Akosua Adoma Owusu | Reluctantly Queer / 2016

letter home

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kwame Edwin Otu (story and narration), Akosua Adoma Owusu (director) Reluctantly Queer / 2016 [8 minutes]

 

Akosua Adoma Owusu’s film of young Ghanaian refugee Kwame Edwin Otu’s letter to his mother might have better be titled, Reluctantly American, as Letterboxd commentator Michael Sicinski observes, since “we get no sense that he is "reluctantly" queer” [but] “he does express serious regret that his identity positions him in a no-man's-land between two inhospitable cultures, neither of which he can make into his true home.”

      Written in a far more florid and literate English than younger US viewers are used to, Otu’s beautiful letter home to his mother describes the pushes and pulls of his life, facing in the country to which his parents have helped him to emigrate, an unsettling hostility. As he describes the situation in the US of 2016: “The life of a black man is uneasy, messy. It is riveting, inuring physic carnage. Indescribable.”

       Nonetheless, he quickly shifts to his real subject, carefully coding his language so that he can express the problems he is facing without actually having to explain that it primarily concerns his sexuality. It begins with a simple statement of self: “Of the things I have told you there is but one self left out. It is that self which renders my life a puzzle.”

       He continues with a brief explanation of what that puzzle consists of, and how determines the difficulties in his life: This self is at once daunting and haunting. Drifting further and further away from the love you nourished me with. That indefinable love. … This self is troubled by the double jeopardy of wander and wonder. This self wanders around seeking to speak out, yet at the same time being careful and fearful with what to say and what not to say.”

      As he speaks these words, director Owusu shows him in bed naked and with another man, making it clear to the viewer that his vague expressions of “wander and wonder” have to with the search for male love and the wonder of finding it, even if temporary. And at the same time it presents a body behind his puzzlement of self, a beautiful man that he soon relates would be suppressed in his homeland, perhaps even rejected by his beloved mother.

      “Would you embrace this self if it finally speaks?” Certainly, his homeland would not. He notes that while he sang in primary school that Ghana remains “My Happy Home,” it continues “to remain my unhappy home.” And he links that with his puzzling self: “I come up against the jeopardy of being this self, this self I cannot bring home.”

      Indeed, we suddenly recognize this 8-minute film as a very different to sort of coming out movie, a work in which the young man “comes out” to his mother without having the possibility to truly express in full what he means, that at the very moment he “speaks out,” he must necessarily also be “careful and fearful” about “what to say and what not to say.”

      He wonders if he truly spoke out “will you ever let me in to the lighted caverns of your heart?” And with that question unanswered can he ever dare to speak the truth?

      Both the cultural and legal viewpoints of his country do not permit his to return, so he forced to remain a different kind of outcast in a country in which he can at least express his sexuality. Sickinski nicely summarizes these irreparable tensions in his comments about this work:

 

“As a gay man, he is not welcome back in Ghana, where homosexuality is considered not only immoral but illegal. But he also recognizes that in Ghana, his Black body is the norm and not a spectacle. In the U.S., on the other hand, he feels the eyes of racism upon him every day. (Although he does not mention Frantz Fanon, the young man's account of daily experience in America calls to mind the writer's description of being Black in a white world: ‘Look, a Negro!’)”

 

     So painful is this epistolary picture that we wonder if he dare send the letter to his mother, or if he does so might not his language trouble her more than if he simply announced that the issue was about sexuality. We see him writing the letter, but we never see him seal it up to post. Perhaps the film containing what he has written provides a fuller picture of his dilemma.

 

Los Angeles, November 4, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).