The Mumpsimus

This review was first published in the Fall 2018 issue of Rain Taxi Review of Books . (I have kept the page references in that are provided for the Rain Taxi copyeditors, but which are cut from the printed version.) At the end of December 1977, police arrived at the home of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in Limuru, Kenya. He was sent to the Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison under a detention order signed by the Minister for Home Affairs, Daniel arap Moi. He had no right to a lawyer, there was no trial, there was no sentence. For two weeks, no-one outside the government and police forces, including his family, knew where he was, or even if he was still alive. (Later, family visits were occasionally permitted, but they were rare and extremely short.) He could be detained for a day or for the rest of his life, his access to any news of the outside world severely restricted, his recourse to anything resembling due process limited to brief appearances before biannual review tribunals that might as w...

This is the seventh in a series of posts leading up to this blog's tenth anniversary on August 18. In each post, I look back on one year, sometimes specifically and sometimes generally. All the posts can be found  here . Miami Vice K: There are times when I'd really love to live in your world. M: It's full of existential crises, but not a lot of headaches. K: I've already got the existential crises, so it might be a nice change. M: There's a reason the first album that ever made a strong impression on me was Stop Making Sense . K: So that's your aesthetic credo? M: No, I don't have a credo. It's just something I thought of and so I said it. It's probably not even true. —"A Conversation After Miami Vice " 2006 seems to me an ideal year of The Mumpsimus, not because all of the posts are high quality (they aren't!) but because the diversity of posts covers just about everything I think of as Mumpsimusian. In other years, th...

Last year, I wrote about Mukoma wa Ngugi's  Nairobi Heat , seeing it as an interesting, if flawed, first novel. Now Melville House has released Mukoma's second novel, a sequel to the first: Black Star Nairobi , a political thriller that begins as a detective story and ends up taking us from Kenya to Mexico to the U.S. and then back to Kenya at the time of the election crisis of 2007/08 . The writing in Black Star Nairobi  is more assured than in Nairobi Heat , and the plot and structure are more ambitious. The ambition is also the novel's curse, because the text is not up to the task of portraying and dramatizing the richness of its worlds and ideas — it's a book that needs to be twice its length or half its plot.

Keguro Macharia has written an essay titled "On Quitting" that I've now read three times since I first learned about it this morning. So much of its subject matter sits close to my heart, and thus so much of it is heartbreaking. I begin to wonder about the relationship between geo-history, the saturation of space with affect, and psychic health. I want to describe how I come to be here-now: another threshold I start writing a linear story, winding, but linear, about psychic health and academic production, a story that tries to make sense of why I am resigning from a tenure track job from a major research university at the same time as I am completing a book manuscript for publication. Not only resigning but also changing continents, returning to a place I have not called home for a very long time. This, I realize, is a story about words and places. So let me start with the word that started it, or named its fractures. As you can see from that little excer...

This is my second post for the great 2012 Caine Prize blogathon. (See my first post for some details.) I'm coming a little late to Billy Kahora's story "Urban Zoning" (PDF) because it was finals week at one school where I teach and the last week of classes at another, so I haven't had much spare time, and then when I did finally start writing this it kept growing, and I disagreed with myself frequently, and I couldn't make anything cohere, and finally I gave up and just tried to salvage some of the maelstrom of questions and doubts that plagued me as I wrote. There are some thorough and excellent posts about this story up now, so I highly recommend following some of the links to them, which this week I will put first rather than last, because really if you do want to know about the story, you should read those... Other writers' posts about "Urban Zoning" by Billy Kahora: Black Balloon Stephen Derwent Partington The Reading Life Backslas...

I read Mukoma wa Ngugi's Nairobi Heat (part of Melville House's International Crime series) a few weeks ago, but haven't had the time to write much about it, so what I say here is likely to be more general than it would have been before. Though I think the novel has some significant flaws, those flaws are mitigated, for me at least, by a number of real strengths, and in the weeks since finishing it, moments from the novel have scratched through my thoughts and memory. For that reason, I think it's a book well worth reading. First, to get unpleasantness out of the way, here's what I see as the novel's flaws: Events often feel like they exist for the sake of the plot's convenience and not for any reason organic to the narrative; some moments that should evoke an emotional connection from readers are not set up in a dramatic way that would allow such emotion to come to the surface and are instead sped through (a particular fault in the romantic relation...

At Gukira, Keguro has posted some provocative thoughts on "report realism" in Kenyan fiction : Over the past 15 years and more specifically the past ten years or so, Kenyan writing has been shaped by NGO demands: the “report” has become the dominant aesthetic foundation. Whether personal and confessional or empirical and factual or creative and imaginative, report-based writing privileges donors’ desires: to help, but not too much; to save, but not too fast; to uplift, but never to foster equality. One can imagine how these aims meld with traditional modes of realism and naturalism and also speak to modernist truncations and postmodern undecidability. However, report realism names a more historically accurate way to name a genre indebted (very literally) to NGOS in Kenya. The report aesthetic goes beyond citing NGO facts and figures. It is concerned, above all, with a search for truth and accuracy and is threatened by imaginative labor. I cannot comment on the specific a...

In the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Petals of Blood , Moses Isegawa calls the novel "the definitive African book of the twentieth century". I would only disagree because I do not think there is any one definitive African book, nor should there be -- one of the problems African literatures face when sampled here and there is the tendency for one or two books to be seen as giving some sort of definitive portrait of a continent of over 50 countries, a billion people, and thousands of languages. Petals of Blood  is capacious and brilliant, but it's not definitive. A lot has been written about Petals of Blood  since its publication, and it continues to incite interest both in its portrait of Kenya in the early years of independence and its (and its author's) politics. This was especially true at the time of its release, because it was difficult then to see beyond the novel's critique of Kenya's ruling class to its subtler aspects, and the f...

From Elspeth Huxley: A Biography by C.S. Nicholls (2002): [David Waruhiu] was a padre at the huge Athi River Mau Mau detainee camp, run on Moral Rearmament lines. The MRA was influential in Kenya, Nell Cole and Tuppence Hill-Williams being among its original members, and had created the Torchbearers, an inter-racial society. At the Athi River camp, where Tuppence was in charge of five hundred women, Elspeth found the MRA workers very sincere and devoted, although she doubted whether they cuold really change black hearts. The inmates were rather fat, because they were fed on Geneva Convention rations four times as heavy as the normal Kikuyu diet. At intervals they were given pep talks and called to God. From Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins (2005): Former detainees scarcely recall Athi River as a site of spiritual awakening, perhaps because they were cycled through an endless regime of physical and psychological coercion. ...

I didn't intend to disappear from this blog for quite as long as I did, but I got busy with work on the manuscript of Best American Fantasy 3 (the contents of which we'll finally be able to announce next week!) and I've been teaching an online course for Plymouth State University, an interesting experience, since I've never taught classes entirely online before (nor am I all that sure it's a way I like teaching, but that's another story...) I probably owe you an email.* Readercon is coming up -- July 9-12. I'll be there Friday afternoon and most of Saturday. The great and glorious Liz Hand and Greer Gilman are guests of honor. The other guests ain't too shabby neither. Except for that Cheney guy. He's a putz. Some things I've noticed out on the internets: Hal Duncan wrote a little post at his blog about ethics, reviewing, criticism, etc. A few people commented. Hal wrote another little post responding in particular to comments by Abig...

One thing I love about blogs is seeing people discover books that have become so much a part of my own life that I develop the sense that everybody else on Earth has also read them, and so there's no need for me to talk about them, because we all know these are great books, right? It's nice to be reminded that this is a fantasy -- nice to see people suddenly fall in love with books I've known for a little while already. The great and glorious Anne Fernald just posted a list of some books she's read lately with joy and happiness, and the two books on the list that I've read are ones I recommend without reservation: Tropical Fish by Doreen Baingana and Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys. I first heard about Tropical Fish when I was in Kenya for the SLS/Kwani conference and Doreen Baingana was part of a panel discussion; I found her captivating. Later, a Ugandan friend (who also told me about FEMRITE ) exhorted me to read the book. I did. I exhort you to do th...

I'm stealing this call for submissions from Potash , because I think it's a hugely important project. Please spread the word to anybody who might be able to contribute or help out: CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS Writing Queer Kenya Editors: Keguro Macharia and Angus Parkinson We lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex individuals, in a word, queers, have had the distinct un-pleasure of being told we don't exist—in official government statements, historical documents, and contemporary statements. Well, we do. We want Kenyan stories by Kenya-based and Kenya-born queers. About everything. We want writing about the dailyness of our lives, the good, the bad, the weird, the indifferent. If you have lived it, we want to hear about it. We especially want to reach beyond Nairobi, Mombasa, and other cities to all corners of the country. And we know the rest of Kenya, Africa, and the world wants to hear these stories as well. Formats We have three distinct formats. Choose what appeal...

Potash just let me know that there are two new blogs worth keeping an eye on. First, the Kwani? literary magazine and organization now has its own blog (not to be confused with the Kwani? litfest blog ). I was thrilled to see that Kwani? 4 has officially been published , and I hope copies find their way to the U.S. soon (the first three are available at various places, and are worth seeking out). I saw a preliminary edition of Kwani? 4 when I was in Kenya in December, and it's a big book rich with fiction, poetry, and nonfiction of all sorts. Second, Binyavanga Wainaina has a blog . Actually, that should be Binyavanga Wainaina has a blog!!! , because it gives me great joy that one of the most astute writers I know is now going to be (at least occasionally) posting new material online. Binyavanga is presenting not only some of his own writing, but that of writers he knows and admires, including Jackie Lebo and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie .

In writing the previous post about Sunday Salon , I realized I hadn't checked the Kwani? website for a while, and lo and behold -- they've got fiction from Kwani? 4 online ! Not only that, but among the stories are "The Obituary Man" by Muthoni Garland and "The Other Side of Knowing" by Dayo Forster , both of whom will be reading on Sunday night at the Salon.

Baby should not have drunk coffee. He urinated all of it during the night and now the smell lay thick and throat-catching, overcoming even the perfume of his mother's bed across the room. In the bed Ben lay with the boy's mother curled in his large arms, warm and soft and fast asleep. But Ben was not asleep anymore. The pungent baby urine stink had awakened him long before his usual waking up time. He released the woman, turned and reached on the bedside table for a cigarette to combat the musty smell from the baby's bed. There were no cigarettes in the packet. He lit a half-smoked one from the ash-tray and lay smoking in the early morning gloom. Wini breathed soft and low by his side. Her nude body lay stretched out against his, her hand resting on the inside of his hairy thigh. She would be waking up soon to make his breakfast. He did not stir her. She had her own clockwork system that first turned her over once or twice before she opened her eyes to complain ...

While at the SLS/Kwani? conference in Kenya, I was in a workshop led by M.G. Vassanji , and one day when we had some extra time, he walked with a group of us to the city center in Nairobi. Our first stop was Prestige Book-sellers on Mama Ngina Street, because it was, we were told, a good source of fiction and poetry published in Kenya. As we were looking through the books, someone in the group noticed that Marjorie Macgoye had come into the store. "I'm just here to get some Christmas presents," she said. I was, I think, the only one of the Americans in the group who knew who she was -- I had begun reading her second novel, Coming to Birth just before I left for Kenya, but I hadn't had time to finish it, and it was a library book, so I just figured it was something I would eventually get back to on my return. I grabbed a copy of the East African Education Publishers' edition of the book from the shelf, quickly paid for it, and brought it to Mrs. Macgoye, who s...