It's Just Us
Embracing Self-Identity: A Journey to Positive Self-Perception
read time| 3 minutes 40 sec
who | Gogo Isolezwe (they/ them), Sangoma, gender anarchist, and pawerent queering life.
The death of Vivek, oh Vivek
Everything is spiritual isn't it
We walk this earth in drag, you cosplay man, I’m built for ‘woman’, and I play men
Emezi takes us to a familial place of wanting to be heard and seen in difference.
The longing for a community where equity speaks is a gleeful but hungered expression, that feels all too familiar when navigating the world as other’d. Of what do we become as I co-exist in systems unkindered to teen queer realness? Uniformity promotes discomfort, denial, and depression of self. Expression fails in ebb to grayscale and we are required to deconstruct identity by returning, emandulo to our original ways of being.
Okay, let's stop with the airy fairy ambiguity because people who live their lives queer deserve more than that. The death of Vivek carries us I cannot immediately recognise – simply because it doesn't roll off my tongue with the ease of root call. This novel takes opens the lens and walks us into the closets of gay boys, femme queers, thems, and old silk-dressed hems, right in the heart of southwest Nigeria. In their writing, Emezi transports us in sing-song and poetry that tells the tale of the happenings of a locale of African Blackness and takes on a journey of forged community in lone space.
I can only describe this written offering as transcendent, through time and binary space. I exclaimed to myself after ruminating over the stories and lines and all of these young gay characters sharpened to a way that I enjoy. Awaeke reminds us that there is a method to the madness we allow our realities to be.
Definite.
I have always said that Awaeke writes for me, the non-binary different person. This offering is spiritual. Fore the call to home transcends social constructs and linear ideas of being. /Inkenqe/ does things with vigour – like keeping you out of colonial systems.
In their re-birth, we see that community building is (unremunerated) care work,
It's a reflective process
It’s incredibly intimate
It supersedes the tears of capitalism called genocide
It talks about power as rapture
Moving boulders of mountains shame
Manouvering danger in dubious ways
Dealing with legacies of anti-Blackness
Queerness becomes the lighthouse in the dark sky of post-colonies
I too become light bright in the vibrance of Nyanga.
There’s death in birth and birth in death – I dare you to flip the pages of non-fictions fiction.
One More Question: Humor me for deep dive's sake
When was the last time you questioned a system?
How will the future ‘you’ look different from the ‘you’ right now?
How do we create and sustain safety for queer (closeted) young people?
