Liberating Lit: Iryn Tushabe on Writing Stories of African Black Queer Joy Under Oppression

In the spring of 2015, after I’d been working as a journalist for nearly two years, my post-graduation Work Permit expired. I’d been in Canada for seven years by then. I was allowed to stay in the country while my application for permanent residency was being processed. But in the meantime, it was illegal for me to work here—though I was expected to keep paying off my student debt—so my employer let me go.

I’d always wanted to write fiction but never—between school, work, and parenting—had the time. Now I had more of it than I knew what to do with. In the beginning, opening my laptop and making up a story was a way to distract myself, like my daughter soothing herself with song when anxious.

When I was making up stories, I wasn’t obsessively checking the immigration and citizenship website for wait times, which were exasperatingly vague. I wasn’t hanging out in the chatrooms of those who were stuck in immigration limbo, commiserating about our stalled lives.

When I started writing a story about a young woman whose sister is gay in Uganda (where homosexuality is criminalized) I found myself listening again to the episodes of This American Life featuring David Rakoff. My journalism professor had recommended the podcast back in 2012 when I was a student at the University of Regina.

David wrote about his queerness with the same self-deprecation he applied to other aspects of his life. Hearing him qualify his observations with phrases like, “to be perfectly homosexual about things,” made me guffaw. The laughter lightened some of the weight I still carried from the years I spent petitioning the Christian God (in whom I was raised to have absolute faith) to erase my bisexuality.

I’m still grappling with those years. I like this word grapple. How it evokes not stillness, but a movement forward one grip at a time.

Writing Everything is Fine Here was an act of faith, too: a grapathon that lasted six years. By then my status in Canada had changed from permanent resident to citizen.

But when I submitted the manuscript around, prospective agents and publishers didn’t understand how the lesbian characters in my novel could be reckless and carefree when everyone in the news-reading world knows about Uganda’s Anti-homosexuality law (AHA).

Those who understand the inner workings of publishing advised me to “raise the stakes.” This would make the manuscript more appealing to publishers. The resulting novel would be so marketable.

I was considerably shocked that the threat of disinheritance—which is very real for the lesbian sister in my novel (who has endured years of conversion therapy)—wasn’t tragic enough. As a young teenager when I came out to my mum, my biggest fear was that she’d stop loving me.

Disinheritance—or being disowned—is a more realistic punishment in rural Uganda where most people don’t know about AHA, but would, because of widespread Christianity, view sexual attraction between people of the same gender as sinful.

In any case, if raising the stakes meant reproducing the grammar of violence that often defines the narratives of people living on the margins, I was unwilling to go there. In fact, I had assumed that since everyone knows about Uganda’s state sanctioned homophobia—which Western media dubbed “Kill the Gays”—I didn’t need to focus on it as much.

Not just because scenes involving physical violence are difficult to write and leave me feeling hopeless, but they can inadvertently glorify the oppressor and create justifications for state actors carrying out the oppression.

I’m drawn to portrayals of queer black people living their lives unapologetically and on their own terms. A couple of lesbians living together and fulfilling their dreams and ambitions regardless of the hostility around them is infinitely more interesting to explore. How they build beautiful and resilient communities around themselves—those are the stakes that heal our imperialized eyes.

So, what does it mean when the majority of the African LGBTQI+ narratives lauded as “important,” “urgent,” or “powerful” are ones where queer black bodies are tortured, shamed and violated? And what kind of reading culture is fostered by a publishing industry that prioritizes those particular narratives?

“The problem with this type of reading,” writes Elaine Castillo in How to Read Now (in an essay titled reading teaches us empathy and other fictions “is that in its practical application, usually readers are encouraged…to read writers of a demographic minority in order to learn things.”

It’s a practice, she argues, that turns writers of color into little more than ethnographers. “The result is that we largely end up going to writers of color to learn the specific—and go to white writers to feel the universal.”

It’s not just that our fiction is instrumentalized to educate. This imagined universal audience—always positioned as white—has seen the CNN interview where President Yoweri Museveni uses deplorable language to describe gay people. That’s the specific knowledge queer Ugandan writers are expected to expound upon and teach about. If we depict queer joy, are we really representing our communities responsibly?

But by this logic, only writers from the global west—white writers who’ve benefitted from the rights and freedoms fought for by the gay liberation movement—are allowed to imagine queer presences navigating life with adventure and creativity.

So African queer bodies are relegated to explaining their joy—their full humanity, that is—to the imagined universal audience. This persistent centering of whiteness is what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (may he rest in peace) calls the normalized abnormality of colonialism.

These days when I think about David Rakoff—his books are favorably positioned on the shelf closest to my writing desk—I see him not writing, but dancing. The image is from the episode of This American Life called “The Invisible Made Visible,” which was taped in front of a live audience.

There’s a video on YouTube. David dips his good arm and sweeps it up and over his head. Then he’s doing this thing, lithely moving backward and forward. He’s transformed his body into a state he described earlier: “a beautiful working instrument of placement and form and concentration.”

I’ll forever be grateful to him for his language and humor, some of it so sophisticated it often went over my head. I have a feeling that his stories moved me so much because he got to decide for himself what aspects of his life he wanted to write about and how.

In Everything is Fine Here, Mbabazi tells her teenaged sister, “Write about this. Write that you’re embracing the woman your sister loves and that your sister is bawling her eyes out.” Aine rolls her eyes; she can generate her own ideas, thank you very much, big sis.

Much later when she does decide to write that narrative, it is because of the message her uncle brings to Mbabazi and her partner, Achen. Grandma wants the girls to know this: where many people walk, a new path clears. In turn, Aine writes the story for herself and for those people walking the path her grandmother invokes.

That crowd—the ones who don’t need to be convinced of Mbabazi’s and Achen’s full humanity—are my desired readership, too.

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Everything Is Fine Here by Iryn Tushabe is available via House of Anansi Press.