It is a healing act to love someone and to be loved in return. My greatest act of self-preservation has been to love and to be loved by women of colour.
For a long time, I felt like I was existing on the outside, looking in but unable to be a part of any community. The LGBTQIA+ community couldn’t make sense of me.
I was once asked in my university queer space how can you be Muslim and gay. I didn’t know how to answer this because my existence there should have been enough.
My identity was constrained by a colonial gaze. I was seen as the other. This was no different in the Muslim community, where people couldn’t fathom being religious and being a lesbian. These essential parts of my identity were seen as impossible when combined. I felt like I was invisible.
I was once asked in my university queer space ‘how can you be Muslim and gay?’ I didn’t know how to answer this because my existence there should have been enough.
Years before I realised my sexuality, I remember a hyper awareness to inequality, shaped by my parents open discussion of political structures and war from my earliest memories. There were discussions about corruption and oppression over coffee in the morning. It fuelled a righteous anger before I discovered the word for patriarchy and later for feminism.
I also felt like I was always navigating the white gaze of the queer community. Faced with taking this home into a personal life, into a bed with a partner, this inequality seemed too bleak.
In her book, Living A Feminist Life, describes the need to live a political life and how this chips away at oppressive structures. In this way, women who love women are living their political lives every day simply by existing. In a chapter on lesbian feminism, Ahmed describes the feminist and political power of relationships between women who love women.
This idea helped me to reconcile my identity as an Arab Muslim woman and a lesbian, knowing that instead of focusing on the clash, I could focus on the healing power of this combination and on what I could give to the world.
To love a woman of colour is to be affirmed on every level. It has allowed me to be loved into a better version of myself. My partner’s understanding and acceptance of every aspect of me has helped me to accept myself too. She can meet me at every moment of disconnect, because she knows what it’s like to feel that there is no place for us. The difference is then that we carve out our own places: we create our own families, we paint a beautiful tapestry to exist within, a life that neither of us believed we could ever have. That we have built a home for ourselves to belong in feels like a miracle.
In her book Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, explains how life as a black lesbian feminist is revolutionary:
“To go to bed and to wake up again day after day besides a woman, to lie in bed with our arms around each other and drift in and out of sleep, to be with each other not as a quick stolen pleasure, nor as a wild treat but like sunlight, day after day in the regular course of our lives. I was discovering all the ways that love creeps into life when two selves exist closely, when two women meet.”
When I sought out love, it had to be someone that understood already what it was like to walk in my shoes. To understand white power structures that dominated our lives. It would give me the space to do the best self-work I could.
Loving a woman of colour has helped me look inward and to understand the deepest parts of yourself, whether it be trauma, mental health or even your greatest strengths. Shame cannot coexist with love.
It’s a productive way for women to love themselves so deeply that they stand against powerful systems and economic structures that profit from women’s insecurity.
It is the most affirming way to know yourself; to know that you can exist without internalising or recreating the traditional narratives of womanhood, gender, and sexuality.
As a woman who loves women, it has been healing for me spiritually; allowing me to know that my existence is so radical and wonderful that there is no way I can ever hold it in any doubt.
Cindy El Sayed is a freelance writer.
