For Eddie

If sorrow is a suit, its weight is incalculable. One day he’s gone and you put it on. One day he’s gone and it sews itself inside you. Mourning drapes your skin in its invisible fabric.

—John Keene, “Suit”

Ombagi, Eddie. "Nairobi Queer Visibilities/Invisibilities and Forms of Queer Ambivalence." In Urban Forum, pp. 1-9. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2023.

Ombagi, Eddie. "“I beg to differ”: Queer notes on Kenyan editorial cartoons." In Sexual Humour in Africa, pp. 141-153. Routledge, 2022.

Ombagi, Eddie. "Queer Fragmentation as Method: Nairobi’s Example." Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies 7, no. 4 (2021): 258-270.

Ombagi, Eddie. "Filming the invisible: Rubrics of ordinary life in." Journal of African Cinemas 11, no. 3 (2019): 261-276.

Ombagi, Eddie Cavines. "Becoming queer, being African: re-thinking an African queer epistemological framework." PhD diss., 2019.

Ombagi, Eddie. "Filming the invisible: Rubrics of ordinary life in." Journal of African Cinemas 11, no. 3 (2019): 261-276.

Ombagi, Eddie. "Nairobi is a shot of whisky: queer (Ob) scenes in the city." Journal of African Cultural Studies 31, no. 1 (2019): 106-119.

Ombagi, Eddie. "“Stories we tell”: queer narratives in Kenya." Social Dynamics 45, no. 3 (2019): 410-424.

Ombagi, Eddie. "Notes on the Nation: A Conversation with Sara Ahmed’s Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, The Cultural Politics of Emotion and Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others." Agenda 30, no. 2 (2016): 147-152.

I have been wondering what epigraph from Eddie’s body of writing to use. And then I thought to list his impressive bibliography as its own epigraph. Bibliographies are not typically listed in eulogies, at least not in Kenyan eulogies. Mostly, we track relations and achievements: where one went to school, how one performed in school, what hobbies one had, what communities one was involved in, who one has left behind. At such moments, bibliographies feel irrelevant.

Yet.

Bibliographies tell stories of how we have imagined and with whom we have imagined. Of how we understand the s/places we inhabit and how we seek to transform them. Or how we navigate the everyday while trying to live otherwise. Of how we map our relations to temporality, to the pasts we have inherited, to the presents we live, and to the futures that might happen.

Eddie was my friend. I shall miss him.

Eddie was one of the most astute scholars of queer Kenyan urbanity. He observed and described and theorized how queer Kenyans make life and space and relation in the most ordinary ways. When I was asked about queer African scholars thinking specifically from and about Africa, he was one of the first people on my list. He still is.

His work delighted me because it took us seriously. And it took us seriously by engaging with us, as one of us.

There is grief, yes. But there is also the joy of having known Eddie. And to write about him brings immense joy.

Because of technology, we have access to some of Eddie’s published work, and when the history of queer studies in Kenya is written, I hope the chroniclers will be wise enough to recognize him as one of the important dreamers and builders of the field.

I am still haunted by stories of how many gay men were erased by their families when they died—their gayness unacknowledged, their completed work and works-in-progress destroyed, their partners and lovers and friends shut out of mourning rituals. These are stories from the plague years. And also ongoing stories. We are too easily erased. Our lives and loves too easily destroyed. Even though we remember each other, as best we can.

And so, a partial bibliography: to say Eddie dreamed and imagined and wrote and theorized,

I know that grief takes away eloquence. I wish I could write more elegant sentences about Eddie’s smile. How much he loved life. How much he invited those around him to celebrate life. How he gathered people around him. To walk with Eddie was to stop every few minutes as friends greeted him. To be drawn into the orbit of his care. He enjoyed life. He showed those around him how to enjoy life.

I know, too, that grief is an unending wail. That we write and write and write and hope that the writing will prolong someone’s presence in our life. The end of a sentence or a paragraph or a page or a chapter or a section or a book feels too cruel. A brutal truncation.

I loved you, Eddie.

I will miss you.