When Family Becomes a Container for Contradictory Narratives

Meet Arya Jeipea Karijo, a narrative worker and journalist. She is collaborating with a unique digital research team supported by Komons, the Kenyan Comms Hub, and Puentes. In this article, Arya explores how family and religio-cultural containers confer instant legitimacy, mask contradictions, and can enable patriarchal and anti-queer harms, and why prying them open is vital for a more just society.

CONTAINERS: A FAMILY WOMAN

In the last 5 years, I have been described as a mother, substitute mother, chosen family, and older friend, all terms that were used to describe some caregiving role I had taken up in another life. Unlike all the “million” words for my gender that I would have used to describe my existence, this one word: "MOTHER", seemed to carry its own self-contained definitions that earned me some respect, a lot of love, relatability, and even belonging. At one point, I was also referred to as a bride courtesy of what me and my partner in crime (literally) described as a social experiment. Again, being seen as the bride of a bride earned both of us some relatability. People sent us congratulatory messages, and at the post-wedding party, random people bought drinks for the newlyweds “Tequila shots for the newlyweds”. Online messages of congratulations on YouTube, even from naysayers who would add “even if you can’t get children”.

This was my first interaction as an outsider-insider with the power carried in the narrative container of family. Brides and their brides or grooms as well as weddings carried in-built stories with them. There was the assumption of love, the assumption of bliss (someone told me my skin was glowing, I swear it was coastal weather, not the relationship with my coastal non-binary partner). The “mother” identity also came with in-built stories about care for the children. All of a sudden, it seemed like I had a halo that said “mother” whenever I was in any space.

In our research “Family Values and LGBTIQ discourse in Kenya’s digital sphere”, we found how many politicians, societal analysts, family and lifestyle influencers worked hard to situate themselves as family man, family woman, happy wife, dutiful wife, successful mother, hardworking father. These family-adjacent identities gave all these people legitimacy. In some cases, even corporations are self-defined as family-friendly, e.g. TV for the whole family.

In addition to using the family as a container for legitimate and celebrated identity, lots of people in these categories used the family as a site to actualise patriarchal norms. Influencers such as Amerix specifically direct their advice to the formation of men, which is either done in a family or is meant to shape them into leaders of a family and really make the family into the place to actualise and manufacture patriarchal norms. Finally, everyone from your favourite radio show host to your prime-time news and advertisements in between claims the family as the target audience of their communications.

All these people ride on the benefits of the family as a container of narratives and suppress any external and internal attempts to separate them from belonging. When blanket statements such as “family is the basic unit of society” or “families take care of children and elders” or “in our families, parents are honoured” we accept them even if we are part of abusive families, even if we see “street children” every day, even if we have neglected grandparents and elders in our families. If someone states, “The family is the basic unit of capitalist consumption and the provider of labour for its production” we will object. Even if we truly know that all our money spending is directed towards our family and the primary reason for not quitting jobs and occupations we don’t like is our dependents, this glaring fact will be swept under “I love my family” and “family is the basic unit of society” and “I am the man of my family”.

Narrative containers like “family” hold both realities and fictions, and that is what makes them so powerful. Religio-cultural narrative containers are just as powerful as the family narrative container. For example, when someone says, “Kenya is a Christian nation”, and still says “according to our African culture”. They do this to legitimise their identity or to target a group as a way of building relatability with their target audiences. We do not question these statements even if there is a contradiction in the two containers of Africanness or Pan Africanness on one hand and Christianity on the other hand, which in our case is often Western and Victorian. The narrative containers are big enough to carry contradictions which we can’t hold as individuals. An example of a contradiction held in a container is ‘God's chosen President in Kenya can still “take young GenZ protestors' lives” and still be validly God's man’.

Are our stories our realities?

I do not expect everyone to give up the narratives or the cosy containers that have helped our lives seem normal in an upside-down world. Containers of belonging, like family, give us an anchor position to view life and our place in it. However, they also influence our choices and actions. So, when Judges, Police officers, your President or your friend takes an action that doesn’t seem rooted in their profession or their character, there is a likelihood they are protecting a narrative container or are using it.  

We have seen this happen on Kenyan social media in our research. It is the insult of “Msenge” to anyone who is not supporting our cause or with anyone we are in disagreement. It is the laughter and the desensitisation to suffering when queer people are killed. They are outside of our family container or our people of God container; they don’t deserve life; they do not deserve sympathy or empathy.

I know you are wondering at this point why I brought up such an uncomfortable topic, other than, of course, our research on social media discourse. Our upside-down world is created and reinforced by our protection of containers of narratives. When 60 young people are shot and killed by Kenya’s government in protests in 2024, and the 30 others killed by the same government in 2025, are they part of families? Are they children of God? Are they un-African, criminals and goons?

These containers of narratives seem like Pandora's boxes, but only by opening them can we right the wrong in our world.