Adrian, the protagonist of Jude Dibia’s 2005 novel Walking With Shadows, is a mid-career business professional whose life is rocked by a coworker’s decision to out Adrian to his wife, children, and any member of Adrian’s family that deigns to listen.
The novel follows Adrian through the crisis, as he navigates his crumbling sense of self, and the hurt, shame, and stigmatization from his family. The novel includes perspectives from Adrian, but also his family and friends. At first, the center of this hurt is his wife, Ada, who is unexpectedly confronted by the news that upturns her entire life and that she can do very little about.
Dibia is a brilliant hand at developing characters that feel true and genuine, even though I might not entirely like them. In fact, Dibia’s ability to keep me invested and rooting for characters I don’t like is part of what makes Walking With Shadows shine. There are few villains in this novel, just hurt people with limited options trying to weave through where life has placed them.
As the novel develops, more of Adrian’s character comes to light, but Adrian as an adult — a confused, stressed, well meaning workaholic who tends to make decisions with one eye closed — is never as clear as the first glimpse of him we get in the novel.
As a child, Adrian goes by his Igbo name, Ebele, until he decides he will be reborn as Adrian after his baptism. Ebele, so ready to die and shed all parts of himself, but not aware that what he’s feeling is shame. This is the clearest view of Adrian’s character and the first chapter of Walking With Shadows. I doubt Adrian was aware of this, but the rest of the novel is Adrian trying to find the person he killed, after he’s been shocked out of his illusion by the forced outing.
Ada’s response to Adrian’s outing is harsh. Not because she’s hurt or upset, but because of how that blends with homophobia. She assumes Adrian is cheating on her, immediately going to get an STI test, and she isn’t interested in hearing what Adrian has to say or even that he was being outed because he had been part of a fraud case against a coworker. She treats Adrian like his being gay was something he did to her, rather than an aspect of who he is.
What Adrian did to hurt Ada wasn’t “be gay.” Rather, he made a decision that affected both of them, without giving her the information she needed to make a consensual choice. The hurt was lying about his ability to emotionally and physically invest in Ada and the way he was distant from her and their child as a result. Marrying someone for dubious reasons isn’t a “gay” thing; it’s a people thing.
Still, by the end of the novel, I’m Ada’s biggest fan. Despite her being a person directly hurt by Adrian’s actions, she manages to work through that hurt. Most of her uncharitable thoughts don’t get directed at Adrian, and she goes out of her way to protect him from her family and ensure his access to their daughter — though she struggled there for a bit. Conversely, most people in Adrian’s life are too shocked by someone they love being different — truthfully, they’re ashamed by how his sexuality would affect them — to love him right.
Where Adrian’s personality bothers me is that he seems rather unaware of the privilege he holds within a patriarchal society. The stigma of being an unmarried or divorced woman in Nigeria is often enough to drive women to early graves. In worse cases it could spell estrangement from the woman’s family and from her children. Patriarchy cares little for logic and seeks to reinforce blame on women for the actions of men. A large part of how this happens is shame.
It is this shame that drives so much of Ada’s hurt because it’s a shitty and dangerous situation for her — something Adrian never seems to realize because he’s focused on his own shame and hurt.
Adrian is so much like who I was as a child. As children, our experiences and feelings can be larger than what we have the cognitive ability to process or skill to communicate. Without the aid of a caregiver, they get buried until they become a part of our unprocessed subconscious, still affecting our lives and actions but outside the frame of our awareness. This is called a shadow, and Adrian has spent his whole life suppressing his.
Like Adrian, I was a quiet and sickly kid. Unlike Adrian, I was raised as my mother’s daughter, so I have little experience with the rough play encouraged in boys, and it was not a bad thing for me to enjoy playing with dolls. In fact, my disinterest in boys was a good thing (until it was time for me to get married). As a child, I wasn’t different because I was gay (that came with teenagehood), I was different because I was autistic.
My inability to do things as quickly or easily as other children was a problem, especially because I was bigger than everyone else and knew how to read books even adults struggled with (“you can read Shakespeare but you can’t tie your shoes?”).When I explained that I was struggling, I was not believed. I was told I had to work harder or smarter. There had to be a reason I wasn’t getting it right, and there was, but no one around me was prepared to hold the answers, and I became the problem.
Like Adrian, I did what any child does when you’re repeatedly rejected for who you are. I hid. I hid so well that when my gender and sexual identities became questions, it wasn’t difficult to have yet another thing I couldn’t tell my family without endangering my safety. Like Adrian, I did try to come out, but the violence and condemnation in my family’s mouths about people like me made me swallow myself.
If I was to come out, it would be when I was no longer under their roofs, where they couldn’t hurt me. It was a decision that meant, for most of my life, I knew the people who claimed to love me the most would send me to my death in the name of salvation. I cannot overstate the shame and feeling of unworthiness that leaves a child with.
Unlike Adrian, while I hid myself from other people, I didn’t hide myself from myself. That choking feeling of not being able to speak or communicate with the people you love because you’re not sure who or how they want you to be, knowing that if you get it wrong you’ll be met with violence? Yeah, that feeling sucks. It’s been my childhood promise to myself to find a place that doesn’t feel like home, and that while other people might make me feel like shit, I would never do that to myself.
My younger self was able to hold a belief in a world where we’re seen and loved because it was in all the books I was reading, and I figured those thoughts had to come from somewhere, right? I’m grateful to child-me for the decision to save us, because with age I got more disabled, and more queer. What’s ironic is, I doubt my sexuality would be such a significant portion of my life if not for the prejudice I expected and experienced. I was dogged in my quest to love myself, so I started with what I considered to be the most shameful part of me. I wanted to understand how queer people could have any other feelings for themselves besides this pain and hurt and shame. I learned that my difficult feelings weren’t about me being queer, but about what I knew it meant for me. I started learning about difference, not just in gender and sexuality, but in mind and body, language and creed and culture.
I started to see how the urge to conform and the violence that greets us when we don’t “fit” are aspects of colonization and suppression. We are raised to see differences punished and then told that punishment is a result of difference, not a global system invested in keeping us from knowing and being ourselves. A person is poor or houseless because they didn’t work hard enough. Suffering because they do not know god. And so we are raised to “not be poor” and “not suffer” with little attention given to the kind of world that punishes lack and suffering.
Colonized people especially have been conditioned to treat differences with shame and abjection. After learning this, I understood that what I needed to be safe was to be surrounded by people who exist in a different reality from what is common or accepted. People who don’t see my worth in my sexuality, my ability to earn income or survive this hellscape reality.
If I wasn’t guarded on who and what I allow to speak shame into me, if I was surrounded by people who had conditional love for me, who required me to split myself into digestible parts to stay my family, they would kill me in their attempts to “love” me and cure my difference.
I think that’s the crux of Walking With Shadows. The parts of us we’re conditioned to believe are shameful are parts of us we should hold close and be intentional with. They are the parts of us we need to love, hold, and understand, because it’s hard to love yourself from shame, and the closest chance we have of setting that shame down, of experiencing a love that holds most, if not all, of us is asking and allowing the people that love us to see all of us.
While Adrian’s story ends on a somewhat hopeful note, it was bittersweet to read within the context of present day Nigeria and America. Adrian’s worst fears and more have been realized in Nigeria. It was never completely sweet for queer Nigerians, but the world Adrian exists in — where his friends say, “what’s the worst that could happen?” to him coming out, where he could even consider fighting a discrimination case at work, and where his fears on his sexuality, great as they may be, are limited to the response of his immediate network — is very different from Nigeria today.
The homophobic fires of protestant evangelism are only growing, but we are growing, too.
We, the different ones, we the shadows. I see it in Nigerian music, in our films and protests, and even in our heartbreak and stress. Something has to give, and oppressed people are running out of things to give.
Queer Naija Lit is a monthly series that analyzes, contextualizes, and celebrates queer Nigerian literature.
My internal identity journey as a black genderfluid person involves engaging with my relationship to masculinity. I’m figuring out what it means to be masculine in a patriarchal world, something I think is a personal and communal responsibility.
Common narratives on masculinity are often blatant reinforcements of patriarchy, and anything outside of that is subjugated. I want to be outside of that narrative, which means my reflections on masculinity prioritize BlaQueer — a term coined by Dr. T. Anansi Wilson that is a portmanteau of Black and Queer — masculinity in the myriad ways it exists. Communal narratives and reflections help me understand my own positioning and provide me with tools. As a result, Chike Frankie Edozien’s memoir Lives of Great Men: Living and Loving as an African Gay Man is a very important book to me.
Edozien writes with journalistic precision, befitting his trade, and it makes the book a compelling, multifaceted display of genius.
On one layer, The Lives Of Great Men tells the story of Edozien’s life so far. His childhood in Nigeria, his migration to America through Europe, and his search for purpose. This search draws him to journalism in New York City, and eventually around Africa, reporting the experiences, hopes, and challenges of queer and minoritized Africans.
From his secondary school principal, who teaches with the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Poem that inspires the book’s title, to his first friend Paulie, to his first love, Edozien shares several intimate portrayals of the men — mentors, friends, lovers, and family — that live and love alongside him on his life journey. These men, great men, are great in their love and how they reach for it. What makes them great is their authentic and earnest attempt at life.
I think being Queer saved me. As a kid, the most important thing in my life wasn’t being a kid, but being a good kid. I wanted to make my caregivers and teachers — the people I loved and respected — proud of me. Many of my life goals were a reflection of the things they wanted for me. Realizing I was queer, something they most definitely would not be proud of, made me consider, for the first time, what I wanted.
I came to recognize the ease with which I did what was wanted and expected of me as a symptom of my disconnection from myself and my resulting lack of desire for life in general. I was stuck and miserable because I was alive in a literal sense, but I wasn’t alive. My choices, actions, and spaces were not reflective of my values and were not conducive to my peace. I was a child at the time, so this was largely a failure of my caregivers to nurture my spirit, but the gift and joy of adulthood has been creating that life for myself.
Edozien’s work echoes a similar sentiment. His choice to be himself turns into loving himself and his community. The Lives of Great men is an unabashed, vulnerable testament to love. The love Edozie painstakingly grows for himself is central to the memoir, and this love is only possible as a reflection of the love he shares with the other men in his life.
Edozien’s memoir also explores the economic challenges of migrants, primarily within NYC.
I emigrated with my mother, so at first it was not me but her who had to deal with underpaid, backbreaking work and xenophobic harassment. Later, when I found myself estranged from my family — something common for queer migrants — the easy university jobs I’d been picking up didn’t cover me anymore. As with a lot of immigrants, but particularly men, I was shut out of every job but warehouse and manual labor, so the backbreaking continued.
It was nice to see elements of my economic experience as an immigrant be reflected by someone else, even as Edozien was experiencing these things decades prior. There were places our experiences diverged as well. Edozien’s experience in America is largely impacted by his training and experience as a reporter in New York.
Where Edozien loses me a bit is in his commentary on both non-men and women but queer African women specifically. Edozien acknowledges the way that women and non-men are impacted differently by anti-queer laws, particularly the way a lot of homophobic laws in Africa seem to target men more explicitly. At the same time, the book doesn’t quite outline the struggles of queer African women beyond the stronger pressure to marry. Though it might be unintentional, Edozien also presents queer women as being more acceptable societally.
Queer women know this acceptance is often a fetish. In my experience, queer women face a similar violence to men. In Nigeria, especially with the passing of the SSMPA, queer women also face physical harm in the streets and cannot always safely walk about. There’s also intimate, private violence which isn’t the center of the queerphobia explored in The Lives of Great Men. Still, considering the title, I did not go to this book expecting reflections on the lives of non-men.
Edozien’s stories also trace, quite accurately, the political, social, and historical landscape of queer Nigerians primarily, but queer Africans at large.
Edozien also pushes back against the party line narrative that queerness is unafrican. Like other queer African authors, Edozien takes time to outline the different presentations on queerness and gender diversity in Africa. While his factual points, listing queer communities like Senegalese ‘goorjigen’ or Ghanian ‘kombla besia’, are helpful, it’s Edozien’s personal narratives and accounts on the different queer communities he encounters as he travels through Africa for work that speak to me the most.
Edozien’s lived experiences, written into the book, overlap with key places and critical moments in recent African queer history. Edozien explores the impact of the British Empire on African countries, as much of the anti-queer policies on the continent can be traced to the colonial era. He also explores how this was picked up by American evangelists. Specifically, Scott Lively who in 2009 gave a lecture in Uganda titled, “Exposing The Homosexuals Agenda” (yeah, he’s who we have to thank for that). In this lecture, Lively claims that queer people “have taken over the United States, the United States government, and the European Union … Nobody has been able to stop them so far. I’m hoping Uganda can.” After Lively’s speech, Ugandan lawmaker David Bahati introduced the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality act. These acts build on each other, spreading through different West African Nations, and from his travels, Edozien is able to share his perspective on their impact.
From first-hand experience and witnessing, Edozien also details the political and economic realities of queer migrants and asylum seekers. From his witnessing of his friends — largely other queer African men — Edozien is able to show how the homophobic laws in Africa drive out highly talented and qualified Africans from engaging with their country.
The memoir, told in a collection of stories, weaves these extended arms expertly, creating an insightful, vulnerable, and compelling book. Reading The Lives of Great Men is, to me, like reading the words of a living elder. I’m grateful for this book’s existence.
Queer Naija Lit is a monthly series that analyzes, contextualizes, and celebrates queer Nigerian literature.
Hausa is a language of love. This assertion, made in the first story in Arinze Ifeakandu’s story collection God’s Children are Little Broken Things butterfly-cut my heart in preparation for the rest of the stories.
Hausa is spoken everywhere in Nigeria, but mostly in Northern Nigeria where it’s one of the many languages indigenous to the region. The furthest North I’ve been in Nigeria is Niger, which is more like a central state, but I know Hausa is a language of love because of my mother.
My mother spent secondary school in Sokoto, one of Nigeria’s northernmost states. She also schooled in Bauchi and spent time in Jos, Maiduguri, and Kano, all Northern states. My mother speaks Hausa (and Igbo and Yoruba and Fula), and in my childhood, Hausa and Igbo were the languages I heard her use the most. She would greet me in the mornings with “Ina kwana?” which is Hausa, or in Igbo, “I teta ofuma?” both of which ask if I slept well. My mother was also my Sunday school teacher, and the first christian song I learned was in Hausa.
Hausa became the thing that connected us across states when I went to secondary school in Abuja while my mother stayed in Lagos. The first thing I did was try to learn Hausa. I never succeeded past the insults and slang my mates were quick to teach me. Still, every other Saturday, when we were allowed, I would call my mother and practice new words with glee. Hausa made me feel closer to her.
My mother’s ability to fluently speak some of Nigeria’s most widely spoken languages made it so I saw my country primarily through language and connection. No matter where we went, we could talk to someone. The rest of my family tends to see the country in segmented ways. The Biafran war — which placed Igbo and Hausa people on either end — did little to gentle the relationship between tribes.
“The Dreamers Litany” the first story in this collection, which follows shop owner Auwal and his relationship with Chief Emeka, engages with these complex realities. Between the layers of hurt, shame, and confusion that clouds their relationship, there’s Hausa. Connecting.
Ifeakandu makes intentional choices not just in the stories he tells but in how they’re told and what is pulled to the surface and woven together.
The back of the book describes Ifeakandu’s writing as “alert to the human and universal in every situation” and I agree. Ifeakandu is able to center the uniqueness of his characters’ stories by sharing what is the same in their realities. Inevitably every experience, even universal ones, are made individual by the individual experiencing it.
To be human is to be, or not. To love, or not. I spend a lot of time thinking about beingness and language and the way humans interact with both things — with duality in general. Humans are in an eternal presence-absence by nature of our being. The moment we’re born, we begin to die, this is the universal. Between life and death is individual potential. Some people call this potential for life, God.
Life has been restricted in an infinite amount of ways. This too is universal. Humans have been kept from expressing the fullness of their own potential, largely by other humans. What happens when you can’t be you, right down to the way you think of yourself even in your head? What do you do if something works to make you an impossible existence to your own mind and spirit.
This is life for the majority of queer people globally — and in Ifeakandu’s book.
Ifeakandu skillfully explores these realities with grace. While the characters themselves shoulder shame and fear, and lash out, the god that writes them does so with a gentle pen. The ten stories in Ifeakandu’s collection move between Kano, Lagos and Enugu, forming a triangle of states that encloses more than half of Nigeria.
Each story is intimate, painful, and beautiful. Ifeakandu explores the lives of queer Nigerians in a way that emphasizes the connection of our struggles. He writes about queer Nigerians but also poor Nigerians. He writes about the myriads of abuse and limitations that stifle life: the misogyny, the tribalism, the capitalism, all of it feeds the things that restrict our lives.
There are at least two things happening in each story: a breaking and a joining or life and death.
Sometimes characters get to choose their direction; other times the choice is made for them. Most times, it’s some combination of the two.
Pain, joy, loss, happiness. Most people experience these things, but what is the shape of your fear? The taste of your loneliness? The color of your peace? The way we respond to our experiences is what’s human. Ifeakandu leans into the response, and the stories are snapshots of responses to life happening, while the characters are being denied the right to life because they are queer.
The stories are not tragedies, though some are tragic. Hope is in the trying, and not the outcome. With stories, hope is in the telling. Most characters in the book try, and the tragedy lies in the limitations on their attempts, external and internal. The characters deal with loss, disenfranchisement from their families, and sickness, all while their right to being is suppressed by legislative authorities.
In all this, the question asked by the book, the title, the characters, is “where is God?”
God in one sense is authority. For queer and disenfranchised Nigerians that the book centers, authority exists to suppress their existence. The violence of the Church in Nigeria for all Nigerians, and particularly for queer Nigerians is something Ifeakandu’s characters must contend with. Shame and the Church often go hand in hand. When secular governmental bodies also reinforce the violence of the church, it can seem and be impossible to escape. Worse, it can feel impossible not to internalize the narratives.
However, the characters in God’s Children are Little Broken Things are written with such kindness that their hurt, which feeds their shame, doesn’t fuel condemnation in me but empathy. The pain of that empathy became a point of catharsis for me. I found myself getting angry for the characters and the things they’re forced to endure. In doing so, I became angry for myself because a lot of those experiences have been mine as well. Very few queer Nigerians are able to escape the “deliverance” of the Church, in whatever abusive form it takes.
When abuse is justified by the people we love, our internal narrative starts to rationalize it, because in that moment it might hurt less, or be safer to blame ourselves. Yet, when we take responsibility for pain that isn’t ours, we internalize another person’s narrative, and can deny ourselves the freedom of our own gaze.
Ifeakandu’s book showed me a different face for God. God in another sense is love. The companionship of close friends. Art. The very possibility of existence itself.
For as much as bigots try to deny people the right to be, they cannot make and unmake a person. They can kill and hurt, but hurting me doesn’t make me less queer, it makes me unsafe. Ifeakandu shows how, even within the seemingly omnipotent reach of suppressive authority, there is love and possibility, if we take the chance to see the connections.
Thank you, Arinze.
Queer Naija Lit is a monthly series that analyzes, contextualizes, and celebrates queer Nigerian literature.
Welcome, welcome to another book review by yours truly for Queer Naija Lit. Today, I’m getting into The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi. The novel centers Vivek Oji, born to Kavita, his mother and Chika, his dad. There’s also Vivek’s extended family, his uncle Ekene — Chika’s elder brother — Ekene’s wife Mary, and their son Osita.
Vivek’s immediate family is a fairly standard Igbo family living in Aba, Nigeria. Their family — or really, Vivek and Kavita — are isolated from the community. At first, the isolation is because Kavita is Indian. Eventually it becomes because of Vivek’s “strangeness” as well. The majority of Vivek and Kavita’s community is made up of the Nigerwives and their children. The Nigerwives are a socio-communal group formed by the wives of Nigerian men who were not Nigerian. The group provides space for women who’ve been wrested from a lot of what they know and their safety mechanisms and are forced to rely on a man in his home country. It also offers a community for some of their children who have to deal with different kinds of ostracization. Vivek is one of these children, and so are the kids that become his friends and shelter, Juju, Elizabeth, Somto and Olunne.
Vivek needs shelter because his mind, body and spirit are existing in a reality that his father Chika and most of the adults around him are fighting to suppress. The reality is this: Vivek is the reincarnation of Ahunna, Chika and Ekene’s mother.
This isn’t a reality that’s hidden from the people around Vivek and most Igbo people reading the novel. Vivek is born as Ahunna dies. Vivek has the same scar on his leg that she did, and Ahunna was buried the same night she died. Vivek starts to experience blackouts and premonitions of things that happened when Ahunna was alive. It doesn’t end there; the signs of reincarnation are clear throughout the novel.
The book, like its title makes clear, revolves around the death of Vivek, a jarring painful horror that wrenches an already splintered community further apart. Vivek’s death becomes a true thing; an irrevocable presence that forces everything else to move and restructure around its truth.
The plot turns the title on its head and shows how the first tragedy in Vivek’s life isn’t his death, or even Ahunna’s death, but his family’s refusal to acknowledge his life. Vivek isn’t told about his grandmother. He isn’t told who he could be, and the reality Vivek is carved from is suppressed by the people who raised him.
I hurt for Vivek, and my anger at the family that let him down is plenty, but Vivek’s family aren’t the only ones responsible. Fear is no justification for bigotry, yet the people that manufacture the fear that feeds bigotry are responsible for it as well. The spiritual reality Vivek exists in, one where he is his grandmother, would be actively denounced by most of the religious circles I grew up in as “village superstition.” This denouncement is a remnant of colonial authority, which permeates through private and public spheres.
The consequences of Nigerians being forced to witness and interact with ourselves through the eyes of colonizers is that our own realities, which we’ve been taught to see and interact with, become othered, explained away, and mislabeled.
The spiritual consequences, both for Vivek and his family, are dire. Understanding this requires understanding the role of reincarnation in Igbo culture, and particularly in the family. This is one of the many aspects of the novel where Emezi’s skill as a writer and theorist shines. The plot of Vivek moves through time, unbound by his death. This allows the reader the chance to step into Vivek’s narrative as he is experiencing it. One of the ways Vivek describes himself is as a hinge. The philosopher Jacques Derrida uses the term hinge to describe the connection between absence-presence. Think of it like a door hinge that separates and connects, and both functions are vital.
So, Vivek our hinge is connecting what is absent and what is present. In other words, life and death. In other words, Vivek’s body, life, self, experience are a tether to the spiritual realm. In Igbo culture, there are procedures around this kind of thing. Unfortunately for Vivek, none of them are followed. It’s not right, and it’s not fair.
More painful is that it’s so clear how much Vivek’s family needs Ahunna. In Igbo culture, the need of your descendants is enough to cause an honored elder to return. Vivek should have been seen and recognized for who he was, especially by the people who needed him there. Vivek (the present thing, the material) was a channel for spirit (the absent/needed thing).
Outside of the spirit face of the book, the characters are living human contextualized experiences. For Vivek and his community, this means they’re having experiences contextualized by their embodied realities. Vivek (who isn’t a man) is forced to align with his parents’ perceptions of gender and sexuality that don’t settle neatly on his skin.
It’s his friends — Somto and Olunne at first, then Juju, Elizabeth and Osita — that breathe life into Vivek. While Vivek’s parents worry about how he is, his friends try to make sure he is at all. Vivek’s friends face ostracization (for their tribe, or gender, or sexuality) and they allow that hurt to soften their hearts toward each other best they can.
Another place Emezi’s writing shines is in their ability to create worlds within each character. In a novel like Death of Vivek that centers on community, this results in a near endless depth to the layers within the text.
Death of Vivek is based entirely in Aba, Nigeria, and through Vivek’s relationships, Emezi is able to authentically capture and communicate multiple realities of youth growing up in Nigeria. A big part of how they accomplish this is in their god-tier ability to disappear within the text. Emezi is a writer with a strong voice — it’s impossible to be reading their work and forget you’re reading Emezi — and strong character presence. They’re able to present a story from within the character’s perspective so that the reader is truly immersed in Vivek’s world, even as the reader is also unmistakably within an Emezi world. Just the best kind of mind melder.
It was fun to hear them talk more about this aspect of their writing process — intentionally presenting a slept-on reality from within the perspective of a character living it — on a Twitter space hosted by The Reading Corner a few weeks ago. It was nice to have confirmation of the intention behind the work (even though it’s evident in the text) and the questions asked in the space were better than most of my grad school discussions.
Emezi’s ability to immerse the reader into multiple characters’ realities and tell a story that isn’t just one narrative but infinite is reminiscent of Toni Morrison, even as Emezi creates something entirely new in Vivek. It’s like hinges again, Morrison and Emezi’s work are connected by a spirit, a trace that exists in the space between and within both of their works.
Emezi skillfully explores various aspects of Nigerian society, from boarding school as a hotbed of queer activity — the only true universal experience — to the many violences of the Church within the Nigerian intimate family sphere. The characters embody and engage with tribalism, gender discrimination, and political upheaval.
The Death of Vivek Oji is a book to read and read again!
Queer Naija Lit is a monthly series that analyzes, contextualizes, and celebrates queer Nigerian literature.
What does a different world feel like? How do we get there?
In the speculative young adult novel Pet and its prequel Bitter, Akwaeke Emezi explores the possibilities and responsibilities of revolution and world-making.
The protagonist of Pet is 15-year-old Jam, living in post-revolution Lucille.
A little tidbit I learned: Jam’s name is a portmanteau of the Igbo words ja mu, meaning “praise me.” Jam spends her time like most kids her age: at school, hanging out with her best friend Redemption, going to the library, and accidentally summoning an angelic (in the biblically accurate sense) monster hunter, known as Pet.
So, what is a monster? And how do you find one? Jam knows what she’s been told: A monster is someone that hurts others, feeds off hurt, or willfully contributes to it. Problem is, according to the adults in Lucille — especially Jam’s parents Bitter and Aloe — there are no (free) monsters.
Another difficulty is that a monster doesn’t look like anything specific and can be anyone. To see the monster, you have to see the hurt. To see the hurt, you have to be open to seeing what fear and conditioning say to look away from. How do you look at what you’ve been told doesn’t exist? How do you “see” what isn’t real (to you and your society)?
Let me take a step back. If these questions sound familiar, it’s because, despite Pet being placed a few generations past 2022, they’re grappling with a lot of the same problems of this time. Like Jam discovers, it can be a struggle to see the hurt we’re conditioned to think isn’t there.
As children, we’re taught to see the world in this way: With a few rare exceptions, society rewards good. Similarly, Jam is raised to believe that the monsters of her world are gone — rounded up and sent to rehabilitation programs in the revolution that thrust Lucille into a new world. In both cases, what’s being taught isn’t as simple when you look closer.
In our world, societal concepts of what is good, bad, or monstrous are complex. Generally, wealth is a signifier of virtue, yet a majority of the world’s resources and systems are obtained and managed through extractive, oppressive policies and ideologies. The state of global resources makes wealth a poor reflection of virtue since its acquisition is layered in harm.
Next, ideas of beauty and ability are warped to such an extent that people outside of a certain (prejudiced, supremacist) standard are villainized, especially in comparison to people within the standard. What you look like, sound like, or how your brain works are signifiers of monstrosity as much as whether or not you hurt anyone.
Further, the groups of people that are isolated or ostracized from communal and public spaces en masse are disenfranchised and targeted groups — like unhoused people, migrants, and prisoners. These are people who might be hurt or poor or a threat to capitalism, but not necessarily a threat to other humans.
We’re taught to believe we live in a world that rewards good and condemns bad, but much of societal authority is in the hands of hate-mongering, callous people and institutions. The people being punished by society are often the most vulnerable. I find myself asking the same questions as Jam. What is a monster, and how do I see one?
In Jam’s world, it’s difficult for her to find a monster when she has been raised to believe they’re nearly extinct. In our time, it can be difficult to see what is monstrous when monstrous is used as a code for different or targeted, while the people that kill masses of people and cause resource shortages are called leaders and heroes.
Even though the questions are similar between this world and the world of Lucille, the state of the worlds themselves are different.
Jam lives in post-revolution Lucille, a world that human angels, revolutionaries, helped birth through decades of work. “The revolution had been slow and ponderous, but it had weight, and that weight built up a momentum, and when that momentum finally broke forth, it was with a great and accumulated force,” Emezi writes. Jam lives in a world where a whole community made it safe for people to label their hurt and made a commitment to healing and accountability.
Because of their work, toddler Jam is safe enough to announce her gender to her parents and grows up receiving informed and respectful care. The scene where Jam describes her first (and only, she clarifies) tantrum as a toddler — her screaming “girl” at strangers that misgendered her and Aloe (Jam’s dad) comforting her in Igbo — probably did about ten months worth of therapy for my inner child.
I’m grateful to Emezi for the line “people started by believing the victims” to describe the onset of the revolution. That is one way I learned to see. A lot of the work of seeing is internal. For me, it’s difficult to engage with the massive amounts of hurt in this world. It’s painful on my mind, body, and spirit, but with time and patience I’ve learned to broaden and develop my tolerance window.
I think Pet put it best: “the truth does not change whether it is seen or unseen … a thing that is happening happens whether you look at it or not … maybe it is easier not to look. Maybe it is easier to say because you do not see it, it is not happening.” But it is happening, and I found that I couldn’t tell myself otherwise without either going numb to what I’m feeling or engaging in some sort of cognitive dissonance.
I know and understand the “science” that justifies the state of the world and capitalism, but it doesn’t make any sense that billionaires exist while people go without food. It doesn’t make any sense that so much of my community works eleventeen jobs only to barely afford rent (if that).
It’s incomprehensible that the United States, Canada, and countries within the EU account for over 25 percent of global CO2 emissions (in comparison, the entirety of Africa and South America contribute about seven percent), yet the governments and some citizens of these regions show ambivalence and a lack of responsibility to the people displaced and dispossessed by climate change.
Within the United States, the people struggling with the impacts of climate change, natural disasters, and government negligence are, once again, targeted classes. It’s overwhelming that so many of us (globally) are struggling, systemically, individually, on all levels. So I also have to work to remember that despair is not a resting place for the heart.
I can’t allow numbness — a useful coping skill when I’m overwhelmed — to become my primary state of being either.
Why? A lot rides on our collective numbness.
Being numb can mean being numb to hope, a vital ingredient to charge a revolution. A new world isn’t possible without people believing it is. It’s part of why artists are so important. Art can channel faith; it can make something real from a possibility.
It matters to move beyond numbness and feel, because belief can be action, but belief is also a feeling. “Believe victims” includes feeling and tending to the hurt that is easier to block out. This includes other people’s hurt and your own.
A part of learning to see hurt is feeling it. Another part is information. As Redemption would say, “all knowledge is good knowledge!”
On their quest to find a monster, Jam and Redemption discover that information can, with the right application, give you the tools to see the truth — ot just disseminated knowledge from institutions, but the stories of our communities. We can listen, validate, and amplify each other’s voices — including our own.
For instance, it was healing (and therefore empowering) for me to learn the ways that depression, anxiety, and chronic pain can feel like failure.
A lot changed in my relationship with myself when I started asking: Are you failing or are you hurting? My misplaced blame was preventing me from tending to myself. Blame felt easier to manage than hurt, but no amount of blame can heal a wound. Blaming myself for feeling hurt led to me blaming myself for other people hurting me, which disconnected me from my ability to direct my healing.
Things like accountability and healing aren’t actions; they’re skills to be built. It takes energy to blame myself the way I was. Energy that could be better spent learning to recognize feelings of hurt in myself and differentiate my triggers. I say “better spent” because when I’m in a blame cycle, I’m distressed, but healing brings peace. Even more, healing is a thing that spreads.
A world where we believe victims and hold people accountable for the harm they inflict is also a world where we allow ourselves to feel our hurt and respond to hurt with care. There is no end to this commitment. Healing isn’t finite.
Even in Jam’s world — with the revolution and its angels fresh on the minds of the adults — people still choose to look away from what they see. The commitment to communal healing and accountability isn’t one and done, but ongoing.
The possibilities Emezi presents in post-revolution Lucille include a world where people fight to do the difficult work necessary to maintain systems of care. Accountability is a significant part of care. If we ever do say “there are no more monsters,” let it not be because we won’t look.
The world of Bitter, which takes place a few decades before Pet, sees Lucille still led by monsters but thrumming with a revolution ready to change that. In the midst of this are the students of Eucalyptus, an academy that shelters talented youth, and among them 16-year-old Bitter, who has no intention of ever leaving Eucalyptus, the school that offered her shelter and the space and resources to paint.
Most of her life, Bitter only had the comfort of her painted creatures, which she’s able to temporarily bring to life. Eucalyptus offers her something new and more constant than she’s ever had: family. People who love and challenge her — and don’t disappear after a few hours.
Bitter wants to be safe behind the walls of Eucalyptus, but she wrestles with this decision as the fires in the streets of Lucille rage and the bodies pile up.
In our world, as the fires of revolution rage globally, a lot of us are relatively (if not completely) sheltered from the risks of the frontline. Bitter’s engagement with her responsibility during the revolution resonates with me, especially as an artist living within a violent empire.
Is there a role for art in the revolution? Bitter — the book and its titular character — explores this question. Bitter finds that no revolution worth fighting demands everyone to sacrifice their lives at the frontlines. The kids from Assata, the revolutionary group behind a lot of Lucille’s direct action, teach Bitter that rather than wanting her and everyone to fight on the frontlines, they’re fighting for more people to get to choose to do art or whatever feeds their soul. And there are more ways to help than being on the frontlines.
I enjoyed reading about the people that became known as angels, especially seeing Bitter, Aloe, and other residents of Lucille that show up in Pet. A lot of the bonds being formed in Bitter — bonds of love — are what gives them strength. They fight for and with each other.
The Gwendolyn Brooks quote that resonates through Pet and Bitter — “We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond” — perfectly captures the heart of Assata. Their fight isn’t one that sacrifices the well being of their community in the pressure to birth a different world. They become the new world by choosing to show up with each other differently.
A conversation in Bitter and Pet that was striking to me was the one around fear. The angels say not to be afraid, and both Bitter and Jam see their fear as something to be ashamed of, but I think fear has a bad rep.
At many points, Bitter blames her fear for her struggles, but when the whole story is looked at in context, it’s not Bitter’s fear that’s her problem. It’s the difficulty of accepting her fear that creates a blockage. Bitter numbed herself to a lot of feelings and isolated herself because she was ashamed of her fear. When her community holds that fear without judgment, and gives her the care she doesn’t know how to give herself, she’s able to move through her fear.
It’s not that Bitter stops being afraid; it’s that she builds up her tolerance and does the work to move through the defensive walls of her judgment toward the Assata kids, subsequently feeling things beyond her fear. Plus, her community helps her carry what she cannot. Bitter practices the discipline of hope, and she comes out stronger for it.
She learns to fight anything that says a new world isn’t possible or feeds apathy. To listen and find the hurting thing, even if that thing was herself.
It makes sense how the kids of Lucille brought forth the revolution since they work to do the internal healing the new world needed.
Still, their fear is enough to allow them to once again turn away from the presence of monsters. It’s Jam that follows the trail in Pet even though the adults have more experience. This shows, to me, that it’s necessary to heal the common narrative that fear is something to be conquered.
Jam is also scared and, like Bitter, she resents herself for it. But her fear isn’t stronger than her love for Redemption, and focusing on that allows her to move through her fear. Jam doesn’t ever stop being scared. She just doesn’t stop at fear, and neither does Bitter.
Fear can be a stopping force, which makes it easy to reject the emotion, but I think fear is a part of love. Rather than rejecting or feeling less, we can feel more. We can learn to transmute fear into hope, to increase our tolerance, and to feel things that allow us not to stop at fear. I think all of these things are necessary for the kind of world Emezi makes possible in Pet.
In both Pet and Bitter, Emezi doesn’t shy away from the costs of a new world, but the possibilities presented by those costs are tantalizing. Emezi shows that no matter what world we find ourselves in, we often have the choice to show up for each other and ourselves.
Together, maybe we can create a world where kids have to learn about monsters secondhand.
Pet and Bitter are dedicated to Toyin Salau, who deserved a better world.
Queer Naija Lit is a monthly series that analyzes, contextualizes, and celebrates queer Nigerian literature.
Feature image by the_burtons via Getty Images
We Are Flowers, a Queer Nigerian anthology, is defiant and audacious. It has no choice but to be. The collection was published in the online literary magazine Brittle Paper in the years following the passing of Nigeria’s SSMPA. The editors took on the group name 14, both as a reference to the 14-year prison sentence imposed by the SSMPA on queer and trans folks and an attempt to preserve anonymity. We Are Flowers is in an active dance with the realities it’s seeking to argue against.
The anthology is an argument, even as it is artistic expression, because Nigeria forbids such expression from its citizens. The writers and editors of We Are Flowers grapple with telling a potentially illegal story, and therefore are made to justify the telling of their stories.
Perhaps this forced justification is part of why the anthology includes a well thought out introductory section, where editors and writers map out their intentions and hopes for their collection. As Unomah Azuah writes in said introduction: “The task of the anthology moves beyond enlightenment and entertainment. It delves into the topography of advocacy and activism.” Ikhide Ikheola follows up with, “marvel at the gift and resilience of beautiful people who refuse to be ugly in an ugly world.”
The SSMPA and similar ordinances subjugating queer Nigerians do so by distorting public perceptions and intentionally galvanizing the unrest of the populace from things that need to be addressed — like income inequality, Nigeria’s failing universities, and the ongoing pillaging by neo-colonial empires — and redirecting this unrest into useful tools for the state to keep its populace in check by blaming the struggles of the public on the existence of queer Nigerians.
The blame heaped on queer Nigerians (a descendant of the ‘divide and conquer’ strategy favored by oppressors everywhere) is a logical leap made possible by ensuring that “queer Nigerians” become the kind of people (in public conscious) that could somehow be responsible for the issues facing Nigeria. In short, queer Nigerians are grappling with the external violence of the state — and an internal crisis of identity.
Identity formation is a vital part of the development of a person. Yet, how do you engage with the complications of identity formation when so much of your expression is criminalized and therefore suppressed?
Who are you when you don’t get to be you?
“We are flowers” is the answer the anthology provides.
Each artist engages with identity through different forms (poetry, essays, and visual media) and different standpoints. The pieces that make up the collection are from a varied source of Nigerians living within the country, as well as queer (and not queer) people aligning themselves with the cause from outside of Nigeria (an unexpected offering the editors incorporated into the anthology). The variation in narrative bolsters the depth of the anthology’s engagement with identity.
It’s easy to pigeonhole queer identity into the expression of ‘queer’ desire, but no one ever taught my body to divide its desires into ‘queer’ and ‘not.’ Meaning, it is the same desire that guides me to play video games and read books that also guides me to make friends and fall in love. Before there’s a “me” that loves, that “me” must first have room to exist. The stifling of my queer desire is simply the subjugation of my desire in general.
It wasn’t until I moved out of Nigeria that I discovered I was not, in fact, a quiet child with little interest in making friends. While our stories are different, I resonate with the protagonist of the short story, “Friends In A Ship” who bemoans that, “A friendship based on a misconception is a fraudulent acquisition. Like fake jewelry, it will fail every examination and test of time.” I understood, innately, that there was a difference between me and the people around me, one so dangerous I couldn’t allow myself to label it. Unfortunately, me not labeling myself didn’t stop others from helping themselves to what was not theirs.
I learned names for “people like me” before I learned of “me.” I was certain I was not a sin, and yet that was the only word given for me. Rather than be a sin, I chose not to be at all. It’s a kind of living death, feeding the functions of the body but not the spirit. It’s even worse when this ‘choice’ happens subconsciously, because your mind is too scared — and too young — to make those choices intentionally.
Which brings me back to my earlier question: Who are you when you don’t get to be you?
I have a few favorite engagements with this question.
First, Osinachi’s visual piece “Ada-Obi.” Images have the ability to give form to unlabeled or even unexpressed experiences while still remaining free from the constriction of language and definition. “Ada-Obi” is a multifaceted piece, reflective of its name. Adaobi is, in igbo, the way to refer to the first daughter of a family. There are numerous expressions of the name “Ada” (first daughter), but what’s interesting is the way Osinachi chose to write the title, Ada-Obi.
The separation between the phrases calls into the picture the (again, numerous) meanings attached to “Obi.” Obi can be the heart organ, it can be a family compound, it can be the title of a ruler, and, in present day igboland, it is a common “boy” name. It is this last definition of Obi that I most enjoy applying to Osinachi’s piece. With a simple hyphen, Osinachi separated and recontextualized a name I’ve been called by often (as the first daughter of my father).
What once left me feeling gendered incorrectly has become an affirmation of my gender and the multiplicities inherent in igbo culture. Visually, the piece engages with traditionally gendered depictions of igbo people, not so much as to present any one gender in a person, but the way they’re all connected. Part of how Osinachi does this is by utilizing elements of Uli (in igboland, an art style associated with women) but not quite making an Uli drawing. It’s a reminder that everything in my culture is an attempt at representing what already is.
What came first, the person or the identity? In Igbo culture, the spirit comes first.
Another favorite is Romeo Oriogun’s poem “You Think You Are Fucked,” which I like both for the title, and the first lines, “wait until you write a poem/ about your father asking what it means/ to be bisexual” because it drew a chuckle at the reminder of a similar horror I faced, and also gratitude that I could now laugh where I once only felt despair. Another favorite poem, also by Oriogun, “How To Survive The Fire,” has the lines: “the first rule of survival is to Run” and “I tell you this to understand my silence,/ to understand why I crawled into my voice,/ I do not want to die.” I always appreciate art from people haunted by the same things that construct my fear.
In stories, Rapum Kambili’s “Gay Wars: Battle of the Bitches (or, The Tops and Bottoms of Being Out in Nigeria)” remains one of my favorite shorts every time I read it. Even if I didn’t deeply enjoy how it’s written as well as what is written, Kambili’s use of “bitch” alone would secure this piece as a personal favorite. In Kambili’s words, “Bitch: A man who rolls his eyes, dangles his wrists, or simply says, ‘I am.’” Beyond that, the Rapum in the story survives with a balance of wit, humor, and aggression that I’ve never been able to figure out but admire.
Additionally, Rapum’s experience is a bit similar to the experiences I had in Nigeria, when I would return as an older teen with a better understanding of my own desires (that is, knowing they exist in the first place). While in America, I labeled the sense of isolation I had grown up with as reflective of the rarity or impossibility of my own existence. It didn’t take long after returning home with a sense of self for me to realize I was terribly wrong, and there were queer people everywhere in Nigeria. Rather than the isolation I expected to continue, I was faced with learning how to safely (for us) navigate the now visible (to me) queer world I was simultaneously told didn’t exist. Rapum, as an ‘out’ gay man in Nigeria, is entrenched in balancing cultivating a life between visibility and invisibility. His observations of the harm done to a community forced to live in this way are layered intricately through the piece connecting his personal and larger communal experience.
As with Osinachi, Kambili and many of the artists in the collection work to define themselves. We are obliged to name ourselves, especially when the world aches to give us false names. The result of this work is a beautiful offering of life, a collection dedicated explicitly to “the victims of the February 2014 Gishiri (Abuja) homophobic attacks. And for all those who have suffered homophobic violence.”
A rose by any other name would still smell as sweet, and we are flowers.
Queer Naija Lit is a monthly series that analyzes, contextualizes, and celebrates queer Nigerian literature.
Chinelo Okparanta’s Under The Udala Trees is nothing short of revolutionary. The novel was published in 2015, a year after Nigeria’s then-president Goodluck Jonathan signed the SSMPA into law. Okparanta doesn’t shy away from the political and lived realities of the time period the book was published in. Rather, she engages with these tensions (and, by extension, the tensions within Nigeria itself) directly. Due to her literary courage and outstanding execution, queer Nigerians — and the world — have been gifted with a book that captures the past and ongoing resistance of a people.
Under The Udala Trees is the story of Nigeria. To understand the Biafran War — the central conflict that upturns the life of the novel’s protagonist, Ijeoma — you must understand Nigeria. In January of 1966, the Prime Minister, Premier, and several members of the newly independent Nigerian Government (and some of their family members), were assassinated by a class of junior military officials. Leadership of the country was then transferred to a military head of state, General Johnson Ironsi.
By July of the same year, there was a counter-coup that replaced the head of state once again. The initiators of the first coup claimed the government was corrupt and acting against the interests of the people, and their coup was an attempt to reset a corrupt government and return power to the people. Yet, from the outside, most of the people who took part in the coup were from one tribe (Igbo), while most of the people being deposed were from another (Hausa). Furthermore, the person that took command after the January coup, General Ironsi, was Igbo. A common narrative — and fear — was that the coup was an attempt by Igbos (Easterners) to usurp power from Hausas (Northerners).
The first coup spurred the killing of thousands of Igbo people in Northern Nigeria. The killings only increased after the July counter-coup targeted Igbo military officials and led to the death of General Ironsi, as well as the installation of a New — Hausa — Head of State, Yakubu Gowon. The increased violence against Igbo people, as well as the fact that Nigerians didn’t get to choose to be Nigeria, contributed to Eastern Nigeria cesseeding. The Nigerian Civil War began on May 30th, 1967 when Colonel Ojukwu declared Eastern Nigeria to be the independent country of Biafra. In response, the Federal Government of Nigeria set out to reinstate Biafra as part of Nigeria through military conquest.
Ijeoma’s childhood in the novel takes place between the first two coups and the civil war. At the start of Under The Udala Trees, Ijeoma believes — because her father believes — the war is a far-fetched impossibility. She doesn’t believe there will be bomber planes over igboland and military blockades intended to starve out millions of civillians. Despite her father’s reassurance, the visibly rising terror of the adults and community members in her life prompts Ijeoma to ask god for help. A year later, Ijeoma and her family are avoiding bomber planes in an underground bunker.
The war and its violence arrive quickly, and Ijeoma isn’t spared from it. Neither are readers. Okparanta’s account of Ijeoma’s wartime experience is meticulous and the best telling of the Biafran War I’ve read in fiction. This meticulousness also makes the stories contained within the novel, at times, difficult to read. The 30 months of war are bitter, and Ijeoma emerges on the other side of it a changed person — and not just because of the violence.
The war, and Ijeoma’s temporary separation from her family because of it, causes her to meet Amina. Ijeoma happens upon Amina and brings her home to offer her food and shelter. Ijeoma’s host family (a grammar school teacher and his wife) agree to take her in, though their reasoning isn’t selfless — they want another helping hand. Still, they likely saved Amina’s life.
Ijeoma’s relationship with Amina deepens as they grow up, and they fall in love. Their blossoming relationship is complicated by a few things. First, Amina is Hausa, and their friendship alone is enough to draw consternation. Second, they are both girls. Even while the war deepens tribal division amongst Nigerians, different groups unite in the joint persecution of queer Nigerians. This persecution is justified through religion.
In Nigeria, both Christianity and Islam establish strict, largely patriarchal, systems of government that centralize power. This is because the systems that establish the authority of these religions in Nigeria were developed concurrently with colonization. In the South, South-West and Eastern parts of Nigeria, Christianity was used to establish and expand European colonial authority. While Islam in the North and North-West Nigeria predates European colonisation, the establishment of Islam in West-Africa was also an attempt to centralize and expand power by pre-colonial Hausa Kingdoms. This worked so well that even after the fall of the Hausa Kingdoms to the Sokoto Caliphate in the 1800s, European colonizers were able to use established religious governing structures to consolidate their power.
As a result of the alignment between religious and colonial authority in Nigeria, much of governmental authority is an extension of these powers, even in 2022. The persecution of queer people — despite the Nigerian government’s claim to be doing so in the interest of African culture — is one manifestation of this oppressive alignment.
So, even after the war, Ijeoma is confronted with a different challenge: living as an igbo lesbian in post-civil war Nigeria. As an adult, Ijeoma contends with the ever-present threat of being discovered, of being outed and subject to beatings — or murder. The suppression of identity Ijeoma faces is so strong that “lesbian” is not a term she uses herself. Ijeoma doesn’t have the space to create and refine linguistic authority. Much of her mental energies are spent deconditioning herself.
Ijeoma’s awareness of and participation in her internal world and forming an intentional identity is cathartic, even more so because it’s a consistent aspect of Ijeoma’s character. Her persistent reading of the bible — a genuine attempt to understand her “sin” — ends up being what frees her from seeing herself as wrong. Okparanta takes the time to craft both the arguments many queer Christians hear growing up and the ways they fail to hold up under scrutiny.
Like Ijeoma, I was warned about Sodom and Gomorrah, but when I came to my teachers with questions about the references to hospitality, I was met with a shrug at best and, more commonly, anger or violence. Like Ijeoma, I learned to keep my questions to myself. When I was older and learned how exactly my parents and grandparents came to hold the beliefs they now browbeat me with, a lot of things started to make sense. It didn’t take long after that for me to detach from beliefs meant to cause me to see myself as less than.
Reading Ijeoma experience a similar religious journey validates my lived experiences and provides the affirmation I didn’t get when I chose to love myself. For that alone, this novel is dear to my heart.
Okparanta’s focus on religious oppression is intentional. The author’s note at the end of the book cites a 2012 global study on Religiosity and Atheism that ranks Nigeria as the second-most-religious country surveyed.
Okparanta’s analysis of religious authority in Nigeria goes beyond outlining its connections to the oppression of queer Nigerians. In my experience, sexual oppression is rarely far removed from misogyny, classism, and ableism. This holds true in Under The Udala Trees as well.
Ijeoma’s choices are shaped in part by her sexuality, but also by her womanhood. Even the women around her who aren’t queer are confronted with restrictions on their freedom, often backed by religious justification. People who occupy positions of difference in various forms are marginalized or ostracized in the novel.
These other forms of marginalization form nucleuses of power that, by the end of the book, show a larger, sinister web of oppression than what is directly facing queer Nigerians. Sinister, because it’s impossible to reinforce oppression on one end without subjecting your own freedoms to oppressive conditions. Yet, different groups of people are being eagerly offered up by governments seeking to expand power and control by any means.
In the novel, Ijeoma’s awareness of her marginalization also feeds her awareness of other people’s conditions. If you can justify your own oppression by agreeing with another’s, then understanding your marginalization helps connect your liberation with someone else’s, which builds solidarity. This is the gift of self-analysis, one Ijeoma continues to nurture as her story develops and she’s met with different types of oppression.
Neither discrimination nor manipulation are solely tactics of colonizers. An easy way to unite and distract two people is to scapegoat a third person. Suffering people are angry people, and angry people often need to be given an outlet for their anger before they start to ask too many questions about why they’re mad. It’s no coincidence that the hyper-vigilance of queer Nigerians is on the rise again as the 2023 presidential elections draw near. The SSMPA was signed into law in 2014, a year before the 2015 Nigerian presidential elections. The further criminalization of queer people in Nigeria will do nothing to alleviate many of the economic and social burdens currently facing Nigerians, but it does provide a smaller, unprotected portion of the populace for the majority to vent their anger on.
In light of current conditions for queer Nigerians — and global conditions facing queer people — a book like Under the Udala Trees is ever-timely. Okparanta succeeds in creating a character that lives, despite survival being tenuous. By the end of the novel, Ijeoma is rooted in her love of herself and has gone past surviving to manifesting a life beyond the boxes she was forced to construct herself in.
Here’s to all our unseen-but-hoped-for futures.
Queer Naija Lit is a monthly series that analyzes, contextualizes, and celebrates queer Nigerian literature.
Hello, Hello! Welcome to my column, Queer Naija Lit, where I’ll be reviewing some of my favourite queer Nigerian books.
CONTENT WARNING: EVERYTHING deserves its name. Between the first and last pages, my mind became a thunderstorm of questions. What is time? What is being? What is life? What is death, to a god? Each poem presents an experience like lightning. Look: love. Here, pain. See where they connect. At the center of the thunderstorm is stillness. There, clarity is born. If you feel confused and a little unsteady then, congratulations, you’re ready to read Akwaeke Emezi.
What is time?
In colonial reality, time is a wound. Colonial time announces itself by the suppression of other times. It is the present, absent. In Emezi’s work, time is mended by stories that reach across, into, beyond, and before the bifurcation of “this” time.
It’s common to think of time as linear, but Emezi’s poems convey a story that doesn’t go from point A to B. Rather, it explores moments: freedom, peace, reckoning, and hurt can be represented through time — by which I mean experience. In Igbo culture, experience is the focus of a story and, by extension, life (what is life, if not one long story/experience?).
I grew up hearing stories from my family that didn’t hold their center in a particular time or region but in experience and shared understanding. Simultaneously, I was hearing a linear story about my country and people that only made sense if I didn’t look beyond the last few decades. I was — through spiritual and academic colonial institutions — conditioned to think of myself through a lens that denied my existence. When you have two means of storytelling next to each other — like with most binaries — we’re taught to pit them against each other. The “and” of the colonial mind is really a “versus.”
Emezi recognizes this cultural conflict in their narrative, but they step out of the narrative of oppression and into truth. Binaries can show us where things separate, but also where they connect — like a door hinge, or the two faces of a coin.
When I look at time as an experience the way Emezi writes it and compare it to linear, measured time, what becomes obvious to me is the way they are connected, and that one way of perceiving — the linear way — is deemed more real than another.
The consequences (and intent) of this are dire. Experiences and realities that can be validated through linear time thrive. Meanwhile, experiences and realities that can’t be translated into this metric are invisibilized and subjugated. Specifically, the people and environments living in non-privileged realities are subjugated.
Not in Emezi’s book. CONTENT WARNING: EVERYTHING exists in the reality of the spirit that wrote it. Emezi is who they are, an ogbanje and a god-child. The book is an embodiment of their reality, which is also Igbo reality.
What is being?
Colonization forced a majority of the world to think of beingness as one thing. There’s one (white) human, one (white) reality, one (white) self. This narrative is a modern descendant of Plato’s search for Ultimate Truth, which is fear and control. Colonization is an empire’s attempt to take all that is. I can’t imagine the size of the ego necessary for a person to believe they can know and be all that is, and yet, the proof is in life right now. It’s in the ways we’re still conditioned to try to define everyone else and the ways we’re prevented from defining ourselves. Like Toni Morrison says, definitions belong to the definers.
Our ability to know and define stops at us — and even that is tenuous. To reach beyond the self and attempt to define (control) all reality — and therefore the experiences of people that aren’t you — is violence.
When Emezi writes, it is from deep within themself, made possible by their acceptance of their reality. The book is filled with selves mirroring each other, asking hard questions. This mode of storytelling is grounded in our culture. Duality is an important concept in Igbo culture. Life is possible when two exist. The earth and the sky, day and night. Time and being create life and death. While colonial reality seeks to suppress difference, Igbo culture recognizes that difference itself is life.
A poetry book is brilliant fabric to weave reality with. In physical form, each end of the book serves as a container that the selves in the poem differentiate and reflect within. The difference in the book serves a different purpose from the conflict and suppression that is the current dominant narrative. Instead of suppression, Emezi writes towards connection and integration.
One poem, “Self Portrait As An Abuser” (one of many portraiture poems in the book) fractures the selves in two. One self seeks to live by taking. This self fears being alone, fears being unloved. The other self, on the other end of the page, is healed enough to tell the story as a warning. Between these stories, another narrative emerges.
I literally mean Between. When the stories are read through the space that separates them, a third narrative emerges. The hurting self tries to tell the spirit inside it to live. It doesn’t end there. I count at least ten narratives in this poem alone, and the entire book is like that, yet no two poems are the same. It’s brilliant.
This is a book to be read and re-read, like all true stories. People aren’t ever just “one” thing. We grow, change, heal, and hurt. That’s life. Stillness (which is not rest) belongs to spirit, the internal consciousness. We dip into it from time to time, but permanent stillness is death.
It’s important to place Emezi’s work in context. It makes sense that this was a book written by an ogbanje. An ogbanje is a trickster spirit, and what is colonization if not trickery. Substitute that, unname this, redraw these lands, rename these people, destroy their artifacts. Weave a web of fear over the world so we pretend all is well, as people are hurt. Trickery.
So of course, it takes an ogbanje to see where the oppressors’ tricks fail and spin old realities into new worlds.
Emezi is also the child of an alusi (deity) , Ani. The earth mother. She holds life and death, the harvest, marriage, communal laws, and spiritual practices. Ani is the ground everything is built on, and she is where we return when we leave this realm. The python that swallows everything.
That Ani sends her child as an ogbanje makes sense. The child of Ani has to be everything, a reflection of their mother. For Igbo people right now, that means they have to be part trickery. They are a reflection of the liminal space that the colonized culture — fighting for its own reality — occupies.
It matters that a god of my people showed their face and is queer. It matters the way they continue to experience violence in this embodiment. This mirrors colonial interactions with African liminality and the ways we experience the embodiment of spirit. Their stigmatization by cis-het Nigerians invested on some level in the upholding of colonial reality makes it clear what the arms of oppression are orchestrating us to kill internally. Our own spirits, our own people, our own gods.
I, and any of my people who know to look, know what we see. What we feel in Emezi’s telling. To tell a story is to survive it. To tell a story with all your faces present, as Emezi has done, is to live. As a people, if our gods are alive, so are we.
The whole story matters, it always does. So, thank you Akwaeke, for giving us everything.
Queer Naija Lit is a monthly series that analyzes, contextualizes, and celebrates queer Nigerian literature.
Hello, Hello! Welcome to my column, Queer Naija Lit, where I’ll be reviewing some of my favourite queer Nigerian books. It has been eight years since Nigeria passed the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act (SSMPA) in an attempt to erase its undesirables, or at least push us away from its center, depersonalize and unname us. Queer Nigerians — writers, poets, speakers, activists, lovers, fighters — responded to this with a resounding NO! So they wrote, and lived, and wrote some more and they gave us, their community, our selves back. They gave us our stories, our lives, as terrifying and brave and beautiful as it is. These are the stories that helped me remember my name, remember that no person has the right to unmake me, remember that I am not alone and most importantly, that I am loved.
What better place to start than with Eloghosa Osunde’s Vagabonds!, a novel about the lives of Nigerians whose existence is criminalized? Vagabonds! debuted Mar 15 and — deservedly — broke Twitter. Even a week before its debut, my Twitter feed was filled with Vagabonds! anticipation, and a few hours after it was launched, glowing Vagabonds! reviews started to come in. Other tweets were from people eager to get a copy (sorry Joel!) or the lucky chosen that got signed copies. I love how communal my reading experience was. I live in the US, so I feel the distance from my community. With plane tickets being so expensive, and now a global pandemic, I don’t get to go home often. I was sad I couldn’t be reading this book in community like I would prefer, but that space was created online. I think so much of that is because the book itself is communal.
I read the book as soon as I could calm down enough to. Now, at the other end of it, I’m not the same person I was when I started.
From the responses I’ve seen, my experience is a common one. This book has changed lives, taken people apart and, with love and care, put them together again. It’s only been out a few days. So what kind of book could do this? What kind of magic did Osunde conjure? I’ll tell you, then you can buy the book to see for yourself.
Who are the vagabonds? In the book: “the queer, the poor, the displaced, the footloose and rogue spirits.” In Nigeria, vagabond is used in the criminal code of several states to refer to different forms of perceived or actual gender non-conformity. It’s a term the government gives to those it wants to see punished, erased or hidden. The novel’s vagabonds include poor Nigerians across ages and backgrounds, rich elite that hide secrets their peers legislate other people to death for, and queer Nigerian youth and kids struggling to build a life while being punished for their attempt. It also includes the spirit realm; the other face of the world and Lagos, pressed right against it and often going ignored. The spirits also have their hierarchies and power games. Therefore, vagabonds exist even among spirits, and the story weaves through realms. The characters deal with central questions a lot of Nigerians have to grapple with. Like, how do you find safety when your life is subject to the whims of the stronger person? That’s a question Johnny has to answer when the cushy job his cousin hooks him up with turns out to have a cost beyond the abuse rich people already subject their drivers to.
How do you love as queer Nigerians in Nigeria when the country could snatch everything from you in a heartbeat? There are different answers in the novel. Some characters navigate through privilege, others through hiding so well they forget they’re hiding. My favorite characters find ways to survive together; to grow fangs and learn to hold each other gently in them. These characters are a bold contrast to the government that denies their existence as unafrican and a “western ideology” or invisible.
To quote Daisy who works at one of Lagos’s underground sex clubs, “Being in a country where dykes were ghosts and shapeshifters for a living, for a life, meant that shit here didn’t work like it did aborad. But that didn’t mean it didn’t work at all, because people still found ways to love each other, even in nervous conditions.” The issue is not the presence or existence of queer Nigerian lives, but the cost. It’s this rising cost, not just for queer Nigerians but all Nigerians deemed not part of the elite that pushes the tension through the pages, to the novels end. Osunde rests on this: You can only keep people from living true lives and loving publicly, and never completely. Sometimes, you can’t stop people at all.
The novel has many hearts, and therefore many whole-parts. The music referenced in the book, for instance, is its own spirit. Its heartbeat rises and falls with the story. It’s a good thing there’s not just one but two playlists to accompany your read.
Another spirit Ékò — the city spirit of Lagos, Nigeria — is central to the novel. Quick background: Ékò is an old name for Lagos, and even before that, it was known as Oko by the Awori, its indegenous people. Lagos is a behemoth of a city, and Ékò is exactly that. The novel switches between Ékò’s spirit and human faces with dizzying speed that is reflective of Osunde’s skill with wordcraft. “See the cityspirit as a simulation glitching, mutating into hundreds of selves gathering in a sideways crowd”. Ékò is split into as many selves as the 21 million Lagosians inhabiting it.
Our first guide and narrator is Tatafo, Ékò’s favorite creation. Tatafo is an eye spirit, one of many created to see what Ékò needed seen. It is through Tatafo’s eyes that we see the beings that give the novel its name, Vagabonds, scattered between realms. It is Tatafo that shows us the glitz and glamor of Lagos, as well as the bodies that lie underneath and the blood that keeps the city running. That’s the thing about Lagos, it must keep running. It must, and the city’s vagabonds pay the price for it.
If it wasn’t obvious already, names are important in this book. Like their name, vagabonds are pushed to the edges of what is visible to allow those with privilege to look away or deny their personhood. At the same time, vagabonds are hypervisible, their sacrifice and blood a constant spectacle: househelps, hawkers, meguards, drivers, and sexworkers are the economic lifeblood of Lagos, yet are subject to endless violence from the upper class that makes up the minority.
Tatafo as a narrator doesn’t look away from the realities that vagabonds face. Through Tatafo, Osunde touches on experiences I had forgotten about, repressed, or didn’t know how to contextualize: schoolmates being pulled out of school to get married. The ceaseless violence women and children are subjected to, the pain, the sweat, the hunger. All of it gets jumbled in my head as [Nigeria] right next to home and love. It’s hard for me to make sense of, but Tatafo does so with ease. It’s what the spirit was made for, to be in everyone’s business. We are conditioned to look away from the things Tatafo picks apart. Abusers, serial killers, body snatchers, corrupt politicians, and violent spirits run amok under Ékò’s watch, often doing his bidding. Tatafo reports it all.
Something that strikes me is Tatafo’s confusion about Ékò’s inexhaustible demand for blood and bodies. To me, Vagabonds! contains stories within stories, and this is of them: Lagos was named by the Portuguese who settled there, named after their own coastal city. They used Lagos’s ports to sell and ship enslaved Africans across the ocean. The blood money helped consolidate Lagos’s emergence as an industrial center, particularly for the British colonizers that came after. You could say the blood spilled became part of Lagos’s spirit. Today, Lagos is Nigeria’s financial capital.
So Ékò demands blood, and his spirit creations work to keep him fed. But even Ékò must bow his head to a greater spirit: money. Money creates and protects the blessed elite, who steal and kill with abandon. The vagabonds pay the price. They’ve been named expendable. Vagabonds get hurt. They die. This is the hardest aspect of the novel for me. The violence is not gratuitous — it’s real.
Many times, Tatafo backs away from a description, choosing to spare the audience more detail. Instead, the violence is just present, and that’s enough. My memories filled in the places Tatafo did not go, but even that was a kind of healing. Vagabonds in my reality also get hurt and die. For a lot of us, the stories of our communities begin with death. As a result, this kind of telling is necessary.
Osunde writes that hope is fear transmuted. Vagabonds! Is exactly that. The novel is hope given form. A beast, formed by one of the strongest of all forces: love. At first Tatafo shares the scary things, the not-so-secret secrets. By the end of the novel, the thread of love-formed-resilience that connects all these stories is visible and solid. It spins all the way back to the first web on the first page. The thread is made even brighter by the sheer aliveness of the characters, and the love (or rejection of love) that is central to so many of their stories.
There’s also Thomas, who sees more than he knows how to see. Thomas, like me, grew up being told stories and given lessons the “civil” world tries to get him to forget. Indegenous knowledge is dismissed as superstition. In Ékò that’s dangerous. There’s Johnny, a driver who is way over his head and trapped in a Nightmare of a job. There’s the Fairy God-Girls, girl spirits whose unfair deaths have kept them in Lagos, wanting to protect still-alive girls who don’t have the power they do. There’s Toju and Agbon: lovers separated by changing bodies, lives and their own fear. There’s Wura, who wants to die well, and Adura who loves her even after. Adura who says: “It’s not that I didn’t love you enough to stay. It’s that I loved you enough to burn all the courts down” and “this is Nigeria. Even if we manage not to kill each other, they might still find us and eat us.” Then there’s Gold. Gold, who showed me what it would look like to be queer and Nigerian and loved by a parent.
“Where were you on the thirteenth of January 2014, when that law was passed?” Tatafo asks. Most queer Nigerians don’t need to look up the date.
I was in New York, finishing my second semester of freshman year of college when the SSMPA was passed. The summer before, I had been in Nigeria. I remember thinking things were different: far too many pastors at my house warning me to behave well. My cousins let me know they thought conversion therapy was a suitable, ethical response to having a gay family member.
I wrote it all in my diary. My aunt read it, and I was shipped off to Christian Camp with the aforementioned cousins. For two weeks no one who loved me knew where I was. Not long after, I left for New York to start University. Months later, that law passed. The shockwaves arrived fast and relentlessly. For Nigerians in the diaspora, there was an uptick in being disowned or being sent home for “training.” In some households, pastors were summoned for “deliverance”.
For Nigerians back home in the epicenter, it was even worse. Cishet Nigerians didn’t need more of a reason to be violent towards queer Nigerians — colonisation and prejudice did their work well — but the country was squeezing even more of its people’s lifeblood from their veins, and the guys in government make scary opponents. Why not direct the violence towards a readily available target? They killed, burned, jailed, and did much worse. Are still doing much worse. And the country looks away as their children, friends, family are taken because someone else named them wrong.
When I heard they passed the law, I thought nothing. Have you ever had your body hijacked by fear? I didn’t know how to think or begin to process. Trauma like that never goes away, not really. You just learn to make room, because you must, but that fear still grips until it’s released or transmuted. I grew bigger, but it will bring me to my knees everytime something brushes against it.
So in Vagabonds!, when Gold folds over after she hears the law is signed, and all she can say is, “Mummy, they’re coming for me” — I understood a part of her helplessness and fear. What shocked me was her mother’s response: “Before they get to you, they would have to kill your mother first.”
I used to know that kind of protection. I remember when my mother cussed out my brother’s teachers in four different languages because they framed him for something he didn’t do. That kind of protection extended to me, too, until I became undeserving, and then it didn’t. Like Gold, I spent my life waiting for the other shoe to drop. Unlike Gold, that moment came for me. I know now that I can love myself even when those that brought me into this world do not, and it is not a sin. Still, when no one you know has a parent that loves them in their truth, that sort of thing begins to feel impossible. Osunde made it possible. I’ve seen what the love I deserve would look like. It hurts, and I’m angry, but feeling is healing.
Osunde makes clear what is needed to defend queer Nigerians and vagabonds alike: Stepping in to move power we can’t move ourselves. The status quo is that poor, queer, Nigerians continue to be the scapegoats, while other Nigerians pretend the machete cannot reach them. But the police do not only chase down Nigerians they perceive to be queer. The violence of those in power extends far beyond the scapegoats. The homophobia the government is drumming up is a distraction. While you are looking, they will take the ground from under you. It’s a different story if those who want us gone have to fight all of us. In Osunde’s words, “love is, after all, what fights for us so that we can hold our peace.”
Love is central to the book, and Osunde writes about communal love so well. Better than anything I’ve ever come across. This is not a story about villains, and you find yourself rooting for the sometimes-bad guys. Because being a vagabond is not often a choice, you know? Because poet Staceyann Chin’s words resound strongly in the novel: All Oppression Is Connected. You do not unmake your suffering by continuing to paint with the oppressor’s brush. A different world means new ways of being and loving and reading each other. The ending of the novel echoes this sentiment. The vagabonds’ greatest strength is each other. We grow when we create the space for each other to be. That’s love. The ending we deserve.
Vagabonds! will continue to be written about, because it’s not done yet. It just got started. You should read it if you haven’t already. Get it for anyone you love (including yourself). Me? I’m going to read it again. Then find the audiobook and read that together. Then I’ll read it one more time just for fun. I know I’m not alone in feeling this:
Thank you Eloghosa, for naming the things people would rather look away from. Vagabonds! is righteous and unflinching truth. Which is another name for love. When you go through the kinds of things Nigeria’s vagabonds are subject to daily, yet people walk past like they don’t see anything, it invisibilizes a wound. Vagabonds! names what oppressive power would like to see hidden: the power of those it oppresses. When we name the wound, it makes space to address and heal hurt. Healing gives strength, and strength is needed to fight for ourselves and our communities. Vagabonds! brings queer Nigerians closer to living true and free lives. Thank you.
Queer Naija Lit is a monthly series that analyzes, contextualizes, and celebrates queer Nigerian literature.