Interlude 2 kiSwahili Mahmoud Ahmed Abdulkadir

In July 2003, Mahmoud Abdulkadir read an article in one of Kenya’s national newspapers, reporting on the activities of a national committee in charge of the Swahili language. The poet was struck by the accompanying photo of the committee. “None of its members visibly looked Swahili,” he recounts; none of the participants wore Swahili clothing or look like a Swahili person. Rather, all members appeared to derive from “upcountry” Kenya. Unsettled that no waSwahili were concerned with the Swahili language, he wrote this poem....

Epilogue

The conclusion returns to debates about globalization, global Islam, and global terror, but links these overall concerns to the everyday lives of young Muslims in Lamu. This book challenges portrayals that concentrate on young Muslims’ supposed conflicting engagements with Western modernity. The conclusion therefore does not reflect upon “Islam and the West” and its transpiration in young people’s lives, but rather considers the moral urgency that underlies discussions of self-fashioning and embodiment in contexts of rapid change. The detailed discussion of language and self-fashioning that formed the focus of the book sought to provoke broader discussions of ethical living in contexts of change. The conclusion reflects upon how self-fashioning is always also a political project, whereby young people position themselves locally but also translocally in relation to a range of “others.” The ambiguity of social evaluations, and the uncertainity as to how “others” evaluate young people’s everyday practices, forms a central focus of this discussion.

Introduction

Through the discussion of a religious sermon, this chapter introduces readers to the intersections of ethical self-fashioning, semiotics, and modernity and how these play out in the context of Lamu. Setting up the theoretical framework of the book, it provides insights into anthropological approaches to everyday Islam, questions of morality and modernity, and the linguistic anthropological angle from which this book approaches these issues. The introduction further situates Lamu within Kenyan and transnational politics by highlighting current events that shape outsiders’ perception of Lamu and by providing a short historical overview of the relation between Lamu and the Kenyan mainland.

Interlude 3 Tupijeni Makamama (Let’s Embrace) Mahmoud Ahmed Abdulkadir

Composed in March 2010, this poem was written for a workshop organized by the Research Institute of Swahili Studies in Eastern Africa (RISSEA). Focused on the preservation of Swahili culture in changing times, the workshop asked whether development necessarily entailed leaving one’s traditions. In this poem, Mahmoud Abdulkadir reminds the reader that waSwahili were historically more advanced than other population groups in Kenya, and he suggests that Swahili people can again attain that status. According to the poet, development does not require abandoning cultural practices. Rather, waSwahili ought to be selective and appropriate only those developments that do not contradict or violate Swahili traditions....

Reframing Morality through Youthful Voices

Chapter Four analyzes the interactional practices of young Lamu residents in a variety of contexts. Particularly, it looks at how young people are able to differently present themselves by drawing upon a broad linguistic repertoire and upon their awareness of the evaluation of different language varieties. For example, a young Swahili woman, in an attempt to speak with authority, shifts between English-infused Standard Swahili and local Swahili dialects when addressing her peers or elders respectively. The chapter thus shows how young people use linguistic tactics to negotiate new social positions, but also how a moral narrative of modernity can be linked to or mediated within linguistic practices. The analysis simultaneously raises the question of reception and whether young people’s strategic self-positionings are always successful.

Dialects of Morality

This chapter looks at how language and linguistic varieties get imbued with social, political, and moral value. It examines how these language ideologies inform young Lamu residents’ everyday linguistic practices and their attempts to negotiate newly emerging subject positions.

Interlude 1 Mila Yetu Hufujika (Our Traditions Are Being Destroyed) Mahmoud Ahmed Abdulkadir

Composed in December 2008, this poem captures the poet’s reflections on contemporary life in Lamu. It does so through the voices of an elder and a young man (indicated by E and Y respectively), who speak to each other through Swahili majibizano, or poetic dialogue....

Senses of Morality and Morality of the Senses

Non-verbal communication, while never separate from verbal communication, has a distinct signifying value in the context of Lamu. Because the exchange of verbal greetings carries implications for an individual’s respectability, individuals frequently rely on non-verbal language to communicate while in public. Chapter Five therefore looks at how material practices and the moving body are implicated in the negotiation of social change and the emergence of new social positionings. It examines how young men and women in Lamu differently use material and bodily practices—e.g. stride, walking route, hand greetings, gaze, clothing—to gradually redefine norms of proper conduct and social status. A closer look at young women’s use of handshakes, the ethnographic vignette of a young female professional accused of immoral conduct, and the story of a beach boy who becomes a local politician illustrate the different means through which young people negotiate a respectful positions within the Lamu community. The theoretical discussion in this chapter focuses on gender, material practice, and the moving body in relation to ideologies of moral personhood and notions of modernity.

“This Is Lamu”: Belonging, Morality, and Materiality

This chapter explores the present-day meanings residents attribute to “being from Lamu” and describe a moral code of respectability that shapes social structure and everyday interactions on the island.

“Youth” as a Discursive Construct

This chapter picks up the discourses on change introduced in the foregoing chapter, but zooms in on the discursive construction of “youth” as a recently emerging category of social identification. Through the analysis of Lamu residents’ discourses on change, we see the social category of youth materialize as either enslaved to their longing for Western modernity (with explicit comparisons of youth to slaves) or as the “dot com” generation that has access to a range possibilities previously unreachable for their parents. The analysis of these discourses also demonstrates how differently positioned social actors read and evaluate verbal and non-verbal practices and link them to newly emerging social categories. Such reading of material signs and their explicit incorporation in evaluations of youth already hints at how young people are able to strategically use details of dress, smell, gaze, or stride in the presentation of self.