For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith
and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God
not by works, so that no one can boast
Ephesians 2:8-9 (NIV)

Big bull now eeh?

Now, I see you have decided to be a bull. You with this… this pin on your nose.
We have heard rumours and have seen that you are an lgbtq now… In the respect you have for me, take that thing off…

This is a man whose orature I grew up watching and greatly admiring. The way his voice shifted, adding tremors and quivers when quoting from the Lord, the perfect emphasis point, a likening close to God. A mighty voice this was. The great one above must sound like this, I always thought, looking up at this beautifully dark towering figure. The brother of my father. Laughter, there was always laughter called upon around his presence. It was also in the vestments he wore, and how he swayed and even sashayed a little when walking in the ornately embroidered cassocks, some of which, I had heard, came from Rome. Seeing him under the lights by the altar, this look on his face… Was this all intentionally done to show that he truly was the anointed?

He was always the example of educational thriving, in spite of my mother’s very present existence there. My mother, a teacher by calling — it is a calling after all to nurture children, even those of the mungiki, to tell them to look around to change thought and actually have them attend those chemistry classes — to then return home to two children and that presence of a man. These three you have to think to feed and to clean and, and, and… and then yourself too. Do not forget yourself. It is a calling even if they forget sometimes.

“Children, come to wear this gown. Our father, your uncle, is now a Dr… Even you girls, if you work hard, you will get here.”

I take a picture of this, the designated photographer, with the camera he gifted and which is the very reason my friends now call me a photographer, and some a filmmaker. A tale of nurture, a tale of indebtedness.

 

Or do you not know that wrongdoers
will not inherit the kingdom of God?
Do not be deceived…
1 Corinthians 6:9 (NIV)

You want to join the choir in high school, so you sing in front of a panel of three, realizing as you go, because it is all written on their faces, that maybe instead of, you know, working entirely hard to afford you a private school all dressed in blue, your parents’ love should have actually just given you this truth, that you cannot sing at all. It was a no. It stung, but eventually you forget. Life will be full of many more rejections. They will hurt immensely.

You do not curse a child
calling it a triumph, if anything then happened to them.
But don’t you see how ugly your soul, killing a child for merely being?
If anything, you teach me to be unafraid,
forcing me, to stand up for myself in ways not even you ask from an abuser
— simply, because I
(to dance on weekends,
To kiss her as her me
Play with the waters
A child laughs lying on my bosom)
Am.

But this curse is what you have chosen.
Making me then unafraid of fate.
And if I die, so be it.
For this is a child — kind and gentle, happy and light,
that you may stand tall, hand beating on your chest.
The carrier of an ugly heart.

I wrote this, not to plead for acceptance for the curses we receive. I wrote this, standing by the grave of the woman I am named after. It was Wairimũ but also Gathigia, Nimo to some which gives mush and cush. I was cursed. How instantly I returned to being a child again, my being castigated in front of everyone no longer a being with agency.

“In the respect you have for me, take that thing off…”

This majestic voice now turned against me. It keeps ringing, but now with anger. I said no because even with the hurt and the risk of disconnect all at the age of twenty-eight, queerness shouldn’t come at a positioning of such loss?

“Just return to the Carol we used to know…”

No one, if ever, prepares you for this rejection from those who nurtured and loved you and are the reason you become both in matter and ideology.

 

For the Lord does not reject forever;
Though He brings grief, He has compassion,
according to the abundance of His mercy.
For He does not willingly afflict or bring grief to human beings.
Lamentations 3:31–33

It was Lesbian Visibility Week two weeks ago, and now I sit with how quickly these passionate romances burn, churn, and collapse into memory. How they leave you, leave me, in deep agony, returning again and again to the softness of her lingering kisses, the warmth of her breath against my skin, her wit arriving so easily and never seeming to end. Her smile now no longer turned toward me.

This particular grief in loving a woman and watching it fail to endure till the imagined end of days. It can be a question to wonder if maybe it is doomed because ideologically and morally the world had already named it wrong before you ever touched each other. And so we begin to see ourselves through wounds that are not entirely ours. Through the shame inherited from parents, from churches, from governments, from societies that summon us into being and then shudder at what we become, carrying these violences quietly into our loving, into our bodies, into the spaces where we try to be soft with one another.

But even in all of this, I want to believe that when I come to you, I am not the wound returning, at least not intentionally. Perhaps I am simply another person trying to survive this world beside you. A possible tenderness. A hand extended toward something freer, softer, more alive. And perhaps because of this, we are not doomed. Perhaps we can still meet each other gently. Still dance. Still play in water even. Still laugh with our whole bodies without waiting for this specific punishment to arrive.

May we come to know more than endurance. May we know tenderness without punishment. May we know love that does not immediately ask us to disappear.

Which one of you would hand his son a stone
when he asks for a loaf of bread?
— Matthew 7:9

 

 

 

 

 

 

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