Binyavanga’s clever strategy to manage his story in the media

After reading the ‘missing chapter’ that Binyavanga Wainaina, the celebrated Kenyan writer, published online on Chimurenga Chronic, you delve into his memoir One Day I Will Write about this Place, searching for the cracks and silences that you believe will shine out and weaken the book.

Strangely, they are not there. The memoir, which chronicles Binyavanga’s life experiences and insights into ‘this place’— Kenya and Africa, ends with a weighty presentation of the Kenyan political and social struggle.

The reason for his fear of the ‘primeval, unknown shadowy’ Kenya, here symbolised by the traditional music that he couldn’t stand to listen to on the National Service radio as a child, is the straight-jacketed idea of himself and Kenya as a civilised, composite person and nation, marching forward on the road to ‘development’ and ‘progress’.

This lie is, however, exposed in the 2007 post-election violence that he chronicles, the virulent tribalism that had gripped almost every Kenyan’s heart then, and the divided land upon which we still walk.

The missing chapter thus, though informing us that Binyavanga is a person of an alternative sexual orientation, does not weaken the book by its ‘absence’. If anything, its inclusion might have detracted from the witty, incisive and insightful picture of Kenya that he draws.

With a focus on the ‘this place’ he writes about, the writer’s own story as a gay man may have crowded everything else. His story on being a homosexual may need its own space and platform if he ever chooses to write about it.

What is of interest with his declaration (not a confession, it would do well to note) is the fact that it is an attempt to integrate his ‘shadow’ – what Swiss psychologist Carl Jung described as the hidden, repressed sides of us that society tells us are aberrant and forces us to hide — with his light, the achieving, successful, celebrated and feted parts of ourselves.

Some commentators on the story, which The Guardian newspaper carried, harrumphed that his coming out is no big deal. Looked at closely, however, it is.

It is not just the fact that homosexuality is illegal in over 38 African countries, or that Ugandan and Nigerian political leaders are taking draconian steps against it; it is not the fact that confusion about sexual orientation is the second cause of suicide among Kenyan teenagers today, after failing exams.

It is the fact that homosexuality is a taboo topic shrouded in fear, mystery, prejudice and stereotypes and Binyavanga’s coming out publicly blasts all the orthodoxies that the African Christian and Islam social fabric have used to regulate and control society.

In ‘coming out’, Binyavanga has lobbed a grenade into convention, the status quo and ‘the way things are done’. No longer can the simple stereotypes of homosexuals as insane, sex-mad, evil people suffice.

With Binyavanga bringing his secret into the light and choosing not to resort to a furtive, shadowy double life to collude with the illusion of ‘normalcy’, he forces the Kenyan society to interrogate its script and understanding of what it means to be human.

His declaration may not lead many to embrace homosexuality or slow down their attempts to bring LGBT community members back into ‘the fold’ (as they are seen to do on LGBT community sites, urging them to return and repent to God).

Nevertheless, the fact that he, a distinguished and highly-achieved public persona, now personifies this societal ‘shadow’, will now force arguments and prejudices on what it means to be gay, to melt away.

Having strung his ‘demons’ out in the light of his own volition, they have nothing more to say about him but meekly join in the dissemination of his news as he wants it done — by way of a missing chapter and a Youtube clip.

This insistence by Binyavanga to tell his story as he wants it points to the idea of a ‘missing chapter’ as being more of a clever literary strategy to tell an additional side of his story than it is any real missing chapter in his book.

In effect, it does two things: it tells the story Binyavanga wants to tell, but it also firmly situates him in his world as a writer, a world in which no critic, or melodramatic mud thrower can dare challenge him on.

I am gay

It is also worthwhile to note that LGBT persons are represented in high numbers in the writing and artistic worlds. Ranker.com lists over 300 famous gay writers such as Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, among others. Closer to home, South Africa’s K. Sello Duiker was publicly gay.

The wording of his declaration is also important to look at. It was not a weak, apologetic, ‘I am gay’, it was a blatant, unapologetic ‘I am a homosexual’, as if daring anyone to throw any larger bomb than the one he had lobbed at the world.

By dedicating it to his deceased mother, it was also as though telling the world at large that at its core, that this was his business with his ancestors, the world of the eternal, his destiny.

Even beyond being a chapter missing from his memoir, this ‘missing chapter’ really symbolises the missing chapter in Binyavanga’s road to ‘wholeness’ that Jung points to. The search for wholeness may sound easy but is in truth, an arduous task.

It means that one must turn their back on the versions of truth they have been fed on all their lives, and craft their own understandings of it. It sometimes literally means, standing against one’s very family, society and age, something that not just anybody can do.

Indeed, what Binyavanga has publically done here could not have been pulled off by just anybody. It is only at the pinnacle of his career so far, that he has been emboldened to do this. As the founder of Kwani?, he engineered a revolution in the literary world which eventually seeped into other spheres of the artistic community.

From a literary sphere where creative writing had been locked up in the ivory towers of universities, Binyavanga freed words and told them they could run free in bars, pubs, restaurants, even on the streets, as the proliferation of poetry events and literary festivals has proven.

The 10-year anniversary of Kwani? that brought another world-class African writer, Nigeria’s Chimamanda Adichie, to Kenya, drawing numbers of the equivalent of a rock star concert at its public lecture and book party, is testament to the resonance his spirit of ‘cutting the crap’ of social orthodoxy has found amidst the Kenyan middle class.

The presence of this wide and large community that he has nurtured has thus given him strength to speak out and indeed. It is a group that consists of music artists, activists, academics, actors, thinkers and writers.

The international community, which in a curious way, always spots our stars way before we do (Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Wangari Maathai were celebrated internationally before we slowly came to realise their shine) has also come out to stand by him in a big way.

The BBC, the Guardian, and the Huffington Post were among the first to cover the story. This is despite the fact that they have often been on the receiving end of his sharp pen for their own biased coverage of Africa.