Keguro Macharia: On Grinding, Grating, and Creating Friction against Kenyatta’s Figurations of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity

Keguro Macharia’s body of work – his blog, Gukira and other online writing, his Twitter feed, and now, his long-awaited text, Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora – has always challenged us to imagine freedom and its relationship to the erotic. In Frottage, Macharia adds new elements to existing histories and theories of diaspora and blackness, asking readers to consider sex and sexuality, gender-construction, desire, and eroticism as central elements of Black freedom struggles. For Macharia, “frottage” presents a metaphor and a methodology for “grasp[ing] the quotidian experience of the intra-racial experience, the frictions and irritations and translations and mistranslations, the moments when blackness coalesces through pleasure and play and also by resistance to anti-blackness” (Macharia 2019, 7). Histories rub up against histories – igniting some versions, while wearing down or erasing others. In chapters focused on four figures in revolutionary struggles and “freedom thinking” – Frantz Fanon, René Maran, Jomo Kenyatta, and Claude McKay – Macharia illustrates how foregrounding heteronormative relationships and kinship models, which have historically dominated “visions of diasporic encounter” (64), has limited our understanding of Black freedom struggles. These were moments when hierarchies of power were continually shifting, and people’s ways of relating to each other (including erotically) were fundamentally affected. Expanding on that idea, Macharia asks: how, then, might we situate “erotic pleasure and diversity as practices of freedom, complicating dominant visions of diasporic encounter as heteronormative kinship” (64)? If we were to “enlarge the vocabularies and frames of diasporic encounter to include lover, fuck buddy, and trick... [and] a range of erotic desires and encounters” (64), howmight we re-conceptualise struggles for freedom, and practices of freedom? Many of us know the poetics and politics of Macharia’s writing – essays theorising freedom, imagining the ways bodies and psyches find passage, even when political decrees and power structures attempt to immobilise them – through reading his blog, Gukira. As Lindsey Green-Simms writes in her contribution, Macharia’s academic writing and his intimate engagements within blogging culture are illustrative of his complex