{"id":2242,"date":"2023-03-08T12:40:25","date_gmt":"2023-03-08T12:40:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/?page_id=2242"},"modified":"2024-05-01T10:27:20","modified_gmt":"2024-05-01T09:27:20","slug":"awuor-onyango-october-2022","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/awuor-onyango-october-2022\/","title":{"rendered":"Awuor Onyango, October 2022"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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What I am Reading Now\u2026
Awuor Onyango<\/strong>
October 2022<\/p>


I thought I was reading about Love and its associated anxieties.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>

Election season in Kenya is usually traumatic; I wanted to believe this one wouldn\u2019t be. I dove into this podcast (Dissect season 6<\/strong><\/a>) that gave me a more contextualised look into\u00a0Beyonce<\/strong>\u2019s Peabody winning visual album\u00a0Lemonade <\/em><\/strong>and its themes around love, shame, broken relationships, patriarchy and generational \u2018curses\u2019 brought on by surviving systemic injustice. I started to chart what this would look like for my own family, how our history is interwoven into the country and its politics, how much one affects the other, how one could perhaps redeem the other. I wanted to believe these elections would be different so badly I tried to borrow Beyonce\u2019s hope.\u00a0<\/p>

It wasn\u2019t until I read\u00a0Communion: The Female Search for Love<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0by\u00a0bell hooks<\/strong>, where she says, \u2018Feminist women stopped talking about love because we found that love was harder to get than power. Men, and patriarchal females, were more willing to give us jobs, power, or money than they were to give us love.\u2019 that the tension between Love and Power that elections represents became clear to me. A history of being systematically denied power had made elections traumatizing. If all you\u2019ve ever been exposed to is state violence then becoming the state, getting the job and money and \u2018representation\u2019, the military might, the Power becomes a stand in for love. And so what was love in the face of this traumatic performance of political power?\u00a0<\/p>

I thought I was reading about Love and Power, and then the elections happened and calls for peace and calm started to overpower the danger and harm and fear people were feeling. A country was reduced to an economy and any emotion was met with mockery. It\u2019s then that I realized what I was reading about; the erotic.\u00a0<\/p>

\u2018When times are good, Eroticism is what converts the mundane into magic. When times are tough, (it) inspires us to survive\u2014and even to thrive\u2014despite all odds. It is why we make art and music and go into nature when we are in pain. It is the orchestras in the concentration camps, the choirs in the cotton fields, the dark humor shared by refugees all around the globe\u2026 the blues\u2026 both the letters of longing and the poetry of heartbreak\u2026 the playlist we make for a friend working graveyard shifts at the hospital\u2026the spirit that creates new life when death is ever-present.\u2019 Esther Perel says in her\u00a0newsletter<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0having grown up in a community of holocaust survivors and seeing those who \u201cwere not dead\u201d and those \u201cwho came back to life\u201d.\u00a0And then I ran into this excerpt on Twitter, having no context to\u00a0either\u00a0people.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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\u2018So scared to feel anything, to grieve, to cry, to be angry all we can do is focus on the economy\u2019, I wrote to a friend about the psycho-spiritual failures of the country, masked as calls for peace and acceptance of what many feared will become a dictatorship.\u00a0<\/p><\/div>

\u2018The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than\u2026of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need\u2026 is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfilment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love\u2026 It is also profoundly cruel.\u2019\u00a0<\/span>Audre Lorde<\/b>\u00a0<\/span>says in her essay\u00a0<\/span>Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.<\/i><\/b>\u00a0<\/p><\/div>

I\u2019ve been searching for ways to nurture the erotic within me and in my community, despite the political, biological, climate and capitalist pandemics at our doorsteps. So far it\u2019s meant listening to\u00a0<\/span>Beyonce<\/b>\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>Renaissance\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/b>for affirmations to rebirth those parts of me intentionally, \u2018vilified, abused, and devalued\u2026by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the\u00a0<\/span>possibilities of it within themselves.\u2019 (Audre Lorde) and cultivating that joy, not judging<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/span>myself<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/span>whenmy<\/span><\/span>\u00a0\u201c<\/span><\/span>productivity\u201d<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/span>takes<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/span>a<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/span>hit,<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/span>making<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/span>a<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/span>playlist,<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/span>planning<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/span>a<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/span>low risk<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/span>high reward playdate with my friends, pedicures and mumbling \u201cYou won\u2019t break my soul\u201d and \u201ccomfortable in my skin\u201d until I believe it.<\/span><\/span><\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Awuor Onyango<\/b><\/a>\u00a0<\/span>is a writer and multisensorial artist based in the pagan citadel of Nairobi, Kenya. Their multidisciplinary and multisensorial approach is rooted in the ephemeral, interactive and lived art traditions of East Africa, inviting, engaging, honouring and centering the voice of the side-lined, erased, in danger of amputation, aiming to integrate our ruptured histories, mythologies and philosophies into present technologies.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Listening<\/b><\/p><\/div>

Lemonade<\/i><\/b>, Beyonce\u0301 (Parkwood Entertainment, 2016)<\/b><\/p><\/div>

Renaissance<\/i><\/b>, Beyonce\u0301 (Parkwood Entertainment, 2022)<\/b><\/b><\/p><\/div>

Lemonade by Beyonce\u0301<\/i><\/b>,\u00a0<\/b>Dissect Season 6<\/b><\/a>\u00a0(<\/b>Dissect Podcast<\/b><\/a>, 2020)<\/b><\/p><\/div>

\u00a0<\/b><\/p><\/div>

Reading<\/b><\/b><\/p><\/div>

Communion: The Female Search for Love<\/i><\/b>, bell hooks (William Morrow Paperbacks, 2002)<\/b><\/p><\/div>

Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power<\/i><\/b>, Audre Lorde (Kore Press, 2000, first published 1978)<\/b><\/p><\/div>

Letters from Esther #25: Eroticism in Hard Times<\/i><\/b>, Esther Perel (<\/b>estherperel.com<\/b><\/a>)<\/b><\/b><\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Please note the views published in <\/span>What I am Reading Now…<\/i> are personal reflections of the contributors.
These may not necessarily represent the views of the University of Dundee.
<\/span>\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Home<\/a><\/p>\n

Previous Issue: Harun Morrison, September 2022<\/a>
Next Issue: Saoirse Amira Anis, November 2022<\/a><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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about projects What I am Reading Now\u2026Awuor OnyangoOctober 2022 I thought I was reading about Love and its associated anxieties.\u00a0\u00a0 Election season in Kenya is usually traumatic; I wanted to believe this one wouldn\u2019t be. I dove into this podcast (Dissect season 6) that gave me a more contextualised look into\u00a0Beyonce\u2019s Peabody winning visual album\u00a0Lemonade …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":525,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2242","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/525"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2242"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3917,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2242\/revisions\/3917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}