One random night in July 2018, during the intense beginning of my first out lesbian relationship, I sat up until dawn writing the story of how I found my way back to my queerness.
When I flipped open my laptop, I had only the tiniest seed of an idea where that story would take me. All I knew was that I had reached a place within myself where I could finally open my metaphorical mouth and describe how I loved women, how I had always loved women, and how this love of women was as integral to my being as any other identity of mine.
The story that emerged that night, “There They Are, Those Girls”, freed me immeasurably. Prior to that, everything I had written about my desire for or intimacy with women had been under an alias. I was afraid to be seen, afraid to be identified as even more deviant from what was ‘allowed’, afraid that I would be further punished for my inability—my unwillingness—to stuff myself into a box (or closet, or coffin) that the status quo would approve of.
The thing is, modern human beings have inherited a world which foams at the mouth to commodify and control who we are, what we know, how we sustain ourselves, and how we relate to one another and the earth. All that we are taught about being human is designed to keep us compliant for the sake of extracting surplus value from our labour and bodies.
This world conditions us from infancy to suppress our needs, to not feel our emotions, and to fear or loathe our desires. It fragments our communities through the pursuit of money and the normalisation of harm. It has destroyed our formerly complex, intergenerational families in favour of tiny units unable to cope with the demands of life. Our bodies are broken down by the stress of trying to survive our material conditions. Our minds are frantic for distraction. Our souls strain for rest and connection that we are unable to find or meaningfully sustain.
This world captures us by convincing us of our powerlessness, using threats or actual violence to keep us docile within unsurvivable conditions. There are those among us who, having swallowed the lie of ‘us versus them’ wholesale, are very happy to do the work of maintaining these hostile realities. As a result, those of us who want different have forgotten how to be who we already are. We have forgotten that we exist to know and be known; to travel in deep and practised togetherness on the varied paths of life; to refuse subjection by choosing community. We have forgotten how to gather and tell one another stories of thriving beyond scarcity; how to find the abundant space in our hearts and minds to imagine new worlds; how to let go of fear’s hand so we can be free.
The only way out is love. This is why THS GRLS exists.
The THS GRLS collective is a dream from the margins; the visible yet illegible other who claims the periphery as its centre. It emerges from an awareness that those of us on the outside, with no legitimate access to modern society’s systems or rewards, need to love ourselves and one another into liberation. It is a project designed around being in honest and vocal community for the sake of being less afraid, growing more powerful, and getting free—together.
For now, the members of our collective gather every week to talk about our lives, our hopes, our fears and our frustrations with the limited and limiting societies we find ourselves in. We acknowledge the validity of our experiences and confirm to one another that our perspectives are deeply valuable. We talk about how our brains struggle to keep going or even break sometimes; how our bodies are harmed by infrastructure that demands maleness or denies disability; how we make ourselves fluent in the language of conformity so that we can navigate survival in hostile contexts. We laugh at the world, we speak our mother tongues, we resist the seduction of turning our shared space into one where we must labour. We hold one another in love and softness, and we are reminded that on top of everything else that we may be, we are brave.
And now, we want to share everything we are unearthing in this space with you.
THS GRLS Write Back is our way of bringing what we know, or don’t know, or are frustrated with, to you. It is also an invitation for you to do the same with us. Every two weeks, we will publish a new article, letter, introspection, poem, or other narrative that chips away at our captivity. Our hope is that you will respond in kind via any of the channels that are currently available to us: our Twitter (until the Tesla clown ruins it, at least), our Instagram (fingers crossed that it stays relatively usable), or in the comments section right here on Subtack.
We hope to use our words to complicate, build upon and engage with various freedom-seeking traditions that subvert Eurocolonial capture. Our writing and dreaming in this space will be our way of demonstrating that our inheritance is not this diseased and dying world, but rather a new world in which all of us can be truly free.
We hope you will sign up to take this journey with us.
With love,
Olu Kukoyi
Convener, THS GRLS
This resonates on so many levels. Our challenges and identities may be very different, but we all mangle ourselves to fit into prescribed boxes out of fear of being othered and ostrasized. May your bravery help us all escape a little more every day ❤️