that special machete place: special machetes are everywhere, except when they're not

I've been worried about my friends in Kenya, so it was quite lovely to get a few emails from Binyavanga and to see his op-ed in the New York Times.

I'm not sure exactly where he is right now, but these lines from his op-ed indicate to me that although he might not be completely alright in the grand scheme of things, he remains at the very least himself:

My further suspicion is that Mr. Odinga wants to sell to Kenyans and the world a sort of Ukrainian “people’s revolution” — where protesters take to the streets and change the order of things, and are seen to be throwing happy pink petals on television, so America can say, ah, the people have spoken.

But rather than matters leading to a popular but peaceful uprising against a flawed election, we are likelier to suffer an escalation of retaliations and a descent to that special machete place that nations rarely recover from.

That special machete place!? Throwing pink petals on television, so that America can say, ah, the people have spoken!? How the fuck did that get past an op-ed editor?

Still, the decontextualized images of black men holding machetes have been common in coverage I've seen of the violence in Kenya. This is unscientific and anecdotal, but I feel like I can deduce a paper's politics depending on the images it choses to accompany its Kenya coverage. So-called "liberal" papers go with images of Kenyan security abusing protesters, whereas the conny places tend to favor completely bugged-out images of cats waving the sharp and the metallic at the lens.

Personally, I have idiosyncratic feelings about machetes, mostly because they were fairly ubiquitous in my growing up, particularly during summers spend in Haiti. (One of my Guyanese neighbors in Queens was infamous for letting his grass grow about knee-high and then hacking at it with a machete, but that's another story.) I have to confess to probably chasing a cousin or two with a machete in my day (a little one; I was 12) and my father had a blade rusting away in our garage for years, its edge a sickly concave from over-sharpening. Machetes to me are probably like guns are to some people: a multi-use thing that was always in the house and could have killed someone under the wrong circumstances.

I remember seeing plenty of them brandished under less quotidian circumstances when I was in Haiti during Jean Bertand Aristide's 1991 election, this mostly for American photogs to take snaps of. One time, when a machete didn't make a fearsome enough impression on Michael Kamber, a shooter who was down there covering the election, a gent walked up to him with a live cat hanging by a noose around its neck, the poor thing wheezing and clawing and dying. Mike refused to take the picture. The icon of a cat was, if I remember correctly, the symbol of a minor party in the election, but he didn't want to record a moment whose aspects as news, political theater, and animal cruelty. Mike is a dedicated documentarian and journalist, but he wanted to stay out of the picture, and he knew that cat would have likely not be dangling on end of a rope had he not been there to document it.

These sorts of images remind me of that cat and the zone of confusion that Mike tried, in his own individual way, to sort out using his camera. (Or in that particular case, his lens cap.) The "special place" that Binyavanga references is a zone where cruelty and artifice and audience and politics and intention and message become all mixed up and then (worst case) stuck together by blood. Even those involved may have a hard time disentangling the mess, forget about a visiting photographer, editor or reader. Binya's slightly waggish tone in those lines of his mark the zone "that nations rarely recover from" as a place of slippages and confusions. The man depicted above may have local concerns and he may have global ones, he may have killing on his mind, or he might be most pressingly (and momentarily) interested in simply edging out the dude behind him, in claiming the central space in front a lens. It's impossible to say from the image, and just as difficult to tell reading the news coverage as well.