non-binary forced to live in a binary

the clenches of “tradition”

i love going to ezilalini — the villages, to kwaMakhulu — that’s where i feel most homely and warm. her coffee mornings with amarostile, ahh and the amagwinya afternoons, the smell of her garden, her trees, chickens and cow kraal. the full house with my cousins and extended family. but is it worth my identity?

villages live in a patriarchal system where everything is black and white, no pink, yellow or rainbow in the middle. the boys herd the cows, do yard work, play soccer and go swimming in the river and the girls do the housework, cook and play with dolls… everyone has role based on their gender assigned at birth. fluidity or being beyond the binary is an unknown.

i came out via facebook in 2019, i was 12 and everyone in my family was happy for me. we never talked about it, they just showered me with love and moved on. i dived deep into my sexuality and identity and by 2022, i identified as non-binary.

after that, the conversation of initiation school felt weird to me because i am to become a man from being a boy but i wasn’t a boy. i was non-binary. i went anyway because i felt they would be no point of telling my parents that i don’t feel or want to go. everyone was happy, i wasn’t… i was just there. i wasn’t sad though. i just did it because there was no other door. ever since then i haven’t gone to ezilalini. the binary gets thicker when you become a “man” traditionally, you are expected to attend traditionally ceremonies around the village, there is segregation — older men have their corner, wives, young men, boys, girls etc. but none of those align with me.

there is no saying no, they (men of the village) come and invite you with no accept or reject option to come and you are simply bound to go.

this forced participation created a heavy, suffocating ache. it transforms kwaMakhulu — the place that felt like a break from everything — into a landscape of anxiety. i am trapped into a cruel paradox where the home that holds my sweetest memories and carries the most important puzzle of my family is the exact same place that demands i erase who i am.

to go home now means wearing a mask that suffocates me. it means sitting in corners meant for other people, responding to titles that don’t belong to me, and watching the people who i love and love celebrate a version of me that is entirely fictional.

the weight of this rigid patriarchy, wearing the guise of tradition, forces an unfair heartbreaking choice upon me. i have to now choose between my comfort and my culture, between my identity and my family. there is no middle ground, no shade of yellow or pink where i can just exist.

if i choose my family and culture, i must accept the daily trauma of going back to the closet, being misgendered and boxed into a traditional masculinity that feels like prison.

if i choose myself, i am forced into a self-imposed exile, cut off from kwaMakhulu, from her garden, the laughter of my cousins and extended family and the soil that raised me.

traditional patriarchy and masculinity doesn’t just build walls around the village, it builds a wall between me and the people i love. it is devastating to realize the price of admission to my own family home is the erasure of my truth.

i am still me. i still love the warmth of full house, the morning coffees and evening laughs by the fire, but… i cannot sacrifice my own soul just to make the village comfortable. until there is a door that allows me to enter exactly as i am, ndishiyeka ndizilela ikhaya.

i am left mourning a home that is still there, but a home i cannot reach.