Towards a Judgement of Character – Muriithi Kariuki

1.

When I talk about my experiences today, I laugh

2.

I laugh because removed from the cruelty of their immediacy, experiences become more palatable – sometimes even comic.

3.

Three years ago my friend and I walked two kilometres to meet some men who had asked us to meet outside of our alma mater and later on go out for a party. Once there, we called the men, said that they would be there in 10 minutes. We waited 10 minutes, called back. They said, they would be there in a short while, that they are now taking the corner. And so we waited, snapping gestures of the corner, scrutinising every approaching car. 10 minutes turned into 15, 20, 30, 40. Every car sped past us. For more than an hour we waited before, in their drunken state, told us to go back home.

4.

On that cold Nairobi night, shivering, shock and disbelief was written all over my face. Unable to comprehend what had just transpired walking back to the house, I was there, beefing up my friend, masking my humiliation with mockery: “Those men are so ghetto.”

4.

Then there was the October sun of 2021. Tired, broke and in a desperate need of consolation, a hug, I walked three kilometres from Thika-Runda to Makongeni to connect with a man, who had assured me, with everything possible in this world, that it would be alright. He had not, it was my making, my intuition that a hug from him would undo the turmoil that had built in me. The man looked at me from his window behind the blinds where I could not see him and texted, Go back, you are not my type. 

6.

These are the less cruel encounters with men. The ones I can laugh about now.

7.

Other memories resist laughter.

8.

June 2021. A man I was casually dating threatened, among other things, to destroy my life. No one breaks my heart and goes unpunished, he texted. He blackmailed me, said he would stand on my apartment roof top and announce that he and I were dating. A student then, I was afraid the landlord would throw me out on flimsy behavioral grounds and if the case ended up in courts, I would become the face of queer on queer violence, a caricature of the struggle that activists had put up to defend. For two weeks, I did not step into my house. My first exile born from queer on queer cruelty.

9.

Among the men he had been with and who he had fallen out with, I came to learn later on through networks that I was one handed the least severe ‘punishment’. One young man, a knife driven into his stomach survived after being hospitalised for months.

10.

In June 2022, after being forced out of the city for three months by financial ruin I returned back having fallen out with my countryside relatives. Homeless, the first day, a man who had asked for my support after being blackmailed in the city, got me drunk. Back in his house, I could feel his body on me. I was there, saying No, I am not ready and I could feel him more and more eager pushing himself into me.

11.

The penetration did not happen. Somehow, the name of the high school I went to saved me. The next day, I closed his door never to return.

12.

In January 2023, I wrote about my former friend and lover Edwin Kiptoo Kiprotich ‘Chiloba’, an activist murdered and his body stashed in a metal box that was discovered on a road in Eldoret, Kenya. Published in Minority Africa in May of the same year, the piece argues that the homophobia within society and state silences survivors of intimate partner violence. Drawing from my experiences of intimate partner violence, I contended that silencing is done, systematically, sometimes, without pangas or machetes on anyone’s neck. Queer people, isolated through laws, violence and mockery by the majority society, are pushed into private relationships where even neighbours mistake them as friends – leaving their struggles unseen. In that article, I simply argued that society had done its worst, that it had created the murderer Jackton Odhiambo and put his Victim as perfect prey.

13.

For more than a year, I have battled what I wrote, the argument that I made with absolute belief as I faced the murder of my dearest friend. I have looked at windows (like where the man looked at me from) and revisited my experiences with men and the exoneration of queer agency in crimes and cruelty committed on each other.

14.

The place of the oppressed person in the system they exist in has long been a matter of debate. Are they solely shaped by the forces of oppression or do they bear responsibility for the actions they take in response to their circumstances?

15.

In 1952, Richard Wright accused James Baldwin of betrayal. At the Brasserie Lipp in Paris, an angry Wright confronted Baldwin over the accusation that the idea of the protest novel was wrong. “All literature is protest,” Wright insisted. An astonished Baldwin could not believe it, he rather expected a pat on the back for what he deemed an original idea. For more than a decade after that, the two writers, according to Baldwin, would only once forget the debate and briefly rekindle their friendship.

16.

The first time I read, in fact, for years since I read Everybody’s Protest Novel, like Wright, I could not bring myself to see what Baldwin had tried to put across. Published in 1952 and subsequently included in Notes of a Native Son, Everybody’s Protest Novel, is a tour de force on polemical works that had been so admired for their show of how bad oppression is. In works like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the protest Novel, as Baldwin writes, tends to show: “This is perfectly horrible! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!”

17.

In 1940, Wright published the acclaimed novel Native Son. Fashioned from the Depression and Jim Crow era, the book follows Bigger Thomas, an utterly poor 20-year-old man from the south side of Chicago. Working for a white family, Bigger accidentally kills a white girl and is forced, in the racial nightmare he exists in, into a desperate attempt to escape. Captured, he is marshalled into a court. In a passionate lengthy speech, his lawyer Boris A. Max lays down the social conditions that had produced Bigger Thomas. Through his speech, he emphasises that Bigger was a man each of the people who sat there and everywhere throughout America, had made.

18.

In Bigger Thomas, Wright had seen the vehicle through which oppression creates the oppressed. In fact the murder of Bigger’s loyal black girlfriend Bessie Mears is treated as a mere act of desperation, an act made out of the fear of Betrayal. For Wright, it seemed, only Bigger Thomas could be a victim of racial oppression.

19.

“Our humanity is our burden, our life,” Baldwin quipped. Under oppression, he argued, the oppressor and the oppressed are held together by the categories created within society. That everyone has agency in what they do and their humanity or lack thereof cannot be merely explained through the categorisation created. The Protest Novel, evidenced by Wright’s Native Son, failed this test.

20.

Baldwin, in his evisceration, was rather succinct. But perhaps what both Baldwin and Wright failed to include, or rather grasp in their arguments was the relationship between two oppressed people. What happens, how do we judge two undeniably oppressed people who must navigate their lives with and against each other under terms not of their own making?

21.

In Thomas Mallon’s Fellow Travellers (brilliantly captured in the series film of the same title) the protagonists are caught in a quagmire neither of them created. Set in the 1950s at the height of the McCarthy era when anti communism paranoia and fear of homosexuals ruled the American State Department, the story follows the fraught romantic relationship between Timothy Laughlin, a young man eager to make a mark in Washington and Hawkins Fuller, a charming, handsome older gentleman and more cynical state department official.

At a time of moral panic, fear mongering and accusations that lead to witch hunts, the two protagonists are acutely different. Timothy, the younger of the two, even though aware of the political climate, is irrevocably in love with Hawkin. Hawkin on the other hand, pragmatic and aware of the society and political climate the two men are in is self preservative. In the immediacy of the homosexual witch hunts, first goes Mary Johnson, a lesbian woman and secretary, then others and then at last, Hawkins gives Timothy up as prey. Sad, Timothy leaves Washington right into a devastating HIV crisis. Isolated, he would be dead at 59.

22.

When I wrote the Minority Africa piece, I was writing from a place of persecution. In the heated social media space that accused queer people of murder and silenced by public hostility, I had no other course than to write on the systemic silencing of queer on queer violence. Yet, even this writing carried its own risks – the risk of absolving or defending queer agency in crimes and cruelties on each other.

23.

Jacktone Odhiambo, then 24 years old and Edwin Chiloba, 25 were caught up in a world they both had not made – a world made of systemic homophobia, repression and violence. Given this world, though they fell in love, one leaned into dazzling resilience, turning fashion into defiance and activism. The other, locked into the vague shadows of a closeted life, could only live from a place of fear and resentment. In the end, one was dead and the other would be found guilty of murder a year later.

24.

Mary Bears. Timothy Laughlin. Mary Johnson. Edwin Chiloba.

25.

Queer activism as practiced today is a public facing endeavour – one whose goal is to show how horrible homophobia is. But what has our existence, rather, survival within these systems ultimately made of us?

26.

Queer people, like all other oppressed people, live with each other. Their relations are formed within and by a society that has categorised them. Their frictions or lack thereof are from the same place and categories that created them.

27.

As of November 2024, Jacktone Odhiambo is guilty of murder. The prosecution lawyers, some of them activists in their own right, are asking for the heaviest, maximum penalty.

28.

Jacktone Odhiambo could hang in the gallows.

29.

Bigger Thomas. Jacktone Odhiambo.

30.

In most cases, no one ends up dead. The quieter, more insidious cruelties shape our lives.

31.

Drunk one night at a club during a friend’s birthday party, I watched as two young queer men learned their first lesson in queer on queer disposability. After the merry, hype and a dancing happy man painting cake cream on my friend and whispering that he would love him forever and the rest of us, in the most out of tune voices singing Happy birthday at 3am all the glamour and flirting came to an end. Those whose flirting had succeeded, hand in hand with their lovers for the night, left for home. The two kids, living with their parents, could not go home. Drunk and queer, they would have to answer on knocking the door at 3am.

“You should go home with these kids, you brought them here,” I protested.

“We are not anyone’s parents, they should have known how they would go back,” one of the party attendees shot back.

32.

That night I was reminded, like in my own experiences, of the many ways queer people can be fleetingly cruel to each other – an aspect of our reality, our activism, so reliant on positive public facing rarely exposes.

33.

And yet, like all oppression, exposed or not, homophobia is lived by real people, whether deeply closeted or out in their full glory and activism. The categories society imposes upon us are carried in the unspoken fears and in the cruelties we dish out upon each other – the small acts that shape our commonplace, everyday lives. These are the moments that go unnoticed but leave their scars all the same.

34.

I blocked most of the men whose cruelty I endured. I swear, it’s not vindictiveness – it’s survival. But at times – just at times – I want to unblock them and send: Hi, I hope you finally made it out of that dusty Makongeni that you looked at me from the window and told me ‘Go back, you are not my type’. I am writing from Rome, Italy, where are you getting shocked from?

35.

But what would sending it even mean? Possibly, they wouldn’t care. And maybe, years later, having grown older and moved continents neither do I – except for the small part of me that still wishes for the world to see me fully. Even them!

Muriithi Kariuki is a writer activist currently based in Rome, Italy. Their work explores identity, the Black queer condition and what it means to be queer in a world that categories are made sense of but rarely looked into internally. Their work has been published in Minority Africa and the Kenyan Newspaper Daily Nation.

*Image by lloyd jr. on Unsplash