Seeing Myself

An Igby Prize essay exploring how homophobia informs an avoidant relationship to my queerness — by Akinyi Linda

The Kalahari Review
Kalahari Review

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Over the past three years, my stance on letting my family know about my queerness has alternated between avoid avoid avoid and I might as well get it over with. I lean toward “getting it over with,” when I’m depressed from the exhaustion of living with and despite structures of othering, but more often I take to the former. So, I have not let anyone in my family know about my queerness yet.

A few weeks ago however, I felt like I wanted something other than my two default stances. I felt like I needed someone in my family to know about my queerness. Just one person– a cousin, a sibling, an auntie, it didn’t matter, just…someone.

Image credit: unsplash.com/@wsantos

I’ve been trying to figure out where this need, this desire, for family to recognize my queerness stems from. In fact, I am mostly confused by it. I have tested the waters many times, engaging with “LGBTQIA+ issues” in family settings as “an ally” to try and gauge where people in my family stand with regard to queerness. What this has resulted in, is me testing the waters less and less because whenever I do, how my family responds leaves me vulnerably scared, and suffocated by anxiety.

My thirty four-year-old cousin says “queer” like she is spitting hard on the ground, “how he walks is so queer,” she cringes.

When anything mildly “homosexual” comes up on TV, the quickness with which my mother asks for the remote is–yes comical, but also leaves our sitting room so thick with discomfort, you can feel everyone’s desperate wait for any kind of frivolous distraction to cut through the thickness.

When my dot com auntie talks about queerness, everything about her becomes strange to me. Her voice especially. She has one of those deep voices that makes talking to her feel somehow ceremonious, one of those life of the party deep voices. One of those sultry, I’ll let you do things your mama won’t auntie voices, that I’m deeply fond of. When she talks about queerness, her voice goes from lively, soothing and naughty to RAGING. Her voice rages with a very palpable hate that leaves me disoriented because it makes everything about her unfamiliar to me.

And so on, and so on. I know it will not rain hugs or even indifference when my family learns about my queerness, so I’m confused about why I felt like I needed their recognition.

From my journals, it’s been ten days since I started tending to this confusion. I still have not got to the root of it, but I’m realizing that as a lesbian, when I’m with my family I primarily know myself by fear and hatred. I’m realizing that knowing myself this way has translated to me repressing being who I am, as fully as I can, with myself.

I struggle to sit with my fears and queer desires, and struggle more to imagine my possibilities. When I try to, feelings of vulnerability and suffocation that my family’s homophobia elicits from me resurge, and so I respond by averting my attention from them–from my queerness. I’m realizing that yes, I hold Black trans and lesbian freedom dreams core to how I live, build relationships, and name the world, but I struggle to see myself. It’s like my unconscious stance on knowing myself has also been avoid avoid avoid.

While journaling, my knee-jerk reaction to thinking about how my family’s homophobia is contributing to my avoidant relationship to my queerness was, I’m probably drawing parallels because I’m spending a lot of time with family in quarantine. I scoffed at the thought. Then I wondered whether certain tendencies I had noticed in my habits pre-quarantine (noticed from a safe distance of course), were also manifestations of this fear-informed relationship to seeing myself. Long-standing tendencies of: being afraid to desire or imagine queer intimacy, being frequently detached during intimate physical moments out of some weird sense of anxiety, being afraid of and most times unable to think about my relationship to people in my family years to come. Were these tendencies receipts of how my relationship to seeing myself has long been informed by homophobia and avoidance? I thought they were.

Reckoning with these tendencies, and with my struggle to see myself has made me yearn for a different way of being with myself. Ten days ago I felt like I craved for my family’s recognition, but now I feel like I need my own recognition. Black trans and lesbian world naming, kind and expansive queer relationships, and everyday queer life-making-despite, show me how much I love my queerness. They show me that I can have affirming and nourishing feelings that are weightier than fear, vulnerability, and anxiety, in relation to my queerness. They show me that rich histories of brilliance, resourcefulness, and subversion of limiting understandings of shared cultures, are also my queer realities. I need to remember these when I’m afraid of holding parts of my queerness long enough to see myself. They remind me that I can hold my queerness long enough to be able to say lesbian and possibility in the same breath, even when I’m sitting in rage, exhaustion, or sadness.

Now I’m eager to explore what I will unearth from tending to my confusion further as I move towards seeing myself.

Akinyi Linda is working on being a consistent writer. She is based in Kenya, and writes because she believes that processes of giving language to experiences, can contribute to creating freer ways of being. Akinyi Linda is a pen name, but she hopes that soon she will be in a less precarious position to write about queerness openly.

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