To revert to oneself is not to establish oneself at home, even if stripped of all one's acquisitions. It is to be like a stranger, hunted down even in one's home, contested in one's own identity and one's very poverty, which, like a skin still enclosing the self, would set it up in an inwardness, already settled on itself, already a substance. It is always to empty oneself anew of oneself, to absolve oneself, like in a hemophiliac's hemorrhage. It is to be on the hither side of one's own nuclear unity, still identifiable and protected; it is to be emptied even of the quasi-formal identity of a being someone. But it is always to be coram, disturbed in oneself to the point of no longer having any intention, exposed over and beyond the act of exposing oneself, answering for this very exposedness, expressing oneself, speaking. It is to be an undeclinable One, speaking, that is, exposing one's very exposedness.

What is there to say?

Shit is whack right now: insane protests resulting in dead bodies, burnt cars, looted shops, random roadblocks, lots of teargas and random bullets.

We will see what tomorrow has to bring, I suppose. It is so strange to watch this happen, the way you know things can turn this fast, but never believe that they will turn at all.

Immemorial, unrepresentable, invisible, the past that bypasses the present, the pluperfect past, falls into a past that is a gratuitous lapse. It can not be recuperated by reminiscence not because of its remoteness, but because of its incommensurability with the present. The present is essence that begins and ends, beginning and ending assembled in a thematizable conjunction; it is the finite in correlation with a freedom. Diachrony is the refusal of conjunction, the non-totalizable, and in this sense, infinite. But in the responsibility for the Other, for another freedom, the negativity of this anarchy, this refusal of the present, of appearing, of the immemorial, commands me and ordains me to the other, to the first one on the scene, and makes me approach him, makes me his neighbor. It thus diverges from nothingness as well as from being. It provokes this responsibility against my will, that is, by substituting me for the other as a hostage. All my inwardness is invested in the form of a despite-me, for-another. Despite-me, for-another, is signification par excellence. And it is the sense of the "oneself," that accusative that derives from no nominative; it is the very fact of finding oneself while losing oneself.

Will a putting between parentheses suffice - a type of writing, of committing oneself with the world, which sticks like ink to the hands that push it off? One should have to go all the way to the nihilism of Nietzsche's poetic writing, reversing irreversible time in vortices, to the laughter which refuses language.

Ezeulu moved his head up and down many times. "It is a story of great sorrow, but we cannot set fire to the world."

Vera was alone walking through the forest. In the bushes she caught sight of a rabbit stooping by a large stone and reading from an old book.

--What are you reading?

The rabbit looked askance at her. After some time it deigned to speak.

--This is a story about elves and hidden people who live their lives inside rocks like this one.

It closed its eyes and turned its head back towards the book.

--Can you read with your eyes closed? Vera asked in surprise.

--Of course.

Vera felt the rabbit wishing she was gone.

--Goodbye, said Vera.

--Yes, goodbye.

The rabbit still had its eyes closed. But then it opened them and looked on Vera.

--Perhaps one day we will meet.

--Perhaps, said Vera and strode off.

Said Linus,

--Like a bird that arrives at a house and must first remove its wings before entering, I am astonished by the sudden nearness of voices.

And from this evidence at the end of a long tunnel of night, Negritude appears to be rooted in an épistèmè that defines the African as other, fixing him or her in a binary relation (of conflict or of marriage, what does it matter?), of same and other, of subject and object. That this order of things is a heritage of Western thought, hundreds of contributions have already established; in their readings of Senghor's complex, they have not desisted from suggesting the intellectual falseness of his famous "kingdom of childhood." For us today, however, following Mudimbe's analysis, the subject/object relationship appears to be directly inherited from the colonial order that created an infinite number of dichotomies, of which Negritude itself as "a discourse of alterity," as Mudimbe's phrase goes, is one of the most vulgar manifestations. It becomes clear that this relationship, inscribed as it is in all its glory by Sartre in his famous preface, Orphée noir, remains canonical. It is not only canonical in its logic (the figure of Narcissus is sufficient for that), but in its structure. It defines an idea's house and thus opens or closes various passageways and their possibilities. "I is an other," Rimbaud tells us; his phrase captures the paradoxical situation in which Negritude has placed us: I look at myself in the analytical mirror, the weapons Negritude has provided in my hands--and I see myself as the West's other! At the same time as I recognize the distortion of my face, I discover the chains on my ankles that bind me to that familiar dichotomy--same and other. In short, following the lead of colonial discourse, Negritude has Africanized Africa. How does one escape the violence that for Mudimbe is a "panacea" and for me, who was born in Cameroon, is the revelation of a conceptual prison? The lack of movement that has followed this frightening discovery, as much as it stuns me, shows that Negritude, in its épistèmè, has left us in a profound transcendental fall before the zigzags of our history, by erecting ethnology's assumptions inside of us; and leaving us unable, for example, to conceptualize the violence of which we are capable. It is incumbent upon us to create other paths, to see Negritude only as the prelude to a new order of intelligence, and to thus go beyond ethnology's othering dualism; we must open our minds to the "patience of philosophy," to begin to pay attention, to devote ourselves to the disassembling of our own reflection.

In an as yet unpublished short story of mine, the action is as follows: a terminally ill woman asks her husband to tell her a story so as to alleviate her unbearable pains. No sooner does he begin his tale than she stops him:

--No, not like that. I want you to speak to me in an unknown language.
--Unknown? he asks.
--A language that doesn't exist. For I have such a need not to understand anything at all.

The husband asks himself: how can you speak a language that doesn't exist? He starts off by mumbling some strange words and feels like a fool, as if he were establishing his inability to be human. But gradually, he begins to feel more at ease with this language that is devoid of rules. And he no longer knows whether he's speaking, singing, or praying. When he pauses, he notices his wife has fallen asleep, with the most peaceful smile on her face. Later, she confesses to him: those sounds had brought back memories of a time before she even had a memory! And they had given her the solace of that same sleep which provides the link between us and what was here before we were alive.

When we were children, all of us experienced that first language, the language of chaos, all of us enjoyed that divine moment when our life was capable of being all lives, and the world still awaited a destiny. James Joyce called this relationship with an unformed, chaotic world "chaosmology." This relationship, my friends, is what breathes life into writing, whatever the continent, whatever the nation, whatever the language or literary genre.

I believe that all of us, whether poets or fiction writers, never stop seeking this seminal chaos. All of us aspire to return to that state in which we were so removed from a particular language that all languages were ours. To put it another way, we are all the impossible translators of dreams. In truth, dreams speak within us what no word is capable of saying.

...

Languages serve to communicate. But they don't just "serve." They transcend that practical dimension. Languages cause us to be. And sometimes, just as in the story I mentioned, they cause us to stop being. We are born and we die inside speech, we are beholden to language even after we lose our body. Even those who were never born, even they exist within us as the desire for a word and as a yearning for a silence.

...

I am a biologist and I travel a lot through my country's savanna. In these regions, I meet people who don't know how to read books. But they know how to read their world. In such a universe where other wisdoms prevail, I am the one who is illiterate. I don't know how to read the signs in the soil, the trees, the animals. I can't read clouds and the likelihood of rain. I don't know how to talk to the dead, I've lost all contact with ancestors who give us our sense of the eternal. In these visits to the savanna, I learn sensitivities that help me to come out of myself and remove me from my certainties. In this type of territory, I don't just have dreams. I am dreamable.

All human action is incomplete, partial, and characterised by contradictions, concealments and distortions...the meanings that are constituted by social practices (e.g. classification and labeling) often assume a life of their own (reification) and become cultural ideologies (or standards) for a host of value laden discriminatory practices (e.g. educational placement of students with mental retardation in restrictive settings)

.

there is a distinct impression of shared perception between the Western agencies, national governments, and local education institutions that adoption of Western cultural ideologies in mental retardation is the natural course of things, much like the rise and setting of the sun

.

the problem with charity is that it sees disability as an individual problem, not an institutional one

.

knowledge as a material effect of power

.

as a community of intellectuals and inquirers, we have to understand and unpack the conditions under which knowledge about disability is produced and reproduced.

R. Chimedza

Tue, 11AUG09

SEATTLE (SEA) 11:53AM ---> NEWARK (EWR) 8:08PM

NEWARK (EWR) 9:25PM ---> PARIS (CDG) 11:05AM (12AUG)


Wed, 12AUG09

PARIS (CDG) 4:15PM ---> DAKAR (DKR) 7:55PM (12AUG)



Mon, 31AUG09

DAKAR (DKR) 6:20AM ---> NAIROBI (NBO) 5:25PM
My parents fly in two hours later. On the 1 September, off to the Masai Mara for 4/5 days to frolic in the Mara as tourists and look at big magical animals. Then we either bus or fly to Entebbe, rent a car, and spent the rest of the time driving around Uganda so they can meet all my people and see all my projects. On the agenda?

The North: Gulu & (hopefully) Kitgum
The West: Kyzanga, Jenifer's project: House of Hope. This is presuming she is still safe there (witchcraft things recently that have been really bad). Parts of the project got burnt down and everyone thinks she should flee but she won't do it, yet anyhow. So assuming she is still alive and the project is still functioning, I guess.
Down Home: Najja, Mawotto (my old, old village and people), The Elizabeth House (of course), meeting Esther and Moses and their families. Possibly white water rafting on the Nile. My mother will not partake in this. Hike up Monkey Mountain. Hiking in Mabira forest. Visit the source of the Nile. Visit Jinja town. Sipi falls in the East up by Mount Elgon, possibly. Oh yeah, and the Entebbe Botanical Gardens.


Tue, 22SEP09 (the unhappy part)

ENTEBBE UGANDA (EBB) 7:50PM ---> NAIROBI (NBO) 11:45PM ---> LONDON (LHR) 6:45AM (23SEP) --->

LONDON (LHR) 8:40AM ---> HOUSTON BUSH INTL (IAH) 12:40PM ---> SEATTLE (SEA) 5:09PM (23SEP)