VIOLENT LOVING.
Words by an SoN Contributor
Image from Brown Queers. Image Credits: Dan Fontanelli
How can peace be brokered between two parties when one does not even recognise the conflict as a conflict but as love, as loving? Pain is inflicted, violence enacted for the purpose of loving. When my mother tells me my homosexual relationship will go nowhere because of gender incompatibilities, I am told it’s done in my best interests. And so I cage my anger. I have been angry at my parents for a long time now, for many reasons but their responses to my queerness is a particularly salient one. I keep my anger in check by remembering that homophobia in West Africa is a colonial legacy, a Western import. My love and my desire for their continued loving also tempers my anger. I wish I could scream at them sometime ‘Look what you have done to me!’ but I know they wouldn’t understand. They seem too deeply entrenched in colonial thinking and it is too painful when I try to draw them out of it, and evidently too much for them to handle. My awareness of my relative privilege as a queer person pacifies my anger somewhat. When I came out to my parents I had been, like many queer people of colour, preparing for the worst. My father had threatened to kick me out and disown me a few times; my parents had both given sermons warning against homosexuality a few times; they told 6 // QUEER BODIES.