You're up you're down

Ugh, what a day. Thunderstorms woke me up at 5 a.m. At least I didn't get soaked on the way into work like monshu, but I did arrive late to my morning meeting--which was fifteen minutes earlier and halfway across the building from when and where I thought it was. I was only back at my desk for a little while before a personnel crisis I thought had been dealt with months ago exploded in my face. Then I spent my last hour trying to chase down an item I believe has been stolen.

There were plenty of high points, though, starting with the DOMA decision which unexpectedly brought tears to my eyes (though for me that's a common symptom of lack of sleep). At the meeting, my Überboss came out with the phrase "brain harvest ritual" in the most inappropriate context imaginable, causing me and a coworker raised Baptist to share what I described as "a 'Children of the Corn' moment". And when I came home (dry again), I found the Old Man in a perfectly lovely mood.

Anticipating the court's decision, we discussed the marriage option some months ago. If Illinois ever gets its act together (in one very small manageable way--I'm an optimist but I'm not insane), we could be hitched before the end of the year. Right now I'm expecting one of those little adjustments which changes nothing and everything at the same time. Kind of like this strategic planning/reorganisation process I'm currently engaged in at work. But, you know, way more important.

About a white boy

The book of secrets turned out as disappointing as I feared it might. Maybe I'd've been more indulgent if I'd read it at a different time, but coming on the heels of Petals of blood, it can only suffer by comparison. Ngũgĩ's work has been criticised for being too polemical, and it's true that the internal political monologues can get tiresome. But even so there's a sense of vitality and engagement, the appeal of an angry young man talking about a subject that is of deep importance to him.

What Vassanji has to offer in his novel is mostly a sort of genteel indolence. The narrator is a retired schoolteacher, one who confesses that he "never took a risk" in his life. To give himself something to do in retirement, he tries to piece together the life history of a fate-kissed orphan from his poor beginnings in the upcountry during WWII through independence and immigration to England. Sound familiar? It feels familiar, too, despite the initial novelty of the Kenyan/Tanzanian setting. Early on I had hopes, but about a third of way in the trajectory becomes predictable, leaving only the "secret" of the title which the reader is expected to care about far more than I did.

SPOILER ALERT

Surprise! It's adultery. I guess I should've anticipated that a graduate of the Iowa school with a cozy existence in Canada and a handful of mediocre literary prizes would be this thoroughly bougie. Despite living through decolonialisation and dislocation, he can't find anything interesting to say about it. He makes a feint at criticising subaltern racism and then drops it. One of the characters is a homosexual--oh, wait, no, let's heterosexualise him in the last few pages. Bleah.

Not that I don't have problems with Ngũgĩ's work. The one major female character is a whore, and it doesn't remove the sting that this is, in large part, political allegory. It's very Kikuyu-centric; the suffering of the (presumably Maasai) pastoralists feels very short-shrifted. But even as he paints a bleak portrait of the transition to a Kenya run by Africans but not for them (or at least not the mass of them), he held my attention, and that's no easy trick. So my positive memories of his writing weren't false after all.

Now it's on to nonfiction, an English journalist's account of Kenyan government whistleblower John Githongo--a fascinating man with a fascinating tale to tell. It's another story of idealism betrayed, but one with a slightly more hopeful ending.