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A meditation on the years the body spent telling the truth while the mind insisted otherwise. Read and recorded by the author.
Zawadi is a poet and spoken word artist writing about queerness, the body, and what it means to come home to yourself.
A poem about the years before there were words for what I was. Written after a conversation with my younger cousin who asked me when I knew.
Before language there was
a leaning — the way a plant
does not know it is
moving toward light,
only that it is moving.
I did not have a word
for the particular hunger
I felt watching certain people
leave a room.
I called it sadness.
I called it envy.
I called it hunger for God.
My body knew.
My body had always known
the way a key knows the lock
it was made for —
not consciously,
just metallically,
in the fact of its shape.
When the word finally came
it did not feel like discovery.
It felt like someone had finally
translated a letter
I had been carrying
in a language I could not read —
and the letter said:
yes. this. exactly this.
you have always been
exactly this.
The Collective is open to all queer Kenyan artists. We feature poems, dance videos, podcasts, music, visual art, and mixed-media work. Submission is free.