Except this isn’t a tweet obviously but memes within memes are spectacular. Plus, the story of Makmende spoke to me. I’ve been feeling a bit nostalgic lately, one of the many things spring tends to inspire in me: nostalgia, loneliness, and allergies. It’s not time to unpack trauma here though.
I missed the Makmende train and it makes me SAD; this is what I get from deleting my Twitter app every few months. However, I have seen African memes quite similar in popularity to what Makmende seemed to have. Memes of low quality African music chopped and screwed, or cut to a five second clip for laughs and reaction imagery. African memes and African Twitter users outsold, honestly – but only when they’re not being elitist and anti-black (you ain’t hear that from me).
Makmende’s proliferation reminds me of how stans and fandom members behave: finding something they enjoy and love and making it their own and showing it off to the world. Manips, manipulate photos, like the GQ and Esquire covers mention on page 279 were the rage on Tumblr back in 2011-2013. I’ve seen a number of magazine covers altered to be focused on Harry Potter as if the characters were real-life celebrities and not just bits of fiction. That’s what Makmende reminds me of.
There’s also the addition of funny memes Twitter users pushed out during the height of Makmende on the web. Jokes like “Makmende bit a mosquito and it died of malaria” are jokes I couldn’t and can’t in good conscious make because, well, I’m not African and I don’t deal with tragedies like death by malaria intimately (279). But, it’s less taboo to laugh at a joke that somebody who has experienced or observed things like that – it absolves me of my privileged guilt, not that I’d even think to make such a joke anyway honestly. It’s just that quick memes with a focus on certain individuals or concepts that are easy to understand go viral the fastest. It’s not shocking that it felt like Makmende was everywhere despite it being an African, especially Kenyan, reference.
Things reach transnationally when it is placed in a relatable and easily understood style, and I don’t think it especially American. I understand obviously that the jokes made about Makmende crossed American and Kenyan cultural lines – and like Zuckerman explains there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. It isn’t necessarily a sign of cultural imperialism so much as a melding of cultures and disintegrating transnational borders via social media. I am hopeful that that the propagation of such memes from developing countries will result in the welcoming of said countries to web 2.0 platforms (280) and give them further and bettered access.
But for a quick anecdote that explains why this section of the text spoke to me so revisits that topic of trauma earlier, but it doesn’t hurt too badly now. One of my best friends passed away when we were just little 15 year old high school freshmen. We were in an honors physics class, and one of our assignments around the time of her death was to create a superhero with powers based on physics. Mine was based on her because she asked me to, and I even wrote her a little story and designed her!
Just A Band – Ha-He (without the music) Have you ever wondered what a music video sounds like without the studio recorded vocals perfectly infused into it?
Just A Band – Ha-He (without the music) Have you ever wondered what a music video sounds like without the studio recorded vocals perfectly infused into it?
