notes from fallow
on erasure
It is not enough to tell us that one was a brilliant poet, scientist, educator, or rebel. Whom did he love? It makes a difference.
—Essex Hemphill, “Loyalty”
i.
It feels odd to think and write about erasure from the hyperdocumenting practices of our present. We record and are recorded. We journal and image and film and voicenote and groupchat and email and zine and podcast and tiktok and instagram. We circulate our images and voices and words and, by doing so, multiply their possibilities for preservation.
Yet, I am still haunted by “the chilling threat of erasure.”
ii.
A warning I return to, by Melvin Dixon:
Then there is the chilling threat of erasure. Gregory, a friend and former student of mine, died last fall. On the day following a memorial service for him, we all were having lunch and laughing over our fond memories of Greg and his many accomplishments as a journalist. Suddenly his lover had a shock. He had forgotten the remaining copies of the memorial program in the rental car he had just returned. Frantic to retrieve the programs, which had Greg’s picture on the cover and reprints of his autobiographical essays inside, his lover called the rental agency to reclaim the material.
They had already claimed the car, but he could come out there, they said, and dig through the dumpster for whatever he could find. Hours later, the lover returned empty-handed, the paper programs already shredded, burned, and the refuse carted away. Greg had been cremated once again, but this time without remains or a classy urn to house them. The image of Greg’s lover sifting through the dumpster is more haunting than the reality of Greg’s death, for Greg had made his peace with the world. The world, however, had not made its peace with him.
His siblings refused to be named in one very prominent obituary, and Greg’s gayness and death from AIDS were not to be mentioned at the memorial service. Fortunately few of us heeded the family’s prohibition. While his family and society may have wanted to dispose of Greg even after his death, some of us tried to reclaim him and love him again and only then release him.
I was reminded of how vulnerable we are as gay men, as black gay men, to the disposal or erasure of our lives.
A (too quick) search through Kenya’s online obituary sites finds nothing lgbtiq+.1
Kenya obituary notices are a genre—I am waiting, eagerly, for Joyce Nyairo’s in-progress book on this genre. Obituary notices embed one in a web of relations: parents, siblings, in-laws, spouses, children. Sometimes this web includes extra nodal points—“x in Iowa,” “y in London,” “w of East African Oxygen,” “q of Barclays Bank.” LGBTIQ+ does not fit into this web. The connections are elsewhere and otherwise: friends, lovers, tricks, allies. These relations are rarely found in obituaries. Perhaps they need not be.
Obituaries are a way of reclaiming lgbtiq+ people, erasing the known, the unknown, the speculative, and the embarrassing, by insisting that lgbtiq+ people have been promoted to glory under the watchful eye of their named kin. Funerals follow the lead of obituaries. We are reclaimed through silence and erasure, folded back into practices we had fled because they made our lives unlivable.
*
A friend tells me that queer friendship is strange when faced with funeral practices. Who are we? What can we claim? Where do we place our grief? Who calls the queer chorus to mourn? In what register could we grieve if our grief must unravel the strategies used to de-queer us?
*
Here’s Melvin Dixon’s prescription:
We alone are responsible for the preservation and future of our literature.
If we don’t buy our books, they won’t get published. If we don’t talk about our books, they won’t get reviewed. If we don’t write our books, they won’t get written.
Let’s expand literature and books—while holding on to them—to consider the range of aesthetic experiments we term culture work, the practices that materialize our imaginations in sound and movement and image and texture and flavour.
And let’s hold on to the practices of making and distribution and circulation that subtend and sustain the we-ness of we. The we who are assembled through those practices of buying and talking and writing and reviewing. The we who might survive the erasures of obituaries and funerals.
iii.
I do not yet know how to think about aesthetic experiments—those practices that materialize imagination and so make presents and futures possible, and, perhaps, inevitable—in the age of hyperdocumentation. I spend hours and hours on TikTok watching aesthetic experiments by Kenyan queer and trans creators. Experiments in self-fashioning, whether that be through fashion or dance or storytelling or home making or. Selves take shape through story that veers between fantasy and memory, all of it unverifiable. The unverifiable is a condition of the opacity that inheres in ethical relations.
Yet.
Hyperdocumentation still feels fragile.
Of the queer and trans Kenyan blogs I was reading a decade ago—perhaps longer—few still exist. The shenanigans with TikTok over the past few years—Palestinian accounts being suppressed or erased; TikTok disappearing from the U.S. only to reappear, only to be sold and modified to suppress pro-Palestinian voice; Black creators have their work stolen; people leaving the platform because of intense harassment—tell us our hyperdocumenting present is not secure. We cannot trust it to preserve something that can support a “we.”
It’s not yet clear to me how—and if—the images we take and share with each other as part of our general sociality can be part of the aesthetic projects we need to sustain a we. For aesthetic experiments, we might use the word poiesis—making. In poiesis, we are made as we make. We are gathered as those who make and in our making are made and unmade and remade.
Perhaps I name a longstanding problem: What is the relationship between the aesthetic experiments in self-fashioning central to Kenyan queer and trans hyperdocumentation and other experiments in fashioning and sustaining collectivity? Do these experiments in self-fashioning form a collective aesthetic project through which freedom can be imagined and pursued? It might be that the Get Ready With Me videos invite us to imagine and pursue worlds otherwise, where those who fashion selves often at odds with mainstream Kenyan practices can move from their private spaces of experiment to public spaces of expression. Not simply expression as self assertion, but expression as a collective freedom practice.
iv.
Yet, I hear José Muñoz:
Queerness is often transmitted covertly. This has everything to do with the fact that leaving too much of a trace has often meant that the queer subject has left herself open for attack. Instead of being clearly available as visible evidence, queerness has instead existed as innuendo, gossip, fleeting moments, and performances that are meant to be interacted with by those within its epistemological sphere—while evaporating at the touch of those who would eliminate queer possibility.
It’s a question of temporality.
The ephemera that Muñoz thinks with anchors relation. I pause at the word “transmitted.” Transmitted speaks to intergenerational work, even as it gestures to the fractures caused by HIV, the interruptions to intergenerational work. The interruptions that are, also, part of intergenerational work. How to “make [queer] generations,” if I can, rudely, steal from Gayl Jones.
By temporality, I mean something like the difference between a book (in Dixon’s time, existing as print) and gossip (even though gossip also moves across time, and in that movement, is subject to elaboration and fabulation). A book might hold time in a particular way, even though the loss of many small gay and lesbian presses and the out-of-print status of books from the 80s and 90s suggests that books can be as ephemeral as gossip. How many times do we hear, “I’ve heard about, but never read.” Gossip, too, which I’ll use as my example of ephemera, holds time in a particular way, though it travels in more unruly ways than books, especially as it is modified by the needs of any particular time. Which is not to say that books are not altered by the times in which they are encountered.
To move into our hyperdocumented present, it might be that digital practices are ephemeral, in the sense that they might be fleeting and vulnerable to erasure. If that is so, it is also true that duration does not determine effectiveness. Transmission is independent of duration. Digital memory is long.
It might also be that for lgbtiq+ people today, ephemera still offers the same kind of protection as it did in earlier periods of time, and that protection is still needed.
v.
I find myself disturbed by the sense—sense, as I’m not an ethnographer, so do not ask people questions—that younger Kenyan lgbtiq+ digiterati are unaware of earlier digital experiments by older digiterati, that transmission fractured, and that in that fracture important things were lost. I am not sure how, and if, transmission happens.
Do I place a burden on younger queers to remember older queers because our heteronormative kin will happily disappear our queerness? If I do, I am uncomfortable. It is a gift to live your life without the burden of other people’s trauma, after all. And, sometimes, without the burden of other people’s memories. But I am not convinced that constant invention is useful.
We still live with “the chilling threat of erasure.”
Neo Musangi points out that the terms “gay” and “lesbian” and “trans” have largely disappeared from Kenya’s political vernaculars. Instead, people are lgbtiq+. I would like Neo to write something about what this shift indexes.