Self-stylization in Kenyan Queer Life Writing: a Study of Kevin Mwachiro’s Invisible and Stories of Our Lives by the Nest Collective.

Abstract

Chris Dunton has accused African scholars, especially in the literary field, of maintaining an intentional silence concerning homosexuality on the African continent. There is, however, an emerging field of writing by and about the queer where they tell their own stories. My research has delved into the emerging genre of collective life writing adopted by members of the queer community in Africa with specific focus on Kenya. This research poses the argument that through self-life writing, members of the queer community reclaim the power to create images for themselves in what I refer to as self-stylization. It is based on a comparative study of two anthologies from Kenya: Stories of our Lives and Invisible: Stories from Kenya‟s Queer Community. The argument of collective writing is not only supported by these two texts but also by the existence of similar texts from other parts of the continent. The study has also drawn from other works of art such as film especially in Kenya to investigate the developments taking place in African queer studies unlike the claim by scholars like Dunton.While a lot of African literature on queer studies emerges from South Africa and Nigeria, my study has attempted to place queerness on the Kenyan literary scene while at the same time questioning the relevance of collective writing as a form of attaining agency for the queer community in Kenya. With the help of the autobiographical theory and the Gay, Lesbian and Queer theories; I have looked at both the divergence and convergences in the two anthologies to investigate the images of the queer selves and how this helps the subjects to reclaim the power for self-portraiture