42

Or, Knowing One’s Place

Reader,

Happy New Month!

I almost started writing this on Saturday evening after what was a wild afternoon and evening but I let it marinate and here it is. 

On Saturday, I went to Alliance Française Nairobi for the Broken Rhythm Reading. Gathoni Kinuthia - writer, literary enthusiast, pop culture & art lover plus all-round cool person - was one of the writers reading and I wasn’t going to miss it (despite my copy being at a friend’s) so I was sat at the front at 2pm. And then things started happening - the MC who confessed to not having read the book (a pet peeve), the way there was no indication about when things would start, the wonderful readings once they finally began.

In a room full of women and other people who don’t present as men, the primacy of men was unsettling. This was most evident when the guest of honour - J.B. Omukangala - decided to illustrate a point by having 3 women stand at the front then calling up 2 of the men who were among the readers to choose who they would pick for marriage. That moment was the opposite of this:

I was too shaken to speak in the moment but later, I asked the moderator for the mic and wondered out loud if I was the only one who’d felt like I was at a meat market, not a literary event. The way those men stood and didn’t protest as they made a show of choosing amongst women who are technically their peers was astonishing. If this is the literary scene, I thought to myself, count me out.

The Nairobi literary scene (one would argue the world) isn’t too hot for people who are not men and I could go on for ages about this but actually, I’m tired. All I want to do is eat hot chip and lie in the sun reading. I’ve been interacting with it in one form or another for over a decade and I think I’m tapping out. There’s a frequency with which it reminds me that I am not a man and, therefore, that I am not valuable. And the bruising that comes with throwing myself up against it isn’t worth it. I’ve paid the dues nobody even asked for and I’ll go back to (just) reading.

Being off Twitter has been really helpful in this regard and the panoramic impulse to avoid public gatherings means the reading on Saturday was the first such event I was attending in a long while. Was it lovely to see some of the homies (especially the ones who I haven’t talked to in the months since I left Facebook)? Yes, it was…but at what cost? The late start, the ease with which non-men kept being overlooked, having to witness the aforementioned indignity… Not worth it, I’ll say.

Outside of the hateration I’ve brought to the dancery (I might just be hating from outside the club), I would like to share the news of the comic I’m currently reading - Fine: A Comic About Gender by Rhea Ewing. Gender exercises me so I’ll read one or two such books a year just to chew on this vexy thing and I love all the voices and viewpoints that I've encountered so far. There are ideas about gender that we all carry, whether or not we examine them, and it’s especially lovely to have cisgender people interrogate gender when so often it’s considered the province of those to defy the binary in some way. The other comics I have lined up - Wash Day Diaries by Jamila Rowser & Robyn Smith, Moms by Yeong-shin Ma (translated by Janet Hong), I Will Judge You by Your Bookshelf by Grant Snider and In. by Will McPhail - all promise to be a good time and I can’t wait to dig into them when I’m done with Fine.

Lastly, on a day when a political event intrudes, it’s a strange comfort to be reading two quite political-as-personal books. Both Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov (translated by Boris Dralyuk) and Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness by Baynard Woods (which I first heard about on the brilliant NPR podcast Code Switch) tackle national events in gripping, moving, personal ways. The former, a work of fiction set in Ukraine, is set in a time when war has become the norm in the grey zone - unremarkable, yet intrusive in peculiar ways. The latter, written in the wake of recent racial antagonism in the US; situates whiteness as a feature, not a bug, of that nation’s design without making it the task of non-white people. I’ll hide in these for a while yet.

As ever, please write back to me and tell me what books you’re reading or looking forward to reading this week — it’s always a great time talking about books.

Enjoy the rest of the week and have a lovely time reading. Talk to you soon!