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I want to specify human rights. This is not an attempt to insult anybody's intelligence. Far from it, I see the need to steer the vehicle of rights agitations on to what i think should be the right path. In doing this a problem must be identified and it is the very acknowledgement and recognition of this problem that sets everything to some kind of fulfillment or actualization.
What
we are doing now as a nation is denying what has been a part of us for
centuries before the coming of the Europeans. We are currently springing a
bouquet of denials and smugly congratulating ourselves for exorcising an
'alien' spirit. What we have neglected in our impetuosity and rashness--or just
simply refused to acknowledge--is that even the yardsticks with which we decide
what is right or wrong are completely foreign.
This
is how a group of devious and mischievous miscreants had begun a vendetta
against history. It is like having this beauty spot on your forehead but each
time someone points it out, you deny that it's there. How can one deny what is inexplicably
a part of one?
What
we deny is the very locality of homosexuality here. We would prefer to
erase--no, emasculate--the very existence of LGBT here. But at the back of our
minds, we hear conscience persist: we recall childhood and adolescent memories
of otherness, of peculiarities, of queerness. It is all there in those early
friendships and enmities--in all our human encounters. And did we take it for
granted then because we were young and 'naive'? Is what we do now right?
The
word 'right' is a funny diaphanous one and could, like the famous amoeba, take many
shapes and meanings. What is right here could be wrong elsewhere. Cultures thrive
on these subtle differences and yet remain dynamic.
Now
these clobbering miscreants, who are bent on victimizing LGBT people, and their
sympathisers balance their supposed high sense of morality on the pedestal of
religion, Christianity and Islamism. I will look at the one i know better. Some
160 years ago Christianity was virtually alien in our clime. It was brought
here by 'skinless' people from overseas. Before then our people worshiped many
gods and lived pretty fine. Now Christianity came and some made it their own.
Now more than a century later some people are using it to judge our characters,
erroneously citing Sodom and Gommorah which was, upon closer reading, punished
for bestiality. Even then there is a sense in which our diversities should be
seen as the wonderful handiwork of an infinitely creative God.
A
question that must be asked now remains: is this religion a part of us? Why
have we made it ours to such an extent as to guage our actions and inactions by
it? Like the risible woman in the proverb who cries more than the bereaved, we
have fanaticized and fundamentalized a religion that is not our own such that
some people take you to the cross for not going to church on Sunday. I find it
personally annoying on Sunday when someone greets me and then proceeds to ask
if i went to church, as if going there would all make us acknowledge each other's
humanity and right to exist in a diverse world and stop all these misguided clobbering
of others from happening. That hardly goes because churchgoers are occupied with
other things. The so-called custodians of morality today in our churches are
constantly falling short of expectations, especially considering how they have
made themselves effigies of purity. It is no longer news, is it, that many
sleep with women in their congregation. I have a personal grudge against a
religion that has not removed the cataract in its eye before trying to remove
that of others.
I
never wanted to tell this but i might as well go ahead. Months ago, in January,
it came to light that my younger sister was pregnant. It was a trying period
for me but to cut a long story short the culprit was a young pastor in a
certain church. And here was a guy who hardly makes a full sentence without putting
the name of God or quoting the bible. It says a lot about a society where a lot
of zealots cannot even live up to what they so vehemently proselytize.
Now,
why are we always trying to join the throng? Coming to terms with the LGBT came
naturally to me after long hours of introspection. The unsurprising insight
that came from that exercise is that these are people like any other. It is we
who have chosen to take their existence for granted. Now it's not about saying
from smug armchairs that 'Christianity' does not sanction this or that. That is
invalid. It's not about saying so stupidly and without any fact, it's not in
our culture, for it has been there. History is there to prove it. It takes
a little curiosity to clear things up. What comes up after all the sleuthing is
that we are dealing with human beings here with human feelings and with as
ordinary a motive and cause for living as any other. Why would I like to be
friends with a particular person? Is it because he is dark and everybody likes
dark people? Is it because she is intelligent and everyone prefers clever people?
When I become friends with a person, is it because he eats beans (I don't care
what he eats)? Is it because of her sex style or orientation? Such things are
trivial. In any case they play second fiddle. I am not your friend because you
prefer sex in a particular way. I mean, that hardly comes up at all. Why should
anyone spend his precious day imagining another person's sex life? These are
non-interest areas. Sex is not why I like Prof. Emenyonu or Prof. Diala or Dr.
Leon. I am simply not interested in how they have sex with their wives or
whoever. It's none of my business. And the idea doesn't come up at all, why
should it? Sex is not why I like Darlington or Johnpaul or Chibuihe or Olisa,
that hardly comes up. Then why would anyone be so concerned about another person's
sex life that he feels his sexual preference is not right? Why have we not
locked up porno viewers, sado-masochists, and all owners of Fifty Shades of
Grey and Pirates DVDs if we are so bent on maintaining orthodoxy?
(orthodoxy in this context may imply that LGBT is new which it's definitely
not. It's a living, fiery, defiant thing, like all visceral feelings that drive
humans.) What I am saying basically is that it shows the perversity at the very
heart of this ongoing victimization of other people and a gross trampling on
their human rights. What matters for each and every one of us, what makes our
fallibilities tolerable is the idea of our innate humanness, which brings up
the idea of fallibility and imperfections in the first place. These are people
such as we are. People who could be anything. People who eat and love and think
and laugh and hate. These are everyday people in the streets, in the markets,
in the banks.
What
is the motivation behind a Reverend Father or Sister's celibacy? Why do we
choose to do certain things and not the others? Why do we grovel at a thing for
years and then leave it for something else, something deceptively lesser
perhaps? The dialectics of happiness and choice is subjective to individual
human experiences. The dynamics of the workings of the human mind, their innate
convictions and inbuilt orientations, are sometimes beyond comprehension. Our
swiftness to involve sex as being at the heart of LGBT identity is a grotesque
testimony not only to the despicable perversity--even of the oh-so-smug moralists
in the churches--but also of their inchoate understanding and experience. Just
as sex operates at the periphery of our lives and encounters, albeit in an
important way, that is the way it is for them, for us, for everyone. It is a
free thing that has its boundaries.
In
lieu of a conclusion, I will refer to a book I just finished: Blessed Body
edited by Unoma Azuah. It is a book of real life stories, stories of people we
so shallowly condemn. The book shows that we are thoughtlessly condemning our next-door
neighbor, sibling, friend, etc. Reading the book instilled a kind of fear in me,
a trepidity I can only describe in apocalyptic terms. Before we call for a
person's head, let us sit down and reflect for a while and ask ourselves if it
is the right thing to do, if we ourselves are not guilty of a fundamental
violation of human rights, if we too are not really in very subtle--and not
immediately apparent ways--condemning ourselves too. This is the duty, the
specifics, of human rights: it encompasses all of us, not a particular group,
for we are all humans and nothing else.
Chimezie Chika's works has been published in Brittle Paper, Aerodrome, The Kalahari Review, Praxis Magazine, and several other literary outlets.
Chimezie Chika's works has been published in Brittle Paper, Aerodrome, The Kalahari Review, Praxis Magazine, and several other literary outlets.
I so much love this piece of work here. I do not know if it's because of the fact that you are a Nigerian, or the way you explained it and judged it critically that me love it more. I am so happy more Nigerians are beginning to view things with their own perceived mindset and not the mindset that was enforced on us.
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