limitlessafricans: #LimitlessAfricans: PO, Afro-Queer Congolese (Shot in Mons, Belgium) Q. Was there
limitlessafricans: #LimitlessAfricans: PO, Afro-Queer Congolese (Shot in Mons, Belgium) Q. Was there ever a time where you felt pushed away from your African or LGBTQ identities? If so, how did you overcome that personally? “I’ve felt pushed away, and trying to push myself away also, since a young age because of the integration injonction - [compulsion] to integrate - which meant moving away from African-ness, and also by the fact that I don’t speak the african language of my parents, which is Swahili. It made me feel… It’s part of the thing that made me feel like a black Belgian person but not an African. Just black Belgian. But at the same time identifying as a Belgian who is black it’s mindfucking because I have to come from somewhere. I am pushed away from my queer and African identity by being afro-queer, it’s not supposed to go together for many people on both sides. I felt it more hard to affirm my queer identity in queer and LGBT space because people would see me as a straight because I’m black. I felt isolated and I felt nobody should be isolated as I feel. So if I have to be the first one around, I will be the one showing that some black people are also queer. And so I decided that I didn’t have to prove anything to anybody, and I would never exclude one identity to appease anybody. And when I started to do that, I managed to meet more people in the same situation, and particularly thanks to social networks. Also being African and queer was two outsider identities and for me it never seemed impossible to combine. In both spaces I was supposed to be fitting a norm that I wasn’t able to fit. Whether it’s the white one or the straight one, and when you say “fuck it” to one it’s easy to say “fuck it” to both.” - PO (she/they, IG: @po.b.k.lomami, Twitter: @lomamipo, Facebook: Po B. K. Lomami, Website: www.turbonegresse.org) Website: www.limitlessafricans.comDonate: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=48VSXUG4RBZVG -- source link
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