In the middle of a (tea) plantation is a bare patch of land. It is said that “it is [at] this precise location where Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi was carried to, and placed, after he was shot by colonial home guards”. It is said that his blood seeped into this bare patch of land in Karunaini, Nyeri — on land he bled to see free. At the location where his blood was spilled, it is known that there is yet to be anything to grow. It seems his blood ‘holds’ the seeds beneath the ground, patiently, with revolutionary anger, awaiting a climate of freedom to sprout, as the climate then and now remains colonial.
The refusal by the seeds beneath to neither germinate nor emerge, in land ‘unfree’, is rooted in a deep indigenous knowing of climate. This ecological resistance, radicalised by blood, is a decision not to be webbed in the deathly matrix of extraction and ‘profit’ that characterises the afterlife of the colony. This colonial climate, that is intimately involved with the “weather” encountered by Christina Sharpe, ‘suffocates’ — as the crying call of all born from they who ground this ‘continent’, as cargo or as ‘citizen’, by way of the cutaneal, remains “we can’t breathe”.
‘The Afterlife of the Colony’ is both a register and a description. It is descriptive of the persistence of colony post ‘independence’. It reckons, as a register to notice and imagine, that independence was not an emancipatory event but a shape-shifting moment… for the colony still breathes on. It suggests that what happened in 1963 was the ‘carefully’ curated cosmetic introduction of flag and anthem, a symbolic re-naming which served to mystify coloniality as structural in (The Colony and Protectorate of) Kenya, and consequently continue the ‘hold’ of the seeds beneath the ground. Hence, a re-sounding “we can’t breathe”. Hence, ‘Afterlife’ — as a register, through which we shall notice and imagine beyond.
In the wake, Field Marshall Muthoni’s hair remains loc’d and living as an archive awaiting the “real” — the real as a climate ‘changed’ and ‘truly’ free. Her dreadlocks, breathing with ends that are deep, dark and rich in colour, with roots that are silver grey, as soulfully described by Aleya Kassam, are within a ‘hold’ similar to the seeds beneath in Karunaini, Nyeri.
“Reaching all the way to her ankles,” her hair is ‘held’ in suspense, a tension of the possible — as “she won’t cut them until she sees real freedom”.
Her strands of memory, loc’d in a protest of remembrance, reflect a deep knowing of the ‘hold’ — an attention to climate. This archive is patient, even if time is fractured in the colonial. It notices. It maintains a deep knowing of the possible. The archive, in its different being(s), is a method to notice. Through poetic encounter, the archive inspires imagination as the inevitable exhale — in other words, we imagine as/in/through archive. Prefiguring the real, while ‘we’ wait.
(Pause)
…
(Continue to insist)
1963, Madaraka Day. A time re-membered and commemorated. A ceremony to inaugurate the symbolic, one flag down to prime the rise of another all the while the structure as climate breathes on. The seeds hold out (with)in a ‘hold’. Field Marshall Muthoni’s hair persists in protest.
Madaraka Day, 1963. Celebrated. The grand reveal of the symbol and (poem in) song that dominate ‘our’ desires, present and ‘future’. ‘Independence’ did not free ‘us’ from the colonial hold …that is the truth of ‘afterlife’. A continuous climate, deeply in tension with the “as yet unresolved unfolding” noticed in the wake ( Christina Sharpe, 2016*). And there is more to be noticed.
To notice is a poetic intervention — it happens everywhere, by way of different tongues… in as few words as “Not Yet Uhuru” or through seeds within the soil and above the ground, immersed in climate, in both spectacular and unspectacular methods of rest, rage, resistance, refusal or reckoning.
Wangari Maathai planted seeds unwaveringly, in the same way Stella Nyanzi continues to do so. Ungovernable, they are, and the seeds they sowed and continue to sow above ground. These seeds are in fact seeds of possibility; seeds that ‘cruise’; seeds that hope; seeds that dream; seeds in the colonial ‘hold’ that, parasitically, form the language to notice the climate and imagine beyond it. We, (all), who dream freedom (and ‘freedom-dream’) are seeds of discontinuity — we are in a ‘hold’, yet we also breathe, care and imagine the possible. We disrupt. We prefigure. We insist and persist, as archives in motion. We, as seeds of discontinuity both born from and as seeds of possibility, breathe with the spirits of those who planted before ‘us’ and those who plant now, in the timelessness of this colonial climate, because we deeply, erotically, know of a climate beyond the colonial.
Seeds, like sparks, are always with-(in)-tension and a deep knowing of the possible.
(Pause)
…
(Continue to insist)
This piece (of poetry) is a poet’s attempt, by way of verse and prose, to sow a seed of possibility while invoking the radical spirits of the named, unnamed and unnameable through the register of “The Afterlife of the Colony”.
Germinal, yet dreaming germination — a seed, a register, an imagination of bloom, that notices the climate as total and imagines future time as one of ease and possibility. This is a method of revolt, attuned to the fact and frequency of climate, suffocated by the atmospheric ‘hold’ that will conclude that Kenya must be abolished.
Kenya will be abolished.
This is a piece of destructive writing because I imagine, prefiguratively, the end of the coloniality.
Karibu.
Welcome.
We begin by noticing, and then we imagine.
Notice
To notice is to “call into question”.
All colonies must be called into question as that is the beginning of their eventual fall. It is ‘tradition’; radical and well knowing of the abyss.
‘Kenya’ in climate and as structure will receive this call. Similarly, it is important to notice that ‘Kenya’ is also a synonym, perhaps one that signifies and resonates ‘continentally’. Perhaps. I sense a mirror. (I’ll let this breathe).
(I proceed)
To notice is to rupture the unspeakable. It is to introduce abolition, and with it release imagination as the ‘political’ prisoner of coloniality. To notice is to “disturb the peace”, to rupture the unspeakable by speaking it — it is to insist, by way of poetry and ‘strategy’, distanced-from-order (as opposed to in-order) to prefigure germination.
Noticing is to be with sensibility. It is both a method, all the while suggestive of the fact that we can all sense the atmosphere — the colonial climate. It is to be intimate with ‘sensibility’, as it is described by Denise Ferreira da Silva, which is to say that the colonial is visible, potent, humid, intrusive and haptic in the texture of (‘this’) sociogenic fabric — it is noticeable.
It is noticeable.
In the gratuitous/logical violence of the police; home guards of this ‘independent’ nation who serve colonial continuity; through the law (of the ‘settled’), the policy (of the protectorate) and a curriculum (that disciplines/regulates possibility and imprisons imagination) — it is noticeable.
In the forced evictions, to name a nameable few, so far, only recently — it is noticeable.
(Pause)
The Northland Curse notices (atmosphere). Listen to how Kisu na Wembe are attentive to the Afterlife of the Colony and imagine beyond it, while in climate. A seed, a spark, a flame ungoverned by the laws of fire… rooted in beauty, in sweetness, in protection, and ‘more’ that needn’t be named but is felt. This curse is ‘freedom dreaming’ by way of a time-twisting imagination of colonial end.
“here is where you will end”
~ Kisu na Wembe, for whom I am grateful.
(Continue to insist)
It is noticeable in ‘access’ as a method of violence and ‘poverty’ as colonial infrastructure.
In who cooks the food and cleans; in who ‘mans’ the gate(s), and, [notice, as this is critical], whom is ‘settled’ — in particular homes — it is noticeable.
In the gaze, within the borders and without, that decrees, denounces or ‘developments’ (an impermissible yet necessarily referential) ‘belatedness’ onto ‘country’ and ‘continent’— it is noticeable.
In the colonial hold of a ‘hope’ in democracy all the while capital accumulates, it is noticeable. And note, I am unconvinced.
In the theatrical stages on which political performance takes place, it is noticeable. And note, do not forget, in this climate, “its been raining men”. In other words, politics is the domain of patriarchy’s fantasies (projections), [phallocentric] delusions and hegemony (continuity). It is NOTICEABLE.
In Uthamaki, it is noticeable.
In the names of particular colonial chiefs and home guards still present (continuous) in the ‘Kenyan Government’ as well as “in the name of the Father, the son and the Ethnic Spirit” … it is noticeable.
In the banal misogyny; hubristic upumbafuness (that is, “the sexist, misogynistic, victim-shaming tendency that seems to pervade all aspects of everyday life”); in familiarity with silence — it is noticeable.
(Pause)
Notice, “Silence is a Woman”.
(Continue to insist)
In ‘national heterosexuality’ (“the mechanism by which a core national culture can be imagined as a sanitised space of sentimental feeling and immaculate behaviour, a space of pure citizenship” (Berlant & Warner, 1998)), it is noticeable.
In the colonial regulations on ‘cruising’, and “the then and there” of queer being, it is noticeable.
(Pause)
“The Queer is Spilling Over”, forever and ever, amen.
(Continue to insist)
It is noticeable in those who remain ‘settled’, in the name of conservation, or simply in the name how ‘class’ settles and unsettles the symbolic subjects of the colony — Kenyans.
In the ‘afterlife’, imbued by epidermalization, it is noticeable.
‘Speaking in Tongues’, we emerge (already) as the ‘Wretched’. It is noticeable.
(Pause)
“My tongue trips as it walks along tarmac that is unfamiliar,/Learns that it must apologise for being unable to fertilise its soil,/Or build a foundation.”
~ Anuarite Gikonyo, Speaking in Tongues.
(Continue to insist)
1492, ‘prior’, 1500, 1885, 1895, 1963, 1999, 2007, 2020… Today, and in all captive time as well as in the time we attempt to capture (as history) — it is noticeable.
The dates we remember, and the dates that remember us.
Time/less. No time. There is no time to heal. Yet.
It is noticeable.
It is noticeable is my recent present, and in a past I do not ‘hold’ as memory that seemingly ‘holds’ me. It is noticeable in the living and dying memories of they who are symbolically named as ‘of-colony’.
It is noticeable in everything because it is climate. It is the air we breathe, the atmosphere in which we relate — the Afterlife of the Colony.
Colonialism is a disruption. And note, I am not in conversation with nostalgia here. It is a method with blood ties to capitalism, and therefore the ‘becoming’ of (the) world within and without borders — hence, the climate. As disruption, it is intimately involved with, and in many ways inseparable from, the ‘weather’ encountered by Christina Sharpe and noticed by Saidiya Hartman as the “afterlife of slavery”, which is to say that (the) colonial fabric is woven into/by/through the cosmos of anti-blackness.
The fractures noticed in the social fabric of bordered (colony and protectorate) and un-bordered (global) worlds reveal the disruptive violence of colonialism. In the afterlife of the colony, those fractures exist as contradictions — present, as named by Sylvia Wynter, “in being, power, truth and freedom” and ‘more’. The tensions of climate are present in the noticed and the yet to be noticed. (Shall we notice together?) The air in which we breathe reveals the presence of climate; the dynamics of ‘being’ subject reveals the presence of colonial infrastructure; the violence ‘employed’ by enforcers of coloniality (police, in varied uniforms) reveals the presence of (a) colonial logic, and finally the presence of presence reveals colonial continuity.
It reflects a “past that is not past” (Christina Sharpe, 2016*) hence why there is no time to heal.
Time is fractured by way of the disruptive and disrupted by way of the presence of fractures — the presence of presence. This loss (theft) of time, amongst ‘more’ incalculable loss (theft), for which we have no method to grieve in this climate but to dream, is mystified by independence. Fractured time, unsettled by the violence of the colonial, complicates memory and remembrance. I do not ‘hold’ 1885, 1895 as well as the events/moments/times after (with 1963 registering as a ‘chronological conclusion’ of the colonial) as memory, and yet, it seems, they violently hold me. They hold us. They haunt us.
A colonial ‘hold’ — present in atmosphere, noticed in quite literally everything — which not only complicates memory and remembrance, but further ‘disturbs’ future time. What is ‘tomorrow’ if today is ‘entangled’ with the past? How do we ‘hope’ in this climate? What is a dream if it is ‘held’ by a fractured ‘passage’ of time, which is to question…what does it mean to dream in no time? I know of no dream that does not take place in the presence of ‘darkness’, in the wake, before we wake, sometimes while we are awake and yet we still persist in dream. (I’ll let this breathe).
(I proceed)
Time is a deathly hallow, fractured by the climate of a “past that is not past”, that produces and re-produces silence (a dialect) and yet, if we notice, silence is essential to the structure that is ordered chaos. Within this climate, silence is essential to the safety of ‘designed peace’. The colonial ‘hold’ involves an ‘invisible hand’ that is persistently violent unto ‘our’ beings, hence why we notice — we rupture the unspeakable. As mentioned, to notice is to introduce abolition, and with it release imagination as the ‘political’ prisoner of coloniality. (I’ll let this breathe).
(I proceed)
I imagine a time beyond the colonial ‘hold’. I do this primarily, albeit with multiple grammars interacting across difference, within a “tense of possibility” referred to as “the future real conditional or that which will have had to happen”. The grammar of a black feminist futurity, further described by Tina Campt as “a performance of a future that hasn’t yet happened but must” hence ‘seed of discontinuity and/as seed of possibility’. “It is the power to imagine beyond current fact and to envision that which is not, but must be”. Destructive writing. Destructive dreaming. Destructive being.
It is why we notice The Colony and Protectorate of Kenya as a “past that is not past”, to be abolished and imagined beyond.
Imagine
To imagine is to destroy the coherence of the horizon within the paradigm of landscape.
Notice the landscape. Do this by looking closely at the images, or any view/landscape that is close by. Notice how the landscape maintains coherence by and through the horizon, which is to say that essential to ‘our’ knowing of landscape, what it signifies and ‘more’ is in fact through the position of the horizon. Horizon is how we know landscape.
Notice.
What is landscape without horizon? What happens to landscape if the horizon, which we know all too well, is destroyed? What happens to ‘us’ both if we destroy it, and in the wake of its destruction?
Kenya knows itself through ‘us’. Kenya structures the coherence and knowing (in a word: episteme) of “being, power, truth and freedom”, and ‘more’. It is a landscape and, it seems, we suture the horizon, which is it to say that our love of landscape, our hope in its possibility and our disappointment in its being ensures that we remain stitched up to a colonial hold.
Kenya renders us ‘unimaginative’, through violence.
Notice.
The Colony and Protectorate of Kenya is a “past that it not past”, which is to say that the colony is present. It is climate. It is the air we breathe, and the atmosphere in which we relate. We know ourselves through ‘Kenya’, and thus we are intimately involved with violence. The settler and the native, as a relational dynamic of climate, (still) persists as a fundamental feature within ‘class’ — in that to be ‘settled’ is to be safe, distanced from violence in its varied modes and in proximity to capital and wealth (whiteness). The construction of ‘highlands’ goes on, and, with them, sustaining infrastructure — as the colony must breathe on. Notice Northlands City, and the technologies of coloniality. ‘Development’ as continuity.
Notice.
In knowing ourselves through colony; ‘we’, being, love, ‘more’ is structured by violence. In as much as ‘Kenya’ in climate and as structure necessitates our compliance and reliance for its continuity, ‘independence’ imprisons the imaginary as it seems we require ‘Kenya’ for the coherence of our own landscapes. ‘We’ are romantically involved, deep within an ‘entanglement’ of world proportions. And still,.
(Pause)
There are other landscapes, some which know themselves through ‘us’. Some intimately known as cultural. Some worldly known as black. In one, the horizon requires being. In one, the horizon requires non-being. We know ourselves through these landscapes, too. Notice.
(Continue to insist)
When Kenya, as landscape, is called into question — we are called into question as well. We sense, that is see, hear, feel, smell and taste, each other in the Afterlife of the Colony. We care in ‘community’. We hope as ‘collective’. We experience disappointment and anger as ‘citizenry’. What happens to ‘we’ in the abolition of Kenya? “Who do we become?” How do we collectively heal if the collective may be unable to know itself in the destruction of the landscape that ‘gives it’ meaning? There is no time to heal. Yet. And still,.
“Abolish Kenya” is an expression of anti-colonial distaste, and the will to not disavow by and through the “past that is not past”. Abolition, I sense, and therefore notice, is a register attentive to structure and climate. It is disruptive of horizon(s) of meaning. It ignites seeds of possibility and/as seeds of discontinuity. ‘Abolition’, when uttered, is a cause for alarm.
(Notice how loud the alarm must be to ensure you understand that what was once safe, no longer is, or never was.)
It is a crisis for continuity. It is a provocation to notice and to imagine, rooted, as inspired into being by Kisu na Wembe, in beauty, in sweetness, in protection, and ‘more’.
I am suggesting we imagine in the dark, in the presence of darkness.
I am suggesting we imagine beyond.
Horizons are not “the impassable boundaries where possibilities end” and “frontier[s] which separate… being from nothingness”. In fact, they, horizons, are “the real boundaries where all possibilities begin” and “the frontier[s] which separates being from being more”.
Seeds, like sparks, are always with-(in)-tension and a deep knowing of the possible.
Imagination is attentive to this depth, it is intimate with the “dark place[s] within where hidden and growing our true spirit[s] rise” (Audre Lorde, 1985).
Imagination is to risk being beyond* horizon — the event horizon of revolution. It is to rest, love, and dream in the crisis of meaning — in the “past that is not past”.
In imagining beyond, we call into question the structural stability of ‘our’ universe as seeds of possibility as/and seeds of discontinuity.
In imagining beyond, we position ‘ourselves’ at the horizon of a death we will not mourn but deeply know in the life, living, breathing, ease and possibility born, flowing and set in motion.
And in the presence of darkness, there shall be germination.
Epilogue
Hi!
I say “hi” when I cannot decipher,
The darkness,
So I can feel seen.
(I proceed)
What beauty,
To write, think, risk, imagine
Through birth,
The life,
Born in poeisis,
Never tasted,
Registers, words and the crevices that speak,
Pauses, motion, pauses…
Continue to insist.
The intimacy of relation, as words
convey, conflict, reflect.
I see a mirror.
Engender ‘more’.
Live in poeisis, the perpetual and the possible.
What beauty it is to dream in colour,
Write in darkness,
And imagine aporetic[ally].
What beauty.
I imagine my words sound like Sh’Diah and (Unregulated) Drums. I imagine sunsets without horizons, as my unfamiliar breathes.
Notice breath as being. Notice ‘more’ as resisting the finality of ‘most’.
I write slowly, although I meditate with the fractures of time. I think together with doubt. I know myself to be aporetic. I sense unfamiliarity as the residue of my presence. I feel the erotic revealed with care by Audre Lorde, as well as the darkness in my being. I have ‘more’ to learn. I am excited to be in conversation with ‘more’. I am excited about the possibilities of praxis. I am excited for the possible conversations, from whoever is in conversation with this piece. I am excited to think, and dream together. I am excited about abolition and imagination. (Noticing is never ending, for we may not be able to tell if healing is true.) I am not sure what more there is to say, but thank you for/to presence and vulnerability in the dark by the dark.
‘More’ to be said: What do I imagine?
I imagine… a romance in being, an intimacy in breathing — poetry as the suture that reveals living. Ease as well. The collapse of ‘I’.
What do you imagine?
This piece is in conversation with:
- Aleya Kassam
~ (on) Twitter
~ (through) Blog | Field Marshall Muthoni, the woman. - Anuarite Gikonyo
~(through) Poetry | Speaking in Tongues - Atula Owade
~ (in) Poetry - Audre Lorde
~ (in) Breathing/Being
~ (through) Care | Poetry in Not a Luxury | The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (“I Die for All Mysterious Things”, Piroutte, Generation, Oaxaca) - Chao Tayiana
~ (on) Twitter | “On this bare patch of land in the middle of a vast tea plantation in Karunaini, Nyeri, nothing grows.”
~ (through) Her (Wake) Work - Christina Sharpe
~ (in) Poetry/(through) The Unspeakable and Unshakeable | In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016*) — “past that is not past” | * This work transcends time as there is no time in the afterlife| The Weather - Denise Ferreira da Silva
~ (through) eflux Journal #105 | How - Frantz Fanon
~ (in) Breathing/Being
~ (through) Poetry | The Wretched of the Earth — “call into question”, structure/sociogeny and ‘more’ | Alienation and Freedom - Hamile Ibrahim
~ (in) Spirit
~ (through) Love
~ (with) ‘Afrophobia’ - Jaimee Kokonya
~(in) Poetry
~ (through) Twitter, and ‘more’. - James Baldwin
~ (by) Listening | Social Change & The Writer’s Responsibility - José Esteban Muñoz
~ (through) Critical Hope | Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity - Karwitha Kirimi
~ (in) Poetry and Freedom-Loving - Kedolwa Waziri
~ (in) Poetry and Freedom-Loving - Keguro Macharia
~ (on/through) Twitter |in The Spirit of Welcoming | and so much ‘more’
~ (through) Blog | Banal Misogyny | blackness, mathematics, fabulation: speculation | and so much ‘more’
~ (in) Queer African Reader | Queer Kenya in Law and Policy
~ (in/through) Poetry | belated: interruption | The Development Imaginary Tracks (of which I would like to think together with them)| Gukira — With(out) Predicates| Twitter - Kisu na Wembe
~ (in) Tenderness
~ (through) Flame Ungoverned By The Law of Fire| Northland Curse - Koehun
~ (by) Thinking Together - Lanaire Aderemi
~ (through) Love and the archive
~ (on) Stage - Lena Anyuolo
~ (with) The Soil | (in) Love | (within) The Earth - Mumbi K*
~ (in) Poetry | The Queer is Spilling Over |and ‘more’ - Mumble Theory
~ (on) Twitter | “Destructive Writing”
~ (through) Blog | Nothingness-With-Incomplete
~ (in) Sound | Iamswimsoul - Mutemi wa Kiama
~ (on) Twitter | #PoliticalEducationKE
~ (through) The Elephant | The Ideology of Uthamaki - Ory Okolloh
~ (on) Twitter | “It’s raining men” | and ‘more’ - Patrick Gathara
~ (on) Twitter
~ (through) Blog | BLACK, RED AND GREEN: The story behind the Kenyan flag - Paulo Freire
~ (in) Poetry | The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (together with Professor Alvaro Vieira Pinto) - Qondiswa James
~ (in) Fugitive Dreaming
~ (through) Borderless Care - Saidiya Hartman
~ (in) Poetry/ (through) The Unspeakable and Unshakeable | “The Afterlife of Slavery” & “The Burdened Individuality of Freedom” in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America
~ (by) Listening - Stella Nyanzi
~ (in) Spirit - Stephanie Mithika
~ (in) Questioning | “Who do we become?” - Steven Mwangi
~ (through) Care and Communion | The Struggle Discontinues by Damian Marley - Suhayl Omar
~ (through) Presence
~ (on) Twitter
~ (in) Abolitionist Spirit| https://nommomag.com/BlackStruggle | and ‘more’ - Sylvia Wynter
~ (in) Poetry | Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation — An Argument - Tina Campt
~ (in) Poetry | Listening to Images (2017) (I’m thankful to Lola Olufemi to introducing me to the Feminist Imagination)
~ (by) Listening - Tourmaline
~ (in) Freedom-dreaming - Wambui Mwangi
~ (through) Writing | Silence is a Woman - Wangari Maathai
~ (in) Spirit
