notes from fallow

on lying as method

We held a lying contest out under the trees in the night time, some sitting, some standing, everybody in a jolly mood.
—Zora Neale Hurston, Of Mules and Men

As Cherokee Nation citizen scholar Christopher B. Teuton notes, the Cherokee word for storytelling is often rendered as gagoga (literally, he or she is lying), and though its meaning is contextual, to “lie” in this tradition is often understood to refer to “telling stories that stretch the imagination and belief.”
—Joseph M. Pierce, Speculative Relations

I have been thinking about lying as a method of intellectual practice.

It seems I am always thinking about method. A few years ago, I wrote,

What if the the aim of method is not to define an object or subject, not to mark out an area or field? What if method does not teach us how to ask questions?

What if above all else, the goal of method is to assemble people around shareable scenes and situations? What if method is a call that gathers different people—I mean call in the call and response tradition, not in the call for papers sense. And what if method asks us to assemble not to define borders around objects and scenes and situations and archives, and not even to break borders between and across fields and disciplines.

What if method calls us to assemble so we can be curious, so we can share wonder, so we can muse on possibility, so we can follow the generosity of the call—all such calls must be generous—and so, having learned from the call to be generous, we can extend similarly generous calls?

I am trying to think beyond “what is your method?” to “who is gathered by your invitation?”

Lying assembles people. Lying invites people to assemble. In Hurston’s Of Mules and Men, lying is a practice of sociality. We might ask what lying does that storytelling does not.

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Hadithi! Hadithi!

Hadithi Njoo!

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When I first read Ashis Nandy, I was struck by his claim that we counter myth with myth.¹ I did not yet know how to work with this claim, and so much academic worlds in the fields I cruised insisted that the task was to correct distortions—historical and contemporary. Gay men were not hopelessly promiscuous—well, some of us are. Black people were not always horny—well, some of us are. Those framed through orientalism were not obsessed with luxury and sensuality—well, some are. On and on. And because I am drawn to the minor power of the exception (for that, we can blame an earlier education at the intersection of feminism, deconstruction, and postcolonial theory), I wanted to figure out how to think and write without taking the distortion as my starting ground.

The work of correcting distortions is necessary and urgent, and I am grateful to the many people who undertake it, but that is not my ministry.

I am interested in lying.

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In ongoing work that looks at the presence of girls and women in early colonial Nairobi, I insist that lying is my method.

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An encounter: I tell a historian what I am looking at and for, and he repeats the distortions in the colonial archive as fact. I am baffled. Why should I believe the letters white men sent each other about African girls and women? What anoints the written word with the power of truth? Do we not know distortion when we read it?

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Saidiya Hartman has gifted us with critical fabulation. She asks, “How does one tell impossible stories?” And in recounting the story of the enslaved Venus, she writes, “By playing with and rearranging the basic elements of the story, by re-presenting the sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view, I have attempted to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done.” She writes,

Is it possible to exceed or negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive? By advancing a series of speculative arguments and exploiting the capacities of the subjunctive (a grammatical mood that expresses doubts, wishes, and possibilities), in fashioning a narrative, which is based upon archival research, and by that I mean a critical reading of the archive that mimes the figurative dimensions of history, I intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling.²

I love critical fabulation. I love what Hartman does in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Yet, as she said during a talk—was it in the Q&A?—people love her work and tell students not to use her method. I suspect one needs elite credentials to try to use critical fabulation and get away with it. Also, even though I try to get away with stuff, I do experience attempts to discipline me when I submit to U.S. journals. The African can only get away with so much!

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The first time I announced that my method was lying, I was in a seminar, and the gasps and chuckles were audible. Why lying? Why not use speculation? Why not use critical fabulation?

I am not attached to truth claims. After almost a decade of fact-checkers checking facts, little has shifted in how those invested in the unfacts think and act. If we were Althusserian, we could say this is ideology in action.³

I am attracted to the banality of lying. Everyone above the age of 7 knows what a lie is. There’s something comforting—and necessary—in using a familiar vernacular.

By lying, do I risk multiplying the distortions that exist in the archives of colonial modernity? Perhaps. But distortion, as Lorde teaches, destroys relations. It makes difference threatening. Distortion unhumans. Distortion isolates and destroys.

In contrast, I return to Hurston’s lying as an act of gathering to create relations. I learn from Joseph Pierce that lying (gagoga) is a way to assemble a people through story. I wonder about this shared understanding of lying as a practice of sociality across Black and Cherokee communities, about the cross-fertilization of practices, about shared imaginations and practices of relation.

I learn from Saidiya Hartman that the past is not a static set of events, that I can interrupt and narrate and re-narrate and re-present and use the resources of my imagination to imagine otherwise. Hortense Spillers writes, “In order for me to speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings, made an excess in time; over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there await whatever marvels over my own inventiveness.”⁴

I lie to await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness.

I invite you to gather and listen to the lying.

1. In Nandy, The Intimate Enemy. And, yes, I know Nandy is a problematic casteist person!

2. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”

3. “Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”)

4. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”