On Distraction
A sunbird perched on the bird of paradise outside my office window moves me from what I’m reading to be in the world differently. A Hadada Ibis cries out and cuts through sound and silence, shifting my soundscape. The scent of brewing coffee breaks the scent world to which I’ve become habituated. A puppy wanders into view, another joins it, they play fight, invite my legs to join, move me from a paragraph to their world.
Distraction can slice a sentence and shift a paragraph, displace a page or undo a thought—it tugs at attention and returns us to other engagements. A habit is broken. Discomfort is noticed. I hadn’t noticed my shoulders were so tense. I need to rub my eyes. My attention had wandered while I thought it was deepening. Distraction can be an invitation to renew engagement. It might be the break we need. Or the break we want. Not a pulling away but a pulling toward. Not a pulling out, but a pulling with. A name arrives as a phone call, a smile breaks on a face.
To live with others is to live with interruption, to live with distraction. To listen for the sound of another person’s breathing, to hear if your name is being called. To hear if your name is not being called. To listen for a knock. Or the sound of something being knocked over. Or the sound of something falling. Or the sound of someone falling. Or a phone call. Or a bell. Or a message. To change your schedule of concentration, not an hour of work, but 10 minutes and then another 10 minutes or 7 minutes and then maybe 5 minutes. In between this need and that need. Sometimes your need. Sometimes another need.
If care has a rhythm, it is this listening for and living with interruption. A different kind of syncopation.
Distraction can turn us from what’s required to what’s needed.
Distraction names the social, the cough that compels you to look up from your pursuits, the child kicking against the back of your seat, the restless person whose sighs and gasps demand attention. Someone dances into view.
Distraction is the essence of our sensorium. A cool breeze on a hot day changes the atmosphere.
What, then, might it mean to describe another human’s life and well-being as a distraction?
I could try to map how distraction became a political vernacular in Kenya. Track all the concerns and issues that have been labeled distractions, assemble how they cluster around gender and sexuality, around social welfare and community care. It is strange how the claim that we are human through and for each other—utu—is now dismissed as a distraction.
What are we being distracted from?
A failing economy, we are told, with charts and graphs and experts and rumour and panic. An increasingly authoritarian government, others say. The failure to implement x and y from the constitution and any number of legal instruments Kenya has ratified. An executive that appears to have cowed the other supposedly equal arms of government, the legislature and the judiciary. The environmental devastation that has intensified the already catastrophic effects of climate change. We receive numbers that 5 million and more Kenyans face starvation.
Given all this—and more—the transphobic and homophobic utterances of religious and political and civic leaders might seem inconsequential. A nonissue, Uhuru Kenyatta said when asked about queer and trans rights in Kenya.
Recently, William Samoei Ruto has said, “It can happen elsewhere but not in Kenya. We know there are people pushing the LGBTQ agenda and our children are being bombarded with this talk.”
From nonissue to issue. From Kenyatta to Ruto. From a president mostly indifferent to religion to one who claims the mantle of Christian fundamentalism.
What might it mean for a president to say that “it can happen elsewhere but not in Kenya?” What is this “it”?
Ruto and I agree on one aspect: LGBTIQ+ is practice, not identity.
It is how we who use those terms live and love and feel and affiliate and make lives, despite all the things arrayed against us. It is how we find pleasure and make friends and find lovers and make art and create theory and compose music and grow food and nurture flowers and take our hormones and stay on antiretrovirals and PrEP and ask friends which therapists are safe to visit and which doctors and landlords and lawyers and accountants and shopkeepers and neighbourhoods and employers are safe. It is how we ensure we continue to live. It is how we grieve those we lose to violence. It is how we organize for justice against those who harm us. It is the differences among us: we do not all agree. But we learn from Audre Lorde that difference can be a source of energy, not the destruction of alliance.
If we are a distraction, we ask to be a distraction that demands care. A distraction that breaks habituated ways of being and asks how we might live with utu/ubuntu.
Professor Micere Githae Mugo described utu as “the capacity to exhibit behavior that is humane.” She offers this example of a greeting from the Shona people:
The originator of the greeting: “How are you? Are you well?
The respondent: “ I am only well if you too are well.”
Utu/Ubuntu in action.
Distraction might be a neighbour who drops by unexpectedly and the rituals of hospitality that demand you offer tea or fruit and share space and time with them. Distraction might name how you respond to someone in distress, how we are moved out of ourselves to be and remain in relation with others, which is to be returned to ourselves as the shared possibility of us.
And it might be that distraction is how we remove ourselves from our habituated attunements and rejoin the improvisatory choreography of the social, how we listen to the call so we can join in the response.
Distraction can remind us that we live in relation, that we are interdependent, that to harm each other is to tear at the fabric of our collective being. Distraction can embed us in utu/ubuntu, the collective life force we generate and sustain through practices of care: I am, because we are.
As someone who has been studying ways in which we care, I have never thought of distraction as a way of care. Thanks for making me imagine new ways of caring.
I loved this read on distraction. I value both the political point, and the tenderness with which the matter (sensory, embodied) of personhood, and inter-personhood, has been raised. I approached the title expecting an original take on a familiar subject -- distraction as minor assault on sacred flow/ solitude etc -- and found an original angle on familial/kin care. I am constructively challenged (habituated to the former, individualist notion of distraction).