I feel forgotten.
I have given my all for my people but they forget that I exist, and sometimes I’m grateful that they forget because when they do remember me, it’s with bile rising in their throats and violence burning at their fingertips.
I am a queer woman from Kenya, and my goodness, everyday that I ride at dawn for this country, I remember that its liberation might not be shared with me.
Seeing the numbers at the protests, feeling that solidarity, and realising that the same solidarity wasn’t shared with us during the End Femicide march in January, if anything, we were met with ridicule and victim blaming.
That same solidarity has not been shared with my community when queer and trans people are killed. Instead, they write think pieces about how we should be less emotional yet one too many of us are being killed and harmed at alarming rates.
We go out into the streets and fight online when they kill and abduct us as Kenyans, but cheer when they criminalise a certain community further.
We make more noise when they refuse to hear us as citizens, but women have been kicking and screaming in defence and for help, but in that scenario it’s our fault.
Jokes weren’t made about the killings during the protests, but when the majority of the bodies found in the Kware dumpsite turned out to be women’s, there was suddenly a justification for ‘dark humour’ and that we should appreciate said humour as a soothing balm during the turbulent revolution.
F***.
I don’t know. Why am I still fighting then?
For the children. For the children of this country not to go through the pain and neglect most of us went through, and find themselves chewed up and spit out by a system that doesn’t care for them, making them machines devoid of feeling that end up becoming said system.
I do it for the children. They matter the most now.
I guess I’m still holding out hope that the liberation of Kenya will pave the way for my own as a queer woman.
Perhaps if we have gotten to the point where we can imagine a better future for this nation and not just sadly accept the status quo, maybe then our beliefs in general can shift to being intersectional too?
We can fight just as fiercely for women, children, queer and trans folk, disabled people, mental health issues, religions outside of Christianity… and more. Perhaps?
Writing this feels like journaling in a wishful thinking style, I might as well start doodling unicorns and rainbows with pots of gold where they meet the ground.
But here’s the thing, our ancestors who fought in worse conditions against barbaric colonists endured so much more pain, and they probably didn’t imagine what this freedom would look like exactly, but they knew they had to have it. And not just for themselves but for future generations too.
You could have called that wishful thinking too. Especially when you’re fighting with no X, TikTok, electricity, modern weapons or communication devices.
Wheeew.
But here we are, 61 years deep into our independence, well, of sorts.
So why shouldn’t I imagine a free future for my people too? What’s the point of radical thinking if we don’t dare… think it?
And as we fight for this freedom, I want our part in it not to be erased as it was in the past. May history not call us good friends if we were lovers, and may they not omit the ‘s’ in ‘she’.
May the women and queer people who come after us draw courage in knowing that they can fight as loudly too for whatever struggle we really hope they don’t have.
But what does liberation look like for me?
Maybe I should view it from my lens of hope? And I’m not saying to forget about how the others view it, because that would be gaslighting myself. But to use what I have, which is the will in me to fight to my death because what is a life without freedom, and my imagination, it has wrapped me in warmth when the cold threatened to freeze over my heart.
That’s what my liberation looks like to me, fight and imagination.
