Call Me Kuchu

I will talk about this film again, because even though I’ve watched it last year, it is important to remember that these men and women are still fighting in Africa, because it is unthinkable what’s happening in Nigeria for example, and because I need to remember it too. I need to remember the staggeringly different realities we live in. It is yet another quite personal take.

So let me try to resume what’s happening in Nigeria. These days, gay men and women and non gays, are being persecuted, are being beaten, and are being arrested and sentenced to jail by law, because of who they love. I think this is the main idea. Now there are a number of secondary lines attached. It’s prominently political.
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Call Me Kuchu

This is a documentary about the LGBT community in Uganda. When I look at the current and recent LGBT history in Uganda, I can’t help but think of my choices and my liberties being a European, but also how far and strangely and unremarkably undeveloped is the harmful thinking in this placed called Rwanda. And yet, you can still relate to it, because no matter where you are, you will still find someone who is as anal as some of the Ugandan people, whether you’re in France, Russia or American. But these are different realities.

The basics – no matter how underdeveloped Uganda is, this is a country where a group of people is fully invested in objectifying and labeling homosexuality as a crime. Then there are the western people. And this is another huge part of the problem. The people from Uganda say homosexuality was brought to their place by the western people, its part of the western culture, part of the developed countries. But then you have the missionaries, you have Priests and so on, from the western civilization, who come specifically to these countries and make up the civilians’ minds, they screw them with literally delusional ideas, known ideas, such as homosexuality as the devil on earth, etc etc. So the Rwanda people don’t want to follow the western society and culture, but then at the same time they’re listening to these dangerous, extremely confusing and delusional westerns (who in my view should be left in psycho wards).

There is a lot of bravery in this film, from the ins and outs of it. Like I said at the beginning, it is a recent history. You have the story of a young woman, who likes other women, who was outed, not under her own will, in a place where gays are under danger. But before being outed she has gone through worse. She was raped when she was younger, because the boy she was friends with realized she preferred to make out with another girl instead of him so he raped her. Because she was too young to realize, she had to abort at about five months of pregnancy. Here I was in my sofa, watching this girl’s story, doing whatever I want and don’t want to do with my life and I am shushed as a Kuchu, hiding myself and not appreciating and welcoming to the experiences of possibilities and in this moment, my image is absolutely depressing, whereas that young woman, forced to be who she is under a place she can be killed, suddenly her bravery comes out to the surface effortlessly. I have no bravery.

With these stories, it becomes clear that there are no boundaries, no boundaries in general, and no boundaries to where and how much a human being is capable of withstanding a tremendous amount of pain. So Call Me Kuchu is about bravery.

A luta continua.