash has been ponied-up by funders for us to kick the project around for a few months, this before building something that will (hopefully!) be live by the end of '07. In addition to the proverbial income coming in, the gig will also have me travelling back to various parts of the Continent (African, that is) as well as to India, not to mention NYC and SF to meet with folks involved in US indie media projects. Not bad work if you can get it.

7 - Between all of this I started playing WoW somewhere along the way. You can likely guess what my name is there and I'm on Darlaran. (Don't make me kill you.) I am kind of against Second Life for obvious reasons that will nonetheless be re-iterated (by me) in a forthcoming issue of Bidoun. That said, I am buying some SL property nonetheless, just for kicks and also because I have a wackjob art project that I have been thinking through that will need a virtual house.

Conceptual art really is the is the last refuge of a scoundrel, huh?

8 - While away I very happily discovered a band called Mahogany, whose video for Supervitesse is depicted below.

(Thanks for the intro, Mike! And get a fucking blog already so that I can link to you.)

I also could not get the following snippet from Kool Keith's I Don't Play out of my head:

Yo, what are you doin lookin in my closet? Why are you tryin to try on my sneakers? Stop lookin around in my kitchen That's right it's Honeycomb up there, raviolis Everything a regular man eats I'm not the Elephant Man, whassup?

I'm not quite sure why, but those were the songs of the summer... In my mind... In December.

9 - The other thing I did in Kenya is that I went to an island called Lamu. Although I claim to be having a hard time describing my experience there, in point of fact I actually did manage to write a few emails about Lamu, and have mashed those emails into the one below:

hey! Happy new years, X-mas and associated jazz :)

The trip was pretty sweet. First I went to a conference in Nairobi which ended up with me and Mike getting some money from the [redacted] and the [redacted] to build a website for a group of literary magazines in the US, UK, sub-Saharan Africa and India. We're going to go to Bangalore in june for a coupla months to build the site and the cash should see me through 2007, which is both hot and relieving.

After the conference though I went to a fairly mind-blowing Kenyan island called Lamu, which floats on the Indian Ocean south of the Somali border. It's a Swahili sailing town: old stone buildings and narrow streets and no cars, just boats anddonkeys and donkey shit that comes in different colors and textures depending on what they've been eating. Half the women wear headgarb and the men sail and fish all day. When the wind dies down dudes either pull out outboard motors or fry fish on the boat. They smoke weed and chew chat and drink sweet tea until the wind returns. Completely idyllic and amazing and exactly what I would do on the 405 during traffic if it made sense.

We went on a 2 night sail to some of the outlying islands, an experience that kind of made me want to stay forever. Warm water with phosphorescence in it and strong winds conspired to take us to isolated towns that get visitors maybe once a year. We visited Siu, which once fought a war against the Portugesese, and we walked into the Tomb of the Last Sufi Saint, which is pretty much like saying I was in fucking Raiders of the Lost Ark only without the nightmare colonialism and racism, just once holy ruins protected by local people eager to tell you about the great, curious history of their town. Towns like Siu (where the Tomb is) are poor but green and clean, and they are full of thoughtful people trying to navigate the ever-combined problem of the present and the past, this without resorting to the usual bullshit about poor, downtrodden tradition or easy fundamentalism. Those folks were powerfully, genuinely generous, feeding us and talking us through their lives and towns. (The imprint of contact with South Asia is all over the place, but it was especially strong in the teas, samosas and breads we ate on those islands.) Saying everyone we met was beautiful and proud and charming and funny does not do justice to any of them.

Besides sightseeing and talking we went looking for a game cock for one of our hosts, so I spent a few hours checking out completely freaky roosters that look and act exactly like what I imagine dinosaurs looked and acted like. (Apparently those islands are famous for champion chicken bloodlines.) A good gamecock is 2 1/2 or so feet tall and will pretty much come right up to you, absolutely fearless. From what I understand they don't fight them to the death (relax, all you animal people, the market is your friend here: the owners are strapped for $ and a noted winner can fetch 200+ US). The audience and the two owners declare a winner long before anyone gets too fucked up. There's no particular shame in losing as the feeling is that a rooster can always get lucky tomorrow, but if your cock outright runs away from an opponent that's considered the worst thing EVER and you have to kill the cowardly little shit yourself right then and there, this to keep those bad genes from going back into circulation. (All this is, of course, under-substantiated, hearsay ethnography. I asked someone the last time a cock ran away from a fight and he claimed he couldn't remember any local birds running but swore that the roosters from the next island were straight up, well, chicken.)

They practice a (relatively) open, live-and-let-live strain of Islam in the area, so on top of every other inneresting thing there were moments that the big town on Lamu seemed gayer than Christopher Street. At any given moment there are a fair number of comely eurotrash ladies about (over-fit, over-tanned, fortysomething Germans mostly, their noses open to the various local excitements) so the place is also crawling with bedredlocked "beach boys" who act as tour guides, day-trip boat crew, drug dealers, porters, gigolos and good will/ good vibe ambassadors. (Think Heading South transposed from Haiti.) Because it's a veil-wearing town 3/4 of the the local women are locked up after dark (likely chained to radiators by the local, islamic version of Sam Jackson), and when the foreigners run thin the beach boys find other ways to amuse themselves, like (no joke!) running around in full, trad female garb and staging fire-dance shows in banana-hammock speedos and hugging up on each other and giggling. (From what I could see the region also seems to produce - or is that attract? - highly "passable" trannies, all of whom were with thugged-out/hip hoppish white brits for some reason. Banjie realness indeed.)

(But it all really just went to show that horny young men, when left to their own devices for long enough, invariably do get around to doing the hoo-haa on each another, this even in zones that one might have otherwise have considered congenitally homophobic. I mean, was is was like a happy-friendly, rape-free remake of Oz up in that piece after the last german matron had gone to her rest.)

The truly awful and disturbing and unfortunate thing about the beach boys wasn't their polymorphous perversity, but the fact that they will yell "HEY MON!" 30 times a day at you if you look in the slightest like a kindred spirit. Walking down Lamu's one, narrow main street was like walking through a drunken frat-house, what with all the "RESPECT!! JAH RASTAFARI! BOB MARLEY!" shouts I had to endure because of my locks. Dudes there all style themselves stoner philosopher/seekers, so during prime hustling hours I couldn't get five meters without having to stop and engage each and every man-whore sporting wormy baby dreads, this partially as a set-up to some kind of pitch (weed? boat? tourist kitsch? ass?), but also partially because dudes were engaged in a completely sincere (albeit dippy) quest for spiritual fraternity. (Just because you service white women for a living does not mean you are without your higher inclinations.)

Most of the beach boys were barely older than my oldest lock, so I found myself immediately installed as a kind of visiting, greybearded dignitary owing to the length of my hair - 16 years worth?! My dreds were misread by the locals as some proof of my virtue and dedication, this when the reasons behind my seeming stick-to-itiveness are significantly baser. (Vanity? Social power? Laziness? Fuck-you-ery? Peacockery?) I was initially humbled by my installation as (as one of my traveling companions put it) the dread king of Lamu, but soon all that power went to my, er, head, especially once it became apparent that the bulk of those kids had picked up their affectations from the same VHS copy of Cool Runnings. I forced myself to try to find genuine responses to low-grade quips like "A friend with weed is a friend indeed!" for about three days before giving up, settling into an unresponsive, surly and downright American zone of non-interaction that likely severely tarnished my halo. Oh well. You can't please all of the beach boys all of the time.

The actual king of the beach boys is a super-skinny, expat-black-Brit named, uh, [completely insane fake name redacted; but seriously! imagine he was named "beelzebub!"]. From what I was able to gather [redacted] was some kind of (wait for it!) cultural studies graduate student (!) back in the UK who came to the region to do field work and never left. More recently he impregnated the buxom [white] manager of the [redacted] and has thus been able to secure his position as beach boy king through his high ranking, semi-offical/familial connection to the island's tourist infrastructure, this as opposed to having won a Sweet Sweee(ee?)eetback type fuck-off involving dozens of German tourists.

[Redacted] talks like Tricky and is touted as the best best dj from there to Zanzibar, but when I finally heard him spin he played a completely crap set - basically some Time Life Music GOA Tribal Trance mix CDs from 1994. I told [redacted] that if he chucked it all and moved to Lamu with his records he would own the island's social scene in a year, tops, although I can imagine the beach boys and the tourists might resist his troubling newness. We went to a super-lovely beach bar/resort called Diamond Beach which is run by two hottish stoner white-girll British expats whose taste in music seems confined to the kind of chillout electronica CD you might buy at Starbucks. When we were floating in the warm water off Diamond Beach, glowing plankton trailig our movement, a canopy of stars above, Mike and I had to admit that maybe the place actually needs bad music as a kind of safety mechanism. If, say, this dude had started spinning that night, I very well could have ecstatically blown a mental fuse and drowned, which would have obviously bitten. Needless to say, Mike and I are planning to do the same trip next year and are already planning to host a party (maybe on Diamond Beach?) so we'll see what happens.

that's all I can think of for now, except that I was bitten by a sailing bug in Lamu and am investigating a sailing class in LA. There is something fairly primal and soothing about wind power, the way it's silent and tactile all at the same time. It's a shame that sailing has previously been owned in my mind by rich men and the proprieters of slave ships and I'd like to reclaim it if possible. I have been told on numerous occasions that my father loved sailing off the coast of Haiti and that as a boy he had a little boat that he went out on whenever he could. Exile in America erased that part of him and out on the boat I wondered how many of my thoughts were original and mine and how many of them were things my father had thought and that I was re-enacting/channelling. Getting back on a sailboat seems the best way to figure it out.

I also need to go swimming more at the pool at the Y. I went swimming in deep water for the first time in my life on Lamu, so I can no longer go around telling that story I tell all the time about how "my people are island people, but my silly immigrant parents forgot to teach me how to swim!" (Silly immigrant parents!) It turns out that I can swim fine, or at least I'm competent at not drowning in extra bouyant salt water. Next up: swimming 20 yards without feeling completely winded.

10 -

Omigod, while I was there I met Kenyan painter Richard Onyango who is the most amazing human I have met in forever. In the picture above he is re-enacting the scene painted below, wherein the great love of his life - a 300 pound Italian woman named Drossie (!) who kept him as a semi-willing sex slave when he was 16 (!!) - dressed him up in a boys lacrosse uniform (!!!) and asked him to "do the exercises with her, yes?" (!!!!) What I am trying to say is that Richard paints completely batty (yet compelling) erotic, interracial, BBW-themed, autobiographical paintings. He is supposedly coming to LA soon at the behest of some or another snarky curator to paint the world's fattest woman and I am desperately trying to be his driver while he is here.

11 - But the really funny thing is that I spent a whole, powerfully gratifying month there and yet I never really felt any particularly powerful urge to permanently decamp to Lamu or Kenya. Don't get me wrong: I desperately want to go back ASAP, but move there? Not really. All my unleashed, native-going urges were curiously being reflected by Kenya back across the Atlantic towards Haiti, a place with which I have a more immediate "going native" relations, fantasy and otherwise. You see, getting off the plane in Nairobi, and feeling dizzy with all the first-time-on-African-continent pyschodramas, I found myself most floored by how, well, good Nairobi smelled, this in comparison to the wave of stink that greets you when you get off the plane in Port-au-Prince. As educated as I am, as much as I have read and written and watched, I realized that my entire thinking life I've been putting a false frame around "Africa," a frame that, while not quite the stuff of racist media fantasy, is nonetheless literally foreign to any given African nation I might have been thinking about at any given moment. Which is really a way of saying "same racist diff," as projecting memories of the most fucked up (and most heroic) black place in the Western Hemisphere on Kenya or Senegal or South Africa or wherever is pretty much the same as erasing them.

But the trip did make me realize that I desperately need to go spend a year or two as an adult in Haiti. All my memories of the place are a child's memories. Who can say for sure if I really know what I think I know?

And that's that.

Posted by ebogjonson in Kenyaebog housekeepingplaces at 4:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)