Lessons From an Artist in Exile

In June 2022, Achiro P. Olwoch witnessed — what was to her — a miracle. Her play, The Survival, opened at Lincoln Center as part of the Criminal Queerness Festival. The production was the culmination of a dream that Olwoch fled her home in Uganda to realize, after enduring persecution and suffering bodily injury. “When I say it took blood, sweat, and tears, it’s literal,” says Olwoch. The name Achiro means “the resilient one” in her native language, Acholi, and considering her life’s journey so far, it is fitting.

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Olwoch, who is a playwright, novelist, filmmaker, television showrunner, and this year a visiting Barnard professor, knows all too well what it is to suffer for her art and to persevere. She is gay and from Uganda. Olwoch was born in exile in Nairobi, because the brutal military dictator Idi Amin was targeting her father’s tribe. She returned with her family to Uganda as a child and grew up in Kampala, the country’s capital. As a writer, she has risked it all to tell her truth. In Uganda, being a gay artist determined to tell stories with LGBTQ+ themes is to be in peril.

The East African nation has a long history of anti-gay policies. Since 2009, the Ugandan government has proposed several bills to codify the nation’s traditional practice of punishing same-sex relationships. The legislation was passed in February 2014, only to be annulled by Uganda’s Constitutional Court a few months later. In May of this year, it was signed into law. But according to Olwoch, the long and winding legislative process was only one dimension of the threat. She says the unwritten law on the street was one of violence against gay people.

Since Ugandan culture frames gay sex as “unnatural” or wrong, Olwoch says that “everybody — if they can’t justify [doing] something evil — they say, ‘our culture says’” as a way to sanction the persecution of gay people.

Her play, The Survival, reflects and rebels against this reality. “It is a story about a woman who gets pregnant out of wedlock with a homosexual man in a culture that loathes the subject of either,” says Olwoch. “This play explores the thin line between culture and modernity in a typical African society. It also explores the reactions to this news, of all the characters involved, and how their reactions emanate from the laws that the society has placed.”

After a reading of the play in November 2016, word of The Survival and its themes drew fury. Olwoch began receiving threatening phone calls and texts. One evening in late 2017, while walking home from a local theatre where she’d been working as a stage manager, Olwoch was violently attacked. She says the beating was a result of not heeding warnings to “stop promoting homosexuality” with her play and works.

She suffered lasting injury. “All of 2018, I was horizontal. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t sit or stand because I developed sciatica,” she explains. In 2020, Olwoch was back to work, making a short film with an LGBTQ+ theme, which attracted media attention. That’s when she received more warnings. She kept going.

Despite the aggression and the threats that arrived via calls and texts, Olwoch remained in Uganda until 2021. She says that as soon as the U.S. lifted COVID-19 travel restrictions, she came to Brooklyn, New York.

“I had a valid visa to the U.S., and I knew that in the U.S. I would be safe. I did not come initially to seek asylum, I came to clear my head with the intention of going back home after a while,” says Olwoch.

In mid-2022, she joined the Scholars at Risk program, a nonprofit that protects scholars under threat by arranging temporary research and teaching positions at institutions that have opted into its network. And that led her to Barnard. This semester, Olwoch is co-teaching the Performing Women course with senior lecturer Shayoni Mitra.

“I love that the students are open to learning, and they are interested in what I have to say,” says Olwoch. In October, she gave a playwriting workshop on campus. This year, the Theatre Department has planned several events with Olwoch, including screenings of her films, readings of her work, and a panel discussion on artistic responses to queer persecution globally.

Though Olwoch is grateful for her time at Barnard and for her new life in the U.S., she says it’s difficult to be away from her homeland and her family, especially since her own immigration status is not yet resolved. “My papers are filed, but they haven’t yet been approved, so that literally means I don’t necessarily belong anywhere. I don’t even know how to describe it, but it almost feels like you’re dangling.”

Even with this looming uncertainty, she continues finding many outlets for her seemingly endless creativity. (Back in Kampala, she was the head writer/showrunner for one of her country’s top television series.) “Right now, I’m focusing on honing my plays. Also, I’m writing books,” says Olwoch, who completed her first novel last year.

For Olwoch, the production of The Survival was a triumph, and she is excited about plans for the staging of the play at the Perelman Performing Arts Center next June.

“I was in tears seeing this on stage last year. Seeing two men holding hands and, at some point in the play, they kiss. All that would never have happened in Uganda. They would have arrested them and the whole audience. So, it was just almost surreal,” she says. “Until I actually saw it on stage, I still didn’t believe it.”

Illustration by Kuukua Wilson / Photograph by Tom Stoelker