The Lesbian Wedding
This piece was written by Āryā Jeipea Karijo. Āryā was part of a team conducting an experiment in Kenya as part of our 5x5x5 experiments, which were part of the co-design phase of building the Narrative Hive. Participants brought together a group of 5 people, who were given $5,000 to spend 5 weeks testing out an idea linked to narrative change in their communities.
“We had a wedding in June!” This statement is likely to elicit congratulations. People often see an imaginary glow around those wedded or even attribute real skincare effort to marital bliss and are filled with thoughts of joy and happiness - sometimes life long happiness.
But our wedding was more than the everyday wedding. It was also a work of narrative change, a political statement by two lesbians (or sapphics if you will) trying to challenge societal exclusion of people like them from the joy of living their lives.
THE PLAN
We set out to do this with the naivete that most activists have. We wanted to change things. We had been in that Courtroom in Kenya when the Judges refused to decriminalise our communities. We heard them say that discrimination against our community was a type of “differentiation”. We lived through the next two years after the Court ruling dreaming and working for better lives and also going through challenges that come with living your authentic truth - evictions, the young ones among us being disowned by parents, livelihood challenges. Yet we still stood up to even the government whenever there was an infringement such as the one by the education minister against young queer high schoolers. We also did beautiful things, partied when we could, supported community and mutual aid, loved one another and created chosen families.
We believed that challenging the myths that were the foundation of our society’s discrimination against our community would be a powerful action in two ways. Firstly to validate the humanity of young queer folx in High School or in their 20s and secondly, to directly challenge society to admit that hate and not all of the other excuses used, was the actual underlying reason for discrimination.
The wedding was therefore targeted at a number of myths. The first myth was that queerness was a Western import, and that it was not African. We specifically targeted this by invoking African Gods and ancestors who were queer as part of the wedding invocation. Like all powerful narratives this was such a strongly held belief that the Judge on May 24th 2019 stated it as part of her ruling. Even within Civil Society it was a widely held belief, with some AID and Non Profit organisations wrongly stating that they were working in areas with retrogressive African cultures. No one ever paid attention to any ethnography or written works that dispelled this as a myth - but they would pay attention to a wedding. The second myth was regarding genders and sexuality, the fact that our communities are overly sexualised and no one attributes love and family to us. The wedding emphasised freedom and our kind of love and the beauty of sexual beings. Having a non binary person and a transgender woman as the lesbian couple just broke every little myth about the gender binary. The final myth was that our way of loving and our lives were just a “behaviour or a bad habit” that could be deterred using the law or other societal tools such as religion - it was a myth against our very humanity.
Our wedding aimed to challenge all this hegemonic thinking that the world around us referred to as normalcy, Africanness, Godliness/righteousness that was embedded in laws that included death sentences in four African countries and a 14 year jail term in the country where we held the wedding.
NARRATIVE CHANGE WORK AND ALL THE LESSONS WE LEARNED
We learned that we were not free of narratives. So we set out to do a wedding to challenge societal stereotypes, but we failed to consider powerful narratives built into weddings themselves. And we as brides, and as the team of co-conspirators that created this beautiful work, as a community of queer people, were not immune to the narratives built into weddings. While the narratives and myths that we were working against were explicit and were used to exclude us from society we stumbled into powerful myths built into weddings. Before the experiment we underrated the importance of wedding as a ritual/practice/event but after we realised how much life significance it held and what our communities were being excluded from by society and by the law.
The first powerful lesson was that narratives are always part of our lives. We didn’t realise how much weddings were part of our lives until our little band of queers landed in this little coastal town. Somewhere within us the narrative of this being a family and community celebration was still alive and the people standing on the beach that Saturday afternoon weren’t actors; they were part of a communal celebration of love that we had all been told wasn’t for us.
And yes there was all the wedding drama of bad weather, things not being ready - always a thin line between totally hating each other after a wedding but also realising what we meant to each other. My “partner in crime” remembered all their vows while myself - who had all along taken the stance of an objective scientist - found I couldn’t remember any of mine. I had balancing tears in my eyes when my person said their vows and I tried to laugh the tears off or brush them away. I was so joyful and emotional and in those moments I appreciated this human being with whom we had fought for, lost with and won so much together over three years of knowing each other and in our activism. Then I appreciated this little band of queers who had taken this long train ride to the Coast to make this happen, especially the Gen Z folx who were my friends and friends of my 22 year old human. And we were all dealing with so much individually. My partner in crime literally had a surgery coming up two days after the wedding - so not much of a honeymoon or sunshine in this post wedding part of the song.
So really five weeks of a narrative experiment was a lie, we had been in one way or another interacting with this narrative all our lives, maybe interacting with it even more intensely since each one of us had started to live our authentic lives as queer folx. These five weeks were a culmination of something that had been there all the while. Even stepping out of our own experiment now, I imagine no one who would do an experiment around early girl marriage, the neglect of menstrual or reproductive health of women or the exclusion of women from equal opportunity and choice would be coming at it from a 5 week perspective. It would be something that they had been interacting with for most of their life and such is the power of narratives to just be there all the while holding so much power in our lives and yet being so anonymous.
The second powerful lesson was the effect this narrative had on the world outside of us.
Weddings had such narratives of joy and love and community built around them that even traditional narratives of hate could not prevail against this type of a celebration.
When we hit social media in August so many people poured in with congratulations, we turned down gifts and offers for trips because we were keenly aware of the experimental part of our wedding, others sent messages saying how they had seen “this love unfolding” before we even saw it. The power of a positive narrative was almost greater than that of negative narratives that denied our type of love or denied our type of genders or denied our existence. We literally got on Prime time news speaking about elections and queer folx, not because we had held a protest or demonstration but because we had wedded. Even now there are people waiting for the next instalment of this story because weddings are supposed to be episode one and then people wait for other narratives they have built into this. Partly to my amusement even “criminalised communities” like ours still have exactly the same societal expectations such as break ups or anniversaries, and growth of families.
So, at the risk of rambling on and on about our “Lesbian Wedding” I will stop here and just say for any narrative change work the first lesson would be immersion. Participants need to be deeply personally invested in the social experiment or the narrative change, so much so that it blurs the line between what is and what is not - kind of like an ethnographic immersion in which you are both the ethnographer and the community. The second lesson would be openness to whatever happens or unfolds when we touch narratives.
In our case, while challenging a set of negative narratives, we found ourselves caught up in the power of a positive narrative that we had not seen in its full depth or power.
The third lesson is of course to know that it doesn’t end there. Narratives are powerful in the sense that one event will trigger more events and being ready and open for post experiment continuity is important. The fourth lesson is being able to step out and document and think about the lessons learned like we did with the mini documentary and like I am doing now. This is so important so as not to lose the gains of the narrative work.
Finally having some human time - this I might have failed to do mostly because all our lives were happening so fast. Being able to gather all your participants and breathe together and ground ourselves again because any narrative change work is really a storm and people need to be held when they land.
