WUNRN
http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/silence-is-a-woman/
“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
—Gikuyu Architecture
“Your silence will not protect you”
—Audre Lorde
1. Of Public Bodies, Bodies in Public
& the Body Politic
In 1922, Mary Muthoni Nyanjiru led a group of women that
stormed a police station in
In 1992, Wangari Maathai led a
group of women that occupied “Freedom Corner” in
Kenyan women have been laying their bodies on the line for
years. A group of women stripping naked in public is one of our most potent
political practices. Women’s bodies work as a potential and latent public space
in Kenyan modernity because they usually appear in public only under cover: a
frightening secret weapon everyone knows about. In many African communities,
there is no stronger curse or taboo upon men than seeing “the mothers naked.”
There is no stronger way for women acting together to register political
dissent. Deployed in this way, women’s bodies have the power to make
(something) public, to create “a public” around this action, and thus to
produce both public-ness and publicity from the ground of their own corporeal
materiality.
As political action, this is not only a public mode of
power and a specific form of public voice. It is also a critical public voice
of dissent against the all-encompassing patriarchy.
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
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
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
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.
I use layered juxtapositions of “bodies” and “publics” and
the metaphorical sutures between corporeal bodies and “the body politic” to
look at how public space has been marked and defined, which bodies impose their
forms on the public, and which other bodies are denied a public presence. These
questions are not only theoretical concerns. Having endorsed Majubaolu Olufunke
Okome that “as a woman, there are conditions under which one is legitimately
able to exercise power,” I also mark the violent masculinism acting in the name
of public “decency” which has launched a pedagogy of violence and terror
against Kenyan women using women’s bodies as its teaching instrument.
These “lessons” are administered through public media
showing public spectacles enacted in public spaces and fueled by public
commentary. Kenyan public spaces are defined and punctuated by monumental forms
of homage to powerful men while by contrast an imaginary symbolic woman without
a body who used to represent social justice is now said to be dead. A
suggestive resonance links Kenyan forms of masculinism to the spaces and
artifacts of