23 May 2022

Editorial Issue 2 – We Must Speak OUT!

Did you know that when a little girl loses her mother, all she wants to do is live with her father and not be sent to an orphanage? She wants to live in a familiar space where love lives, where her family and friends won’t ask her things they already know, like her name, what she likes and doesn’t like. Where she will receive hugs, smiles and laughter from familiar faces. Is that too much to ask on her way to the orphanage as her father finds warmth in the bed of another woman?

Did you know that in Jamaica, homosexual men are referred to as fish? One wonders what the connection is. Why someone even thinks that a man deserves to be compared with a fish because of his sexuality. Do homosexual men have scales? Can we hate so much that we refer to someone derogatorily as fish? These are some of the unrealistic questions I ask myself. I wish I had the answers to some of the questions.

I come from a country (Uganda) that creates a hostile environment for the LGBTQI+ community. We make sure that nobody speaks about homosexuality. In 2014, one media house named ‘200 top homosexuals’ in Uganda, just a day after a harsh law criminalising homosexuality, (subsequently annulled), was promulgated. One wonders why they did it at that time, what reaction they expected from the public and what more they were going to do about it.

This is the second issue of Speak OUT! I wonder if we live in an environment where we can speak out about issues that affect us, issues that are close to our hearts and issues that keep us awake at night. And in some places, I know that is impossible because some people make sure that nobody speaks out.

There are always gatekeepers who make sure that we don’t say what we want to say, make sure that we don’t complain when we should about the rising prices of fuel, sugar and soap, make sure that we find something different in our neighbours so that we can hate them, make sure that our families are constantly divided, make sure that they feel more important than the rest of the country so we must smoothen their insatiable egos. There are people who will trivialise our pain and laugh at us when we cry. And yes, we must speak out because if we don’t, nobody will know how we feel, how we bleed in silence and how we slept hungry because we couldn’t afford to buy cabbage or cassava.

I hope that you will fall in love with these stories of writers who were able to speak out. Stories that will break your heart and will also heal your heart; some stories will be like yours, and you will wonder how these writers wrote your story, maybe because you couldn’t find time to write yours or because somebody put a knife over your neck and said, don’t speak OUT. Things that you have been dealing with and don’t yet know the answers to.

Yes, it’s time to speak OUT!

Speak OUT! Issue 2

Illustration by Gisela Mulindwa

About the Author

Beatrice Lamwaka

Beatrice Lamwaka writes for Global Press Journal, an international media organization that produces award-winning journalism. She is President, PEN Uganda. She has facilitated creative writing workshops in prisons in Uganda and edited a prison’s anthology. She also edited the East African anthology to be published by 8th House Publishing (forthcoming 2022). Her collection of short stories, Missing Letter in the Alphabet was published recently in Tamil. Her short stories are featured in: New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent (2019) edited by Margaret Busby; Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction from Africa edited by Ellah Wakatama Allfrey; Caine Prize Anthologies: African Violet and Other Stories; and To See the Mountain and other Stories, New Writing from Africa 2009: Winning Stories Selected by J.M Coetzee by PEN South Africa.

She won 2021 Janzi Award for Outstanding Fiction Writer and was awarded by Uganda Registration Service Bureau for her literary contributions in 2018. She is a recipient of the 2011 Young Achievers Award, was shortlisted for the 2015 Morland Writing Scholarship and the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing and was a finalist for the 2009 South African PEN/Studzinski Literary Award. She was a fellow at Stiftung Kunstlerdorf Schoppingen (Germany), Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center Residency (Italy), Le Chateau de Lavigny International Writers’ Residence (Switzerland) and Art of Resilience – Salzburg Global Seminar (Austria).

@BLamwaka