“If you haven’t come out to yourself, it’s difficult to come out to [other] people … At first, it might look like a difficult task, like something that’ll never end or something that’ll keep going on but once you get over it, you’ll see that you have your whole life ahead of you.”
Pamela Adie’s words describe her documentary, Under the Rainbow, a film that serves as a ‘visual memoir’ about her personal journey of coming home to herself. Walking us through her experiences, the documentary, which is the first lesbian documentary from Nigeria, points to the realities of some sexual minorities in the country, particularly black lesbians who are often left out of conversations about equal rights.
Throughout her story, for every tablespoon about pain, there are three about comfort.
Her awareness and discomfort with the fixation with pain when it comes to narratives that centre queer experiences challenged her to share how rich queer people’s experiences are, to encourage people to look beyond the pain in the moment and to increase the visibility of multidimensional stories told by black Nigerian lesbians.
Continue reading: https://mg.co.za/article/2019-08-22-00-shining-a-light-on-lesbian-experiences-in-nigeria (source)
Listening to Lesbians 