Text by Nickel L. Translated by Caroline Blacky Mudingo Dipanda

When I was 16, I was living fully a life of survival in a world I could not understand, and the world, so far, had served me well. At 40 years of age, it certainly took a long time to get there but today I fully embrace who I am. The ugly duckling grew up to become a beautiful swan or at least a duckling who accepts itself with pride when it faces this infected poultry.

The rooster should crow while the hen should remain submissive. I said no to those pseudo rituals imposed by men who don’t know a damn thing about the daily life of animals like us.

A life of lies, yes, that’s what you made us endure. Yes, a life of enduring rules we feel are made for others. Is it possible for someone who stands in a court to decide how people should love?

This life of lies, I have lived it fully along with the lies. I lied to myself, to this girl I loved and who loved me back, to this boy who loved me and was loved by my family, to this family who loved a stranger. For, do they really know me? What would they think of me? What would my father say to my mother? My mother to my aunt, and the former, will she dare to tell me the truth about the words they used to define me?

I have lied with more or less success as those of my species would on a daily basis, though it   always has its consequences, because survival imposed us to do so willy-nilly.

So much so that I became pessimist, yes, in the face of this life with no prospect of happiness, a horizon with no sun, not even a moon. But to be pessimistic as I was during these two decades and a half wasn’t so bad. For the world thinks you have everything to be happy; youth, beauty, luck at school and successful with men… but I couldn’t care less about those men. I was screaming it in my dark and secret dreams, I was dreaming only about them; beautiful, frail, gentle, smooth, sweet, delicate. I was longing only for them!

I had everything to be happy and I was sometimes. For, when you always expect the worst to happen, then you know how to avoid it and you can see it coming a mile away. Alas this posture had us miss the best of it too along the way.

In my world everybody is a prince charming riding a white steed, who owns a castle in France inhabited by lords; some strange characters with various psychological personalities. The neurotic one would dream about it all day long, existing side by side with the depressed and forlorn lord who lost it long ago. Along the way, I met the paranoid who shielded himself away from everything, everybody and even love so that he became like his schizophreniac neighbor at times, who lives in it with his other self; lord during the day, courtesan at night. Surely, this CASTLE VALLEY was mostly inhabited by these last two devils; the pathological liar who would auction his, by means of illusion, to the dreamers who had the luck or misfortune to cross his path; and to finish with this overlapping of beings and personalities I introduce you to the pervert who rents his castle only to host depraved feasts, ephemeral moments, GomorrHaesque parties.

But today, at forty years old, I’m free…free to scream my truth to the world, free to love the woman I want, to leave this world free. For, beyond our bodies surviving and toiling, our souls too are dying because they do not dream, dare and shout their love. Today I am the one lending a hand, an ear, a heart and more importantly a mouth for those who, like me, two decades and a half ago, felt lost and unloved. I am an activist I embrace it I stand by it.

I fight for the freedom to love the woman or the man we want in order to be the woman or the man we truly are, for the women and the men who left this world unable to be their true selves, to ensure our souls and our bodies will never pretend again. Soldiers, present your souls. For our freedom to love is our revolution.