Healing Masculinity and Getting Sensual with Onyango Otieno
From Nairobi, Rix Poet makes healing a revolutionary tool for men.
One of my favourite books is All About Love by bell hooks.It speaks of love as a practice of freedom against systems that oppress our ability to love ourselves, each other, and our environment. I love it because the theoretical part is complemented by a practical way to think about love. In it, hooks says, “I was in my mid-twenties when I first learned to understand love ‘as the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.’”
To extend oneself, one must love oneself: trusting, committing, and caring for the good parts and the bad. It wasn’t until my late twenties that I realised I really had to learn to love myself, and years later how that would contribute to my social justice work. Until then, hearing people be happy and proud about themselves and their lives made me uncomfortable; I even if subtly judged it as gloating. I was taught as a child not to be “too much,” and to not talk about my success or people might think I was vain. So I kept my wins to myself and viewed confidence as egotistical.
Last Thursday as I sat in conversation with Rix,I noticed that another person’s happiness and confidence do not make me uncomfortable anymore. Onyanbgo Otiengo, or Rix as he likes to be called, is a therapist, poet and activist living in Nairobi. When speaking of his heart, he said “I am the most conscious I have ever been in my adult life about who I am.” He went on to list what he was happy about, his emotional achievements.
“Mental health is a social justice issue. Our minds are only as healthy as the systems of our environment,”
The reason he can speak like this is that Rix has worked on discovering his own traumas and vulnerabilities. He is now a mental health coach who helps men get in touch with their vulnerabilities. He works with men who have experienced sexual trauma, and runs talks, workshops and seminars in schools across the world championing healthier ideas of masculinity. He speaks of sex in a way that is open and feels comfortable, his confidence feels authentic because it is accompanied by an embrace of the dark sides of his humanity. He is also an incredibly talented poet, who found poetry as a means to shelter from a violent home.
“Mental health is a social justice issue. Our minds are only as healthy as the systems of our environment,” is the first sentence you read on his website. We naturally begin to talk about the personal being political. “My personal life is intrinsic to my environment,” he says, “I can’t really separate my thought processes, what I read, what I wear. All of it is political because it has to do with access, language, race, and spirituality. So, I am interconnected, my within interconnected to my without.” What he says reminds me of the process of alignment, something I have been working on in my personal and political life. Deconditioning myself is intrinsic to deconditioning from the systems that have inhabited me. Personal healing and interior discovery are necessary revolutionary tools. “The way I move around my cultures is also choreographed by what that culture wants me to be,” he tells me.
In 2016, Rix shared his rape story with the world. He did it to “urge more men who had been sexually abused to come out from the silence and shame associated with male vulnerability.” I found his framing groundbreaking. The narratives I have observed around male abuse put male and female abuse in competition - see the #Mentoo hashtag for examples. A recent surge in how we speak of male domestic violence and sexual abuse since the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial proved this even further. It seems there is a fear to speak of the nuances of abuse, and it is easier to make it a competition - my abuse is more important than yours.
Rix focuses much of his work on healing masculinity, mainly with African men. He tells me that in many African cultures, which are also patriarchal, the land is usually inherited by men. “When they stole the land they stole the African man’s identity. It was in very small bits, spanned over hundreds of years,” he says, speaking of the colonial scars that are characteristic in African men. He tells me much of his work is focused on coming to terms with this collective trauma and working with it.
Yet, the personal and political must happen simultaneously, “Men don't learn to be intimate. We don't learn to really be emotionally intelligent. We grow up thinking our place in life is always to fight, to compete, to be above somebody else. And that fits right into the story of capitalism because it is very Eurocentric and hetero patriarchal,” he says. “It’s all interwoven. And by design, it also relates to women’s struggles. I'm out there looking for myself, but also think I have power over someone simply because of their gender,” he says metaphorically. “Emotionally, a majority of men are still in the ‘jungle.’ This is the simplest metaphoric way I could put it. We haven't evolved,” he tells me. We must question the hierarchical structures that men have become very comfortable with if we want the world to change.
“Emotionally, a majority of men are still in the ‘jungle.’ This is the simplest metaphoric way I could put it. We haven’t evolved,”
Rix's work is a poetic weaving of healthy masculinity, art, emotions and generosity. Through his erotic poems, he expresses a beautifully sensual narrative that breaks the stigma around speaking openly and safely about sex and intimacy. By turning these subjects into art, he embodies the narrative he wants the world to embrace, around masculinity, sexuality, and mental health.
Seeing him was an expanding experience. He reinforced a principle that I believe in deeply: that to dismantle a system, we need to first dismantle the systems within ourselves. Men too.
Thank you for reading this month’s Art Corner! This is a monthly column, and a passion project made a reality by New Media Advocacy Project.
You can follow Rix’s work on his Instagram Page and Website
