BY Astherie Iribagiza
Some days I go quiet. Not just because I’m tired, but because of the weight of what I hold — and the things I’ve had to let go of just to keep moving. For a 35-year-old queer feminist in Rwanda, survival isn’t an idea to debate. I live it every day. I live it in the work, the organizing, the dreaming, and yes, in the ache that never quite leaves.
I used to think survival meant taking up space, filling the room, coming armed with plans, proposals, strategies. Now I know it can be smaller, slower. Sometimes survival is simply building something anyway, a conversation, a safe moment, a late-night check-in. It’s telling the truth even when the language hasn’t caught up. It’s protecting each other when no one else will, whether loudly, gently, or in total silence. It’s holding on to queer joy in the spaces that we are creating, the safe circles, dancing together in the pride events, and forgetting the troubles of the world; it is whispering “you are not alone” to a friend in crisis. It’s imagining futures for the 13-year-old who just realized that they’re different and for the 35-year-old who’s seen too much but still reaches for something better. Survival is the reaching, even when the world says, “not for you.”
We survive by finding each other, by organizing, and by protecting what the world tries to strip away. Together, we build around what’s missing: protection, visibility, and political will. And still, we create. Healing circles behind closed doors. Safety written into our group chats. Futures plotted over drinks. Resistance woven into grief. Some of us don’t get to speak, so when we do, it’s for more than just ourselves. We archive our joy like it’s holy, because it is.
We’re connecting across borders, across languages, across silences. Art remains one of our sharpest tools: zines, spoken word, music, and documentaries. We’re growing feminist learning spaces where schools have failed us. Podcasts carry our truths to places our bodies can’t go. We draw strength from African feminists who have always organized outside the institution, and women who rose and resisted gender violence, land grabs, police brutality, and family silence. That lineage runs in us as we gather to face donor fatigue, movement fractures, state violence, and burnout. As Audre Lorde said, there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not lead single-issue lives.
So we build. Queer cooperatives. Security training. Savings circles. Ritual spaces. We write what the world never wrote about us. Even when the system treats us as disposable, we show each other that we are not. We will not wait for safety to be granted. We are building it together.