"It Continues Not To End": Time, Poetry, and the ICC Witness Project

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The openness of the form reflects the refusal of the wound to close on its own: each poem is an instant in time, but they do not resolve into a story, only an interminable unresolved and plural present.
This is the (mostly unchanged) text of a talk I delivered at UT Austin, last Tuesday. Today, I’m going to talk about the ICC Witness Project. This is an archive of poems written and posted to the internet over the last year, starting last March; there are over 150 of them now, with 144 titled as numbered witnesses— “Witness #1, Witness #2.” The “ICC” refers to the “International Criminal Court,” where a prosecution is currently pending against the sitting president and deputy president of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto,  for crimes against humanity committed in the Post-Election Violence of 2007, three months of wide-spread killing and burning across the country, that took on ethnic and gendered overtones and left about 1500 people dead, perhaps a million displaced, and countless thousands sexually assaulted. A church that was burned in Eldoret… Read More...

Reading the ICC Witness Project: Witness #47

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I want to re-visit Witness #47, which gets at the core of what, for me, the ICC Witness Project is doing:   The poem begins…
I want to re-visit Witness #47, which gets at the core of what, for me, the ICC Witness Project is doing:   The poem begins with the president-elect’s injunction to move on, and when voiced in that voice of authority, “Kenya needs to” becomes an imperative, a command. It’s absurd, of course; moving on seems to literally require moving backwards, like starting a video of an atrocity at the end, and running it backwards to the beginning. [it’s like the joke about listening to country music backwards: you get your dog, your woman, and your job back.] http://youtu.be/iohIgorKqxg At the same time, though, let’s look closer at what it means for PEV to un-happen: “needs” become commands. "Those who were killed need to undie" "women need to guard their wombs" "[women need to] erase their memories as they become whole"… Read More...

Reading the ICC Witness Project: About Witness #26 and #47

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What is the ICC Witness Project "About"? If you give the “About” page no more than a cursory reading, the ICC Witness Project is essentially…
What is the ICC Witness Project "About"? If you give the “About” page no more than a cursory reading, the ICC Witness Project is essentially a project to remember. As such, there is nothing very controversial or dangerous about it. Who, after all, could dispute the necessity to remember? Memory is passive, a noun not a verb, and the verb “to remember” is barely a verb at all. Even presidents who exhort us to “look forward, not back” when it comes to substantive matters (like prosecutions) can also easily pay lip service to the importance of memory and history; it easy to convert the imperative to remember the past into the act of moving forward into the future. We must move on. In part, this is because we tend to construe “memory” as a relatively passive act, because we are… Read More...

Reading the ICC Witness Project: Witness #135

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On one level, ICC Witness #135 might be an effort to speak for the dead, which is a slightly different thing than speaking for the…
On one level, ICC Witness #135 might be an effort to speak for the dead, which is a slightly different thing than speaking for the survivors. Survivors, after all, can speak for themselves, and do. The dead do not. They can be forgotten; they cannot remember themselves, in the ways that survivors do and must. Indeed, we might find a certain tension creeping into this poem between the voices of the survivors and non-survivors, a tension between the different kinds of pain and loss that get remembered: if the dead are mourned by the survivors, for the survivors, the fact of being dead means that precisely nothing can be done for them. Hamlet's father is not a ghost; he's a piece of Hamlet, crying out in pain. The dead are not asking for redress of their grievances, because they have… Read More...

Kenyan Somali, Somali in Kenya, Kenya in Somalia

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#kasaraniconcentrationcamp #kasaraniconcentrationcamp #kasaraniconcentrationcamp #kasaraniconcentrationcamp #kasaraniconcentrationcamp #kasaraniconcentrationcamp
Strangers are not simply those who are not known in this dwelling, but those who are, in their very proximity, already recognized as not belonging, as being out of place. --Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters Daily Nation: "Police have arrested 657 suspects in Eastleigh, Nairobi following Monday night terror attack that left six people dead." http://youtu.be/3HVZ8ZcgxiU Somalianewsroom: In one shockingly tweeted photo, a group was shown en masse in a cage, prompting a commentator to ask “Gorme xoloo noqoney?” - When did we become livestock? Kenya is Sliding Down a Slippery Path: "Kenya is rapidly becoming a rogue state, and it seems there is nothing that the country’s leadership can do about it. County officials and Cabinet secretaries are issuing orders that violate the Constitution and the laws of the land, yet they are not reprimanded or brought to book." Daily Nation:… Read More...

Unthinkable Tableaus

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Why does Pieter Hugo's "Portraits of Reconciliation" make us “speechless”? Leave us with “no words”? Why might we find it “stunning”? “Powerful”? “Inspiring”?
Why does Pieter Hugo's "Portraits of Reconciliation" make us “speechless”? Leave us with “no words”? Why might we find it “stunning”? “Powerful”? “Inspiring”? I find it disturbing, and I think this is the best thing you can say about it: if these photographs provoke and unsettle you, then Pieter Hugo is doing something interesting with his camera, and he is not simply telling the wish-fulfillment story that victims of great violence can just get over it and move on. The New York Times, by contrast, seems to want to tell the latter story, a story of resilience and human strength, and especially the story of women forgiving the men who assaulted them: Last month, the photographer Pieter Hugo went to southern Rwanda, two decades after nearly a million people were killed during the country’s genocide, and captured a series of… Read More...

Reading the ICC Witness Project: Witness #69

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ICC Witness Recalls Order to Evict Kikuyus: "When a convoy passed by, I heard Sammy Ruto saying that the results had been announced and ODM…
There is something magical about cleanliness. The labor of cleansing, the work of arrangement and order, is an effort to produce a state in which nothing needs to be cleaned--because it already is clean--and to "return" an inhabited space to a status of purity unsullied by the fetid human condition, with its bodily fluids and smells and decay. It is magical because it isn't real, because it takes a produced arrangement--a space of disciplined and labored arrangement--and presents it as natural, un-marked, un-touched, and un-blemished. All that is not of that space has been removed, leaving that space purified, as it should be, more itself than it has ever been before. In this sense, Mary Douglas also had it precisely backwards when she famously observed that "Dirt offends against order," and argued that "Eliminating it is not a negative moment,… Read More...

Reading the ICC Witness Project: (un)Witness #20, #22, #34

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"Indicative of attempts to undermine the ICC process were the plethora of attacks against witnesses. This included intimidating, bribing, and killing them. The message being…
As Susanne Mueller observed in "Kenya and the International Criminal Court (ICC): politics, the election and the law," the International Criminal Court must rely on the cooperation of witnesses who are, for the most part, located in Kenya, and so it must also rely on the government of Kenya to protect those witnesses from intimidation. International law requires the government of Kenya to do so, and the ICC has no resources to do much on its ownn. However, since it is the government of Kenya, itself, which is on trial at the ICC--in the person of President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto--it should surprise no one that the government of Kenya has been lax in its "protection" of witnesses. One might go so far as to suggest that it has been the government of Kenya itself which is… Read More...

Reading the ICC Witness Project: Witness #140

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"Doggerel is a derogatory term for verse considered of little literary value. The word probably derived from dog, suggesting either ugliness, puppyish clumsiness, or unpalatability…
This is doggerel, not poetry:   We know that it isn't "poetry" because it's a children's rhyme, some variation on "tinker, tailor" or a counting rhyme; if there's a more specific reference to a nursery rhyme buried in there, it doesn't spring to my mind. But the point is still clear: "poetry" is felt by its absence. This is a nursery rhyme, “poetry” in only the most rudimentary and definitional sense, a kind of of poetic zero-point. Whatever poetry is, in its traditional definitions, "doggerel" is non-poetic poetry. It is not, however, simply a negation; it is a negation with content. What we are also not reading is: a work of moral cultivation, the kind of literary text whose Nussbaum-ian ambition is to foster greater understanding and civic appreciation for others by cultivating new sensibilities and sympathies. If childrens' rhymes… Read More...

Reading the ICC Witness Project: Witness #124

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If this was a question—a simple prose sentence—it would open outward: in the answer to the question, we would find its wholeness, completion. It would…
If this was a question—a simple prose sentence—it would open outward: in the answer to the question, we would find its wholeness, completion. It would open up a problem, which would, in being answered, be resolved. Question follows answer, answer completes question, turning an unsettling question mark into a settled period. But it tells a complete story even by its incompletion, since it propels its unsettling remainder outward, onto the resolution that doesn't come. In other words, since it does not resolve—and is not answered—its lack of answer still completes the story: the lack of closure is the answer, the impossible status of not being able to forgive the murderer of my father, a rhetorical question because it is unanswerable, because there is no answer. That lack of answer is the punctuation mark, the absent period that converts a question… Read More...

"This is when things got weird. And ugly."

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self-promotion race hustling ideological motivation distasteful silly dumb wrong distasteful shrill misguided frivolous annoying infuriating disingenuous and self-aggrandizing incite this particular riot mess she leaves in her wake cheapened by the ease, and sometimes frivolity
Words describing Suey Park and her campaign in the last three paragraphs of Jay Caspian Kang's "The Campaign to “Cancel” Colbert": self-promotion race hustling ideological motivation distasteful silly dumb wrong distasteful shrill misguided frivolous annoying infuriating disingenuous and self-aggrandizing incite this particular riot mess she leaves in her wake cheapened by the ease, and sometimes frivolity And this is a column which is explicitly suggests that Park is probably smarter than she seems, more savvy than she has been made to appear; Kang acknowledges, at the end of the piece, that "after speaking to Park about what she hoped to accomplish with all this (a paternalistic question if there ever was one), I wonder if we might be witnessing the development of a more compelling—and sometimes annoying and infuriating—form of protest." He acknowledges the paternalism of his own framing, says… Read More...

(Some Provisional Writing on) Time, Poetry, and the ICC Witness Project"

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This is not a poem that
The first entry in the ICC Witness Project begs the question that it is a poem: This is not a poem that a New Critic would find pleasure in close-reading, no well-wrought urn. Lacking the type of formal complexity that tempts us to fetishize "the poem" as a qualitatively different event than a mere sentence in prose, it’s a simply devastating statement, the report of an event, worth noting primarily because of the interest that attaches to that event being described, and not to the form of its description. “They killed my family” is a painfully direct report of a horrific event, in painfully simple words. This is the point at which the ICC Witness Project begins, the first in a series of lyric poems—though more below on calling the poems “lyric” —which were described by the project’s anonymous spokespeople… Read More...

"Performance in Shailja Patel's 'Migritude'"

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For whatever reason, I was digging through some old papers (actually, the depths of my inbox) and I came across the notes for a paper…
For whatever reason, I was digging through some old papers (actually, the depths of my inbox) and I came across the notes for a paper I gave at a panel on "The Politics and Aesthetics of Shailja Patel's Migritude," way back in 2012, what seems like a very long time ago. For what it's worth, I post it here, a textual trace of that absent presentation. For me, what’s first interesting about Shailja Patel’s Migritude is the space it creates between form and its relationship to performance This is something the work foregrounds, in the split between show and book: experientially, these are two significantly different things: Shailja Patel on a stage != “Shailja Patel” on a shelf (or on amazon.com) I want to tease out and play with that distinction. There’s a tension, a felt tension between: “Migritude” the… Read More...

The World and What it Isn't: Dinaw Mengestu's "All Our Names."

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Everyone knows that the world is what it is and that men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it. What this post presupposes is, maybe it isn't?
“The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” –V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River I’m unsettled by the extent to which Dinaw Mengestu’s All Our Names (2014) seems to have absorbed V.S. Naipaul’s vision of Africa, and the brutal hopelessness of revolution. Mengestu is fond of Naipaul; he recently called A Bend in the River (1979) “a harsh and surprisingly prescient account of the Congo's dissolution,” and wrote that “[a]s the country slowly fractures, so do the lives of the characters, making it one of the most intimate portraits of revolution—in the broadest sense of that word—in literature." If I may make so bold, I suspect it was his own novel he was thinking of, but put that aside for a moment: V. S. Naipaul is… Read More...

Two Covers

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You couldn't want a better illustration of the different ways African literature gets marketed towards Amrikans and Africans than the two covers of Yvonne Owuor's Dust. First, we have Kwani?'s version, which is exactly right in a lot of particular ways you'll have to read the book to appreciate: For a start: the empty shelves frame the term "dust" in really evocative ways, the horseman indoors is a nice image to refract the novel through, and the darkness and grit of the cover gives you the sense of a novel that revolves around dead brothers, fathers, and heroes. The American version, by contrast is a beautiful African landscape composed of colors and light and... no people: And yet, I have to admit, if you were going to describe what this novel is like, you could do worse than show them… Read More...

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Solid Personal Achievements

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The woman who had contradicted him had titles. That was why he called her a woman.
“The man who had contradicted him had no titles. That was why he had called him a woman. Okonkwo knew how to kill a man's spirit.” —Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart I enjoyed Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah. You might say that there’s a graceful economy of motion in Adichie’s prose, if the book were a dancer. If it were a drink, I might describe its crisp taste and clean finish. If it were a person, I might describe the clothes being worn, how the ensemble is carried off, and so forth. On the other hand, if the thing I enjoyed was a review copy of a novel that I received in the mail, late last year, I could describe it as a dull, thick, red paperback, a bit worn and thumbed-over, and with a phone number scrawled in pen on… Read More...