Afdhere Jama’s “Love Song to the Queer Somali”

– “Lovers” by Sarah Elsa Pinon.

My Love Song to the Queer Somali. . . . That’s how author and filmmaker Afdhere Jama describes his book, Being Queer and Somali: LGBT Somalis At Home and Abroad.

It’s the third book by Jama that focuses on homosexuality within Muslim cultures around the world. Like Being Queer and Somali, Jama’s preceeding books – Illegal Citizens and Queer Jihad – feature insightful and moving profiles of everyday queer people living in various Muslim communities.

“Meeting all of these people in my books has been extremely enriching,” writes Jama. “I had the privilege to hear over and over again how our lives are just natural, just like everyone else's.”

I share this evening, as the fourth installment of The Wild Reed’s 2022 Queer Appreciation series, an excerpt from the introduction of Afdhere Jama’s Being Queer and Somali.

________________________

Being queer and Somali is being part of two “different” groups. In the queer American community I’m different because I’m Somali and in the Somali community I’m different because I’m queer. I consider myself to be many things, I especially consider myself to be a global person. I have said to many people that being global is the only way I know to juggle my many identities.

The truth of the matter is that being Somali is not just based on what I say, it is also what others say. It is not just my life, but also the lives of others. Despite our common connections, and there are many connections Somalis have, not all Somalis see the world through the same lenses. I learned that through telling the stories of queer people in the Somali community.

Hamdi Suldan was my first queer Somali subject, and after hundreds and hundreds of other subjects in the years I have been writing about LGBT life in the Somali community, I had learned a few things. These things would help me over the years to be strong in my own personal journey, as the stories of these people showed me that I was indeed worthy of what I believed.

The first thing I learned was that there are a lot of queer Somalis who are in relationships they had not chosen for themselves. I met so may gay men and women who were in marriages arranged by their families. Over and over again that was a theme that kept showing up in these stories, some escaping it by running away from home and others disowned by their families.

“Sunni Muslims believe that marriage is half of your faith,” says Hadiyo Jim’ale, leader of the Queer Somalis organization. “Part of it has to do with tribalism, as that is another added pressure. Many Somalis are expected to marry members of their own tribe.”

My family has many issues, and trust when I tell you that I’m the first to say they are not perfect at all, but I never felt pressure to marry, let alone be forced to marry someone. Neither was my brother, nor my sisters. My family just doesn’t do that.

The second thing I learned was that a lot of queer Somalis have had negative experiences associated with their sexuality from family, friends, and the larger Somali community. I met many people whose families disowned them, or whose families have been very negative towards them, or whose families have impacted them negatively by the way they spoke of queer sexuality.

I grew up in a family where I heard my mother defend me as a child many times. There is a clear conversation that comes to my mind, and it is a conversation that has given me so much strength. I must have been seven or eight, something like that, when I overheard a conversation between my mother and older sister. My sister suggested that I was going to grow up being a homosexual, and my mother said that she loves me nevertheless. I knew the word qaniis meant something unkind, as it was a word used by kids to refer to each other as a weapon, but I don’t think my friends or I ever knew what it really meant.

I have never, ever, not even once heard negative things being said about queer sexuality in a religious way. Everything I heard about qaniisiinta, or homosexuals, was cultural related. That is, I did not grow up with a negative idea of being queer. I would go to the mosque often and never did I hear a Friday Prayer focus on that subject. That is perhaps because I grew up in a time in Somalia when Salafism had not taken root just yet, when music and dance was part of Islam, and the Sufi tradition had a big influence in society.

I had heard about the story of Lut, but it was never a focus and no one really ever explained what and who those people were. They sounded like a bunch of criminals, from what I gathered.

Therefore, I did not grow up with a negative association between my sexuality and my culture.

Did you notice how seamlessly I interwoven the Muslim part of the Somali into the story? I took the story of Lut, associations, and culture.

That brings me to the queer side of this book, which is just as personal as the Somali side. There are ethnic groups in some parts of the Muslim world who do not have to deal with the negative ideologies of being queer.

It wasn’t until I was in my late teens that I realized that just because I didn’t have any issues with my sexuality, it didn’t mean that others didn’t. When I was a teenager I met and fell in love with one Somali guy. Like me, he had no problems with what we were doing. We were doing it secretly, just as a man and woman were doing it secretly. The issue was that we were having a sexual relationship, not that we were having a homosexual sexual relationship.

Later that year I went to the United States and I again met and fell in love with another guy. I know, I know . . . I easily fell in love. This second man, who grew up in a semi-religious household, had issues with it. He would feel bad after we had sex, and one time even commented how he had hoped we would change.

You could say it was the first time I realized there was an issue with people about their sexuality, which of course made me want to understand the issue better.

This experience led me to question whether it really was the case that Islam sees sexual relationship between people of the same sex as negative, or if it was a cultural situation. Ultimately, I came to the understanding that it was indeed cultural, and that different Muslim cultures approached this differently. The cultural approach was, in my new-found understanding, the same way different schools of thought approached this issue differently.

My books about sexuality are, I would argue, my experiences of coming to that understanding. It was only natural that I started with my community, the first story I ever wrote being that of a Somali transgendered woman, but it was not long before I was onto the larger Muslim community. It was how the book Illegal Citizens came about. That book was about the everyday LGBT people living in Muslim communities in the global south. Most of the people in that book are not out.

Queer Jihad was about the people in Muslim communities, especially those in the safety of western countries, who are leading the fight for non-heteronormative inderstand of issues relating to sex and sexuality. With that book I interviewed people like the first openly gay imams, activists, artists, and people who are generally in the public eye. Most of the people in that book are out. Queer Jihad was the love song I would dedicate to a young Muslim anywhere who wonders if it is okay to be queer and Muslim. It answers that question from many different angles.

Being Queer and Somali, therefore, is only different from those books because it combines the everyday and the activists, and it focuses on just my own ethnic community or people whose ethnic backgrounds are in the Somali communities of the Horn of Africa. Most people in this book are not out, even though most of them are out of the Somali communities of Africa. If Queer Jihad was my love song to the queer Muslim, then Being Queer and Somali is my love song to the queer Somali.

– Afdhere Jama
Excerpted from Being Queer and Somali:
LGBT Somalis At Home and Abroad
Oracle Releasing, 2015
pp. i-v

Following is the trailer to Afdhere Jama’s 2015 film, Hearts.

Described as a “global project of love, poetry, and men,” Hearts “presents short, stand-alone images and poems set in various parts of the world. It celebrates ‘the love that dares not speak its name’ in a world where love between men is often ridiculed, denied, and abused.”






NEXT:
“Creative Outsider, Determined Innovator”:
Remembering Berto Pasuka


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Omar Akersim: Muslim and Gay
• Parvez Sharma on Islam and Homosexuality
• Coming Out in Africa and the Middle East
• To Be Gay in Iraq is to Be a “Defenseless Target”
• Liberated to Be Together
• Same-Sex Desires: “Immanent and Essential Traits Transcending Time and Culture”

Opening image: “Lovers” by Sarah Elsa Pinon.
All other images: Michael J. Bayly.