The Elation and Anxiety of Reading Fic in Your Native Tongue
For fans in Kenya, Nigeria, and Burundi, “uncringing” non-English fanfiction is an endeavor in decolonialism.
There are currently only three fanfics on the Archive of Our Own written in Swahili. They are all in the Supernatural fandom and written by one author. As a 30-year-old Kenyan fangirl who’s been devouring fanfiction for more than half my life, it had never even occurred to me that there was anyone writing fanfiction in my native language.
Even though I’m not in the Supernatural fandom, I clicked on the most recent one. It’s a 142-word Castiel x Dean one-shot published in 2017. Its title, “Kama Ni Mapenzi,” means “If It’s Love.” I read it, but felt uncomfortable attempting to imagine the scene. And it wasn’t just me. Most of the comments express shock at finding a Swahili fanfic. One even says, “I’m the first person in my bloodline to see a Swahili fanfic and ofc it’s Supernatural M/M” with another user replying, “imagine if it got to dirty talking XDDD.”
This phenomenon—a latent discomfort with reading fanfic in a non-English language—spiked my curiosity. It’s a sentiment that’s been echoed across the internet for ages from people across the world that speak all kinds of different languages. In my view, this discomfort with reading non-English fic (or even writing fic in a language like Swahili) is an issue of language-informed colonization, more specifically internalized racism that is created and unfolds in very specific ways that start from childhood.
