Thinking time.

What drove the man in the house of horrors nightmare?

Humanity is such a contrast. We can be very kind, and very cruel. Irrespective of race, and of gender, and up bringing.

It is so easy to characterize and stereotype people. The stereotypes help us to think, and hide a lot of the individuality which we all show. Goodness is a perception, and so is evil. To some people I am evil because I am gay. Or I am evil because I affirm that I am gay. Or I am evil because I embrace other gay people from the ‘west’. To others, I am good because I am kuchu.

Once upon a time, soon after I had discovered the gay community in Uganda, I was very trusting. See, I had lived with my secret for years. Then I found that there were people who shared it, and I could trust my deepest, darkest secret with them. I thought that because I could trust them that way, I could trust them in all ways.

Well, kuchu life is a merciless jungle, wilderness. I was soon disabused of that.

Nowadays, when someone comes to me complaining of the ‘badness’ of the kuchu community, I commiserate, and tell them even kuchus are human beings. Bad, good, indifferent, some are supremely evil and uncaring of others. Some are worth of being friends.

That man who deceived his wife, abused his daughter from 11 years of age, then imprisoned her and made her a sex slave in a free country, fathering 7 children of her. Father, grandfather, and prison warder to his family, and benovelent grandparent to others. The only person with the key to the prison where his underground family was. What if something had happened to him? His children/grandchildren, who did not see light, literally for all of their life. To them freedom is a concept that is almost unimaginable. At least the mother had some memories of freedom. They could only see something on a television of the world outside.

Yet, they were victims, not truly able to change their circumstances.

But what drove the man? The man beast?

There are so many examples of such things round us.

Kony the Beast in Northern Uganda. Hitler and his henchmen. North Korea, Mugabe of Zimbabwe, etc, etc. I can understand ideology. Bush the 43^rd and Bin Laden sincerely believe so completely in what they have bequeathed the world that they will go to their deaths believing in their opposing crusades. When one is that married to an idea, one tends to fail to think outside that box. Nothing exists beyond that box of thought.

So, if one is a Christian fundamentalist, all non Christians are a (slightly), despicable part of humanity which does not really know the truth. Same for one who is a fundamentalist Moslem, or Jew, or any other kind of marriage to an idea. Those who embrace your idea are the people. Those who do not are not, and anything is justified in the struggle to convert them, whether it is Communism or Capitalism.

But pure, simple, unadultered selfishness, like the man in the house of horrors shows is kind of hard to imagine. Selfish, self-centered, seeing the world totally in the self and not in family, or any other ideology. Willing, for his own or her own satisfaction and enjoyment, to enslave and imprison his own family. A total lack of care for others, or what may happen to them. I think we call them psychopaths. Another convenient ‘label’.

I admit that I do not understand them. Not at all. Doesn’t stop me from wondering how they think, what drives them.

GayUganda

Life is life

Life is life, life’s no politics

But a strange, pulsing bloom

Whose mysteries a lifetime unsolved are;

Nor can they be by one pair of eyes,

One mind be known.



Life’s a liquid bird note call,

The scent of orchid in bloom,

A mysterious night flower unfolding,

A dream with beginning and end-

Going trillion miles between.

Life’s a living moving river

An ocean caught up in wind,

Life’s the soft sunlight in the morning

The blaze of noonday heat,

The dusk with bird and bat call,

Moonscape with stars twinkling aloft;

Life’s a wondrous open dream,

That I will dare to dream this day.




©GayUganda 05 April 2008

Work in Progress

Life’s a work in progress, that will never end.

I tore myself out of bed. Was morning, and the dawn called. But so did my love’s warm body, as he clung to me, wanting to make love, and to hold me as if the night long hug was not enough. I felt regret to exchange his body’s warmth, for the chill of the morning.

Chill of the morning? The cool of the morning, the song of bird, the time of day when the sun peeps out, first a shy girl’s smile, a teenage boy’s hesitant beauty, before the full blaze of day. That time of day when night gives way to light, and the cool of the night for the blazing heat of day.

It will be a hot day. That I felt in my bones, as I listened to the birds sing, watched them court and play. That song it is so beautiful, the different fervent tones, the sharp and light, the swift and slow, the loud and not.

It is a brief time of day, which is why I do not want to miss it, and daily debate between my lover’s warm embrace, and the dawn of beauty. Temptation. Life a work in progress that will never end.

Yesterday, reading a poem, Rupert Brooke, Soldier.

Was struck by a strange thought. Would Eshuneutics understand that poem?

Why Eshuneutics? Words to him have concrete meanings, set in stone, immutable. Words to me are plastic. Not my mother tongue, I claim, but I’ve never been fluent in any language. Not even the English that I read. Yet there seems to be a deeper sense in the poem. Not the surface, a soldier proud of country. But deeper, a man longing for home, home that he may not see, feel, touch, where he may not be buried, denied that final peace.

Life’s a work in progress, and I am a butterfly, flirting with all the beauty that I see. I was walking Namirembe Road, through the dust of the construction. It was a terrible stretch, now it is being repaired. I walked the pavement, in the stream of people on foot, like me, oblivious to the dust and sound. The begging children, denied school, begging for family and life and being. Not for them the discipline of school, but the harsher demands of survival. Odd’s life, but it is too easy to pity them, and forget that they do survive, even at the toughest of odds.

There is an odd pulse to life. We see it, in the bright lights, the concrete buildings, the huge edifices of the city. But that is not all life, and our sight is perverted. Life is the small person on the street, the child begging so that the family survives, the young man ready to risk lynching to grab a gold necklace, the flood of men and women not able to afford a fare home, needing to walk to work and back, anxiously hoarding the small salary for food, clothing and shelter in the city. A concrete jungle it is, yet that story is not true without the salute to the small man, the little lady, who through it all strings one day after the other, providing for self and family.

There are so many things that I would be, more things that I cannot be. Yet one thing I know, if I miss the beauty of this day- the bright sun in a cloudless sky, the whisper of cool breeze on my skin, the blazing heat of day, the eye hurting brightness of the sun’s halo; if I miss them and not see the flow of life, a child, children growing, nothing else that I see will be worth it.

Enjoy the day, because, wherever you are, it is a beautiful day. Don’t sweat the small things, just soothe the small things, and hear the sweetness in a bird’s call.

Have a great day.

GayUganda

A Return

Yes, there has been a gap. A big one, a considerable one.

I have been procrastinating. It seems too big a task, to start writing again. Then someone rang me to tell me about the blog. I thought he knew about it, but apparently he had not read it. Most people tend to be put off by prose! He was laudatory. I was encouraged, and I thought, yes, I will write again. I will put down more of my daily thoughts and ruminations.

So, why the gap?

I am of a mind not to explain. After all, the blog is mine (Ahem!!!!) And no one is going to force me to bare my thoughts. I do it (compulsively) of my free will!

Ever watched a child learn to walk? The uncertainty, the stumbling wide gait, the falls and cries. That is me. Yet I am no child, though I will claim that as a human being I have the right to fall and the sheer stubbornness to try and stand again.

Oh yes. I fell.

I stumbled and fell. Rolled downhill and was bruised and battered at the end. Fell into the muck and nearly drowned, barely keeping my head above the stinking putrefying essence of it. But I did not drown. I am still alive. The spark of life still burns in me, and that is something.

Ever thought of life as the sheer continuity of life? That flame. Once it is extinguished, then it is gone. Before it is extinguished, it still burns. And it may gutter and falter, or may turn into a brush fire. When it still is, whether it still is, that is what is important.

I will fall, and get up. Battered, bruised, aching. But if I am still alive, life goes on. And like the child learning to walk, sometimes I will cry in utter frustration, other times I will glee with joy as I land on my bum. But I will always get up and stumble on.

So, to all out there, welcome a bright new day!

GayUganda