I had read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s book The Thing Around Your Neck and so I thought that I knew that Kenya was not a country unlike America in the industrialized sense. Even so, when I watched Rafiki and the way in which the Kenyan urban environment was portrayed I found myself being subconsciously surprised. I tried to think of what I had been expecting but I couldn’t; I had known logically that it would look similar to an industrialized city like the one I grew up in, but I couldn’t reconcile that with the rhetoric I had heard about Africa as a whole throughout my life. In fact, I saw a lot of commonalities between America and Kenya in the way gender norms were enforced and how sensationalized politics became. I think this really emphasized once again how powerful that subliminal messaging that I’ve received as an American about Africa can be on myself, even when I know it to be false and strongly believe that. Going into this movie I was wondering how my frame and positionality as a straight white man would impact how I experienced it. Often straight men sexualize and fetishize lesbian women, and I wondered if my positionality wouldn’t mesh well with the material and that my viewership wouldn’t do it justice in that way. I also wondered if it would just feel like my perspective in watching the movie might be disjointed. But I think I got a lot out of the movie, I was pretty invested and it was really compelling. It made me reflect on similar themes in my own culture.
Returning to this reflection is a bit surreal for me, as I am now a senior, and I wrote this when I was in a very different place as a freshman. Besides, I’ve since come out as a bisexual, so I would probably feel less discomfort watching this movie as someone who feels more grounded in the queer community and experience of my own culture. I still relate to my thoughts on the perception of Africa in America and how powerful that implicit bias can be in shaping my viewpoint. The emphasis on intercultural learning as a lifelong process that the Global Engagement Minor integrates into its curriculum really resonates with me in this way, because these subliminal messaging require active reframing to resist. I don’t think I realized this at the time, but thinking back, I think Rafiki was the first film that I watched that had gay characters, lesbian or otherwise. Growing up I learned that gay people existed from playground hecklers in elementary school, and during high school there was a practice among boys of calling things gay to indicate that they sucked or that they were lame. I knew that there were a handful gay people somewhere, but I didn’t think they lived in my neighborhood or went to my high school. I certainly didn’t think it would be OK for me to be one of them. So now I guess I relate to a sense of being isolated from your community that is represented in Rafiki. They weren’t in the TV shows that I watched, or the books I read, or among hollywood actors. I think my first exposure to homosexual activity being represented in media was through reading Kite Runner in 9th grade, where a bully sexually assaults a best friend of the main character, who watches and does nothing. This is not necessarily a strike against Kite Runner, I think it was an illuminating read and valuable for American children to read the book and learn about how the author’s experience growing up in Afghanistan informed the narrative. But I doubt that scene helped my internalized homophobia. The first time I was exposed to a gay relationship in media was through Giovanni’s Room either in 10th or 11th grade English class. I think it was the only book assigned in high school that I didn’t finish. I was a bit of an overachiever, but engaging with the text made me feel like I was being lowered into a pit of snakes. The anxiety made my skin crawl. I hated seeing the title on my shelf; once it seemed to fall to the ground of its own accord and I felt like it was taunting me. It all seems a bit silly now, but high school is an awkward time. Ironically, though, I wasn’t called the f-slur until I came here to Wesleyan.
All this to say, we tend to think of African societies as less progressive than our own with regards to social issues like acceptance of homosexuality. However, while there may be cultural differences, I can draw parallels between the homophobia represented in Rafiki and my experience growing up in the United States. To me, gay people just seemed to be absent growing up in the early 2000’s. But now that I’m older, I see that this absence takes a lot of upkeep to maintain in our political sphere, and is a site of much anxiety for many Americans. So I’m thankful for Rafiki, for occupying just a little bit of that void in my life at that time.
