Nigeria’s queer literature offers a new way of looking at the modern nation and sexuality
When Akwaeke Emezi’s debut novel Freshwater was first published in 2018, it was praised as a ‘remarkable’ and ‘surreal’ novel (The Guardian) which explored Igbo cosmology, sexuality and the nature of selfhood.
Now, the academic Rocío Cobo-Piñero has written a paper titled ‘Queering the Black Atlantic: Transgender Spaces in Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater’. She spoke to The Conversation on the emergence of Nigerian queer literature, and its implications for traditional viewings of the African diaspora.
She said, “African literature has witnessed a growth of memoir and fiction that deals with queer sexualities. For example, Chris Abani’s GraceLand in 2004, Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees in 2015, and Freshwater in 2018.
[…] It is interesting and contradictory that these authors come from Nigeria, the country with some of the most draconian laws against homosexuality on the continent, as well as some of its most noted literary voices.
[…] To begin with, it is rare that trans Africans get to write their own story. Emezi[‘s Freshwater] not only tells the story of their transition in the novel and an autobiographical essay, but also forces readers to consider that there is another dimension to the contemporary understanding of gender.
African spirituality and gender identities were perceived to be more fluid before colonialism”.
The relationship between white colonialism and heteronormative views on sexuality and the self has been explored before in other post-colonial writings, most famously in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.
Both Rushdie and Emezi explore sexual taboo and write using magic realism, a genre which was championed by post-colonial texts to explore how the pre- and post-colonial nation views its dual identity.
Perhaps it is only in moments of magic (or in Igbo cosmology) that two contradictory ideas can be held at the same time, whether that’s gender fluidity or the modern nation.
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