LGBTQAI+ :‘The only way to save the world is to just be yourself”
Author Musa Okwonga’s solution for this age of artifice comes from his deep reflection during an end-of-life crisis
In 2021, Musa Okwonga had not one but three book releases—an auto-fiction, an Eton memoir, and a children’s book with none other than football star Ian Wright, each from a different publisher. It’s a heady accomplishment for any writer, more so when the books are as diametrically different as In the End It Was All About Love (Rough Trade Books), One of Them (Unbound Publisher), and Striking Out (Scholastic Books)—and especially when they receive a consistent outpouring of love.
“It’s very rare that you write stuff that gets a response quickly. After years of throwing paint at the walls, the response has been incredible and also immediate,” says Musa, wondering if the pandemic actually aided the increased interest. “I mean, I did write books that were short enough to be taken [and read] on public transport, but I still think that the nature of what I’ve written lends itself to contemplation, so I’ve had a very unusual experience publishing during a pandemic amidst a global lockdown.”
Seeking himself
Threads of serendipity seem to surge strong when it comes to such pivotal life moments for the London-born author, football podcaster and journalist, poet, musician, and lawyer, whose medical student parents fled Idi Amin’s dictatorship in their native Uganda in the 1970s.
A chance encounter with a Brazilian architect couple on the plane to Rio prior to the 2014 World Cup led to an invitation to stay when Musa mentioned he was thinking of moving. “Why not Berlin, that’s got everything you’d want,” they said, and within a month, he was flat hunting in the German city. “Pure serendipity, the succession of decisions that led me here,” he muses. “Who knows where I’d have ended up otherwise?”
Seven years later, he is still in Berlin, and thriving. “This city changed my life, transformed it for the better. I have met some of the best people I know I’ll ever meet—and the geography lends itself to creativity because it’s flat, you’re not overwhelmed by skyscrapers, it’s spread out, you can just wander, meander, and it gives you room to find yourself,” he says.
Berlin is also the city that features prominently in In the End It Was All About Love, which he calls his ‘end-life crisis’ book. “My dad died when he was 40; as I was approaching the age that he had been, I was reflecting on what I’d done with my life. This was a time of, ‘I didn’t think I’d live past 40, let me assess my entire life’, and then in the self-assessment, ‘now I can live for myself, my life is finally my own’.”
The courage to hope
One of the lines of his life, even before he wrote this book, has been hope and optimism, even when writing or talking about the heaviest of things. I find out that it’s deliberate.
“I’ve got friends who’ve got young children. How can I just go around being a nihilist when they haven’t yet lived any of their lives? I’ve had an incredible life,” Musa says.
“I wake up every morning more privileged than 99 per cent of the people who have ever walked this Earth… as a queer person of colour, the platforms that I have, have been afforded to almost no one else like me at this scale. That sounds cheesy, but that’s how I live […] It’s about trying to live your life to the best of your abilities—there are so many reasons why so many people don’t get a chance to deliver these full lives for themselves,” he explains.
He elaborates: “Everything I do is geared towards the acknowledgement of difficulty and the perseverance through that difficulty, because that is the thing we’re going to need, in the world that we have coming. ‘This is bleak, but here is the transition to hope’.”
Acts of radical vulnerability
Accompanying that hope is the emotional intensity and honesty that equally characterise his work. “People say to me, ‘Oh it’s (his work) so personal.’ I’m a dark-skinned queer man in mainland Europe; how else did you expect it to be?”
There is a simple, potent clarity when Musa explains what he feels is our best weapon to combat the ill-forces of the times we live in and create hope for the future, something we can all do in our own way.
“So much of what we do in this age of artifice is based on not feeling anything. And I’m talking specifically about the reactionary forces in our society. I’m talking about the macho, hyper-masculine, tough-it-out, knuckle-dragging, everyone-for-themselves. The only antidote for that is an act of radical vulnerability. Let me have a sort of shamelessness that comes from a sort of integrity, a place of vulnerability, and a place of healing. That’s the shamelessness that I want. I don’t want the kind that tramples over everyone.”
From HT Brunch, April 23, 2022
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