Silence Is a Woman

[ismnotwasm]

This is a very long blog post with different stories from Kenya, interspersed with poems and art. Most of the stories require tigger warnings. It's a blog presentation in a different style than I've ever seen.



“Silence is a Woman” is dedicated to the reverberating voices of Gladwell Otieno and Zahid Rajan, and to all the women in all the bus and matatu stops in Kenya.“The general term for a woman is ‘mutumia,’ meaning ‘one whose lips are sealed’”
—Gikuyu Architecture

“Your silence will not protect you”

These women’s bodies are subversive bodies. Women’s power deployed in this way can only be oppositional, always a challenge, always-already embodying and performing the power to refuse. Yet, women’s bodies do not have to be unclothed for significant utterance. A woman’s daily clothing is already a mode of speech about her life and about her relationship to the situation of her embodiment. In contemporary Kenya, even the banality of women’s everyday clothing appears to pose a threat to masculinist domination.

The Kenyan post-colonial social contract is not a political agreement between allegedly neutral individual citizens but a patriarchal and ethnicist order based on the domination of all Kenyan women by all Kenyan men. The seemingly unsayable political problem in Kenya is the post-colonial dominance of the patriarchal ethnic Gikuyu elites, whilst the ethnic virulence of Kenya’s patriarchal politics threatens our constitutional democratic opening. The bodies of women speaking from different horizons of political possibility create generative conditions of dissent and democratic renewal. It is very much to my purpose to pay homage to the lineage of Gikuyu women’s political protest, in which I include the historical acts of Muthoni Nyanjiru and Wangari Maathai and of contemporary women who continue to use their bodies powerfully.

In 2008 Kenya’s Post-Election Violence, Rachel Kungu, protected only by her commitment to the work of social repair, walked up to barricades of burning tires erected by angry, armed, and violent young men, to negotiate for peace. In May 2013, Muthoni Njogu wrote a poem the day after she participated in a demonstration outside Kenya’s Parliament:


yesterday, i was hit.
yesterday, my heart, hurt.

[…]
right now.
there is a swelling at the back of my right leg,
beneath the ankle,
i cannot sleep.

[…]

nothing prepares one to be on the receiving end
of a riot police baton.

nothing prepares one to sludge through itchy
eyes, coughing phlegm
& seemingly random state of confusion hours
after the violent dispersion.

nothing prepares for the experience of running
solo
while a band of armed, club welding, tear canister
holding men run after you shouting for you to
stop.


I oppose the exclusionary and false Gikuyu-centric narrative and the ideological erasure of the many other ethnic communities in the Kenyan story as told by Gikuyu men. Here, I also want to insist on the strong tradition within Gikuyu women’s culture of resisting tyranny, oppression, domination, and hubristic upumbafuness by the men. The multi-generational trajectory of Gikuyu women’s political embodiment and ethical public action contradicts the version of Gikuyu culture enforced by misogynist male interpreters and patriarchal narratives.

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/silence-is-a-woman/

[ismnotwasm]

1. Damn

Gwendolyn Bennett said, “silence is a sounding thing for one who listens hungrily.” Listening hungrily, I hear women’s bodies speaking in and through the silence. Kethi Kilonzo lost her case, and the Butere Girls did not win a prize at the festival, but as have many Kenyan women who have enacted protest and dissent under conditions of political duress, both created a visible and vocal public by the focused performance and non-performance of their bodies. Generations of Kenyan women have used their bodies to create a new collective imagination and to nurture justice in our political community by showing nakedness, by offering bodily truths and by converting corporeality into transformative speech. As I tell you these stories now, my own back is curved over my desk. My eyes are tired and my arms are cramped. I feel the tension in my neck and between my shoulder blades. In the silence, I hear the loud clatter of my fingers on the plastic computer keys. I hear the songs of my mothers and my sisters. I hear my voice.

I'm left without any words that can take the measure of this paragraph