Diriye Osman

I've always loved being gay. Sure, Kenya was not exactly Queer Nation but my sexuality gave me joy. I was young, not so dumb and full of cum! There was no place for me in heaven but I was content munching devil's pie here on earth.

In the Somali culture many things go unsaid: how we love, who we love and why we love that way. I don't know why Suldana loves the way she does. I don't know why she loves who she does. But I do know that by respecting her privacy I am letting her dream in a way that my generation was not capable of. I'm letting her reach for something neither one of us can articulate.

As black people, our lives are not tragedies. I will keep fighting against that narrative. Our lives are survival stories that have been passed down from generation to generation. These stories are about joy and celebration and our inherent power. No-one has the capacity to steal our joy. We must resist, resist and keep resisting. We refuse to be annihilated.

He carries home in the way he walks: an elegant, loose strut. He wears home on his skin in the form of attar, a delicious perfume that makes me dream of Somali coastlines, places where children play football amidst colonial ruins, and young men like Korfa flee in darkness on boats to Yemen and Kenya, determined never to look back.

Even Story Time was political. Miss Mumbi infused each fairytale with Kenyan flavour. She illustrated these remixes on the blackboard. 'Rapunzel' became 'Rehema,' a fly gabar imprisoned in Fort Jesus. Rehema had an Afro that grew and grew. Her Afro grew bigger than her body and she looked bomb. The Afro became so strong that it burst through the ceiling of the fort. It exploded into the sky and reached the stars. The Afro wrapped itself around the moon and pulled Rehema out of the fort.

Every experience lately felt like an experiment of the body, of its power and limitations. Such experiments created a desire for something more fulfilling. It was a hunger born of rootlessness but he couldn't see that. He couldn't see that true liberation was a strictly DIY process.

I'm delving into my spirit and unearthing diamonds glazed with grit. I have stopped trying to make these stones glint. Sixir and soulwork are more specific terms for such self-mining. Sixir and soulwork are a kiss from God, and as such, won't submit to decompression. A kiss from God is a dirt-coated diamond buried bowel-deep within the human animal. A kiss from God is how we live and die in this spirit-trapped multiverse

There was once a house built out of memories and inside this house lived a woman called The Memory Snatcher. This woman was my Aunt Beydan. She was a sorceress and as a child I feared she would stalk me in my sleep and steal all my memories until I could no longer remember who I was.

Home is in my hair, my lips, my arms, my thighs, my feet and my hands. I am my own home. And when I wake up crying in the morning, thinking of how lonely I am, I pinch my skin, tug at my hair, remind myself that I am alive. Remind myself to step outside and greet the morning. Remind myself that it’s all about forward motion. It’s all about change. It’s all about that elusive state. Freedom.

When were you first told that you have no value, and when did that torment calcify into the deepest truths you hold about yourself? When did you first break? How did you piece yourself back together? What was the point when you realized that you had to dig out all your roots, and tend to the soil of you, which is to say, the softest, sweetest part of your essence?