“New languages untethered to the state can help us imagine how we want to live with each other”
““We will need writers who can remember freedom.” —Ursula K. Le Guin”
“Political vernaculars announce a conversation about politics: They are the words and phrases that assemble something experienced as the political and gather different groups around something marked as the political.”
“They create possibilities for different ways of coming together”
“Vernaculars are “home” languages banished from colonial institutions, especially schools; they are anti-oppression tools used by those excluded from elite institutions; they are frames through which we apprehend the world, following Fanon; and they are practices for building community.”
“Vernaculars are ways of claiming and shaping space.”
“Vernaculars also discipline, producing habits and dispositions, ways of acting and feeling and thinking.”
“The processes set in motion by existing political vernaculars ultimately remain in the frame created by them.”
“Kenya’s dominant political vernaculars shepherd or funnel us into predictable ends, generating two related demands: that the bad thing stop and that the good thing continue.”
“One is unable to imagine beyond the thing that must be stopped. There is no “after” corruption. And this inability to imagine an “after” makes cessation the only possible demand, the only way to imagine a future.”
“Except that cessation does not produce futures.”
“Corruption is Kenya’s negative political vernacular; development is its opposite number, its positive.”
“(I’ll simply note in passing that corruption often happens on development projects; the vernaculars do not allow this be noted in anything more than passing.)”
“Development is a shepherding political vernacular, because development is what one cannot not want. Development captures imaginations—one is not permitted to think beyond, against, or beside development.”
“But the failure of development projects—often through corruption—only leads to demands for more development projects, and quite often the same ones.”
“Development in Kenya is tightly controlled: We must all want the state-created Vision 2030. Even critics of the state insist that their critiques are devoted to achieving Vision 2030.”
“As political vernaculars, corruption and development create frames and processes, ways of thinking, speaking, and acting.”
“They act in concert to produce and restrict the demands that can be made. They shape the possibilities for what is thinkable. They flatten thinking into habits, repetitions, and negations.”
““What is your solution?” tethers political possibilities to state imaginaries and practices, shepherding us into addressing the state on its own terms.”
“One must learn the state’s languages and processes to engage it; one must learn to be legible on the state’s terms to engage the state.”
“And this is what those asking “what is your solution?” are demanding: that one become fluent in and legible to state-tethered imaginaries.”
““What is your solution?” is the tethering mechanism, one that does not permit any thinking outside of state imaginaries. And your legibility before the state will be predicated on your fluency in state processes. You will be understood so long as you repeat that which has become habitual.”
“We need political vernaculars: We need terms that are widely understood and that we can use to build collectivities, to create sharable worlds, to make demands, and to name and fight injustice.”
“We also need political vernaculars untethered to state imaginaries.”
“Against the state’s war against freedom—since freedom cannot be absolute—we can imagine freedom not as the right to violate, but as a way of being together: your freedom enhances mine. Love becomes central to imagining freedom in this way.”
“Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark has become important to me because she discusses lazy aesthetic practices, those well-worn ways of writing about the world “as is” that replicate, without questioning, all the ways those habits of worlding undo the human.”
“Freedom and love are doing words. They are we-forming, we-sustaining words. Their conjoined impulse is toward making collective living more possible and more pleasurable.”
“Asking “is this increasing freedom?” or “is this promoting love?” anchors and pushes other political vernaculars, reminding us what is at stake.”