"Watering the Imagination": Childhood and the Spaces of African Queerness (original) (raw)
Related papers
Sexual Identities in Africa: A queer reading of Chinelo Okparanta’s under the Udala trees
Asεmka: A Bilingual Literary Journal of University of Cape Coast
In Africa, queer sexual identities have received mixed feelings, leading to the debate in a bid to clearly define the legalization or non-legalization of it in various countries. And, looking at the current changing trends of this concept in Africa, the selected literary text happens to situate itself well within the fluid queer discourse. It follows then that the text provides the sub-plot of characters that have an overtly queer erotic and queer social bonding with some other characters. Consequently, the crust of this study is to draw on the broader queer concept in interrogating some pressing concerns of queer sexual identities in Okparanta‟s Under the Udala Trees. Among other things, the research demonstrates how contemporary works of fiction like Under the Udala Trees use their narratives to conceive space and language whose midpoint encompasses literary innovations and the significance of some experiences of queer individuals within an African setting. The study ultimately un...
Queering the Racial Other: Towards a Queer Africa
New Literaria An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities ISSN- 2582-7375 [Online], 2023
This paper aims to explore recent developments in queer representation in 21 st century African literature. Africa's history with the legitimization of homosexuality is complicit with politics of invisibility, silencing, erasure and rigid cultural ideologies. The Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act (SSMPA) of Nigeria which was enacted in 2014 saw a furore among both old and new generation African writers who were embittered by the systemic erasure of LGBTQIA+ lives. Wole Soyinka's portrayal of the mulatto Joe Golder in The Interpreters was the closest that an African writer had come to representing a non-straight, non-heterosexual character in the panorama of African literature. While the only accomplishment of Soyinka's character remains a sympathetic portrayal of a homosexual, it also suggests the possibility of closeted queer presence in Africa. The beginning of the 21 st century witnessed a bold flourish of queer literature-Chris Abani's GraceLand (2004) and Jude Dibia's Walking with Shadows (2005) present queer protagonists who struggle to come to terms with their queerness and radicalize anachronistic notions of gender and sexuality. Later works by new generation African writers have effectively succeeded in debunking the premise that 'homosexuality is un-African' on which the draconian SSMPA had been built. Chinelo Okparanta's Under the Udala Trees (2015) reinvents the bildungsroman by placing a queer African girl as the hero of her story. Akwaeke Emezi's The Death of Vivek Oji (2020) explores the liminalities of gender and sexuality, the rites of passage that presages the fate of self-identified queer people within a social context that is hostile to sexual difference. This paper will analyze how all these works rewrite the history of African queer people into the nation's body politic by strategically applying pertinent theoretical frameworks like race, gender and sexuality, biopolitics, politics of heteronormativity, and queer necropolitics.
Queer Africa: literature as art of resistance
Revista Letras Raras, 2022
The discussion about literature as a fictional space of resistance in contexts of oppression in life is rich. Relatedly, we find literary works by African authors that represent queer bodies in fictional spaces in which, in life, are marked by homophobia and/or the criminalization of homosexuality. This article therefore aims to thematically present Queer Africa: New and Collected Fiction and Queer Africa 2: New Stories. To this end, we discussed the context of criminalization of homosexuality in the authors’ birth countries and brought to the debate African and Africanist scholars who discuss how the theologization and politicization of the religious discourse, according to which queer people are sinful and deprived of the grace of God, and the discourse of the tradition, according to which homosexuality is a product of the West and, therefore, un-African, seek the permanence of the status quo in these countries. During the thematic analysis of the short stories and the analysis of “Pub 360” based on Bakhtin’s theory of the novel, we realized that the short story writers brought to the fictional world the representation of the conflicts experienced by characters who discover or live their sexuality in the midst of homophobic or criminalizing contexts and the love and passion of couples who live and explore their sexuality in their daily lives; that is, it is the human and humanizing experiences of queer bodies represented in the short stories that make these collections an art of resistance not only for the representation they make, but for their very existence.
Negotiating Identity: Sexuality and Gender in Olumide Popoola’s When We Speak of Nothing (2017)
IAFOR journal of literature & librarianship, 2019
Sexuality" and "gender" are two cultural indexes regarded by gender and culture theorists as well as their allied feminist critics as fundamental to the construction of the Self. It could be observed however that, the spaces and platforms for the construction of identity are diverse and complex when viewed from the psychosocial platform. In this discussion, I elect to interrogate Olumide Popoola's When We Speak of Nothing (2017) as a textual space where sexuality and gender indexes are yoked within psychosocial experiences to complexly negotiate personal identity. I engage the concepts "sexuality" and "gender" with the aim to use these as tools to examine the construction of an identity for a transgender African in diaspora in the novel. "Place of negotiation" and "self-discovery" are analytical variables understood in this discussion as inherent in "the analytic third" espoused by the psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden, illustrating also "the third space of enunciation" explained by the postcolonial theorist, Homi K. Bhabha. Thus, standing on a fair blend of mainstream psychoanalytic and postcolonial critical platforms, I read When We Speak of Nothing (2017) as a postcolonial diaspora textspace where identity becomes a phenomenon emerging through a psychosocial process for the diasporic African person. In this novel, the protagonist's identity emerges through a process that unfolds within a space of complex dialectic tensions between his sexuality consciousness, his gender category unconscious, and the sociocultural environment. In this essay I conclude that sexuality and gender, as they play significant role alongside the protagonist's experience of cultural dispersal, are fundamental indexes for mapping his identity and self-discovery as an African in a diasporic space.
Fiction as prosthesis: Reading the contemporary African queer short story
2021
In this article, I read contemporary African queer fiction as a tool employed by writers to represent and rehumanise queer identities in Sub-Saharan African societies. In these societies, heteropatriarchal authorities strive to disable queer agency by dehumanising queer subjects. I argue that African queer identities, desires, and experiences are controlled and restricted under the heterosexual gaze, which strives to ensure that human sexuality benefits patriarchy, promoting heterosexual desire as ‘natural’ and authentically African and pathologising homosexuality. African writers then employ fiction as a means of rehumanising queer subjects in these disabling heteronormative societies to grant voice and agency to identities that have been multifariously subjugated and/or deliberately erased, and fiction acts as a type of prosthesis, a term I borrow from disability studies. Rewriting such lives in fiction does not only afford discursive spaces to queer identities, but also reconstru...
Can Themba’s iconic story, “The Suit” (1963), tells of a devastating punishment visited upon an adulterous wife, Matilda, by her husband, Philemon. This article begins by examining some implications of Themba’s story and touching on subsequent adaptations that have re-imagined this haunting tale from various perspectives. I then move on to consider two stories by Makhosazana Xaba (2013) which add significant elements to the original fable. “Behind ‘The Suit’” is written in epistolary form by Philemon’s dying male lover to his daughter, thus queering the narrative. “‘The Suit’ Continued: The Other Side” is recounted in first-person narration by Matilda, after her suicide. It delineates the affair between Matilda and another woman, and their plan to have a baby, adding further queer temporalities. Citing theorists of queer and bisexual temporalities, I provide a close reading of the effects Xaba creates in her re-fashionings of Themba’s Ur-text. I argue that both stories critique hetero-patriarchy; they queer marriage, procreation, Sophiatown, black communities and the South African nation; and they contribute meaningfully to postcolonial queer writing and reading.
Poetics: Queer Recesses of the Heart and the Spirit of Intimacy within the Africana Household
AFRICAN JOURNAL OF GENDER AND RELIGION, 2020
Audre Lorde is a household name within Black queer communities and has almost exclusively been associated with scholarship on gender and sexuality. Her early political involvement in Africa's liberation in the context of Négritude, a pan-African movement of self-affirmation, has largely gone unnoticed, inadvertently giving credence to the unfounded but popular idea that queer folks are not interested in Africa's political priorities. This essay is written with the view that Africa and her Diaspora need preeminent queer actors influencing the present and future trajectories and strategies to be considered in defence of a Black dignified presence in the world and against global racism. It is further submitted that the personal is not just politicalit is primarily spiritual. Hence the triad, personal, spiritual, and political has implications for our appraisal of meanings within the Africana household. The exploration of poetry as a spiritual practice of the queered self in this essay blurs the boundaries between religion and politics in order to offer an integral account of gender diversity within the Africana household. We need to collectively learn from the experiences that not just resist racial oppression but also from those that simultaneously free the heart. From this vantage point, Audre Lorde's poetics is read as internal recommendations for building up the Africana dwelling by calling out what remains dormant or imperfectly considered within the realm of spiritual and political imagination: queer recesses of the heart.