aFRica

esponsibility, hygiene, health,
patriotism, love. I have wondered if we
make killable more often in the name of
love than of hate or indifference. And, if
so, how to think about the pull of love
and the pull to love as difficult and
dangerous. How to write a love story in
the register of the killable. As a narrative
of killability.
I have wanted to believe that naming
something as violent accomplishes some
work, even as we seem to back off to
name our acts and beliefs as Something
Else Not Violence. Something Else Not
Violence that enables killing and killability.
I am not thinking about euphemism,
precisely, because euphemism
recognizes what is being hidden or
attenuated. Instead, I am interested in
the un-naming of violence, the
unrecognizability of genocidal
imaginations.
I have been trying to write about this
Something Else Not Violence for a few
days, now. It frightens me. It frightens
me because I do not know. Wait. Let me
be more honest: I do not want to think
about violence. I do not want to think
about how its naming and un-naming, its
legibility and illegibility, permits us to
make ourselves and other killable. I do
not want to be in a space where others
try to convince me about the rightness of
killability.
But our histories and loyalties do not
permit us to evade our presents so
readily. The eardrum-destroying music of
the Eastleigh No. 6 and 9 matatus
continues to throb in memory, if nowhere
else: a beat in the blood. The smells and
sights of Eastleigh continue to shape my
visual imagination of what collectivity
might look like. The life-giving, lifeenhancing,
and pain-amelioration I
witnessed at my parents‘ practice
continue to direct how I think about life,
love, death, kinship, care, intimacy, loss,
grief, collectivity.
Eastleigh is part of my imaginative and
affective terroir.
Form tells its own story, and I realize how
close this writing skates to the
obituary/eulogy. Perhaps to suggest that
a genocidal imagination has won and all I
can do is mourn the passing of a place I
once knew.
I write to friends that I do not know how
to inhabit the ―us‖ we are becoming, or,
perhaps, have always been: at home with
this Something Else Not Violence, bound
by a genocidal imagination. This ―us‖
from whom it is difficult to extricate
myself as it labours in my name: Kenyan
citizen.
Author‘s Note: This writing responds to
efforts by the Kenyan government to
criminalize and pathologize Somalis,
efforts that have been a persistent feature
of post-independence Kenyan history,
and that have been newly revitalized
since the U.S. declared ―War on Terror‖ a
global undertaking.
Something Else Not Violence is a Blog Post on Keguro
Macharia’s blog, www.gukira.wordpress.com
Saraba | Issue 13 | Africa 15