We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.
“Paul Robeson,” Gwendolyn Brooks (1970)
Fa wuntama bε bɔ mi diε anu.
Eight years ago in May 2015, my partner and I, in the presence of supportive friends and family, got married to each other for the first time. We were adamant to call the party a commitment ceremony and not a wedding, which connotes marriage. At the time, we were barred from the legal institution of marriage by both the state of Texas where we lived, and the United States of America. For us, this legal barrier was irrelevant. What did the state or country have to do with our personal life decisions about commitment and partnership?
Despite this political stance, 18 months later, in a Starbucks on 42nd and Guadalupe, we got married again. To each other. Our officiant, the same one who married us the first time, finished a cigarette and then in the space of five minutes, we all signed a sheet of paper to be filed with the state of Texas. The banality of this event, which legitimized our union according to the metrics of the state and federal governments bears consideration. Why did those five minutes bestow more rights and recognition upon us than the solemn and intentional ceremony we held before?
In December 2016, the United States had elected a vocally anti-Black and anti-immigrant president. Furthermore, attempts to institute universal healthcare in the US had gotten nowhere since 2009 when talks of an Affordable Care Act rang through the halls of Congress. In the midst of all this, here I was – a Black immigrant on a graduate fellowship that did not provide health insurance. Getting legally married was a way to share my (now) spouse’s health insurance. Getting legally married was insurance against the fear of having my legal immigrant status revoked. In other words, those five minutes at Starbucks was our own small way of bargaining with the state for protection. And in so doing, those five minutes at Starbucks reified the state’s power over our lives.
The extension of marriage rights to lesbian and gay people fortifies both the state/nation and the institution of marriage. By granting us access to marriage, the state presumed to override the meaningful ceremony witnessed by our beloveds, and instead legitimized our relationship only insofar as we signed that sheet of paper. Those 60 or so people, some of whom traveled to Texas from Virginia, DC, California, and New York to come witness and support our commitment to each other were presumably made redundant by a most profane affair in a coffee shop overrun by college students preparing for their final exams.
Queer activists in the United States have argued that so-called marriage equality has only strengthened the neoliberal institution of Western marriage and allowed the nation to further abdicate its responsibilities to citizens. This fortification happens by conferring the responsibilities of the state to provide healthcare, pathways to immigration, and redistribute income equitably, among other things, to a select group of people who sign away their sexual autonomy through marriage. The legal marriage contract thus cedes power to the state in exchange for the possibility of certain rewards. In my case, it was access to healthcare and insurance against deportation.
Across the Atlantic, in Ghana where I am from, queer activists often insist, when fighting for their freedoms that they do not desire state recognition of their committed relationships. Instead, their focus is on procuring access to healthcare, education, employment, housing, and the basic rights associated with their humanity without fear of discrimination or violence. Despite the insistence by activist that “we don’t want marriage” an overwhelming response to queer activism in Ghana has been that the state will not recognize marriages between people of the same gender. For example, in February of 2021, during the installation of an Anglican Archbishop, the Ghanaian president, unprovoked, reiterated that same-sex marriage will not happen under his watch. (Not too far away, in Nigeria, facing similar demands from activists for the freedom to simply be, the government there passed a Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act in 2013.) Nobody asked for this. Instead, in both countries during those periods and still today, queer activists and organizers are advocating for the recognition of our rights to education, healthcare, housing, and employment without discrimination. We are seeking protection from the state in the event of mob attacks and lynching, ejections from their homes, wrongful termination, blackmail, and other such incidences. Faced with these demands, the state instead chooses to stoke the fires of anti-queer sentiments through legislation and homophobic rhetoric. In so doing, the state also posits that its willingness to affirm the human rights of citizens is contingent on our willingness to give up bodily and sexual autonomy.
For queer people, our decisions to live gender and sexually expansive lives outside of the purview of state power has the capacity to undermine this power. Likewise, queer people’s demand on governments to do their job – provide necessary life affirming supports in the form of economic security, public services, healthcare – without compromising our autonomy, poses a challenge to the power of the state. This is not unlike state legislation limiting abortion and access to reproductive healthcare. When the state presumes to control people’s bodily autonomy and eschews its responsibility to protect the right to life, education, health, privacy, and work, it positions itself in an antagonistic stance against citizens. This tactic situates some people as “deserving” of protection and encourages their compliance to the overreach of state power. The consequences of this antagonistic stance are evident in limited media freedom, increased violence against queer and trans people, restrictions on reproductive care, displacement of indigenous peoples, and the list goes on.
To return to the specific case of marriage, I will use the example of Ghana’s marriage code, which is based in the colonial era law. When Ghana was the Gold Coast, the colonial state employed similar tactics to undermine people’s autonomy. Marriage was originally an affair among people - families came together, enacted various rituals, and supported a commitment between individuals and two families. Witnesses present upheld the union, and any agreements were made among those present. The colonial code required that all so-called customary marriages, those done among families and friends, be registered to the state in order to be recognized as legal. The colonial marriage ordinance remains effectively the same in independent Ghana, requiring the registration of all marriages to the state. The colonial imposition of registration sought to undermine the legitimacy of marriage contracts entered into by indigenous people and in so doing, restructure their family- and community-making processes. Put another way, the state’s presumption to manage marriage and family formation seeks to subverts culturally grounded ways of forming community and families. Instead, we are tethered to the limited imagination of a neoliberal state that consolidates power through the coercive practice of distributing resources and benefits to those who acquiesce to having their intimate lives legislated.
Yet, if I am to understand the Marriages Act correctly, and I am no legal scholar, registration of customary marriages is not required by law. It is merely encouraged. Over time, legal marriage has become a form of social and cultural capital for those who have the ability and decide to enter into this contract. Understanding this legal landscape demonstrates that there is no need within the post/colonial state for queer Ghanaian activists and organizers to advocate for state recognition of their right to marriage. The existing legal pluralism in Ghana makes redundant any activism in that direction. In fact, advocating for “marriage equality” only further entrenches the power of the post/colonial state to restrict resources to those who will not acquiescence to state control of their most intimate lives.
Furthermore, the example of cisgender women whose customary marital rights were usurped by post/colonial laws is instructive. Research has shown how the patriarchal core of post/colonial legislation redefined the family to emphasize the conjugal unit in which the husband heads the household, while deemphasizing what in Akan we call the abusua, the extended matrilineal kin group. This redefinition isolated women from their natal families while giving their husbands heightened power over them. Through this process, a particular form of gender inequality, heteropatriarchy, became entrenched within the landscape, and is now presented to us as tradition and culture. The implications of state-recognized marriage reverberate into outcomes for divorce, widow rights, property distribution, and childcare and women often suffer negative consequences for this supposed benefit. Why then, should queer Ghanaians seek entry into this system?
Queer Ghanaian activists and organizers are clear that legal recognition of their marriages is not their goal. They have emphasized the need for state protection from violence and freedom from discrimination in education, employment, healthcare, and housing. Marriage, to borrow Akufo-Addo’s words, is not on their agenda. Often, the implication of their dismissal of legal marriage is that activists are not advocating for marriage because it is too lofty a goal. The magnitude of the Ghanaian state’s homophobia curtails the fight for the luxury of marriage. But this is not the case. Understanding the negative social implications of state-legislated marriage on the lives of minoritized subjects, alongside the state’s abdication of its responsibilities to citizens explains why queer activists dismiss the fight for “marriage equality.” Legal marriage reinforces state control over our lives while leaving unaddressed the government’s responsibility towards all citizens. Addressing government’s failures of its responsibility towards citizens is what queer activists are fighting for. After all, it is not only queer people who the state has failed to protect against discrimination and violence. In Ghana, just as in the United States, the legalization of lesbian and gay marriages will not address the fact of unemployment, inadequate access to healthcare, education inequality, and the myriad of other very real social problems that all citizens face. When the state intervenes to ensure that queer people, who are uniquely and explicitly targeted, have access to these rights, everyone else will also have access to these rights. Activists fighting for access to care, education, and the rest must recognize that when queer Ghanaians win in our fight, our victory is their victory. Otherwise, the fight for these rights will only be won in piecemeal ways, benefiting a very small fragment of society, while exacerbating outcomes for others. Just as with the fight for marriage equality in the United States.
Reflecting on my own marriage eight years after our not legally recognized ceremony, I feel ever more thankful for the supportive community that surrounded my partner and me on that day. Unbothered by the barrier to legal marriage, we relied on the witnessing and blessings of our dearest ones to support our decision to partner with each other. Through our celebration, we strengthened our community. While this element of community building is also true for those who legally marry as part of their commitment ceremonies, the absence of state intervention made our celebration all the more meaningful to me. Six years later, I still resent the fear that drove us to register our marriage with the state. Depending on the volume of anti-Black, anti-immigrant, and anti-queer rhetoric in the country, my legal marriage does not make me feel any safer than I felt prior to signing and sending off that sheet of paper. The protection I sought from the state was an illusion. Indeed, it is to our community that we turn to for solace, comfort, and protection.
As queer people, we are part of expansive communities that include folks who may not always see themselves as part of the fight for queer freedom. For me, that community includes my aunt who works as a nurses’ assistant and could benefit from higher wages, better work conditions, and universal healthcare (who couldn’t); my friends from undergraduate and graduate school, international students who could use a straightforward path to legal immigration; my cousins, whose young children deserve access to a robust public education regardless of where they live; and all my Black, Brown, and Indigenous friends who have a right to live free from gendered and racialized violence and discrimination. When we stand in solidarity with one another, understanding that our fortunes are tied together, we can demand of the state what is rightfully due us. When we seize our autonomy and refuse to concede power to a state that refuses its responsibilities, we achieve a freedom that is expansive, and we strengthen our community bonds.
These are some lessons that I have learned from eight years of marriage. As queer activists continue the fight for freedom in Ghana, we must remain steadfast in our efforts not to turn our political struggles into a fight for marriage. To our beloved community, resist the urge to concede power to the state. Recognize how state violence against queer people ultimately affects us all and speak out in opposition to this violence. We have seen meaningful efforts by civil society groups in Ghana and we solicit more voices and organizing to support the fight. In Twi, there is a saying, “Fa wuntama bε bɔ mi diε anu.” It refers to the philosophical belief that we have shared outcomes in this life, and we can better navigate the vicissitudes of life if we work in tandem with one another. We must all come together in the fight for our collective freedom. When we fight together, we win.