(Re)Writing the Nation, (Re)Writing the Self: Literary Representations of Contemporary Nigeria in Selected Novels by Chinelo Okparanta, Uzodinma Iweala, Chigozie Obioma, Ayobami Adebayo, Helon Habila and Sefi Atta

UNIVERSIDAD DE SEVILLA FACULTAD DE FILOLOGÍA TESIS DOCTORAL (Re)Writing the Nation, (Re)Writing the Self: Literary Representations of Contemporary Nigeria in Selected Novels by Chinelo Okparanta, Uzodinma Iweala, Chigozie Obioma, Ayobami Adebayo, Helon Habila and Sefi Atta AUTORA: Ariadna Serón Navas DIRECTORAS: Dra. Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Carazo Dra. María Rocío Cobo Piñero Sevilla, 2023 AGRADECIMIENTOS Me gustaría agradecer, en primer lugar, el esfuerzo, tiempo y cariño que me han brindado durante estos seis años mis directoras de tesis, Carolina y Rocío. Ha sido toda una suerte poder encontrar a mujeres que simpatizan con los temas que trato en este texto, que están intelectualmente comprometidas con causas por las que merece la pena luchar y que con su propia práctica docente proponen una forma alternativa de trabajar basada en la horizontalidad y el apoyo mutuo. En este sentido, también me gustaría recordar a la persona que me inició en muchos de los temas que hoy trato aquí, la profesora Sofía Muñoz Valdivieso, de la Universidad de Málaga. Su constancia, rigor y pasión por transmitir el interés por otras literaturas han hecho que hoy pueda presentar este trabajo académico. Seguramente, el dicho Bantú que Chinua Achebe recoge en su libro The Education of a British-Protected Child (2009) refleje fielmente cómo concibo la investigación y la creación de una comunidad investigadora comprometida con mejorar nuestra realidad: “‘A human is human because of other humans.’ We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own” (136). Asimismo, me gustaría agradecer la ayuda prestada por el grupo de investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla “Escritoras y Escrituras” liderado por la investigadora Mercedes Arriaga Florez, al igual que quisiera subrayar el apoyo prestado por el proyecto de investigación PGC2018-095393-B-I00 “Queer Temporalities in Contemporary Anglophone Culture (Literature, Cinema and Videogames)” liderado por el investigador Juan Antonio Suárez de la Universidad de Murcia al que tengo el placer de pertenecer. Por último, le estoy profundamente agradecida a mi familia por todo el apoyo que me ha dado durante todos estos años de investigación y que sin el cual esta tesis no habría sido posible. A pesar de todo, soy muy afortunada de teneros. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1. FAMILIAL PERSPECTIVES, NATIONAL ALLEGORIES ................. 25 1.1. Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen (2015) .......................................................... 31 1.1.1. Preliminary Remarks on Chigozie Obioma and his Novel ................... 31 1.1.2. Fusing the Imaginary and the Mundane: Animalisation, Magic Realism and “Organic Fantasy” ........................................................... 43 1.1.3. A Tale of Deadly Prophecies and Broken Dreams: Revisiting Nigeria’s Recent Past .......................................................................................... 57 1.2. Ayobami Adebayo’s Stay with Me (2017) ...........…….....……........................... 62 1.2.1. Preliminary Remarks on Ayobami Adebayo and her Novel ................. 62 1.2.2. Monstrous/“Monstrificated” Mothers and Abiku Children: An Afro- Gothic Analysis of Stay with Me ......................................................... 68 1.2.3. “Mother Is Gold, Father Is Glass”: Transgressive Motherhood and other Forms of Reclaiming Women’s Agency ............................................. 80 1.2.4. “While my Last Child Was Dying, the Country Was Unravelling”: Interrogating Inviable Nations and Engendering Promising Ones ...... 90 CHAPTER 2. AFROQUEER REPRESENTATIONS OF HOME .................................. 96 2.1. Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees (2015) ......................................... 108 2.1.1. Afroqueer Nigerian Literature as Restorative Project: Cementing a Literary Counter-Archive .................................................................. 108 2.1.2. Preliminary Remarks on Chinelo Okparanta and her Novel ............... 115 2.1.3. Queering the Post-Independence Nation: Towards a More Inclusive Paradigm of Nigeria ........................................................................... 126 2.2. Uzodinma Iweala’s Speak No Evil (2018) ......................................................... 136 2.2.1. Preliminary Remarks on Uzodinma Iweala and his Novel ................. 136 2.2.2. Black Queer Diaspora and Afrodiasporic Conceptions of Home ....... 141 2.2.3. Queer Transnational Masculinities and Racism in the United States .. 150 CHAPTER 3. TRANSNATIONAL REALITIES, LOCAL CONCERNS ..................... 165 3.1. Helon Habila’s Travellers (2019) ...................................................................... 169 3.1.1. Preliminary Remarks on Helon Habila and his Novel ........................ 169 3.1.1.1. An Exploration of the New African Diaspora as Experienced by a Tapestry of Diverse African Travellers Journeying Europe ................................................................................................ 177 3.1.1.2. Afromobilities in Contemporary Europe: Discussing the Role of Buses, Trains, Heims, and Deportation/Refugee Camps ....... 185 3.1.1.3. Into the Deep Blue Sea: Analysing the Mediterranean Sea as a Site of Pain, Trauma and Shame ........................................... 194 3.1.2. Transcending the “Almost Obligatory Obsession of the African Writer with the Nation”?: Revisiting Home in the Post-National Context ... 197 3.1.3. “Hesitant Locals” and Impoverished Migrants: Debating Travellers through the Lens of Afropolitanism .................................................. 209 3.2. Sefi Atta’s The Bad Immigrant (2021) ............................................................... 221 3.2.1. Preliminary Remarks on Sefi Atta and her Novel ............................... 221 3.2.1.1. What Makes a “Bad” and a “Good” Immigrant? Exploring the African Experience(s) in the United States ...................... 225 3.2.1.2. Probing the American Dream: Discussing the New African Diaspora in the United States ................................................. 228 3.2.2. “The Local in the Global”: Theorising Home(s) in the “Afropolitan Time” ................................................................................................ 235 3.2.3. Are We (Still) Interested in “Stories about Borders”? Debating The Bad Immigrant through the Lens of Afropolitanism ................................ 243 CONCLUSIONS ................................................................................................................. 253 WORKS CITED .................................................................................................................. 264 APPENDICES ..................................................................................................................... 342 Appendix 1. Map of Akure city from The Fishermen (2015) ...........…….........…... 343 Appendix 2. Map of Ojoto city from Under the Udala Trees (2015) ....................... 344 Serón-Navas 1 INTRODUCTION Serón-Navas 2 “The Nigeria I knew is receding, but that Nigeria has also taught me to be unafraid of the Nigeria that is emerging” (Shoneyin, “Nigeria Is an Extreme Sport”) The (post)colonial African nation has constituted a source of fascination and even obsession for sociologists, anthropologists, ethnographers and writers. From its inception, African nations have been problematised and contested due to their very structural characteristics. As Benedict Anderson posits, nations can be considered “imagined communities” (6), that is, political projections defined by a number of external and internal factors that make them recognisable and unique. However, while Anderson proposes a suitable definition of the nation, this definition is essentially created with the European nation in mind; sovereign countries, we should remember, that were self-conformed, not imposed by external powers. In this light, when it comes to African countries, they were decidedly imagined and designed by colonial agents in a fierce project whose origin can be traced back to the Berlin Conference in 1884-1885, where the scramble and looting of Africa was planned, removing any form of self-governance and autonomy of colonised territories and peoples. This idea is accurately reflected in Chigozie Obioma’s newspaper article “Africa Has Been Failed by Westernisation. It Must Cast Off its Subservience” (2017), where he claims that African nations should be called “western African nations” as their political, linguistic, ideological and socio-economic structures are of colonial architecture. Therefore, present-day African nations need to be considered part of the paternalistic colonial legacy left behind by European empires, and the subsequent conflicts among ethnic groups in their bid for political and economic superiority, a direct consequence of the colonial project and its policies. Certainly, as contemporary African nations are fundamentally the result of the amalgamation of disparate ethnic groups, this national configuration has given way to scenarios of instability and exacerbated inter-ethnic tensions that have led entire countries (especially in the post- Serón-Navas 3 independence period) to civil wars where thousands, if not millions, of civilians have been massacred. Besides, the imposition of a national identity for Africans that is somehow constructed and artificial has also been problematic, making national identification and belonging almost inviable. In this dissertation, I centre on the study of the Nigerian nation-state, the so-called “Giant of Africa,” through the literature produced by a selection of third-generation male and female writers. It is relevant to mention that the periodising label “third-generation Nigerian writer,” originally proposed by Pius Adesanmi and Chris Dunton in two special issues for Research in African Literatures (2008) and English in Africa (2005), is used to refer to the authors born primarily after 1960, whose works have been published from the mid-1980s onwards (Adesanmi and Dunton, “Nigeria’s Third Generation Writing” 15). This denomination is generally used to debate the literary production of emergent Nigerian writers that “now reside in Euro-America,” and “whose corpus forms part of a borderless, global, textual topography” (Adesanmi and Dunton, “Everything Good is Raining” ix). Furthermore, Hamish Dalley defines “third-generation” as “a more or less thematically and aesthetically unified phase that succeeds earlier stages of literary development” (15), but that is not exempt from further criticism. This label, which was initially received with enthusiasm, also has limitations, particularly in regard to the idea of neat classification. H. Dalley contends that one of these limitations lies in the “arbitrary” temporal framework or “historical cuts” used to catalogue Nigerian authors and their literary production (16). He argues that the textual imaginaries produced in present-day Nigerian novels that fall under this spatio-temporal label are far “more complex than the nationalgenerational framework” generally used to define them (16). In this sense, the nationalgenerational framework is characterised by two seemingly opposing strands of criticism: the Serón-Navas 4 first is focused on the “narrative[s] of disaffiliation” and “politics of spatial detachment” (17), as predicated on a cosmopolitan ethos that transcends the preoccupation with the nation-state. The second claims that present-day Nigerian authors’ literary imaginaries keep on grappling with what Dalley marks as the “Achebe’s engagement with a primarily local, territorially demarcated political sphere” (17). This suggests an interpenetration of generations or an “entanglement” of several temporalities, if we are to use this model, rather than a welldelimited use of such spatio-temporal framework. However, and taking into consideration the limitations of such a historicising label, I incorporate the use of this generational model for practicality purposes because, as Pius Adesanmi and Chris Dunton point out: “the generational approach remains one of the cornerstones of literary criticism” (“Nigeria’s Third Generation Writing” 13). Moreover, I have chosen this West African country as the focus of my analysis for many reasons: Nigeria, a nation of over 60 years (as dating from 1960, when this country gained independence from the British Empire) and over 200 million people, constitutes one of the most economically competitive and salient countries, fundamentally due to its exportations of crude, on the continent nowadays. Besides, Nigeria accounts for a huge ethnic diversity with over 250 ethnic groups forming the country. Finally, it is worth mentioning that Nigerian fiction is now experiencing a “literary boom” or “literary Renaissance” with a huge number of literary works –with a pre-eminence of the novelistic genre−1 published overseas that deal, among many other topics, with the inception and obstacles of this nation-state together with (the trouble with) national affiliation for (cosmopolitan) Nigerian authors.2 We 1 It should be born in mind that the novel is the preferred genre among third-generation Nigerian authors at the moment, but it was not always like that. Poetry inaugurated the beginning of this generation, as Harry Garuba has documented in his article “The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Re-Figuring Trends in Recent Nigerian Poetry” (2005). In his study, he traces the development of Nigerian poetry written in English in the last decades, with a special interest in the ways emergent poets engage with other consolidated voices. 2 In this regard, it is interesting to interrogate the target readership when it comes to the dissemination and canonisation of African works. The African literary production readers can access (or consume) is primarily Serón-Navas 5 should take into consideration that the postcolonial novel has always operated as the platform to interrogate the meaning of the nation, especially in the form of the Bildungsroman, “a genre closely associated with the emergence of the nation” (Feldner 38), where the protagonist’s fate is inextricably linked to the country’s, thus showing the symbiotic relationship between nation and self (Babkar 2018; Courtois 2019). In this vein, I centrally address the problematic with the nation as represented in the following third-generation Nigerian novels: Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen (2015), Ayobami Adebayo’s Stay with Me (2017), Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees (2015), Uzodinma Iweala’s Speak No Evil (2018), Helon Habila’s Travellers (2019) and Sefi Atta’s The Bad Immigrant (2021). I chose to explore a selection of Anglo-Igbo and Anglo- Yoruba novels written by three male Nigerian authors (Chigozie Obioma, Uzodinma Iweala and Helon Habila) and three female Nigerian authors (Ayobami Adebayo, Chinelo Okparanta and Sefi Atta) following a principle of parity, where I would analyse similar topics from both perspectives. As I apply the gender perspective to the discussion of the works under analysis, it is important to me that the realities of Nigerian women are equally reflected in this thesis, especially since the postcolonial nation has traditionally been gendered masculine (Yuval- Davis 1997; McLeod 2000; Boehmer 2005), being the trope of Mama Afrika a representative example of the masculinised interpretation of the postcolonial nation, as I argue in the first chapter. In this vein, contemporary Nigerian literature is characterised by an ever-growing presence of female writers who are creating central and powerful female characters, and who are putting forth alternative ways of signifying Nigerian womanhood (see Hewett 2005; Bryce published by Euro-American publishing houses, which, among other things, promote certain images of the African experience that potentially exoticise or “Otherise” the continent and its peoples, just as they demand stories that are regarded as “authentic” (i.e. stereotypical stories of poverty, suffering and degradation). It is also relevant to mention how international prizes tend to privilege the stories of authors living in Euro-American locales. For this, Isidore Diala’s article “The Nigeria Prize for Literature and Current Nigerian Writing: Politics, Process, and Price of Literary Legitimation” (2021) is very enlightening. Serón-Navas 12 metropolis. Second-generation writers such as Ben Okri, Isidore Okpewho, Zaynab Alkali, Ken Saro-Wiwa or Buchi Emecheta have focused, although not exclusively, on the lacks of the Nigerian nation, especially after the Nigeria-Biafra civil war (1967-1970). These authors recorded Nigeria when it was going through a period of political, economic and social turmoil due to the recent conflicts. They also wrote about the reconstruction of a country profoundly divided across religious, ethnic and linguistic lines and about the discovery of oil in the Niger Delta. Oluwafunmilayo Miriam Akinpelu underlines that a nascent “sense of [postcolonial] disillusionment about the possibility to acquire sustained freedom from western domination, political corruption and oppressive national governments” can be found among the authors of this generation (57). Regarding third-generation writers, some scholars contend that the literary works created by these (transcultural) authors are mainly “governed by the thematics of home and exile, deterritorialization and deracination, of diasporic subjecthood and identity” (Adesanmi, “Of Postcolonial Entanglement” 237), and have left behind the previous generations’ fixation with the Nigerian nation-state (Jones 2011; Dalley 2013). Other scholars also add that this new generation is not as interested in “the tragedy of Africa’s colonial past and the imperfect modernity of the nation-state it engendered” (Adesanmi, “Of Postcolonial Entanglement” 227) or in “the anticolonial defense of national culture” (Dalley 17). James Hoddap, for instance, holds that “what it means to be African [nowadays] has outstripped the nation” (4), and for theorists like Rebecca Jones or Pius Adesanmi, the dysfunctionality and even failure of the Nigerian nation-state, as approached from an Afropessimist stance, is no longer central to the literary projects of twenty-first century Nigerian authors. Certainly, the interest contemporary authors have in the Nigerian nation is not comparable to previous generations, but it cannot be affirmed that this interest has been left Serón-Navas 13 aside or that “a politics of spatial detachment” has promoted “a narrative of disaffiliation” from the national (Dalley 17). In this same vein, Anna-Leena Toivanen states that recent postcolonial discourses have incorporated postnationalism as central to its theorisations, while “declaring the obsolescence of the nation and treating dislocation as the paradigmatic condition” (“Daddy’s Girls?” 99). For example, Helon Habila is one of the advocates for postnationalism, as I discuss in section 3.1.2. “Transcending the ‘Almost Obligatory Obsession of the African Writer with the Nation’? Revisiting Home in the Post-National Context.” However, Toivanen aptly reminds us that postnationalist claims may be premature and that “the nation-state persists in the African literary agenda” (“Daddy’s Girls?” 99). Even though motivated by the realities of cosmopolitanism, diaspora and deracination, the literary engagement of present-day Nigerian writers with the postcolonial nation has not been surpassed or brought to an end. This new generation of (mostly internationally based) writers keeps on discussing “specific local and national conditions in their works” (Toivanen, “Daddy’s Girls?” 100), accentuating the interpenetration of the national/local and the global. Therefore, these writers might have actually outstripped the geographical boundaries of the nation, but they have not certainly left behind its imagined projections. Third-generation authors such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chika Unigwe, Helon Habila, Helen Oyeyemi, Chigozie Obioma or Sefi Atta keep on interrogating the Nigerian nation-state due to a number of reasons. The most obvious one to me is that, like their literary predecessors, they try to write the nation into being in their works and, I argue, propose alternative conceptions of the self and of what it means to be Nigerian in the twenty-first century in their stories. Stories that, Elleke Boehmer contends, have the potential to “embody nations” as they “allow emergent national identities to be performed” (Stories of Women). I consider these writers are still trying to make sense of a country where heterogeneous ethnic and religious “conciousnesses” coexist, which is the main reason why Nigeria, as Uzodinma Serón-Navas 14 Iweala recently stated in an article, “has always seemed like an impossibility” (“Nigeria’s Second Independence” 145). It seems worth pointing out that Nigeria was also regarded with international scepticism once it gained independence in 1960, and it was justified to some extent by the subsequent civil war that tore the newly born country apart in 1967. Thus, Nigeria’s presumed “impossibility” and the (intergenerational) trauma caused by this interethnic war reasonably explain why Nigerian authors are still trying to make sense of the country and to offer alternative ways to achieve and defend a sustainable national unity. In this same light, it is important to emphasise that Nigeria has also been regarded as a stagnant country due to the sucession of kleptocratic governments, the poor life conditions and professional prospects, the rampant violation of human rights, the lack of a robust education system or the scarcity of infrastructures.5 Hence, Nigeria remains an “atrophic” country in many senses: politically, socially, educationally and even economically. Tellingly, Chigozie Obioma defines Nigeria as “the land of the lack” in his second novel An Orchestra of Minorities (2019). He bitingly criticises his birth country when defining it as the land in which a man’s greatest enemies are members of his household; a land of kidnappers, of ritual killers, of policemen who bully those they encounter on the road and shoot those who don’t bribe them, of leaders who treat those they lead with contempt and rob them of the Commonwealth, of frequent riots and crisis, of long strikes, of petrol shortages, of joblessness, of clogged gutters, of potholed roads, of bridges that collapse at will, of littered streets and trashy neighbourhoods, and of constant power outrages. (Obioma, Orchestra of Minorities) 5 I use the expression “kleptocratic governments” to refer to those rulers in power who have misappropriated the resources of the people they are expected to govern. Nigeria has a long history of governments led by corrupt politicians who have committed illegal acts that have gone unpunished. Serón-Navas 15 Even though this passage pertains to the realm of fiction and we ought to analyse it under its own parameters, Obioma explicitly exposes the raw frustration and disillusionment with the (failed) postcolonial Nigerian nation. It also focuses on the lack, perhaps even the impossibility, of belonging to such an unstable and ravaged place. David C. L. Lim posits regarding Ben Okri’s and K. S. Manian’s central characters that they “all long to belong, to find that ‘elusive’ home in themselves and the fractured country into which they have been thrown” (xii). This idea exemplifies Nigerians’ ambivalence towards their home country and proposes literature as the space where Nigerian authors can process the negative and traumatic experiences with their home(land), and come to terms with its failures, hence suggesting alternative forms of national affiliation and identification. In a recent newspaper article titled “My Nigeria: Five Writers and Artists Reflect on the Place They Call Home” (2021), Abubakar Adam Ibrahim recounts a past experience where he got stuck in a train bound for Kaduna and uses that experience as a metaphor of his Nigeria: “This was my country [Nigeria]. This train. These coaches filled with anxiety and frightened people, caught halfway between a dream and a promise, waiting to be led to a promised destination. A terrorised people who have stubbornly refused to surrender their laughter.” Abubakar Adam Ibrahim and Chigozie Obioma not only underline the interpenetration between personal identity and the pathological situation of their birth country, but they also attempt to invent in their fictions more hospitable and optimistic national horizons, where Nigeria (and Nigerians as well) can achieve its/their whole potential. We can find other examples that highlight the ambivalent relationship Nigerians have with their homeland. For instance, in the collection of essays Of This Our Country: Acclaimed Nigerian Writers on the Home, Identity and Culture They Know (2021), A. Adam Ibrahim also compares his love-hate relationship with Nigeria to an abusive partner, “one who bites and punches you,” but also “one who . . . reaches for you” not sure if wanting “to hug or hit you” (“One Season, Many Serón-Navas 16 Decades”), whereas Chigozie Obioma admits in his essay “Pride and Punishment” that he admires the “earthiness of [Nigerians’] cultures and histories” together with their resilience, but that “the lack of development” heavily weighs Nigeria(ns) down. Furthermore, numerous third-generation authors are exploring their relationship with the Nigerian nation as apprehended from a transnational and Afro/cosmopolitan locus. Many contemporary Nigerian novelists are multi-passport holders, that is, they were born in Nigeria but are now permanently based in another Euro-American country (or countries). These authors on the move embody what it means to be at home in the world and to belong in other places, apart from their birth countries, without being physically or psychologically limited by national boundaries. Helon Habila is a case in point: he considers himself a “post-national” writer who has transcended “the often predictable, almost obligatory obsession of the African writer with the nation and with national politics” (“Introduction” viii). In his article “The Future of African Literature” (2019), he holds that, since Africa “has become these diasporic [and] online communities,” then there is no sense in keeping on approaching the nation in the same ways previous nationalist writers have done (158). Drawing on some of the postulates Wole Soyinka proposed in his own body of work, Habila concludes that African writers should overcome the “state of disillusionment” through which their “growth” becomes “permanently truncated by the traumas of the failed nation building,” preventing them from “achiev[ing] great[er] potential” (156). To him, African writers should not be regarded as “appendage[s]” or as “conscience[s] of the nation,” but rather as autonomous entities “free to develop [themselves] as . . . individual[s]” (158), uncircumscribed by their origins because, as Habila points out, “[t]he worst thing for a writer to be is provincial” (159). Sefi Atta is another example of the ideas Habila discusses in his article. She presents herself as a Nigerian author that goes beyond ethnic identities because she regards them as Serón-Navas 17 parochial and somewhat limiting. In her interview with Eva Rask Knudsen and Ulla Rahbek for the monograph In Search of the Afropolitan: Encounters, Conversations, and Contemporary Diasporic African Literature (2016), Atta stated that she regards herself as a Nigerian that “commutes between [Nigeria, England and the US]” (181). Atta further explains that Nigeria is her “home of roots,” that is, her “‘real home’” and the one she longs for (184). However, as Nigeria “is a difficult country to live in if [one] do[es] not have the means,” then other homes (note the “s”) inevitably come to the fore (184). For her, America has become “a home of convenience where [she] can function” whereas England is the place she can do things that she does not do in America or Nigeria (184). Atta thus complicates the sense of home while broadening the definition of what it means to be “local.” These are themes that she explores in her novels like, for instance, A Bit of Difference (2013) and, the one examined in this dissertation, The Bad Immigrant (2021). At the other end of the spectrum, we find writers that urge readers to acknowledge the colonial component of the nation and to try to recuperate an “uncontaminated” pre-colonial past, particularly in terms of worldviews and belief systems. Chigozie Obioma is representative of this tendency: he imbues his works with a notable Igbo cosmology, while asserting that the ethnic identity is the only authentic identity for Africans because “[their] allegiance is to [their] tribe and their families and their kindred” before their nation (qtd. in Bett, “Chigozie Obioma”). Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie also mentions something similar in a quote from her novel Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), which emphasises the artificiality of the African nation and its peoples: “I am Nigerian because the white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came” (20). Back to Obioma, he acknowledged in an interview that he would like to be an “unadulterated” Igbo man “in the 17th century” because Igbos had a far more egalitarian system than Britons (qtd. in Ajibade Serón-Navas 18 262). Obioma rejects the modernity “imposed on [Africans] from foreign ways” that deem them backward and inferior, but clarifies that he is not against material modernity (262). Regarding the structure of this dissertation, I have divided it into three main chapters where I deal with the post-independence Nigerian nation from three different but interrelated approaches, in an effort to prove how contemporary Nigerian writers are discussing their birth country from innovative and ground-breaking perspectives. The first chapter, “Familial Perspectives, National Allegories,” is devoted to the exploration of 1980s and 1990s Nigeria, with a special emphasis on the Sani Abacha dictatorial regime, from a familial stance. In this chapter, I focus on the novel The Fishermen (2015) by Chigozie Obioma and the novel by Ayobami Adebayo Stay with Me (2017). The main aim of this chapter is to trace a parallel between the dysfunctionality of two Nigerian families and the course of a country that has been failed by the promises of decolonisation and democratisation, and frustrated the hopes of a generation that is profoundly disenchanted with their home country. In The Fishermen, Obioma symbolically explores the colonial encounter as embodied by the local madman in his story –Abulu− and the disintegration of the Agwu family due to this madman’s prophecy. This novel can be read as a metaphor of Nigeria and its composite identity which complicates the creation of a solid sense of nationhood. Furthermore, Obioma’s novel constitutes a tenacious criticism of Nigeria as a construction of colonial design, that is, an artificial idea that preceded Nigerians and that, as a consequence, complicates national identification. In Stay with Me, Adebayo centres her story on a Yoruba woman, Yejide, who is unable to engender and thus considered a barren and unworthy subject within her family and community. Eventually, the protagonist gets pregnant but almost all of her children die at an early age, which automatically transforms her into a “monstrous” mother and her progeny into abiku children, precipitating the disintegration of this family. In her symbolic exploration of Serón-Navas 19 the motherland from a feminist point of view, Adebayo de-idealises normative understandings of the nuclear family in order to “uncover the fiction of the nation,” as Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi aptly illustrates (677). Finally, and as drawing on renowned scholars such as Elleke Boehmer (2005), Anne McClintock (1991; 1995) or John McLeod (2000), I aim to present a more inclusive idea to Nigeria and its most recent history, which allows me to advance more viable forms of nationhood, where women are no longer subordinated to patriarchal and colonial prescriptions. In the second chapter, “Afroqueer Representations of Home,” I tackle the idea of Nigeria from an Afroqueer perspective. This is one of the 54 African countries that has banned same-sex desire and other transgressive gender identities on the basis that homosexuality is a colonial import and therefore deemed un-African. Former Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan passed the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act in 2014, a restrictive law that demonises the subjects who identify under the LGBTQI+ label, and allows the imprisonment of homo-desiring individuals, the corrective rapes against lesbians and even the death by stoning in the northern states. This law is representative of a conception of sexuality and gender that is essentially colonial and that has been incorporated by contemporary politicians, law-makers and a majority of citizens who believe that being Afroqueer is an abomination. Besides, Christianity and Islam also play a pivotal role in the construction of this reductive understanding of human identity and sexual orientation. In this chapter, I analyse Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees (2015) and Uzodinma Iweala’s Speak No Evil (2018). Okparanta’s novel is set in the immediate years after the Nigeria-Biafra civil war (1967-1970) and retells the story of a lesbian woman who grows in post-war Nigeria, a time marked by long-lasting ethnic tensions. I seek to prove that contemporary Nigerian authors are firmly attempting to return dignity to Afroqueer Serón-Navas 20 individuals living in Nigeria and in the diaspora, as these writers overtly depict same-sex relationships in a positive and sympathetic light. This creative effort, I argue, is part of what Brenna M. Munro coins as “the queer project” of African literature; an emergent restorative literary project aiming to transcend “fantasies of purity, whether cultural, national, or sexual” (“Locating ‘Queer’” 123), and to re-inscribe these effaced subjectivities into the postcolonial African nation. I analyse how Okparanta tries to re-inscribe these queer subjectivities in a key moment in Nigerian history in order to claim that Afroqueer subjects existed and loved during these turbulent years, and to prove how Afroqueer subjects have been left outside the democratic transition during the post-war years, evincing the impossibility of creating a strong democratic country if some sectors of its society are excluded from the nation-building project. In Speak No Evil, the second novel under scrutiny in this second chapter, Uzodinma Iweala writes about the ordeal a gay adolescent of Nigerian origin experiences in his process of sexual awakening. The protagonist of this novel has been born and bred in the US, which complicates the many ways he relates to what for his parents is the motherland, how he regards queerness and how he constructs his (fractured) identity as oscillating between sometimes opposing worldviews. I seek to explore Speak No Evil as a novel that can be placed under the Black Queer Diaspora field of study that theorists such as Jafari S. Allen (2012) or Meg Wesling (2008) have helped configure. I am particularly interested in the intersections between Afroqueerness and migration and the different configurations of desire and national identity that arise from the coming together of these two realities. I also aim to explore how homophobic attitudes are reproduced in the diaspora and how the rejection of certain sexual identities makes it more difficult the attachment to the (imagined) motherland. I also focus on the father-son relationship to examine the different expressions of masculinity that are explored in the text and to analyse how Iweala proposes new forms of signifying the Serón-Navas 21 Nigerian man. Finally, I tackle the connection between homosexuality and racism in the US since I attempt to analyse the ways Iweala utilises fiction to offer voice to those who are silenced, and to denounce the injustices that US and non-US blacks experience on a daily basis. In the third chapter, “Transnational Realities, Local Concerns,” I address the Nigerian nation as explored from a diasporic and Afropolitan perspective. In this context, it is worth noting that most third-generation Nigerian writers are conditioned by the very reality of mobility and transculturality. Maximilian Feldner rightly states that most contemporary Nigerian novelists can be seen as active participants of the new African diaspora, caused “as a result of recent African migration to the United States and Europe” (15; see also Falola and Oyebade 2017).6 Celebrated African authors such as Chris Abani, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sefi Atta, Teju Cole, Chinelo Okparanta or Maik Nwosu can be regarded as, Yogita Goyal points out, “belong[ing] to a generation that heralds an African literary renaissance while insisting that new migrations demand new conceptualizations of diaspora” (“We Need New Diasporas” 641). In fact, we could affirm that these new voices in the contemporary African/Nigerian literary landscape are inherently characterised by the very condition of diasporism and its challenges in a twenty-first-century world which defines itself as interconnected, post-racial and embracing of multiculturalism. 6 The “new African diaspora,” as oppossed to the “old African diaspora” which was defined by the forced migration of black peoples to Europe, Asia and the Americas, refers to those voluntary massive migrations of Africans that started during the twentieth century to Euro-American countries (Falola, The African Diaspora 101). According to Maximilian Feldner (2019), there are three waves of contemporary African migration to Western countries: The first one took place from 1950s to 1970s because “African governments sponsored young Africans to get their education abroad;” they were expected “to return and fill the positions of civil servants and skilled workers in the public and private sectors.” The second wave initiated in mid-1970s and largely happened as a response to the failure of the postcolonial nation and the internal conflicts that occurred as a consequence (e.g. the civil war). The third wave “commenced shortly after the turn of the twenty-first century, with skilled and unskilled migrants attempting to improve their economic lot” in their massive relocation to Western locales (15). More information regarding this new diaspora will be provided in Chapter 3. Serón-Navas 28 “petro-magical realism” (Miriam Akinpelu 2021; Wenzel 2006) or as a “petro-fictive novel” (Harlin 2019; Ghosh 1992), as I explain further on. A. Adebayo’s Stay with Me also constitutes an allegorical exploration of 1980s and 1990s Nigeria that centres on the implosion and subsequent destruction of a Yoruba family. Whereas Obioma’s story is mostly set in 1990s Nigeria, specifically during the military regime of Sani Abacha, Adebayo explores the relationship between the devastation of a Yoruba family during the 1980s and early 1990s, when Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida was Head of State. Babangida remained in power from 1985 to 1993 and was followed by Ernest Shonekan, who only spent a few months in office, and then by Sani Abacha (1993-1998). In Adebayo’s novel, there is also reference to a pivotal moment in Nigerian history: the 1993 democratic election where M.K.O. Abiola was elected president but that was later annulled by Babangida, ending any possibility for a democratic transition. In this chapter, I will elaborate on how Stay with Me explores the symbolic connection between the falling apart of the protagonists’ marriage and the turbulent political landscape of 1980s Nigeria. Additionally, while Obioma focuses on the fratricidal relationship among the Agwu brothers, Adebayo centres on the experiences of Yejide, a woman who is unable to engender and the social and familial pressures she is subject to. In her exploration of traditional representations of Yoruba womanhood, Adebayo proposes a transgressive and de-romanticised interpretation of motherhood that is not influenced by patriarchal conceptions. Furthermore, by entangling the history of Nigeria with the personal history of a presumably barren woman, Adebayo offers a feminine and intimate testimony of the nation that highly contrasts with masculinised versions of it. In her article “‘Half and Half Children’: Third-Generation Women Writers and the New Nigerian Novel” (2008), Jane Bryce concludes that a new cohort of women writers (e.g. Serón-Navas 29 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sefi Atta, Chinelo Okparanta, Chika Unigwe, Imbolo Mbue, Nnedi Okorafor, Unoma Azuah and Helen Oyeyemi, only to name a few) are discussing “new identities” and “revision[ing] old ones” (56). For instance, the authors previously mentioned examine other conceptions of African femininity that are not exclusively “centered on motherhood, wifehood, and self-sacrifice,” while coming up with new forms of representing the contemporary African woman (Pucherova, “What Is African Woman?” 110). By offering modern ways of reading motherhood, female sexuality and even heterosexual relationships, together with an implicit critique of the general situation of post-war Nigeria, Ayobami Adebayo can be regarded as belonging to this ensemble of feminist authors who are developing new ways of understanding womanhood in a Nigerian-Yoruba context.10 Likewise, this process of rooting the novel in a specific historical and political moment for Nigeria is also mentioned in Bryce’s article, who argues that the literary texts produced by these female writers can be seen as “predominantly historical” since their stories “selfconsciously recreat[e] specific moments in Nigeria’s recent or pre-Independence past” (54). In this vein, the growing presence of celebrated female writers in the contemporary Nigerian literary scene makes possible to “feminise” the story of this West African country through its texts. Furthermore, I mentioned earlier that The Fishermen can be analysed as a contemporary novel in conversation with another canonical piece, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), and as part of a literary tradition where fiction operates as a form of political protest against (post/neo)colonial power. In this chapter, I also argue that Stay with 10 Feminism has traditionally been a contested movement in the African contexts. Nigerian authors Buchi Emecheta and Flora Nwapa are two examples of the rejection of this term because it is regarded as “divisive and too European in its application” (Mears 23). Feminism has been conceived as an exclusive movement that universilises certain aspects of the female experience, disregarding the particularities and preoccupations of African women (see Arndt 2002). However, contemporary African authors offer a more welcoming interpretation of feminism. For instance, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s famous TED talk “We Should All Be Feminists” (2012) is representative of this “new turn toward feminism interpreted as universal human rights” (Pucherova, “What Is African Woman?” 118). Serón-Navas 30 Me (2017) can be read as in dialogue with the works of some of her literary predecessors: Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood (1979) or Second-Class Citizen (1974), and Flora Nwapa’s Efuru (1966) or Idu (1970). Adebayo draws on her literary foremothers, who have also tackled the question of Nigerian motherhood, just as she relies on other Western feminist works and writers, as I prove further on.11 I deem relevant to mention that I have chosen these two Igbo female writers for several reasons: first, Emecheta and Nwapa are considered canonical Igbo authors within Nigerian literary tradition; second, their novels discussed motherhood and womanhood in a really original light; and third, there does not seem to be a remarkable presence of Yoruba authors, female authors to be precise, in the so-called Nigerian canon. Either because Yoruba authors “did not emerge until the late 1970s,” as Toyin Falola and Akintunde Akinyemi contend (210), which could explain the scarcity of female literary referents at the time and the hegemony of Igbo ones, or because some of these authors chose to write in their vernacular language (Yoruba), and so their works were not as widely disseminated, the presence of Yoruba writers in the contemporary Nigerian literary cannon is not precisely abundant. We can mention Dele Agegbemi, Oluyemisi Adebowale or Simi Bedford; to this group of literary foremothers could be added some twenty-first-century female Yoruba writers such as Olufunlayo Akinode, Nike Adesanya, Adunola Amoo, Mubo Aderibigbe, Sefi Atta, and now, Ayobami Adebayo. 11 It is fitting to remember that these two Nigerian female authors are not the only Africans who have delved into the questions of motherhood and womanhood as experienced in Africa. Among them, we can find Guinean Camara Laye’s The African Child (1953), Kenyan Grace Ogot’s The Promised Land (1966), Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo’s No Sweetness Here and Other Stories (1970) and Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint (1977), Egyptian Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero (1975), South African Bessie Head’s A Question of Power (1974) or Senegalese Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter (1979). Motherhood, as shown in the high number of literary pieces dealing with this topic, is a central trope in African literature. Serón-Navas 31 1.1. Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen (2015) 1.1.1. Preliminary Remarks on Chigozie Obioma and his Novel Chigozie Obioma (1986, Akure) is a contemporary Nigerian writer of Igbo descent currently based in the US, where he graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan. He now works as an Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This Anglo-Igbo author has published two celebrated novels: The Fishermen (2015) and An Orchestra of Minorities (2019), which have been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize (2015 and 2019 editions, respectively). His forthcoming third novel The Road to the Country will be published in 2023 and constitutes Obioma’s first attempt at exploring the Nigeria-Biafra civil war (1967-1970). This author has also published numerous short stories like “The Great Convert” (2014) in Transition Magazine, “The Strange Story of the World” (2019) in Granta.com or “Midnight Sun” (2016) in the NewStatesman. To these fictional works can be added a number of newspaper articles such as “Finding the Light under the Bushel: How One Writer Came to Love Books” (2018) for the New York Times and “Africa Has Been Failed by Westernisation” (2017) or “Toni Morrison: Farewell to America’s Greatest Writer” (2019) for The Guardian, among many others. His debut novel to be explored in this dissertation, The Fishermen, was awarded with the inaugural FT/Oppenheimer Award for Fiction, the NAACP Image Awards for Debut Literary Work, the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction (Los Angeles Times Book Prizes) and the GOG Bookclub Best New Author of the Year. It was also longlisted for the Dylan Thomas first book prize and shortlisted for the Edinburgh Festival First Book Award, The Guardian First Book Award, the Hurston Wright Legacy Awards 2016, the Prix du Roman (France), the best Translated Fiction for Winter 2020 in France or the best book of the decade Serón-Navas 32 by Radio National Australia. It is worth mentioning that The Fishermen has been translated into more than 20 languages and even adapted for stage.12 The Fishermen was first published in 2011 as a short story in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Obioma explains in an interview to Nigerian writer Helon Habila (“Chigozie Obioma whose Debut Novel” 45). It has been categorised as a Greek tragedy “grounded in the Aristotelian concept of tragedy” (Habila, “The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma Review”) and mixing in elements from African folklore. However, Chigozie Obioma has asserted that for him, The Fishermen is a different type of tragedy: an “Igbo tragedy” that “[does not work] in the same way the Shakespearian or Grecian tragedy [does]” (“Chigozie Obioma’s ‘The Fishermen’ – A Deadly Game”). Additionally, the idea behind the writing of this African Bildungsroman lies mainly in Obioma’s own personal experiences (e.g. he grew up in a large, tight-knit Igbo family speaking Igbo and Yoruba, with a disciplined father and surrounded by numerous siblings). The author wrote part of this political novel when he was completing his bachelor’s degree at Cyprus International University so this academic stay and being away from home gave him the original material to start writing this literary piece (Obioma, “Chigozie Obioma whose Debut Novel” 45). As he underlines, the germ behind the writing of this novel was his personal interest in exploring sibling relationships (Ajibabe 256). In fact, this novel can be seen as a tribute to the author’s siblings, to whom the novel is dedicated. In addition, the second catalyst for the writing of this story was a statement from Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization (1935-1975) that essentially claimed that a civilisation can only be conquered when it has been destroyed from within (Obioma, “Chigozie Obioma 12 Obioma’s The Fishermen (2015) theatrical adaptation was written by Gbolahan Obisesan and directed by Jack McNamara in 2018. This 70-minutes theatrical piece was featured by actors David Alade (as Benjamin) and Valentine Olukoga (as Obembe). Moreover, it was first performed in HOME, Manchester before it started touring throughout different English and South African theatres, with runs at Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Derby Theatre, London West End’s Trafalgar studios, and Market Theatre in South Africa among various others. Serón-Navas 33 whose Debut Novel” 45). This assertion made him question the destabilising element that could break a close family and extrapolated it to his home country (45). This family drama centres on the fatal events the upper-middle class Agwu brothers – Ikenna (15), Boja (14), Obembe (11), and Benjamin (9)– experience when their father gets transferred to another city for work, and they are left alone with their mother and with other two little siblings (three year-old David and one year-old Nkem). One day, the four elder brothers decide to go to the river Omi-Ala to fish and, in one of these fishing adventures, Ikenna, the eldest, meets Abulu, the local “madman,” who prophesises his death at the hands of another fisherman, and then things start to “fall apart.”13 It should be mentioned that the figure of the madman, as the external destabilising element, is firstly presented as part of the introductory poem titled “Progress” written by South African, Zulu poet Mazisi Kunene. The poem goes as follows: The madman has entered our house with violence − Defiling our sacred grounds Claiming the single truth of the universe Bending down our high priests with iron Ah! Yes the children, Who walked on our Forefathers’ graves Shall be stricken with madness. They shall grow the fangs of the lizard 13 This expression echoes the title of a foundational novel within the Nigerian literary canon: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958). Serón-Navas 34 They shall devour each other before our eyes And by ancient command It is forbidden to stop them! (Kunene, The Ancestors 69-70 qtd. in Obioma, The Fishermen; italics in the original) There are a number of key elements worth exploring in this poem: the figure of the madman who “has entered our house with violence” and “claim[ed] the single truth of the universe” can be easily assimilated to the figure of the coloniser in a South African or any other African context. Furthermore, the image of Africa as “sacred grounds” defiled by alien forces is clear enough in this poem to bear in mind the impact of colonisation. In fact, Obioma also uses this reference to a corrupted Africa with the image of “a cradle besmeared” later in his novel (The Fishermen 27). The reference to the “children stricken with madness” who “shall grow the fangs of the lizard” and start “devour[ing] each other” may symbolise the pervading consequences of colonialism, especially in a post/neocolonial context, and, most importantly, the destruction from within of African societies/civilisation Obioma referred to earlier. In The Fishermen, we find an example of this “madness” in the symbolic allusion to the civil war between Nigeria and Biafra (1967-1970). In this story, the Agwu children are stricken by the words of the local madman Abulu who, through his dreadful prophecy, propels the destruction of their family. Once the encounter between Abulu the madman and the Agwu children takes place, a chain of negative events is triggered and Ikenna ends up being stabbed to death by Boja, and the latter subsequently killing himself after realising what he has done. When Obembe and Benjamin discover what has happened to their brothers, they decide to look for Abulu with the sole purpose of avenging Ikenna and Boja. Obembe and Benjamin eventually find Abulu and they murder him. Then, Obembe decides to run away for fear of being caught while Serón-Navas 35 Benjamin is detained and imprisoned until he reaches adulthood. Mr. Agwu losses his job, his three eldest sons die or disappear, the fourth son is incarcerated and his wife ends up needing psychological care in a psychiatrist healthcare centre. Benjamin is forced to confess all the events in front of a jury and expected to spend eight years in prison. It is relevant to mention that the mother is presented as a woman that works in the local market and that subscribes to everything her husband says, particularly in terms of education. I would argue this female character conforms with the traditional roles attributed to women. This circular and deterministic story is narrated retrospectively as a form of confession in the trial where Benjamin, the narrator, is accused of killing Abulu. In this line, this coming- of-age story retrospectively explores issues concerning national identity, brotherhood and family dynamics in a rather fragmented and non-linear way, thus lining up with the common structure of many trauma narratives. In this novel, the label Bildungsroman, which was initially proposed by Cédric Courtois (“‘Revolutionary Politics’” 1), has been understood in relation to the protagonist’s development, Benjamin, as moving on from childhood/innocence to adulthood/experience and, metaphorically, to Nigeria as a nation and its development in a postcolonial context. According to Cédric Courtois (2019), The Fishermen centres on “the development of the individual but also on that of the nation” (2), linking “individual emergence and historical emergence,” which results in “a powerful instrument for political criticism” (4). Thematically, this novel is a rather intricate text which, on the surface level, mainly deals with sibling relationships but, on a deeper level, addresses key political events in 1980s and 1990s Nigeria. As Kate Harlin (2019) proposes, The Fishermen can be regarded as a “national allegory of Nigeria” (685), and as a “small, domestic African novel” that has been written “at a time when much African fiction is broadening to take on narratives with multigenerational, transnational scope” (685). Indeed, even though there has been a rise in novels addressing themes such as “deracination, displacement, and disarticulated identities” Serón-Navas 36 (Adesanmi, “Of Postcolonial Entanglement” 230), as emphasised in the Introduction to this dissertation, Chigozie Obioma stands out as a third-generation Nigerian writer who, being a translocated author himself, is interested in discussing the “national question” (Falola and Heaton, A History of Nigeria 158) as approached from an ethnic perspective. In addition, there is another central topic discussed in this novel apart from the failure of the Nigerian national project but intersecting with it: Oil extraction in the Niger Delta region. The exploitation of resources, especially of petroleum and gas, and the consequent deterioration of the Niger Delta region is one of the themes Obioma engages with, which allows the labelling of The Fishermen as “petro-magical realism” (Miriam Akinpelu 59), as a petrofictional text (Ghosh, “Petrofiction” 31) or as a “‘Nigerian Oil Novel’” (Harlin 687).14 In Obioma’s text, the once-flourishing river Omi-Ala that criss-crosses the city of Akure is now portrayed as a “dreadful river” (The Fishermen 27), polluted by the massive waste generated by the profitable exploitation of crude, which turned the river into “the source of dark rumours” (27). From an animist perspective, this river was characterised by its erstwhile magical powers: “[l]ike many such rivers in Africa, Omi-Ala was once believed to be a god [and] people worshipped it” (27). However, after colonialists set foot in Nigeria, the river Omi-Ala started to be regarded “as an evil place” and as “[a] cradle besmeared” (27). It is important to consider the Yoruba meaning of Omi-Ala: Omi stands for “water” while Ala stands for “dream.” This is all the more accurate in this novel because the river is perceived as a supernatural space where Abulu first tells his deadly prophecy to Ikenna. Moreover, it is 14 Jennifer Wenzel originally proposed the term “petro-magic-realism” in her 2006 article “Petro-Magic- Realism: Toward a Political Ecology of Nigerian Literature” to discuss the Nigerian works characterised by a relationship between the fantastic and the real or the material, thus connecting socio-economic and other formal concerns with “questions of political ecology” (450). Besides, this author points out that “petro-magic-realism” is a term that best accounts for the events and experiences narrated in some renown Anglophone African novels because, unlike in the “magical realism” produced in other contexts, the “magical” or the fantastic is not presented as “unfamiliar” (456). Serón-Navas 37 also relevant to analyse this river as a metaphor of Nigeria, that is, as a nation of broken dreams unable to thrive. The river Omi-Ala lost its spiritual/animated status before being appropriated and commodified by colonialists. Amitav Ghosh explains that nature was deprived of its supernatural status and agency for its resources to be conquered, exploited and extracted in a colonialist-capitalist mentality that lies at the heart of the formation of African nations. Both the river Omi-Ala and the Niger Delta region are only meaningful if they are conceived as “resources [i.e. fossil fuels] that could be harnessed to generate profit,” no matter if an environmental disaster is the consequence of such extractive mentality (a disaster that was denounced by environmentalists such as Ken Saro-Wiwa) (The Nutmeg’s Curse).15 Donald O. Omagu contends that the oil industry is ultimately responsible for the destruction of the biodiversity of the Niger Delta region, where multinational corporations such as Royal Dutch Shell, Total, Azienda Generale Italiana Petroli, Exxon Mobil and Chevron have especially benefited from this “environmental pillage,” transforming this area into “an ecological disaster zone” (108 and 110). However, and despite being a “major oil producer,” Nigeria “is still lacking in almost everything,” as Obioma denounces (“Chigozie Obioma whose Debut Novel” 47). In other words, Nigeria is still a stagnant country despite participating in a “petromodernity” that far from enhancing this West African nation, further degrades it (Wenzel 456). Besides, the river Omi-Ala is mainly associated with the presence of “corpses,” “animal carcasses,” “ritualistic materials” and “mutilated bodies” (Obioma, The Fishermen 28), which creates an aura of corruption, putrefaction and stagnation. This description 15 Environmental activist and writer Ken Saro-Wiwa fought for the rights of the Ogoni people, whose land suffered the environmental consequences of the massive crude oil extraction. Saro-Wiwa led a campaign to stop the degradation of their land caused by international companies, and criticised the Nigerian government for its inaction. For this, he was unfairly tried and executed in 1995. Serón-Navas 44 postcolonial stance, the deliberate animalisation of human beings can be held as a form of “human Othering” in an African context, where nimals have symbolically stood for the colonised, the postcolonial subject, and the subaltern.17 On the other hand, I analyse this novel as magic realism or as “organic fantasy,” following Nnedi Okorafor’s analysis of the realist African novel that incorporates fantastic elements (275). Although the designation “magic realism” will prove useful in the analysis of this novel, the label is generally applied to works written by Latin American authors, which is why I discuss Obioma’s narrative as most accurately subscribing to what Nnedi Okorafor refers to as “organic fantasy” (275). When dealing with fantastic and whimsical stories that “bloom directly from the soil of the real” (278), Okorafor uses this term because, for her, it most precisely captures the tropes, themes and style employed in these African works (281). She also proposes Ben Okri and Ngugi wa Thiong’o as the authors who firstly incorporated and developed this narrative strategy within African fiction. Zoomorphism, Roman Bartosch states, “has been a powerful tool to degrade the colonised,” flagrantly employed to remove their humanity as predicated on racist “claims of ‘bestiality’” (189). The degrading and de-humanising practice of animalising Africans in Western intellectual tradition and in racist anthropological-sociological discourses has always been used to evince the inferiority of the colonised, to “primitivise” and “decivilise” them (Fanon, Black Skin 32) in order to justify their domination and subjugation (Bleakley 2000; DeLoughrey and Handley 2011; Hutchings Westling 2014; Kiran 2016). The use of animal imagery obeys a very specific literary purpose in this novel, but it incisively urges the reader to ponder on the traditional conceptualisation of the colonised by the West. 17 For the discursive theorisation of Africans as psychic and physical “beasts,” as “monstrous” or “strange,” see Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony (2001). Serón-Navas 45 In The Fishermen, Benjamin Agwu recounts the past experiences he went through from two different perspectives: the child and the adult. This narrator resorts to the child perspective when he is willing to create mystery and when retelling the experiences he and his brothers had after becoming fishermen. On the contrary, this narrator resorts to the adult’s perspective when he wants to instil his confession with authority and veracity but also when he is describing painful events and needs to gain some distance from the facts. Following this recollection of past events, Benjamin starts animalising the people that surround him, which confers the text a fable-like structure, particularly common within African writing and mythology. In this context, fables and folktales constitute one of the most ancient forms of (oral) storytelling that still occupy a pre-eminent position in Nigerian and Igbo writing as they help understand African worldviews. Within this framework, Helon Habila has asserted that The Fishermen “mixes the traditional English novel form with the oral storytelling tradition” (2015), stressing the formal hybridity of the text under scrutiny. Obioma also holds that his novel “is a kind of tragic form of fiction that is both European and African at the same time” (“Chigozie Obioma Interview”). Similarly, this form of fiction initiated by Chinua Achebe where “folklore and popular discourses” are transcoded “from their everyday idiom to that of novelistic introspection” (George, “The Oral-Literate” 20) can be seen as what Francis Abiola Irele has come to name “a textualized orality” (The Cambridge Companion 2). Among the oral elements that we find in this story, we can identify the use of songs (as the aforementioned one) and traditional proverbs, the presence of a prophet (i.e. Abulu “the madman”) and other fantastic allusions, such as the supernatural nature of the river Omi-Ala or the animalisation of characters. Serón-Navas 46 In The Fishermen, the animalisation of characters derives, as Chigozie Obioma asserts in an interview, from the fascination that Benjamin feels with animals, which is something the narrator shares with Obioma himself (Obioma, “Chigozie Obioma whose Debut Novel” 47). We cannot forget that the use of African folktales where animals are the protagonists of these stories are central to teach African children basic concepts. An example of a traditional Nigerian folktale that will be analysed in this dissertation can be found in Ayobami Adebayo’s Stay with Me (2017) under the title “Oluronbi and the Iroko tree.” Moreover, the incorporation of animalised characters functions as a coping mechanism to overcome the traumatic experiences the protagonist has been through. Obioma states that “by equating [the protagonist’s] brother [Ikenna] who has died to a sparrow, he is able to actually make sense of the tragedy” and “to understand it in a way that is manageable to him” (Obioma, “Chigozie Obioma whose Debut Novel” 47). This process allows Benjamin to rationalise the world around him, to work through the painful events he has been involved in, and to come to terms with them. In Obioma’s novel, Benjamin equates each member of his family with a different animal depending on the behavioural traits they display. His father was an eagle, her mother a falconer and a wet mouse, Ikenna was a python and a sparrow, Boja was a fungus, David and Nkem were egrets, Obembe was a search dog but also a rooster and the protagonist was a moth. Ikenna is characterised as a python prior to his death as a way of stressing the metamorphosis he went through due to Abulu’s prophecy. Benjamin saw Ikenna as “[a] wild snake that became a monstrous serpent living on trees, on plains above other snakes” (Obioma, The Fishermen 63). After Ikenna’s death at the hands of Obembe, the former metamorphosed into a sparrow, “a fragile thing who did not design his own fate [because] [i]t was designed for him” (208). Obioma further adds that Ikenna could not choose his own fate because “[h]is chi, the personal god the Igbos believe everyone had, was weak” (208; italics Serón-Navas 47 in the original). This idea is worth exploring because it deals with the idea of agency. As Obioma points out, “in the Igbo worldview . . . agency is fluid,” which is why “[w]hen someone does something, the outcome . . . is often attributed to the weak nature of the person’s chi” (Obioma qtd. in Ajibade 258). The author goes on clarifying that the concept of agency needs to be regarded as “dualized between the physical efforts of the human being and the metaphysical efforts of his chi” (258). Thus, full agency cannot be attributed to the characters of this Igbo tragedy, but understood within the framework of Igbo worldview and, especially, in relation to the figure of the chi. Besides, Benjamin concludes that Ikenna was a sparrow because these animals are believed to “ha[ve] no homes” and thus, “Ikenna’s heart had no home, no fixed allegiances. He loved the far and the near, the small and the big, the strange and the familiar” (Obioma, The Fishermen 217). This excerpt shows, on the one hand, a character that cannot or does not belong to his original home. In the novel, once Ikenna hears the prophecy, he starts taking distance from his brothers, perhaps in an effort not to harm them, as the prophecy sentenced. On the other hand, the idea of not having “fixed allegiances” and of pivoting between seemingly opposite poles can be read from a diasporic perspective, particularly regarding the realities of many Nigerian writers nowadays. The second brother, Boja, is regarded as a “self-destructive” fungus (238) that “lived on unseen in [their] compound for four days after Ikenna’s death, without knowing it” (220; italics in the original). Boja “was there –silent, hidden away, refusing to speak, while the entire district and even the town desperately searched for him” (220). He is also described as someone who has infested the water that the family later drank until his decomposing body was discovered. The water contaminated with Boja’s blood and other effluvia reminisces about the polluted waters of the river Omi-Ala due to the oil industry, which has also caused Serón-Navas 48 the death of people who have drunk it.18 In the novel, after stabbing Ikenna to death, Boja commits suicide throwing himself into the compound’s well, where he lived until he was discovered some days later. When Ikenna got obsessed with Abulu’s prophecy, he firmly believed some of his brothers would kill him. The prophecy went as follows: ‘Ikena, you will be bound like a bird on the day you shall die.’ . . . ‘Ikena, you will be mute’. . . ‘Ikena, you will be crippled’ . . . ‘Your tongue will stick out of your mouth like a hungry beast, and will not return back into your mouth’. . . ‘Ikena, you shall lift your hands to grasp air, but you will not be able to. Ikena, you shall open your mouth to speak on that day . . . but words will freeze in your mouth’. . . ‘Ikena, you will swim in a river of red but shall never rise from it again. Your life—‘. . . ‘Ikena, you shall die like a cock dies’ . . . He [Abulu] said ‘Ikenna, you shall die by the hands of a fisherman.’ (Obioma, The Fishermen 121-122 and 126; italics in the original) Eventually, Boja murders Ikenna, confirming Abulu’s prophecy and triggering a series of regretful events that will end up destroying the Agwu family. Similarly, Obembe is presented as a search dog and as a rooster. As Benjamin asserts, Obembe’s mind was “a searchdog’s: a restless mind that was always engaged in the search for knowledge” (274). After Ikenna and Boja’s death, Obembe “began to read as if his life depended on it” and then, “he passed it on to me in the form of stories he told me every night before we slept” (274). Obembe is the one who tries to dissect reality so as to rationalise what has happened to his family, and he is also the one who comes with a plan to murder Abulu and avenge his brothers. This plan is named the “Okonkwo plan” 18 In the novel, Akure citizens do not dare to drink the polluted waters of the Omi-Ala, what reminds us of the same reality in Ogoniland nowadays. The situation in Ogoniland is a case in point of the destruction of natural areas in the Niger Delta region due to the oil extraction industry and the health issues that contaminated water and other gas-associated pollutants have caused to the Ogoni communities. According to the 2011 report released by the UN Environment Programme, the fishing industry has been diminished, farmlands and crops made useless due to the contaminated water and people are dying for drinking this same water that causes critical health affections. Strikingly, the multinational enterprises like Shell responsible for this ecocide have not even taking care of this area’s clean-up. Serón-Navas 49 (293), as drawing inspiration from Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958). Obembe reasoned that Abulu, as the white men conquering Nigeria, was responsible for the death of their eldest brothers because his prophecy propelled the tragic events that would end up with the final destruction of his family. In the novel, Okonkwo becomes the source of inspiration for Obembe and Benjamin when coming with a plan to kill Abulu and avenge their dead brothers. Benjamin is also self-portrayed as a rooster, like Obembe, and as a moth. Benjamin sees himself as similar to “[t]he creatures that crow to wake people, announcing the end of nights like natural alarm clocks, but who, in return for their services, must be slain for man’s consumption” (352). This excerpt makes reference to Benjamin’s fate once he is caught and found guilty of murdering Abulu. Benjamin, with Obembe’s wit, avenges his brothers, which gives peace to his parents but, in turn, he is forced to serve an eight-years sentence. Once in prison, Benjamin starts perceiving himself as a moth: “[t]he fragile thing with wings, who basks in light, but who soon loses its wings to the ground” (380). As he further adds after losing his eldest brothers, he felt “like a moth whose wings were plucked off its body while in flight” that eventually “became a being that could no longer fly but crawl” (380). These two pessimistic quotes informed by “sentiments of despair and hopelessness” (Adesanmi, “Of Postcolonial Entanglement” 227) can best be interpreted in reference to two historical moments for Nigeria. First, when Nigeria became independent in 1960 and second, when the self-proclaimed state of Biafra seceded from Nigeria in 1966-1967. Nigeria’s independence came to be seen as fragile because the country was “unified under a federal constitution in which politically conscious ethnic groups vied for control of the central government” (Falola and Heaton, A History of Nigeria 137). As a direct consequence of this situation, ethnic tensions among the three major groups in Nigeria Serón-Navas 50 (Hausa-Fulanis in the Norther region, Yorubas in the Western region and Igbos in the Eastern region) that fought for power escalated. The result was the interethnic civil war that broke out in 1967 between Nigeria and the secessionist state of Biafra, causing millions of casualties. Additionally, Biafra was regarded as a nation fully designed outside colonial rule, but failed as Biafrans lost the civil war and were forced to reabsorb into a country that was politically, economically and socially unstable. In this sense, the civil war “did more to exemplify the problems associated with the national question than to solve them” (Falola and Heaton, A History of Nigeria 160). But, it also showed that there was a possibility of creating a selfproclaimed nation designed by Biafrans outside colonial power structures, and this hope for a more optimistic future –as materialised in the creation of an alternative state like Biafra or in another viable solution for Nigeria as it is constituted nowadays– is illustrated by the Agwu younger brothers: David and Nkem, who are seen in the novel as egrets: “The wool-white birds that appear in flocks after a storm, their wings unspotted, their lives unscathed. Although they became egrets in the midst of the storm, they emerged, wings afloat in the air, at the end of it, when everything as I knew it had changed” (Obioma, The Fishermen 394). There is hope in the way Nkem and David are characterised as egrets. Obioma, in depicting them like “birds which appear after a storm” (407), puts an end to the novel in a positive, perhaps utopian, note. He mentions that egrets “present a shift in atmosphere” when the storm has passed as “they can face the future with hope that things – new things – and perhaps symbolically new people and new generations of people can rise and fix what has never truly worked in the first place” (Obioma qtd. in Mallika Datta 62). Perhaps this new generation of egrets will be able to dismantle Nigeria as a colonial imposition and allow Nigerians to “decide for [themselves] on what terms [modern] Nigeria should exist” (Obioma, “Chigozie Obioma whose Debut Novel” 47). Finally, Mr. Agwu, the father, is seen as an eagle: “The mighty bird that planted his nest high above the rest of his peers, hovering and Serón-Navas 51 watching over his young eagles, the way a king guards his throne” (Obioma, The Fishermen 41). It is interesting to see how, despite the fact Mr. Agwu is portrayed as a controlling figure in the novel, once he is transferred to another city due to his job, his reality starts to fall apart. Similarly, Mrs. Agwu is presented not as an animal but as a falconer: “The one who stood on the hills and watched, trying to stave off whatever ill she perceived was coming to her children” (Obioma, The Fishermen 139). Mrs. Agwu’s description as a falconer is inspired by a quote from the poem “The Second Coming” by W. B. Yeats. The lines “Turning and turning in the widening gyre,/ the falcon cannot hear the falconer” (Yeats, lines 1.2, qtd. in Obioma, The Fishermen 139; italics in the original) appear at the beginning of the chapter devoted to the mother. However, and analysing the representation of the maternal figure in relation to Yeats’ lines, Mrs. Agwu can be read as a careful watcher who, despite her unending efforts, eventually loses control of the situation, giving way to the collapse of her family. This happens because she is not aware, at the beginning, of Ikenna and Abulu’s encounter or of his prophecy, preventing her from correctly addressing the conflicts generated among her children.19 Finally, when asked about this novel transgressing the limits of realism, Obioma stated to this respect that “almost every African would read [The Fishermen] as a huge possibility, as pure realism” (“Entrevista a Chigozie Obioma”). However, how can this novel be read as a “pure realist” text? Can this novel be considered “realist” in an African context, or is it best described as “something else” where fantasy is part of the everyday in the African imagination? In order to answer these questions, I draw on scholars such as Brendan Cooper, Victor C. Uchendu, A. G. Stock and Nnedi Okorafor to analyse The Fishermen as oscillating between magic realism, plain realism, petro-magic realism or perhaps this novel is just a 19 “The Second Coming” was written in 1919 and originally published in 1920. Besides, these opening lines from W. B. Yeats’ poem are also present at the beginning of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), which reinforces the idea that Obioma’s and Achebe’s novels are in constant conversation. Serón-Navas 52 realist text that follows a type of realism “that bears the trace of pre-existing non-realist modes of expression and belief” (Bryce 49) and thus, most exactly theorised as “organic fantansy” (Okorafor 275). If understood as a novel that “contests polarities such as history versus magic, the precolonial past versus the post-industrial present and life versus death” (B. Cooper 1), but also European modernity versus the “multifarious [indigenous] worldviews” (Wenzel 457), The Fishermen could successfully be defined as “magic realism” or as “petro-magic-realism,” as analysed in the previous section when discussing the consequences of the oil industry in the river Omi-Ala. In this light, magic realism bridges the gap between (seemingly) binary oppositions in order to make sense of reality. As Frederick Cooper aptly states, drawing on Homi K. Bhabha, this reality is “to exist in a third space, in the fertile interstices between these extremes of time or space” (1). However, and although this label seems fitting to define Obioma’s novel, this label has been mostly used in the analysis of Latin American literary texts so, perhaps, we should look for a definition that takes into account the African specificities. In this sense, Nnedi Okorafor offers a plausible term that captures the convergence of fantastic and material elements in an African context. In her article, Okorafor proposes the term “organic fantasy,” a form of fantasy that “has the power to make something familiar strange” (278) and vice versa, to make familiar what is considered imaginary. Okorafor also adds that this type of fantasy is part of the African folklore and even everyday life, where fantasy “blooms directly from the soil of the real” (278). It is equally paramount to mention that this form of fantasy, where the modern and the traditional, the technological and the natural or the colonial and the pre-colonial fuse together, can be used to discuss identity issues for those individuals who have mixed heritages, like Okorafor who is Nigerian- American. Hence, “organic fantasy” allows for the examination of questions that are in Serón-Navas 53 perpetual conversation, such as the homeland(s), the multiple cultural and historical backgrounds, and the “fertile interstices” in between, recuperating F. Cooper’s statement. Having discussed this formal aspect of the novel, I move on to the examination of the cosmological organisation of the world according to Igbo ontology, which also helps further understand the characterisation of Obioma’s novel as “organic fantasy.” I aim to analyse how Igbo cosmology, where the real is part of the non-real, is explored in Obioma’s narrative. In order to do that, I draw on scholar Victor C. Uchendu and the description of the Igbo world he provides: [t]he Igbo world is a ‘real’ one in every aspect. There is the world of man peopled by all created beings and things, both animate and inanimate. The spirit world is the abode of the creator, the deities, the disembodied and malignant spirits, and the ancestral spirits . . . There is constant interaction between the world of man and the world of the dead; the visible and invisible forces. Existence for the Igbo, therefore, is a dual but interrelated phenomenon involving the interaction between the material and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible, the good and the bad, the living and the dead. (225-226) This illustrates a conception of reality in which the dead and the living inhabit the same space, creating this dual existence in which the human and the non-human, the material and the spiritual converge in the same terrain. As Mazisi Kunene remarks, “[t]he link between the living and the dead is the most seminal concept in all African belief systems” (“Problems” 17). In this context, Obioma has stated that he follows what he calls “the dualism mode,” which precisely stems from Igbo ontology, where there is constant interaction and almost no distinction between the realm of the dead and the realm of the living. Obioma points out that “there is not much distinction between the realm of the real, [the realm] of the fictional, and [the realm] of the extraordinary” in his works, where they constantly intertwine. Similarly, Serón-Navas 60 would become dominated by Muslim Northerners, which turned the Nigerian federation into an exceptionally fragile one. There was also rivalry between the feudal Yoruba in the West and the Republican Igbos in the East (Oguibe 88). Added to this was the discovery of oil in the Niger Delta region in 1958 and the violent competition for scarce resources in this multiethnic society. This tense ethnic landscape was behind what Nick Mdika Tembo coins as “Biafranization” or “the fear of the Igbo factor” within the Hausa-Fulani community (179), which caused the mass slaughter of Igbos and other Easterners all over different Northern regions in the years prior to the war (a massive ethnic cleansing that had taken place since the early 1950s and which has come to be known as the “Igbo genocide”). All these anti-Igbo feelings, tensions and prejudices among ethnic groups fostered that, in May 30th 1967, Lieutenant Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu proclaimed the independence of the South-Eastern Region of the Federation of Nigeria which came to be known as the Republic of Biafra: a self-proclaimed state that existed until January 1970. Previously, in the summer and fall of 1966, the pogrom of Igbos in the North took place and this forced Igbos to return to their homeland from the whole federation. After this declaration, the Federal Military Government (FMG) started a brutal offensive against Biafrans which took the lives of between 500.000 and two million Igbos and other Easterners (Korieh 734). The civil war between Biafran separatists and the FMG broke out on July 6th, 1967 and progressed until January 12th, 1970 with the surrender of Biafra and its final reintegration into Nigerian territory. Internationally, the USSR supported the federal cause led by Yakubu Gowon and supplied the FMG army with aircraft; Biafra was recognised by other African countries such as Zambia or Tanzania, while several international countries such as Israel, China, France or Portugal expressed their solidarity for the Biafran cause. Serón-Navas 61 The civil war exposed the cruel consequences of the “national question” and evinced the disillusionment with the promise of independence; a broken dream in many ways. Postwar Nigeria confirmed itself as a country plagued with political corruption, a succession of undemocratic and parasite governments, further divisions in terms of class, age, religion and gender, but it also experienced an accelerated expansion of the oil sector in the 1970s (Falola and Heaton, A History of Nigeria 181). As the “Giant of Africa” became the main export of oil, Nigeria became the richest country on the continent. However, the oil industry did not contribute to improve the conditions of the Nigerian people, who still remain in utter poverty, but helped the development of kleptocratic governments that concentrated national wealth on a powerful and corrupt minority. Likewise, this oil expansion accentuated the dependence from the West since national economy was highly reliant on oil exportations. In the political arena, the country witnessed two military governments led by Lieutenant-General Murtala Mohammed and Lieutenant-General Olusegun Obasanjo. The Second Republic was born in 1979 and other military governments followed as consequence of recurrent coups d’état: Muhammadu Buhari, Ibrahim Babangida, Sani Abacha and Abdulsalami Abubakar. Nigeria transitioned to democracy in 1999 under the lead of the Head of State Olusegun Obasanjo. In the novel, it is important to analyse the encounter between the Agwu brothers and the famous politician M.K.O. Abiola, an icon of democracy. Chief Moshood Kashimawo Olawale (M.K.O.) Abiola was the representative of the Social Democratic Party, a popular businessman who ran the presidential election and won against General Sani Abacha. This election is defined as the first democratic and fair election in post-war Nigeria. However, Abiola was not allowed to rule and he remained president elect until his death in 1998 under suspicious circumstances. General Ibrahim Babangida annulled the results of the election and appointed Ernest Shonekan as head of state. Months later, General Sani Abacha seized power in a military coup d’état and later imprisoned Abiola. In The Fishermen, the Agwu brothers Serón-Navas 62 meet M.K.O. Abiola in 1993, prior to his election as president-to-be of Nigeria. Out of admiration, a photo of Abiola and the boys is taken and they are also given a calendar, which came to be seen by the brothers as “a badge . . . , a testimonial of [their] affiliation with a man almost everyone in the west of Nigeria believed would be Nigeria’s next president” (Obioma, The Fishermen 107); that is, a talisman and a promise of a more democratic Nigeria. As drawing from Abiola’s political manifesto titled “Hope ’93,” the boys came to regard themselves as the “children of Hope ’93, [and as] M.K.O.’s allies” (107). However, Ikenna tears apart this calendar, symbolically destroying Nigeria’s possibility of a materialised democratic government. Moreover, M.K.O. Abiola’s death coincides with the beginning of Benjamin’s eight-year confinement, tracing a parallelism between these two characters in the novel and attesting to the idea of an abortive nation that keeps on failing its own citizens and that demands to be re-imagined. 1.2. Ayobami Adebayo’s Stay with Me (2017) 1.2.1. Preliminary Remarks on Ayobami Adebayo and her Novel Ayobami Adebayo (1988) is an Anglo-Yoruba author who was born in Lagos. She holds BA and MA degrees in Literature in English from Obafemi Awolowo University (Ife, Nigeria). In 2014, she earned a MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and has been tutored by prestigious international writers such as Margaret Atwood or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (see Olatunbosun 2019). This Yoruba author has been the recipient of a large number of fellowships and residencies from Ledig House (USA), Sinthian Cultural Centre (Senegal), Ox-Bow School of Arts (USA), Siena Art Institute (Italy) or Evedi Hills (Nigeria) among others. Adebayo has worked as an editor for Sabara Magazine since 2009 and has also written fiction and non-fiction pieces for international newspapers and renowned online platforms such as BBC, LitHub or The Guardian. She has also written Serón-Navas 63 several short stories and poems that have been included in a number of magazines and anthologies such as Kalahari Review, Speaking for the Generations: An Anthology of New African Writing (2010) edited by Dike Okoro, or the Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent (2019) edited by Margaret Busby. Her debut novel Stay with Me was published in 2017 by Canongate Books and soon gained international critical acclaim. In fact, it has been translated into 20 languages. After its publication, Stay with Me was shortlisted for the 2017 Bailey’s Prize for Women’s Fiction and longlisted for the 2018 International Dylan Thomas Prize, among others. Her upcoming novel A Spell of Good Things will be published in 2023. Stay with Me is, at its core, a dramatic portrait of motherhood in modern-day Nigeria; a theme that together with “childbearing, child rearing [and] the power relations between men and women” have been central in the literary production of Yoruba female writers (Falola and Akinyemi 210). Adebayo’s novel is articulated around four parts divided into 42 chapters, which span from 1985 until 2008, and recounts the experiences of a childless and motherless Yoruba woman called Yejide Ajayi and her husband Akin Ajayi. It is relevant to analyse the symbolism behind the names of some of the main characters in this narrative. In the Yoruba language, Yejide stands for “image of the mother” which is very appropriate considering the main character’s events in life; Akin stands for “brave” or “heroic” which, again, suits the experiences this character goes through in life; Dotun (Akin’s brother) stands for “transform” or “be new,” which is equally suitable as he is the one who sets into motion a series of events that will eventually transform Akin’s and Yejide’s lives forever. Finally, we should pay attention to the proper names of the marriage’s progeny: Olamide, Sesan and Rotimi. Olamide stands for “my wealth has come”, Sesan, “gift of God” and Rotimi, the title of the novel: “stay with me.” In the novel, and in a stream of consciousness account, events are retrospectively told from the viewpoints of two different first-person narrators: Yejide and Akin. This dual Serón-Navas 64 perspective enables the reader to understand reality from both positions (the wife/mother’s and the husband/father’s), creating “a stereoscopic portrait of a marriage” (Kakutani, “Portrait of a Nigerian Marriage”). Additionally, we observe how Adebayo does not recall events following a temporal linearity but rather, several leaps in time are to be found in this story. Indeed, temporal linearity, mostly associated with the West, is disrupted in this text (and in other texts analysed in this dissertation such as Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen or Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees) through the overlapping or entanglement of past and present time, interlocking of personal and national histories, and the use of reverse chronologies. Indeed, postcolonial authors have overtly challenged the chrono-normativity imposed by the West on its (former) colonies, associated with notions of temporal linearity, forwardness, progress and modernity (Chakrabarty 2000; Mbembe 2001). As Keya Ganguly contends, “the postcolonial has been taken to an ‘other’ time whose logic and historical expression have been incommensurable with the normative temporalities of clock and calendar associated with western modernity” (162) or, as Rebecca Fine Romanow puts it, “the postcolonial is . . . a space [that] inhabits a ‘queer’ nonnormative geography and temporality” (3-4). Thus, the different “forms of temporality identified as specifically European and imperialist” (West-Pavlov 158) characterised by “the forward vector of progress and incremental acquisition of civilization” (159) have been contested by postcolonial writers in an attempt to annul the “imperial time” (158), and to prove that their works are positively cronodissident. Then, and as based on the previous ideas, how does Ayobami Adebayo implement a non-normative use of time in her novel? As Adebayo’s novel is recounted in retrospect from two different perspectives, this dual appraisal of facts is associated with a notable absence of temporal linearity, expressed in this polyphonic story through the “messy” oscillation between the past and the present. The Serón-Navas 65 novel formally alters the “normative temporality of clock and calendar associated with Western modernity” (Ganguly 162), as mentioned earlier, through the entanglement of past and present “function[ing] relationally” (Adesanmi, “Of Postcolonial Entanglement” 229), as facts are recounted from two temporal locations −1985 and 2008– where national and personal events intertwine. As I argue in section 1.2.4. “‘While my Last Child Was Dying, the Country Was Unravelling’: Interrogating Inviable Nations and Engendering Promising Ones,” there is an interlocking of personal and national times since Yejide’s personal experiences are synchronous with the dramatic events that the post-independence Nigerian nation goes through in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This interconnection between the self and the nation’s histories exposes a heterodox conception of time and evinces the “close relationship between subjectivity and temporality” on the continent (Mbembe, On the Postcolony 19). Finally, I discuss how Adebayo’s novel does exemplify the metachronous nature of postcolonial writing that entangles literary pieces from different generations. According to Kinana Hamam, “postcolonial women’s writing emerge as a non-linear or metachronous project which deals with change and empowerment as a movement not only forward but also backward; that is, back to multiple times and locations in which (past) women’s narratives are operative at present and in the future as they teach and inspire us” (22). In this light, I argue that Adebayo’s novel interacts with Emecheta’s and Nwapa’s novels in an effort to acknowledge the literary feminist genealogy that has preceded her and to claim a position within this metachronous project of fictional sorority. Plot-wise, Ayobami Adebayo’s story revolves around a middle-class Yoruba couple who is struggling to have children, while exploring the familial and social conflicts that arise from Yejide’s alleged inability to get pregnant. Yejide is presented as an independent woman who owns her own hair salon, a safe space where she can share her worries with other women. Her salon can be considered a space of female bonding, empowerment, intimacy and Serón-Navas 66 nurture; a female microcosm of sorority where clients call Yejide “‘my dear sister’” (Adebayo, Stay with Me 32). Besides, Yejide is presented as a woman whose mother “died seconds after she had pushed [her] out into the world” (36), and as someone who has grown up in a polygamous home where her father’s wives mistreated her. As I prove further on, this conflict with the absence of her own mother and with a strong mothering figure in her life will be decisive to understand her own fragile relationship with her own maternity. Thus, her only remaining family is her father, her husband Akin and her in-laws. It is important to mention that Akin and Yejide agreed on a monogamous relationship before getting married. However, and as Yejide has not been able to give Akin a child in the four years they have been married, he secretly marries Funmilayo −the beautiful “mangoyellow woman” whose lips are “covered with blood-red lipstick” (Adebayo, Stay with Me 10)−, who becomes his second wife. Akin’s in-laws pressured him to take on a second wife that could bear him children, and Yejide was forced to become an “iyale” or “first wife,” a title that “marked [her] as not woman enough for [her] husband” (Adebayo, Stay with Me 12; italics in the original). This disloyal arrangement brings about the first blow to Akin and Yejide’s relationship, and exposes the social and familial pressures that Yejide experiences on a daily basis. Similarly, the absence of progeny questions the idea of marriage as leading to childbearing, and what is left of that marital relationship when the parties are not able to become parents, thus interrogating at the same time conventional life-scripts that expose a teleological use of time that is not fitting for everyone. Whereas Akin and Yejide’s marriage starts to seriously erode, Akin decides to get rid of Funmilayo, pushing her down the stairs causing her death (Adebayo, Stay with Me 255), and resorts to his younger brother Dotun to inseminate Yejide, without her knowing about their agreement. They have sex multiple times and Yejide eventually becomes pregnant. She Serón-Navas 67 then gives birth to two girs called Olamide and Rotimi, and a boy named Sesan. Sadly, Olamide and Sesan die at a very early age due to sickle-cell disease and Rotimi, who also has the disease, manages to survive and reach adolescence. When Yejide finds out Rotimi will undergo the same suffering her siblings did, she decides to abandon Akin and Rotimi for she cannot stand to lose another child and, I argue, be regarded as an agency-less victim. This traumatic experience leads her to admit that “[t]he things that matter are inside [her], locked up below [her] breast as though in a grave, a place of permanence, [her] coffin-like treasure chest” (Adebayo, Stay with Me 5). However, her children’s disease is not the only reason why Yejide leaves her family behind. She discovers that Akin and Dotun had agreed on the latter impregnating her because her husband was impotent. In fact, Akin marries Yejide without telling her his secret: he suffers from erectile dysfunction (infertility is thus hinted) that deems unfeasible to get any woman pregnant. Akin not only lied to Yejide and hided relevant information from her, but he accepted being socially perceived as the doomed husband with the barren wife so that he would not have to face ridicule. It is for this reason that Yejide does not show pity or devotion for her husband, but rather, it is her who leaves him behind. At the end of the novel, 15 years have passed before Yejide reunites with Akin and Rotimi, who is still alive. This cathartic experience where mother and child reunite is a central moment in the novel not only because Yejide is finally able to overcome her fears and anxieties about motherhood but, if approached from a political standpoint, this moment allows for a an optimistic reading of the Nigerian nation and its citizens. Serón-Navas 68 1.2.2. Monstrous/“Monstrificated” Mothers and Abiku Children: An Afro-Gothic Analysis of Stay with Me In this section, I analyse Stay with Me as a text that can be discussed as a postcolonial Gothic or as an Afro-Gothic text. In her review of the novel, Michiko Kakutani states that this story constitutes a “gothic parable about pride and betrayal” (“Portrait of a Nigerian Marriage”). Similarly, Ayobami Adebayo admitted that the plotting of her novel was particularly twisted and Gothic (“Baileys Longlist Author”). Taking these descriptions of the novel into consideration, I mainly draw on Carol Margaret Davison’s research on the socalled “Postcolonial Female Gothic” (2003) together with the analyses by theorists Ruth Bienstock Anolik (2003), Diana Adesola Mafe (2012), Helen Cousins (2012) and Bernice Borain (2021) to examine how Ayobami Adebayo has re-appropriated this genre from a Yoruba and postcolonial perspective. Carol Margaret Davison asserts that the Gothic literature that thrived in the nineteenth century “foreground[ed] the interconnectedness of home [Britain] and empire” (137). She goes on to argue that “Gothic-inflected classics” such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) or Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1860) with characters like Bertha Mason −the “madwoman in the attic”− or Abel Magwitch expose the “economic anxieties regarding a principal source of British wealth [that] are distilled into dramatic ‘return of the repressed’ episodes featuring such ‘invading’ and uncanny colonial figures” (Margaret Davison 137). These pioneer Gothic works have paved the way for two basic trends: the Imperial Gothic and the Postcolonial Gothic. The Imperial Gothic tackles the “threat of going native [or] the invasion of Britain by colonial forces” while the Postcolonial Gothic taps the “re-animated traumas of a nation’s colonial past” (137). These two trends are part of what Margaret Davison calls the Empire Gothic. In this context, Postcolonial Gothic fiction, Diana Adesola Serón-Navas 69 Mafe writes, “engages with colonial histories through Gothic tropes –the horrific, the supernatural, the sublime, and so on—that originated in eighteenth-century European literatures,” hence, “[t]he postcolonial Gothic text is literally haunted by the colonial experience and its aftermaths” (22-23). Similarly, the Female Gothic, a term coined by Ellen Moers in 1977, refers to the work done by women writers since the eighteenth century as part of the Gothic tradition (1). Despite the limitations and repeated questioning of this term, the narratives belonging to this genre, Adesola Mafe states, essentially “indict patriarchy, critique the ‘othering’ of women, and represent the suppressed Feminine” (23). Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith also claim that the Female Gothic has to be regarded as a “politically subversive genre,” whose main aim is to “articulat[e] women’s dissatisfactions with patriarchal structures” by providing “a coded expression of their fears of entrapment within the domestic and the female body” (2). To sum up, this genre constitutes the expression of the fears, traumas and anxieties attached to the female experience regarding patriarchal and other oppressive institutions such as marriage, maternity, family or domesticity. These anxieties are explored through the Freudian “return of the repressed” in its use of spectrality, ghosts, women imprisonment or women being buried alive in an effort to denounce the violence that men and the patriarchal society in general exert against women (see Williams 1995). Therefore, the Postcolonial Female Gothic explores the tensions and anxieties derived from domesticity and imperialism, jointly critiquing patriarchy and other postcolonial priorities. Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) constitutes the example par excellence of a narrative belonging to this genre. In the African literary tradition, Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005) and Ayobami Adebayo’s Stay with Me (2017), which can be theorised as Yoruba Gothic texts (see Cousins 2012), can be analysed as belonging to the Postcolonial Serón-Navas 76 mothers” since they are thought “to occupy multiple worlds (the bush, the spirit world, and the earth)” (Ouma, “Reading the Diasporic Abiku” 188). These evil spirits are believed to “reenter its mother’s womb” (Adesola Mafe 24) and “take up residence in the body of a newborn child” (Cousins 51), theorising such motif in Nigerian literature as liminal presences. In the novel, Akin’s mother is the first to assert that her grandchildren are abiku, which is the term that she uses to make sense of the genetic disease her grandchildren suffer from. Akin’s mother argues that “these children . . . have made a promise in the spirit world to die young,” and this is the reason why hospitals and medical care cannot cure their disease (Adebayo, Stay with Me 193). While the abiku is defined in the novel as a child born to haunt its caretakers and who will die as soon as s/he can (204), this transgressive figure has also been used in Yoruba mythology to refer to a child whose behaviour is “ambiguous,” “difficult to deal with” or when “there are indications of a dual personality” (Acholonu, “Ogbanje” 103). Christopher Ouma contends that the abiku motif and its “tropological significance in African literature has allowed writers and critics to comment on the complexity of the interfaces of identity” (see, for instance, the 2022 article by Rocío Cobo-Piñero where she discusses the idea of the abiku from a transgender perspective in Akwaeke Emezi’s 2018 novel, Freshwater) (“Reading the Diasporic Abiku” 189). This figure, characterised by its ambiguity, is also explored in Adebayo’s novel, where Rotimi is considered an abiku whose name “was given to boys alone” since it was a mutable name that lent itself to a dual interpretation (Stay with Me 204). Once again, the abiku, as a shape-shifting entity that transcends different realms (i.e. natural and supernatural, but also gender binarisms), can be approached in this novel from an Afroqueer angle, as it is applied to subjects who are not (de- )limited by Western conceptions of gender normativity. Serón-Navas 77 Similarly, Ouma posits that this trope has also been used to discuss “colonial modernity and African tradition in relation to evolving postcolonial African worlds” (“Reading the Diasporic Abiku” 188). As Akin’s mother uses of the abiku to make sense of sickle-cell disease, it confronts her worldviews, where she privileges African belief systems, and Akin and Yejide’s that use the “white man’s school” and wisdom to make sense of reality (Adebayo, Stay with Me 193). In this sense, Adebayo re-appropriates the abiku motif to symbolically stage the tensions between (post-)colonial modernity and African pre-colonial worldviews and to denounce that Africa is still considered a backward continent because, essentially, it does not follow Western modernity. This idea is also summarised in the following words by Akin’s mother for Yejide: “The whole world knows there are many routes into any marketplace. But the white man has deceived some of you, told you his way is the only way” (Adebayo, Stay with Me 193-194). The abiku can operate here as a strategy to revalidate pre-colonial African traditions and belief systems. Additionally, the abiku motif as referring to a “child who had come into the world intending to die as soon as she could” (Adebayo, Stay with Me 204) can be analysed in regard to present-day Nigeria and its colonial past. Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi posits that “the abiku emerges as a perverse, ghostly intimation of a horrendous past, a critique of a tedious present, and a reminder of mortality,” pointing at a certain “social and spiritual unease” (2002, 664). In this light, it can prove fruitful to analyse the abiku in relation to the disaffection with Nigeria’s current state of affairs. In her analysis of the trope of the twins in contemporary Nigerian literature, Jane Bryce mentions how in Ben Okri’s Famished Road trilogy (1991, 1993 and 1998), the abiku “metonymically represents Nigeria itself,” which is defined as the “abiku country” (60; italics in the original). This figure can appear in contemporary Nigerian writing to discuss the disenchantment with the postcolonial nation and its failure to culminate the process of de-colonisation. For his part, Christopher Ouma Serón-Navas 78 contends that this versatile literary motif allows the engagement with “a fractious postcolonial national identity” both at home and abroad (“Reading the Diasporic Abiku” 190). In other words, its metaphorical analysis makes possible the allusion to a dysfunctional country, demanding other forms of governing Nigeria so that it can thrive as a prosperous nation, but it also explores the “dissatisfaction with the condition of migrancy” as a consequence of a collapsed country that forces people to emigrate. In her theorisation of the abiku in Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005), Jane Bryce persuasively analyses this figure as symbolically addressing the dissatisfaction with the diasporic condition and other expressions of unhomeliness. In her article, Bryce examines the conflicts and anxieties of being “half-and-half” (60) for those nomadic individuals found in “new transplanted contexts” (Ouma, “Reading the Diasporic Abiku” 189), and who are forced to negotiate multiple belongings while learning to navigate sometimes opposing world(view)s. As Ouma summarises, “the diasporic abiku” invites “to reframe the discourse on migration and race in relation to a continuously evolving cultural space of the African diaspora” (189; italics in the original). Hence, the abiku is centrally used to criticise negative aspects of the homeland and of the diasporic experience, but it can also be useful to debate new representations of nationhood and selfhood. The last Afro-Gothic element explored in Adebayo’s novel is found in the Yoruba folktale Yejide tells Olamide: “Oluronbi and the Iroko tree.” The traditional version of this folktale tells the story of Oluronbi, a market woman who made the promise to offer her daughter to the Iroko tree if it helped her sell more goods in the local market. The Iroko tree gave her what she demanded and she handed her daughter to the tree. In the novel, Yejide reinvents the tale, creating an alternative version which is, somehow, premonitory of Yejide’s personal story. In this tale, Oluronbi’s family gets lost in the forest next to their farm and she Serón-Navas 79 starts searching for them, but she cannot find them until she decides to enter the forest and ask the Iroko tree if it has seen her family. The Iroko tree accepts telling Oluronbi where her family is hidden if she promises to give it her first child in return. Oluronbi accepts the deal and she sees her family again. Eventually, Oluronbi marries and has a daughter, Aponbiepo, but she is warned no to go to the forest. One day, Aponbiepo goes there with her friends and she disappears forever (Adebayo, Stay with Me 131-138). Diana Adesola Mafe affirms that the forest/the bush/the wood is “a treacherous realm that must be carefully navigated” (21), and constitutes an archetypal element in Gothic Yoruba oral tradition charged with symbolism, strange events and supernatural beings that contribute to build an atmosphere of dread and mystery (46). The forest becomes a foreign space of vulnerability; a place devoid of humanity as it erects itself as the antithesis of what is considered civilisation. Thus, the forest is discursively constructed as the realm of outsiderness and alterity; a peripheral and sinister space that transcends what is held as human and rational. This landscape could be symbolically compared with the feminine domain and with the sphere of the colonised or the captured. In her exploration of Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954), Laura Murphy analyses the bush as a space symbolic of the traumatic and cross-generational “impact of the [trans-Atlantic] slave trade” (144), and of the “fear of capture” (147). She asserts that the landscape functions, in the West African (literary) imagination, as a terrifying producer of brutality, violence and enslavement, concluding that “the very landscape itself works as a captor” (148). The bush is thus understood as a liminal territory that keeps on haunting its very inhabitants; a trace of a traumatic past where Africans were de-humanised and denigrated. In addition, Adesola Mafe also examines the bush motif, depicted as a “haunted forest or wasteland,” as the “symbolic space where solitary male protagonists test their mettle and . . Serón-Navas 80 . masculinity” (21). This symbolic space has been central for Yoruba writers such as Amos Tutuola or D.O. Fagungwa, whose stories have taken place in this off-limits location. Furthermore, in her analysis of Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005), Adesola Mafe proposes a reading of the bush/forest as a mysterious space where the female protagonist goes to in order to interrogate her own mixed heritage and cultural hybridity. This scholar points to a re-appropriation of the bush motif by female Yoruba authors such as Oyeyemi or Adebayo, who enter this haunted space aiming to explore notions of (normative) femininity and identity. In this light, the forest where the Iroko tree dwells in the tale told by Yejide in Stay with Me becomes a symbolic space that hides the repressed or suppressed feminine and, as mentioned above, one of the multiple places abikus inhabit. Indeed, the inherent marginality of the forest is shared with Yejide, which allows Adebayo to explore the protagonist’s anxieties and frustrations regarding her own mothering experience and, most centrally, her own status as dissident and eccentric woman. Thus, I argue that, in the Gothic fiction produced by Yoruba women, the forest/bush is theorised as a space of dissidence and as a space also associated with the feminine, essentially used to reclaim alternative forms of female identity. 1.2.3. “Mother Is Gold, Father Is Glass”: Transgressive Motherhood and other Forms of Reclaiming Women’s Agency In her book Mother Is Gold, Father Is Glass: Gender and Colonialism in a Yoruba Town (2011), Lorelle D. Semley theorises about the current conception of mothers in Nigeria, and more specifically, within the Yoruba community, to which Yejide belongs. As shown in the famous Yoruba saying “mother is gold, father is glass,” Semley exposes the relevance of mothers, who are regarded as enduring, selfless and powerful presences in the lives of their children and within their communities. On the contrary, and exemplified by the part “father is glass,” Semley underlines the fragility and, somehow, the limitations of the paternal Serón-Navas 81 experience in the Yoruba society (1). Remi Akujobi also notes the quasi-sacred status that mothers enjoy in this society, where they are “revered as creators, as providers, cradle rockers, nurturers, and goddesses” (2). Thus, women’s status in society, their “place or placelessness” as Hilary Chala Kowino underlines, depends on their biological capacities and on the realisation of such capacities (25). In Stay with Me, Yejide is clearly imbued with these conceptions of motherhood, which might be considered as essentialising from a Western feminist viewpoint, when she utters the following Yoruba words that deeply resonate with her: “Iya ni wura, iya ni wura iyebiye ti a ko le f’owo ra,” that is, “Mother is gold, Mother is treasured gold that cannot be bought with money” (Adebayo, Stay with Me 45; italics in the original). These words become exceptionally hurtful for a woman who has gone through three pregnancies, which most of them have ended up with the death of the infant. Similarly, motherhood is understood as determining female subjectivity and even humanity in a Nigerian context. A woman is given such status if she is able to engender a healthy progeny (preferably sons). Contrastingly, if a woman is unable or fails to procreate, she is considered “adulterous or cursed,” “her femininity is questioned” and her marriage could dissolve (Zulfiqar 69). If the very femininity and even identity of a woman is conditioned by her status as mother, then, a woman who deviates from this patriarchal (and capitalist) mandate would be considered unwomanly, but also non-human, as suggested through the above discussion on the Gothic. This idea is made clear by Yejide’s mother-in- law, who tells her that “[w]omen manufacture children” and if she cannot do what is expected of her, then she is “just a man” and “[n]obody should call [her] a woman” (Adebayo, Stay with Me 47). In this sense, it is also worth remembering what Hilary Chala Kowino declares when referring to the relationship between the procreative capacity of women and their belonging to the postcolonial nation: “women’s inability to reproduce almost always costs them their membership in the nation” (25). Therefore, if women’s allegiance to the nation is Serón-Navas 82 based on their ability to have children or nationalist sons, as Elleke Boehmer (2005) claims, then their national belonging and even nationhood would be granted (or not) on the basis of their biology. As based on this idea, Yejide could be read as extra-national or, at best, as a second-class citizen. In the literary arena, many first- and second-generation male Nigerian writers have contributed to the perpetuation of these colonial and patriarchal ideals, as literature was traditionally a male domain. C. H. B. Mary Monica points out that most male African writers have traditionally tended to “mythologize women as ‘Mother’ or ‘Earth’,” while others have deliberately “presented a distorted and stereotyped image of women” (3). Generally, canonical writers such as Chinua Achebe or Cyprian Ekwensi have characterised women as “complacent individuals, cheerfully accepting their inferior status . . . in a male dominated society” (3). They have also put forth monolithic images of the female experience, where women were always signified in relation to the masculine, and whose realities were not seen as central or relevant (see Zulfiqar 2016). However, prominent female writers such as Buchi Emecheta or Flora Nwapa, together with the new generation of Nigerian women writers, have contested these simplistic images and proposed alternative female portrayals. These counterrepresentations present female subjects who are not constricted by traditional gender roles like the caretaker or the dutiful wife, and who “seek something more than marriage and children in the quest for fulfilment” (Salami-Boukari 144). Moreover, it was not until the postindependence period when Nigerian women writers started to deconstruct hegemonic images distributed by their male counterparts. These female writers aimed to “problematize . . . the tradition of canonical African male writing” (Mary Monica 57), to reclaim their bodies and voices, and to present Nigerian women in a new light, exploring their “struggles and triumphs” (Hamam 22). Serón-Navas 83 In her seminal article “The Female Writer and her Commitment” (1987), Molara Ogundipe Leslie contends that feminist women writers must perform two main roles: first, “to tell about being a woman,” and second, “to describe reality from a woman’s view,” which allows the writer to delve into the nature of womanhood and the diverse interpretations of the category woman across the multiple temporal and geographical positionings (5). Furthermore, Ogundipe Leslie provides a list of stereotypical features attributed to the female body, namely “formlessness, passivity, instability, confinement, piety, materiality, spirituality, irrationality, [and] compliancy” (5). This list of seemingly intrinsic elements reinforces the stereotypical vision of women as passive and dis-empowered, who are signified in relation to their male relatives and whose experiences are deemed unimportant. Likewise, this scholar also points out that women are represented following binary oppositions. For instance, we find the “figure of the ‘sweet mother’, the all-accepting creature of fecundity and self-sacrifice, [associated] with Mother Africa”; an image that highly contrasts with the hyper-sexualised figure of the beautiful, passionate and erotic woman, who is conceived “as [a] phallic receptacle” (6). Thus, Ogundipe Leslie contends that one of the central commitments of the female writer should be oriented towards “the correction of these false [and dichotomic] images” (8), but also, towards incorporating nuanced representations of African women. For her, female writers ought to seek justice for these women and simultaneously work towards their liberation from patriarchal control (10-11). In this line, Buchi Emecheta and Flora Nwapa constitute two representative examples of the commitments proposed by Molara Ogundipe Leslie. These two canonical female writers in the Nigerian literary tradition have come up with new representations of the feminine experiences while defining the “New African Woman” in their “valiant stories” (Mary Monica 5). Like Ayobami Adebayo, these two foundational authors poignantly explore how traditional African culture and society subject women to “oppression, depression, Serón-Navas 84 suppression, rejection, segregation, and unfair victimization,” critically exposing at the same time “how women are impacted on by economic deprivation, illiteracy, and social discrimination” (4-5). And all these realities, which clearly devalue and diminish women, are fully explored through “issues of gender bias, marriage, motherhood, barrenness, polygamy, social injustice and sexual exploitation” (5). Like Emecheta in her foundational novel The Joys of Motherhood (1979) and Nwapa in her novels Efuru (1966) and Idu (1970), Adebayo also delves into the societal and social dynamics African women are subject to when it comes to delimiting their role as mothers in her already mentioned representation of a Yoruba woman who is ostracised and demonised due to her presumed barrenness. However, there is a fundamental difference between Adebayo’s novel and the ones produced by these two foremothers. In Adebayo’s story, motherhood is detached from womanhood, that is, motherhood is not theorised as womanhood’s defining element. When first- and second-generation Nigerian authors have narrated motherhood from a critical perspective where this was perceived as inevitable and, hence, mothers were depicted as unconditional givers, Adebayo deliberately rejects the idea of a woman being imposed this status. This third-generation author does not portray motherhood as an idealised state of being, but rather, she de-essentialises it while rejecting the pre-conception that women are only valuable and socially recognised if they become mothers. In this regard, Adebayo exposes the patriarchal component of motherhood, detaching it from womanood, which is why I analyse her as a “transformative” author, following Susan Arndt’s description (86). In her classification of the works produced by African female authors, Arndt identifies three general currents into which African feminist literature can be divided: reformist, transformative and radical. Reformist writers criticise men’s attitudes and behaviour as Serón-Navas 85 individuals, but never as part of an oppressive and hierarchical system. Consequently, women keep on “play[ing] a subordinate role” (83). According to Arndt, Flora Nwapa’s Efuru and Idu can be inserted within this reformist literary current, which might indicate the early stage of an African feminist consciousness. On the contrary, transformative and radical writers do question the male-centred system while criticising the patriarchal structures existent in African societies. In this vein, transformative writing “imply that men are (at least potentially) allies in the fight against these forms of discrimination, inequality and oppression” (84-85). Authors such as Mariama Bâ, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Buchi Emecheta or Wanjira Muthoni can be seen as representatives of this current. Finally, radical female writers hold the idea that, due to either biological or constructivist reasons, “men (as a social group) inevitably . . . discriminate against, oppress and mistreat women” so that the possibility of them becoming allies is not possible (85-86). Usually, radical feminist texts tend to portray the emotional and physical violence women experience at the hands of their husbands, brothers or sons and typically end up with the woman murdering men or being killed by them (86). Writers such as Elizabeth Akinyi Nzioki, Wanjiku Mukabi Kabira or Nawal El Saadawi accord with this definition. I argue that Adebayo’s novel is best defined as a transformative novel considering that Yejide definitely refuses to play the role of second fiddle and subdued wife, whereas Akin is portrayed as a man who implicitly rejects traditional patriarchal practices and institutions (e.g. polygamy). Arndt also asserts that “[n]o author of a reformist or transformative African-feminist text −and certainly no non-feminist author− has so far broken the unwritten law that motherhood defines womanhood” (86; italics in the original). In this regard, I contend Adebayo has broken this law, making clear that “wifehood and motherhood” do not constitute “the core of a woman’s life mission” or “the essence of a true womanhood” (Uko, “Womahood” 2). It is for this reason that Adebayo has widen the definition of what it means to be a transformative Serón-Navas 92 being, while women are automatically considered the (passive) symbols of the motherland or the “bearers of tradition” (Boehmer, Stories of Women), but are, nonetheless, excluded from the nation-building project (McClintock 1991). Hence, this interrelation between postcolonial nation and woman risks glorifying a hegemonic image of the African woman that, on the one hand, perpetuates certain phallocentric conceptions of African womanhood (compulsory heterosexuality, submissiveness, self-sacrifice, etc.), and excludes other forms of female signification and identification.27 Elleke Boehmer further highlights that “postcolonial women writers have questioned, cut across, upended or refused entirely the dominant if not dominatory narrative of the independent nation. They have placed their own subjectivities, sexualities, maternal duties, private stories and intimate pleasures in tension with conventional roles transmitted by national and other traditional narratives” (Stories of Women). In this sense, I argue Adebayo contests “the dominatory narrative” of the Nigerian postcolonial nation in two different ways by disputing conventional marriage, on the one hand, and by rejecting her maternal duties, on the other. Symbolically, if we approach the Nigerian nation from the perspective of Akin and Yejide’s dysfunctional marriage, there is a subversion of the gender roles attributed to women within the domestic sphere. Yejide is not presented as a devoted, submissive and conformist wife because she rebels against the farce of her marriage when she leaves Akin. She also rebels against Akin marrying another woman without telling her and having agreed they would only do monogamy. Moreover, Yejide dismantles traditional motherhood in an effort to de-romanticise and de-patriarchalise her maternal duties, especially when motherhood has 27 This idea will be further tackled in the chapter devoted to the analysis of Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees (2015), where I explore the figure of the lesbian woman as part of a nation that can be reconfigured as queer and as accepting of other female paradigms. Likewise, Okparanta presents transgressive conceptions of womanhood, motherhood and family in her depiction of a lesbian woman who raises her daughter on her own, while having a covert relationship with another woman. Serón-Navas 93 come to define female subjectivity in Nigerian society. Hence, in her contestation of conventional motherhood and of Yoruba womanhood, she defies the patriarchal endeavour of the post-independence Nigerian nation, which, as discussed above, has granted Africans independence from colonial oppression, but it has not liberated women from gender subordination. I also contend that, in her decision to abandon her husband and her third daughter, Yejide breaks with phallocentric national culture and grapples with “national selfassertion,” thus offering alternative ways of engendering the (feminist) motherland (Boehmer, Stories of Women). Additionally, it is worth exploring in this narrative the interpenetration between the destruction of the Ajayi family and the political instability of 1990s Nigeria, where Adebayo not only interrogates nationalistic tropes and ideals that eulogise traditional female representations, but also comments upon the state of affairs of her home country, weaving together the personal experiences of thisYoruba family with the course of the country. This parallelism between domesticity and nationality is staged through the violent coup organised by Gideon Gwaza Orkar in 1990 to overthrow Ibrahim Babangida’s government. “The Orkar coup,” as it came to be known, ended with the execution of the plotters and with the restitution of Babangida, who remained in power until 1993. This historical event is recounted by Yejide, who, at that time in the novel, is taking care of her second child, Sesan: “The more I thought about it, the more I hoped Babangida would manage to hold on to power, not because I liked the way he was running the country, but because the status quo was the devil we knew” (Adebayo, Stay with Me 161-162). To which she added that “[i]f the new officers took over and really expelled the northern states, the situation would probably devolve into another civil war within a few weeks” (162). Serón-Navas 94 There are also some references to the 1993 elections M.K.O. Abiola won and that were later annulled by Babangida. As happened in Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen, a patina of disillusionment and hopelessness regarding Nigeria’s transition towards democracy characterises this historical moment. As Yejide states: “This election story is another fraud” (Adebayo, Stay with Me 235), renouncing to the possibility of a democratic future for this country. Interestingly, the 1993 election coincides in the novel with the confrontation between Yejide and Akin and their abrupt separation. When Yejide discovers Akin has deliberately lied to her, she realises their whole marriage is a fraud, and it is then when she decides to leave him, renouncing to the possibility of a life together. The unexpected annulment of the 1993 election after weeks of delaying the results is addressed in the novel through Akin’s words: “I don’t think I’d heard the word ‘annul’ used except in reference to marriage before that day” (275); a quote that preludes the disintegration of his own marriage. As a consequence of this annulment, people started an armed mobilisation, which coincides with Rotimi’s first attack due to her disease. Once again, the parallelism between a or convulsive Nigeria and a disintegrating family is clearly exemplified in the crisis Rotimi suffers where she lost consciousness all of a sudden and the decision Yejide makes of abandoning her, confirming Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi’s words: “women writers critique the idealization of the family in order to uncover the fiction of the nation” (677). Hence, the (fictional) “idealization of the family” also evinces the problematisation of and disenchantment with a nation that has failed its own citizens. Once the riots begin and Rotimi loses consciousness, Yejide tells Akin that she is not coming back to her or to Rotimi, who she thought was about to pass away soon due to her disease, and that she is moving to another city to start anew. However, Adebayo’s story ends in a more positive note with the reunion of an adult Rotimi and Yejide in the funeral of Akin’s father, after Yejide had moved to Jos, established a hair salon and a jewellery shop and started several relationships with other men Serón-Navas 95 (3-4). If we read this final encounter as the cathartic moment for the Ajayi family, perhaps Adebayo is suggesting a more optimistic and promising future for a country that has been marked by several military regimes, coups d’état and dubious political practices. As Yejide admits after seeing Rotimi for the very first time in years and realising she survived: “Inside me something unfurls, joy spreads through my being, unfamiliar yet unquestioned, and I know that this too is a beginning, a promise of wonders to come” (Adebayo, Stay with Me 296; emphasis added). Perhaps, this ending indicates that Nigeria, in its current (neocolonial) configuration, is not viable because it does not reflect Nigerians’ interests since it keeps on oppressing Nigerian women and perpetuating monolithic and essentialising female images that are being counteracted by third-generation Nigerian authors. Taking this challenging scenario into consideration, I argue Ayobami Adebayo also presents more promising national horizons that are certainly more democratic and where women have a say in familial, national and political matters. Serón-Navas 96 CHAPTER 2 AFROQUEER REPRESENTATIONS OF HOME Serón-Navas 97 “I’ve never quite felt like I belonged where I am from, with the strict norms and values. I don’t know if cultural dysphoria is an actual concept, but that’s what I would call it. My freethought & the calm wildness that I have, those have always been interpreted as white sensibilities, and this perception is further propagated by the fact that I am a light-skinned African. But I constantly reject that notion, spit it out & press my foot against it when it hits the ground. I am not white. I am as African the people with darker skin and more normative sensibilities. But right now, Africa does not want me” (February, “Name Tags #10”; emphasis added) “As Africans, we all have infinite potential. We stand for an African revolution which encompasses the demand for a re-imagination of our lives outside neo-colonial categories of identity and power” (African LGBTI Manifesto/Declaration, in Ekine and Abbas 52) In this chapter, I delve into the realities of fictional black queer subjects as depicted by Anglo-Igbo author Chinelo Okparanta in her debut novel Under the Udala Trees (2015) and by Nigerian-American writer Uzodinma Iweala in his second novel Speak No Evil (2018). In an attempt to explore the relationship between (afro)queerness and nationhood, I focus on how queerness is expressed in Nigeria and in the (black queer) diaspora as experienced by homo-desiring subjects. These two Bildungsromans try to, firstly, make visible a reality that is deemed “un-African” and thus negated, and secondly, to encourage a positive, tolerant move towards the acceptance and normalisation of subversive and vulnerable subjectivities on the continent and in the African diaspora. Finally, it is worth emphasising that these novels stand out by their representational capacity since they have the potential to put forth new identity manifestations and encourage non-normative individuals to see themselves in a different, more accepting light. There is an evident need for referents and the fictional arena is the perfect breeding soil to create and set a precedent for other writers and readers to positively identify in them. Serón-Navas 98 Undeniably, the idea of re-inscribing these individuals within the postcolonial nationbuilding project makes possible the creation of new forms of self-signification and determination for Nigerians and, consequently, more diversified understandings of this country. As I discuss further on, these two novels can be considered part of a restorative project where queerness purposefully allows the discussion of African existence “outside neocolonial categories of identity and power” (Ekine and Abbas 52), as stated in the African LGBTI Manifesto/Declaration that opens this chapter. Perhaps, reclaiming the validity and legitimacy of these black bodies that populate contemporary Nigerian literature and reimagining them within the post-independence nation, especially in the context of the Same- Sex Marriage Prohibition Act, not only will reinforce the ethical role of literature, but it will also pave the way for a national scenario where excluded citizens are granted the integrity they have always deserved in a context, hopefully, more accepting of every/body. Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees (2015) can be regarded as a paradigmatic example of a new trend in Anglophone Sub-Saharan literature that represents Afroqueer characters that are defined by its complexity and psychological depth.28 Okparanta’s and other novels belonging to this emerging trend are part of a restorative project that aims to reinscribe these subjectivities into the postcolonial African nation and to propose brighter futurities for this community. I also discuss how Okparanta’s novel actively queers the Nigerian nation, suggesting a queer genealogy that goes back to the Nigeria-Biafra civil war, where the testimonies of the LGBTQI+ community during the domestic conflict are not precisely abundant. I argue Okparanta puts forth very specific lesbian reconfigurations of Nigeria and of Nigerian womanhood, proposing other ways of being a woman and Nigerian, together with alternative forms of affect that can be interpreted in a national key. 28 I use the term “Afroqueer” to refer to those individuals who challenge conventional notions of gender, sexuality or desire, but also question hegemonic social and cultural norms (which includes a revision of normative familial order, customs, traditions, political order, etc.) in Africa and the diaspora. Serón-Navas 99 Furthermore, I explore the figure of the Afroqueer subject as portrayed by Nigerian- American author Uzodinma Iweala in his novel Speak No Evil (2018). Iweala became an internationally acclaimed writer with his debut novel Beasts of No Nation (2005), which deals with the figure of the child soldier in an African context. Both novels, characterised by their ethical response to critical injustices, are dedicated to those who have suffered, been silenced or abused on the basis of domestic conflict and sexual orientation. In this sense, Brenna M. Munro contends that the figures of “[t]he child soldier and the gay or lesbian may indeed also be a means of working through the global nature of contemporary Nigerian life and literature” (“Locating ‘Queer’” 123). Precisely, this is an idea that can be fully applied to Iweala as a hyphenated author who keeps ties with Nigeria −his parents’ home−, and the US, where he is originally from.29 Furthermore, Munro goes on to claim that certain “anxieties about the nation, its integrity, its fragmentation, and its dispersal get mapped onto these figures [i.e. the child soldier and the Afroqueer subject], who are coded in different ways as transnational, moving across or destroying national borders as well as bodily boundaries” (123). Actually, Beasts of No Nation tackles the brutal destruction of territories and people as consequences of an unknown war that takes place in African soil, but it also addresses the fragmentation of the self, which is another key idea closely linked to the globality of African writers and their texts. This idea is exemplified in this novel via the blurring of the lines between (and the overlapping of) victim and perpetrator. Iweala’s second novel, Speak No Evil, also tackles this fragmented nature of the African nation but from a different perspective. In this coming-out novel, the writer recounts the experiences of a Nigerian-American homosexual in a transnational context, where same-sex desire is simultaneously explored 29 I use the term “hyphenated” to refer to those writers or characters in this dissertation who present two or more cultural origins. For instance, U. Iweala was born in the US but his parents are Nigerian so his reality is characterised by this mixture of cultural influences. The characters Bashira and Taslim from Sefi Atta’s The Bad Immigrant (2021) are another example of hyphenated identities. These characters are of Nigerian origin but moved to the US in their teens and resided there for a long period of time, integrating into the host society and acquiring new customs, inflections, preferences, etc. Serón-Navas 100 along specific racial tensions. In this vein, I am interested in the ways Iweala utilises fiction to voice the precarity that US-born and non-US blacks experience daily, and to humanise the statistics of those black subjects who are murdered on the basis of their sexual orientation or phenotype. Moreover, I demonstrate how the Afrodiasporic queer subject that features Speak No Evil is most accurately described as belonging to what scholars like Meg Wesling (2008) or Jafari S. Allen (2012) have called the “Black Queer Diaspora.” Additionally, I focus on the new configurations of Nigerian manhood and masculinity as exposed by the homosexual protagonist. As with Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees, where I delve into the new representations of Nigerian womanhood proposed by this (also transnational) author, I attempt to prove how Iweala’s novel presents new readings of Nigerian manhood from a gay and diasporic position. As focused on the troubled father-son relationship, I interrogate the impact these new interpretations of Nigerian manhood and masculinity have in a country where men adhere to widely-spread hegemonic forms of masculinity. In the novel, the protagonist Niru is portrayed as a gay, vulnerable and cosmopolitan young adult who is successful in negotiating home as multiple, whereas his father is presented as a strict and intransigent man who is “unable to accept the idea that a true home might exist outside of [his] birth country [i.e. Nigeria]” (Iweala, Speak 52). Before analysing Okparanta and Iweala’s novels, I deem necessary to clarify the use of the term “queer” in an African, postcolonial context, and to provide a brief re-mapping of same-sex desire in Africa, and most specifically in Nigeria. In his theorisation of the postmodern re-appropriation of the term “queer,” Elondust Patrick Johnson contends that “[t]o embrace ‘queer’ is to resist or elide categorization, to disavow binaries (that is, gay versus straight, black versus white) and to proffer potentially productive modes of resistance against hegemonic structures of power” (“Queer Theory” 166). He further contends that in an academic context, the term “queer has become a catalyst for theorizing not only gender and Serón-Navas 101 sexuality . . . but also a way to discuss race and class in antiessentialist ways” (166). In this vein, “queer” is not only seen as “the deviation of normalcy” (Butler, Bodies that Matter 176), but as a productive space to transcend (neo- and post)colonial categories and to advance new personal and national horizons outside colonial, Western mandates. In order to situate the use of this term in a postcolonial context, it is important to remember Rebecca Fine Romanow’s theorising of the notion of “postcolonial” as, indeed, a “queer-imbricated” identity when arguing that “the postcolonial is . . . a space [that] inhabits a ‘queer’ non-normative geography and temporality, constructed by the history of colonization, the process of Othering, and the pressures and realities of the diaspora and the emerging global community” (3-4). Following these precepts, the postcolonial subject is inevitably signified in relation to unorthodox conceptions of the self together with dissident temporalities. This idea has already been insightfully explored by theorists such as Oyeronke Oyewumi, who reminds us that the West imposed its own normative categorisations −or, to quote Judith Butler, its own “regulatory ideal[s]” (Bodies that Matter 1)− onto non-Western peoples, who, in turn, project(ed) such binary and straitjacketed categories as natural (Oyewumi, The Invention of Women 11). Sokari Ekine and Hakima Abbas, commenting on the versatility of the term “queer,” state that it “denote[s] a political frame rather than a gender identity or sexual behaviour.” In other words, “gender and sexual plurality” are inherently represented within this concept that openly seeks “to transform, overhaul and revolutionise African order” (3), while denouncing the oppressiveness of heterocisnormativity, compulsory heterosexuality or Western belief systems. Although this term is not fully widespread in Africa (not even among the LGBTQI+ African communities), Lindsey Green-Simms comments that it can be used “both as a critique of heteronormativity and as an expression of same-sex desire that is not necessarily Serón-Navas 108 Stigma, family rejection, community exclusion and isolation are common while the stress of hiding one’s sexuality cannot be underestimated. Unsurprisingly, alongside poor mental health and lack of social support for physical and mental health problems, risk-taking behaviour, substance abuse, selfharm and suicide is higher in Nigerian LGBT populations, particularly for those who are HIV positive . . . Selling sex may be a means of supporting oneself, but brings with it additional risks of internalised homophobia, violence, abuse, coercion and exposure to STIs with transgender people particularly vulnerable to associated harms. (9) Being socially perceived as a member of the LGBTQI+ community is a complex reality where aspects of nationality, location, economic and social status, religion, ethnicity or access to formal education have a great impact on the processes of sexual and gender identity formation. Likewise, the physical and mental consequences of outing oneself or being perceived as a person whose sexual orientation or gender identity is considered “aberrant” or “unacceptable” are life-threatening in this context. It is due to these conceptions of homosexuality and queerness as national/cultural betrayal that a vast majority of queer relationships in Africa are lived in secrecy or in exile. 2.1. Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees (2015) 2.1.1. Afroqueer Nigerian Literature as Restorative Project: Cementing a Literary Counter-Archive Contemporary queer fiction can be theorised as an emerging trend that is slowly consolidating within Anglophone Nigerian writing. In her article “States of Emergence: Writing African Female Same-Sex Sexuality” (2017), Brenna M. Munro argues that even though “[t]he figure of the homosexual has long been deployed to stand for colonial penetration of Africa and cultural inauthenticity,” third-generation African writers have Serón-Navas 109 started to deliberately “remake this trope to address the globalized nature of contemporary life, with the woman who desires women as a sympathetic point of identification for the reader and a symbol of human vulnerability, resilience, and complexity” (187). Twenty-first- century African and Afrodiasporic authors have started depicting queer characters that are no longer associated with certain illegal practices such as paedophilia or rape (Dunton 125), despised or deemed un-African. In her discussion of contemporary queer Nigerian fiction, Lindsey Green-Simms asserts that Joe Golder −the protagonist in Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters (1965)− can be stated as “arguably the first recognizably gay character in Nigerian and Anglophone African literature” who, nonetheless, participated in a literary moment characterised by “silence and opacity” regarding same-sex desire (140). This has been analysed as a novel that openly joined in that silence and negation that surrounded gay characters at the time and that “loudly and forcefully neglected to tell the stories about the love, joy, and heartbreak of African men who love men and women who love women” (141). Brenna M. Munro emphasises as well the fact that “contemporary Anglophone African authors are writing the figure of the same-sex loving African into imaginative existence with a new openness and assertiveness” (“States of Emergence” 186). These contemporary authors deal with queerness in an African “with a new level of frankness and fearlessness” (Green- Simms and Munro, “The Coming-Out”), and are generating their own “poetics of queerness” (Courtois, “‘Thou Shall not Lie’” 128), which presents common elements such as silences, textual digressions, fragmentations or absences. In this context, there is a clear evolution in African literature at the hands of those writers born after independence who have started “to tackle themes previously taboo in African literature” while “critiqu[ing] discourses of homophobia and explor[ing] the everyday fears, desires, pleasures, and anxieties of those who experience same-sex desire” (Green-Simms 141; see also Phiri and Cobo-Piñero 2020). John C. Hawley adds to this respect that this evolution is undeniable but that we cannot forget its Serón-Navas 110 unevenness in terms of its expansion and distribution among the continent and the diaspora, especially in those countries where anti-gay legislations are on the rise. He also contends that “while some countries or voices within particular nations enable such evolution, others (and sometimes within the same nation) seek actively to erase these emerging] narratives and selfexpressions” (“In Transition” 121), so that usually contradictory dynamics take up common space. Green-Simms has also echoed this recent trend in contemporary Anglophone and Sub- Saharan literature when claiming that twenty-first-century Nigerian writers “resist the dominant in ways not previously done before” by “tell[ing] diverse stories about same-sex desire that are neither monothematic nor moralistic” (142). In his pioneering article “‘Wheytin Be Dat?’ The Treatment of Homosexuality in African Literature” (1989), Chris Dunton already contends that earlier African literary texts (implicitly) dealing with homosexuality stereotypically portrayed homosexuality as a Western perversion, and showed a story fairly monothematic and predictable (102). Chantal Zabus thus points out to a collapse of “the ‘sexual initiation’ model of the 1970s,” where homosexuality was represented “as resulting from an encounter between a Nigerian youth and a Western priest” (Out in Africa 95) aiming to “straighten” the deviated homosexual. This scholar argues how Jude Dibia’s Walking with Shadows (2005) can be seen as one of the initial novels that contributed to this paradigm shift in queer (West) African literature (Out in Africa 95). Furthermore, in delineating a genealogy of African authors dealing with queer protagonists in their works, Green-Simms acknowledges the fact that not only queerness is in the spotlight but adjacent themes such as “women’s struggles, sexism, imposed gender normativity, violence, corruption, religion, and immigration” (143) are concurrently addressed. Thus, queer narratives not only inform about the myriad scenarios of these subjectivities but they also “bring the future into existence for the LGBTIQ community by Serón-Navas 111 voicing what has (intentionally) remained unheard, silenced, erased, and forgotten” (Hawley, “In Transition” 121). Therefore, queer writing in Africa can function as an archivalrestorative project where old and new readings of reality are brought to the fore from a queer perspective. For instance, in Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees, the Nigeria-Biafra civil war is revisited from the perspective of a lesbian, Igbo woman which becomes an evident historicising, even archiving, effort to reinsert this collective within the Nigerian nationbuilding project in a rather convulsive historical period. Moreover, this conflict has allowed Anglo-Igbo writers “to examine all manners of marginalization and disaffections created by political authority and its dissemination into private lives” (Adetunji Osinubi 676). Hence, revisiting the civil war in the literary arena can function as a coping strategy to work through its very national and psychological consequences, and as the metafictional space that allows writers to hold meaningful conversations about precarious Others in present-day Nigeria. This reparative project allows the creation of what Hawley names as “queer futurities” or, “a ‘coming out’ by means of a literary archive” (“In Transition” 122). Literature becomes a site with an ethical potential for representation and identification, no longer functioning as a didactic platform instructing Africans against the evils of homosexuality. As part of this project, we could mention the following authors, whose works constitute a clear form of pro-queer artistic activism: the aforementioned Nigerian Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters (1965), Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy (1977), Senegalese Mariama Bâ’s Scarlet Song (1981), Sierra Leonean Yulisa Amadu Pat Maddy’s No Past, No Present, No Future (1997), South African K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001), Nigerian Chris Abani’s Graceland (2004), Unoma N. Azuah’s Sky-High Flames (2005), Jude Dibia’s Walking with Shadows (2005), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie with her short story collection The Thing around your Neck (2009), Zimbabwean Tendai Huchu’s The Hairdresser of Harare (2010), Somali Diriye Osman’s Fairytales for Lost Children Serón-Navas 112 (2013), South African Nakhane Toure’s Piggy Boy’s Blues (2015), Nigerian Chike Frankie Edozien’s Lives of Great Men: Living and Loving as an African Gay Man (2017), Azeenarh Mohammed/ Chitra Nagarajan/ Rafeeat Aliyu (editors)’s She Called me Woman: Nigeria’s Queer Women Speak (2018) and Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater (2018) and The Death of Vivek Oji (2020), among many others that have been recently published. Closely observing this growing repertoire of (pioneering) literary pieces, novels and short stories are the preferred modes when it comes to portraying coming-out stories. In fact, Munro concludes that, while novels have been generally chosen by authors dealing with male homoerotic desire, “[t]he Anglophone writing of African women who desire women, meanwhile, is primarily unfolding in the short story” (“States of Emergence” 186-187). As based on the corpus of Anglophone literary texts dealing with Afroqueer desire, the short story is also starting to be employed by male authors to portray relationships were men desire men. In this line, the author under scrutiny, Chinelo Okparanta, has explored both genres with her short story collection Happiness, like Water (2013) and her debut novel Under the Udala Trees (2015). In Happiness, like Water, Okparanta discusses the politics of homosexuality in Nigeria and in the diaspora. In this collection, there are two stories worth mentioning, “America” and “Grace,” as they specifically deal with lesbian characters both in Nigeria and in the US. Both “Grace” and Under the Udala Trees can be described as coming- of-age stories inasmuch as they deal with the lives of two young Nigerian women who are starting to explore their lesbianism in a challenging social and familiar environment. They explore as well themes such as sexual awakening, the damaging impact of Western religion on homosexuality, the influence of a homophobic family in the delineation of the female psyche and issues regarding female empowerment, independence and agency. In any case, Happiness, like Water and Under the Udala Trees belong to a tradition of exceptional female writers who have addressed the trope of the lesbian woman from a humanising standpoint. Serón-Navas 113 As with gay fiction written by male African authors, lesbian fiction was too “essentialized by first-generation African academic feminists” (“What Is African Woman?” 107), as Dobrota Pucherova asserts. On the one hand, lesbian fiction published before the 2000s negatively portrayed female homoerotic desire while perpetuating the image of the damaged, pathological and even degenerated women-desiring woman. Pucherova further emphasises that lesbianism in African fiction, more specifically fiction created by first and second-generations women writers, “typically stands for a woman’s corruption, moral depravity, and even madness” (108). The novels by Kenyan Rebeka Njau’s Ripples in the Pool (1975) and Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy (1977) are representative of these essentialising and reductionist portrayals. On the other hand, same-sex relationships between women before 2000s can also be regarded as “positively charged” when “expressed as platonic desire, intimate friendship, or nurturing mother-daughter relationships” (109). In any case, lesbian desire or relationships were not accepted, but rather presented as something intolerable that was intentionally obscured. In her article “The Emerging Lesbian Voice in Nigerian Feminist Literature,” Unoma N. Azuah discusses as well the early stage of emergence of “the lesbian voice in Nigerian feminist writing” (129), but, unlike Pucherova, Azuah explores this new voice in Nigerian literature as “emerging” at the hands of four contemporary authors: Lola Shoneyin, Promise Okekwe, Temilola Abioye and herself. She argues that “[t]hese new voices portray female characters in sexual/emotional relationships with women” what, for the author, constitutes “a trend hitherto absent from Nigerian feminist literature” (130). However, and taking into account Azuah’s article was written in 2005, we can agree that this trend Azuah defines as “absent” can now be best analysed as “present.” I agree with Elleke Boehmer that lesbian feminist writing was initially depicted as “a virtual non-presence, or at least a covert silencing, an ‘unsaying’” (Stories of Women; emphasis added), but currently, the silences, Serón-Navas 114 stigmatisation, or even censoring that used to surround these relations are deliberately left outside the narratives proposed by new literary voices. Lesbianism is now positively charged and employed to revisit as well gender (roles), female identity, family relationships, religious beliefs, Africanness and national belonging. Moreover, and as aptly emphasised by Lindsey Green-Simms, “these stories are also beginning to provide readers with portraits of everyday life and love, with struggles that are just as much about being gay and African as they are about being a woman and African, an immigrant and African, effeminate and African, or poor and African” (144). In other words, they are creating ordinary stories not necessarily afropessimistic but with a clear intention of normalising queer desire and transcending reductionist images of the continent and its citizens. For instance, in the works by Nigerians Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives (2010), Promise Okekwe’s Women from the Crystal Deep (2002), Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees (2015) and Ugandan Monica Arac de Nywko’s “Jambula Tree” (2006), we identify a rejection of the idea that “lesbianism is foreign to Africa,” together with a questioning of “the definition of African femininity as centered around motherhood, wifehood, and self-sacrifice” (Pucherova, “What Is African Woman?” 110). Therefore, current portrayals of lesbian subjectivities defy traditional notions of African womanhood, where “motherhood, wifehood, and self-sacrifice” might not be part of their priorities as women, but also of African feminisms which have not been especially accepting of lesbianism. In this sense, Pucherova contends that the consideration of lesbianism among African feminists as “both foreign and alien to African women” has conventionally worked as “one of the defining aspects of African feminism” (“What Is African Woman?” 105-106). In this regard, Naomi Nkealah contends that “[l]esbian, bisexual and transsexual women tend to be completely effaced” since “sexual orientation tends to be suppressed” (65) from (West) African feminisms and their feminist agendas. Hence, the demands of lesbian Serón-Navas 115 women, despite the fact that they are more liable to experience corrective rape, ostracism and even psychological traumas, are not taken into consideration. In this light, Ashley Currier and Thérèse Migraine-George (2017) have claimed regarding the “punitive quality” that African lesbians have acquired in the literary domain that they “have been accused of betraying their traditional roles as bearers and reproducers of cultural traditions in countries . . . heavily gendered by postcolonial nationalist agenda and rhetorics” (143). Thus, black lesbians on the continent are regarded as traitors to their gender and as national outlaws since many of them do not accept the heteronationalist-patriarchal mandates of the postcolonial nation. However, this presumed impossibility of coexistence between feminism and lesbianism is being overcome by present-day Nigerian writers, whose stories are creating counter-discourses that normalise other forms of desire in Nigeria. These contemporary authors unashamedly portray African individuals that exit the heterocisnormative matrix and defy heteropatriarchal mandates in a way that facilitates the proliferation of new female identities. 2.1.2. Preliminary Remarks on Chinelo Okparanta and her Novel Chinelo Okparanta (1981) was born in Port Harcourt and later relocated to the US, where she grew up. She graduated from Pennsylvania State University, gained her MA from Rutgers University and her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has been the recipient of numerous fellowships such as the University of Iowa’s Provost’s Postgraduate Fellowship in Fiction and was also nominated for a US Artists Fellowship in 2012. This novelist has also been awarded residencies by the Hermitage Foundation or the Jentel Foundation or the Lannan Foundation (Marfa) among others. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Bucknell University where she is also a Faculty Research Fellow. She has equally been nominated, shortlisted and awarded with several distinctions such as the 2014 and 2016 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian General Fiction Serón-Navas 116 for her short story collection Happiness, like Water and her debut novel Under the Udala Trees, and the 2014 O. Henry Prize or the 2016 Jessie Redmon Fauset Book Award in Fiction. She made her appearance as a young Nigerian writer in 2013 with her widelyacclaimed short story collection Happiness, like Water. She has recently published her second novel Harry Sylvester Bird (2022). Under the Udala Trees, a novel that was published a year after the passing of the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act, constitutes a rethinking of the lesbian woman in 1970s Nigeria beyond hegemonic notions of gender and sexual normativity, but fundamentally, it is a quest for personal identity in a hostile environment. This Anglo-Igbo Bildungsroman is divided into five sections subsequently divided into 77 chapters, together with an Epilogue and the Author’s Note, where English and Igbo “choreograph a happy dance” (Okparanta, “Let No One Be Fooled” 80). Its linguistic hybridity is best exemplified in the italicised passages where Igbo makes its appearance. In this case, Okparanta adds the subsequent translation after the Igbo word, proverb, song or chant that appear throughout the text. There are some examples worth exploring as they mark the beginning of the civil war: “So, the story begins even before the story, on June 23, 1968. Ubosi chi ji ehihe jie: the day night fell in the afternoon, as the saying goes” (Okparanta, Under 5; italics in the original). The other remarkable instance shows the protagonist’s father’s death: “She [Mama] stayed bent over his body [Papa’s], the cloth of her wrapper soaking up his blood. ‘Uzo, biko, mepe anya gi! Ana m ayo gi!’ I’m begging you, Uzo. Please open your eyes for me!” (19; italics in the original). In addition, Okparanta introduces too chants and songs by Biafran soldiers (48), passages from the Bible in Igbo (66 and 72) and other examples of Pidgin English (30). Furthermore, and grappling with the idea of this novel as a Bildungsroman, it is important to mention that Under the Udala Trees has been one of the first novels to deal with Serón-Navas 117 female same-sex desire. As mentioned earlier, the short story has traditionally been “the dominant vehicle for the representation of women’s same-sex desire” (Adetunji Osinubi 675) and Okparanta, along with other women authors such as Unoma Azuah, Lola Shoneyin or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, is one of the pioneers in “queering” the Nigerian novel. As part of this “overall trend in much of anglophone [sic] sub-Saharan Africa, where anti-gay legislation and rhetoric is on the rise” (Green-Simms 141), these writers have discussed the female same-sex experience using the coming-out novel as their preferred literary mode in order to challenge “reconfigurations of national realities in which the feminine is neither essentialized and mythologyzed nor marginalized, but unapologetically central to the realist representation of a recognizable social world” (Bryce 49). Certainly, Okparanta has mastered the coming-out novel by providing a rather complex exploration of the leading character’s emotional landscape and inner world, which evinces a level “of detail and intimacy previously unseen” in the coming-out novel, according to Green-Simms (144). Furthermore, it is important to mention how this lesbian Bildungsroman outs the protagonist without censoring her homo-desiring tendencies. Ijeoma’s orientation is always veiled, as she cannot afford the privilege to out herself publicly in a heterosexist Nigeria, but her inner thoughts and actions somewhat voice it. This exhibits the tensions and contradictions in contemporary coming-out narratives that arise from “those modes of privacy and publicness that are more complex than ‘out’ or ‘closeted’, but that are unavailable to these characters,” as Lindsey Green-Simms and Brenna M. Munro claim. Additionally, this novel can be seen as part of an exceptional collection of queer works that belong to what Brenna M. Munro calls “the queer project” of African literature; a restorative literary project aiming to transcend “fantasies of purity, whether cultural, national, or sexual” (“Locating ‘Queer’” 123). As I discuss in this section and in the following one, Okparanta centrally interrogates pre-made conceptions of same-sex love that deem it un-African, but also Serón-Navas 124 genre” (127; italics in the original), and lays bare how Afroqueer subjects are denied certain life-scripts and rites of passage that have been traditionally assigned to heteronormativity. Another way Under the Udala Trees queers the Anglo-Igbo novel can be more specifically seen in the insightful exploration of queer intimacies or what Elleke Boehmer designates as an “epistemology of African queerness” that extensively provides “an elaborately detailed or . . . experimental and poetic voicing of [queer] relations, even if these are not in any obvious way sexual” (Stories of Women). In the novel, after Ijeoma’s father’s death, her mother Adaora sends her off to the grammar-school teacher’s house where the protagonist meets Amina, which becomes “the first time that [Ijeoma] befriend[s] a Hausa person” during the war and her first time “getting to know one in an intimate way” (Okparanta, Under 108), signalling to that unprecedented inter-ethnic queer desire in Nigerian literature. It is in this intimate encounter with the Other (excerpt shown below) that a process of mutual recognition takes place, symbolically heralding the ethical potential of lesbian desire to propose new ways of national reconciliation between ethnic groups and a new national paradigm for Nigeria as an inclusive nation: Slowly she [Amina] made her way to my chest . . . She cupped her hands around my breasts, took turns with them, fondling and stroking and caressing them with her tongue. I felt the soft tug of her feet on the peaks of my chest. Euphoria washed over me. She continued along, leaving a trail of kisses on her way down to my belly. She travelled farther, beyond the belly, farther than we had ever gone. I moaned and surrendered myself to her. I did not until then know that a mouth could make me feel that way when placed in that part of the body where I had never imagined a mouth to belong. (Okparanta, Under 123-124) Serón-Navas 125 In this passage, ethnic disagreements dissolve as these Igbo and Hausa women sexually interact in what for them constitutes a rather fulfilling experience. Hence, I argue this example shows the homo-desiring body as metonymic of the Nigerian nation and, more specifically, of a nation that is predicated on the “euphoric” and “ecstatic” relation among citizens coming from different backgrounds. By representing a number of sexually-explicit passages between women from opposed ethnic groups, I contend Okparanta suggests a national model where people act on the basis of mutual love, respect and recognition rather than on the basis of hatred, envy, resentment or even guilt. Unfortunately, the lovers are caught in the act and forced to separate, so that they can be “straightened out” by their respective families (Okparanta, Under 129). Nonetheless, this process of sexual recognition and interconnectedness may have induced what Obioma Nnaemeka calls as “reconfigurations of ethnic allegiances and alignment” (The Politics of [M]Othering 246). In this fashion, the sexual encounter with the (queer) Other, in ethnic terms, may suggest a way of reformulating strained interethnic relations. We also find similitudes between Ijeoma’s first sexual experiences with Amina and with her second lover, Ndidi. I moved to her [Ndidi’s] front, knelt before her. I pressed her wet flesh firmly with the tips of my fingers, then my fingers found themselves inside, enveloped her warmth . . . She let out a cry, and I found myself overcome by emotion . . . It was as if her pleasure was in that moment my own, ours, a shared fulfilment . . . If I could have stayed forever this way with her, there would have been no greater gift. (Okparanta, Under 200) As we can see in these sexually-explicit passages, both Ijeoma and Ndidi not only depict a clear “sexual agency and erotic autonomy” (Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing 22) Serón-Navas 126 but they also “achieve subjecthood through same-sex relationships” (Courtois, “‘Thou Shall not Lie’” 129) which can be seen as a form of female empowerment. This sensuous exploration of the body and the subsequent creation of “an aesthetic of lesbian pleasure,” Courtois finds, proposes a strong criticism against heteronormativity, while asserting that women can derive pleasure from other women with whom they engage in non-procreative sex (“‘Thou Shall not Lie’” 127). Similarly, Dobrota Pucherova (2019) argues that this portrayal of lesbian sexual pleasure can be read as “an experience of freedom, power, and agency” (111) that entails an ethical way of “reimagin[ing] the entire society” (115), proposing “a new model of the nation that is nonviolent” where “love is allowed to be love, between men and women, and men and men, and women and women, just as between Yoruba and Igbo and Hausa and Fulani” (Okparanta, Under 321). 2.1.3. Queering the Post-Independence Nation: Towards a More Inclusive Paradigm of Nigeria In this section, I explore how Okparanta contributes to the interrogation of modern Nigeria by incorporating queer representations of different women as legitimate parts of Nigeria’s national project. This author not only questions traditional gender roles for women together with normative conceptions of desire, but she also aims to widen previous representations of Nigeria so that it becomes a fully democratic country that welcomes all types of gender and sexual identities. In this light, it is fitting to analyse what Benita de Robillard postulates regarding the figure of the black lesbian in literary and national discourses: “‘the black lesbian’ is both instituted and undermined at the point at which the nation becomes vexed by its own limits,” and so their citizenship and national belonging are automatically denied because they are regarded as “extra-national” (21). If we interrogate who is made to belong and who is excluded from the postcolonial nation, we see that those who do Serón-Navas 127 not accord with the exceptional, and in this case colonial, mandates of the African nation are not considered citizens. If the nation constitutes itself by excluding certain Others, then lesbians, gays and queers cannot but be held as stateless subjects (this same idea of statelessness is also shared with other migrants and refugees, as I analyse in Chapter 3). As M. Jacqui Alexander rightly points out reflecting on this situation, “I am an outlaw in my country of birth: a national; but not a citizen” (“Not just [Any]Body” 5). Indeed, if a person is a “national” but is not considered a citizen, where does that person belong to? How would they identify with their birth country if national belonging has been automatically denied to them? In the novel, the lesbian protagonist, who can be regarded as a character that “challenge[s] the prevailing gender regime and heteronationalist order” (Robillard 23), constitutes a figure who lays the foundations for a different imagining of Nigeria where nonhegemonic forms of desire and gender are part of this national project. Furthermore, Under the Udala Trees provides new forms of envisioning Nigeria where belonging and citizenship are not undermined, that is, where queer people can be signified as nationals and citizens. Similarly, if the traditional, nuclear family in nationalist discourses has become the “vehicle of social organisation and a primary carrier of the gendered ideology” (Boehmer, Stories of Women), Okparanta reformulates this conception proposing a more fluid idea of family and, therefore, an unconventional form of national affiliation. I more specifically address the familial relationships that populate this novel in order to prove Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi’s assertion that “[African] women writers [have] critiqued the idealization of the family in order to uncover the fiction of the nation” (677). In this novel, the protagonist loses her father in the Nigeria-Biafra civil war in 1968, just when “the country was falling apart” (Okparanta, Under 5), and it is from that moment onwards that her life and her mother’s change forever. Ijeoma is relocated to another home −the grammar-school teacher’s house– and starts her own process of self-discovery away from her remaining family. At this point, Serón-Navas 128 we should point out that Okparanta intentionally interpenetrates the processes of personal and sexual identity formation (selfhood) and the process of national reformation (nationhood) in Nigeria. As the author affirms: “‘Both the girl [Ijeoma] and the country are children. She embarks on her journey of self-discovery just as the nation also does. It is a journey filled with many missteps and lots of pain. In this way, the life of the girl essentially becomes synonymous with the life of the country’” (Okparanta qtd. in Rose Quinn, “Chinelo Okparanta”). The novel intentionally juxtaposes the coming of age of a lesbian woman and the coming of age of a recently-independent African nation, exposing the “disappointment with the African postcolonial nation that has not served its citizens,” especially those who have been “excluded from equal citizenship” (Pucherova, “What Is African Woman?” 110). In this sense, the premature absence of the father in this story may symbolise the failure of Biafra’s plea for self-determination. Ijeoma’s father willingly decides not to use the bunker when the bombings of his town started to take place because he did not want to live in a country where he would be considered a “lesser citizen” or even a “slave” (Okparanta, Under 9), as he was Igbo and pro-Biafra. The removal of the paternal figure early in the story dramatises the very consequences of this conflict, and metaphorically preludes the defeat of Biafra as a selfdetermined state, but, most centrally, it undermines the hopes of a nation no longer oppressed by colonial forces where Igbos/Biafrans are not persecuted and murdered. Bearing the Biafran cause in mind, we can trace a parallel between the situation of Biafrans as subjects who yearn to live in a self-proclaimed country outside colonial understandings of the nation and queer subjects, who are willing to exist in a country that does not conceive them as based on oldfashioned, colonial conceptions of the self. Both Biafrans and Afroqueer individuals fight for (personal and national) survival in very extreme circumstances and in very different temporal settings. Serón-Navas 129 Simultaneously, the author delves into Ijeoma’s negotiation of her own daughterhood and womanhood in post-war Nigeria. The figure of the daughter is no longer “subordinate, peripheral and quiet [or] virtually invisible,” as in other nation-shaping narratives, but Ijeoma explicitly becomes the heiress of the post-independence nation in position to re-shape it (Boehmer, Stories of Women). According to the same theorist, “the daughters of the nation have generally not been in a position to shape the nation by means of their own self-generated narratives,” concluding that Ijeoma is no longer conceived as the “recipient of national definitions” but, conversely, the “originator” of a new anti-colonial and decidedly pro-queer national narrative (Boehmer, Stories of Women), that is, a narrative that includes empowered, free women who are allowed to desire other women and who are no longer subordinate to their husbands or perceived in relation to their partners or offspring. As a matter of fact, Ijeoma displays a new form of womanhood, which can metaphorically exemplify a new form of Nigerian nationhood. Moreover, it is my interest to explore the relationship between Ijeoma’s heterosexual mother and her lesbian daughter, and between Ijeoma as a lesbian mother and Chidinma as a heterosexual daughter and discuss how this applies to the national narrative. In these two opposing mother-to-child relationships, Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi contends, “one mother’s formation obstructs a transgenerational conversation about same-sex desire while one daughter’s formation points to a radical recognition of same-sex love in the future,” which “underscores the novel’s investment in feminist genealogies” (681). Certainly, we can find some excerpts in the text that evince the perception of motherhood for these two women, namely Adaora (Ijeoma’s mother) and Ijeoma herself. In the following scene, Ijeoma is being lectured by her mother after she is caught in flagrante having sex with Amina, so she is sent back to her mother’s home to be taught in the Christian faith before going to a boarding Serón-Navas 130 school for girls. This is the exchange between Ijeoma and her mother, which can be seen as a form of exorcising Ijeoma’s demon of homosexuality: What is the meaning of ‘abomination’? I [Ijeoma] asked. Simple: something disgusting, disgraceful, a scandal. But what exactly is disgusting or disgraceful or scandalous about lying with mankind as with womankind? Does the Bible explain? The fact that the Bible says it’s bad is all the reason you need’, Mama said. ‘Besides, how can people be fruitful and multiply if they carry on in that way? Even that is scandal enough − the fact that it does not allow for procreation? . . . But even with a man and a woman, procreation is not always possible. Is that an abomination too? I asked. ‘What if there’s nothing they can do about it? (Okparanta, Under 75; italics in the original) From this exchange between Ijeoma and her mother, we clearly see the dreadful conception many Africans have of queerness and same-sex relationships, but we also infer the straitjacketed gender roles women are expected to comply with, being procreation one of the most important mandates for women worldwide. In this fashion, Ashley Currier and Thérèse Migraine-George also argue that lesbian women are reductively “equated not only with an anti-nationalist agenda but also with the prospect of national corruption and collapse [and] ethnic extinction” (“‘Lesbian’/Female” 143), as non-procreative homosexuality is fundamentally regarded as “a space of death: national, cultural, racial, or literal” (Hoad xvi). This very argument can also be found in Lee Edelman’s notion of “reproductive futurism” (3). For him, the queer identity is essentially built upon the “resistance to the viability of the social” (3), opposing the very realisation of the nuclear family and hence disturbing the Serón-Navas 131 established (heteronormative) social order. This idea is best described in the following quote from the novel: “Man must not lie with man, and if man does, man will be destroyed. Which is why God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah” (Okparanta, Under 74). In this text, the idea of a mainstream family, in line with the so-called “reproductive futurism,” is imposed upon Ijeoma mainly by her mother and by certain belief systems that take for granted the constitutive reproductive role of women and praise the centrality of the nuclear family (see also Ekine 2013). In this vein, Ijeoma disrupts a social order based on the narrative of the family by divorcing her husband and establishing a covert relationship with a woman. Indeed, Mama also perpetuates these ideas sentencing, repetitively: “‘Marriage is for everyone! Remember, a woman without a man is hardly a woman at all. Besides, good men are rare these days. Now that you’ve found one [Chibundu], you must do what you can to keep him’” (Okparanta, Under 223; emphasis added). And then, her mother further develops this maxim when claiming that “sooner or later [women] would each become somebody’s wife, and as wives, it would be our obligation to be fertile, to bear children for our husbands, sons especially, to carry on the family name” (310; emphasis added). This conception of motherhood as inherent to womanhood is also heavily influenced by religious mandates, as we can see in the following passage uttered by Ijeoma’s mother: “‘God intended for it to be a man and a woman. And God intended also for man and woman to bear children. It is the way it should be, so yes, it is an abomination if it is not a man and a woman. And it is an abomination if man and woman cannot bear a child’” (75-76). Mama constantly stresses that female subjectivity has to be understood relationally, that is, in relation to husbands and offspring.33 Likewise, Asante Lucy Mtenje argues that 33 The idea of female identity as “collective” or “relational” has been extensively explored by Spanish archaeologist and researcher Almudena Hernando Gonzalo (2000; 2002; 2012). In general terms, patriarchal Serón-Navas 132 “disciplining female bodies and positively channelling their sexual energies towards home and family and away from desire and bodily pleasure sets the foundations for the (re)productive project of building the nation” (192). Women are, thus, conceptualised and treated like (affectionate and exploitable) “means,” while men are treated like “ends” and this is exactly what Ijeoma’s mother demands from her daughter: finding a man, loving him, bearing him sons, and caring for the family just for the sake of perpetuating “tradition,” which reinforces a very specific normative-family-oriented sense of nationhood and Nigerianness. An expression of womanhood that fulfils what Jacqui Alexander coins as the “heterosexual imperative” (“Not just [Any]Body” 7) or what Adrienne Rich coined as “compulsory heterosexuality” (1993). In fact, Mama’s delimiting conceptions sharply contrast with Ijeoma’s own notions of womanhood and motherhood. For the lesbian daughter, Chibundu’s marriage proposal “felt preordained, as if there were no way out” (Okparanta, Under 220), but Mama’s ideas of becoming a wife as a sign of respectability and as a way of turning into a socially-accepted woman also constitutes an added pressure. According to Unoma N. Azuah (2005), homodesiring women, as depicted by postcolonial women authors, usually face “a sense of intense conflict within the characters, a need for the characters to find an alternative to their suppression, and the choice of bisexuality” (138). In a male-dominated society, this intense conflict translates into queer individuals distancing from themselves and from their own sexual orientations (in a process of self-estrangement) and, consequently, accepting a heterosexual marriage in order to lead a life in line with accepted social conventions. societies are characterised by a clear-cut division of gender roles, where “affective” gender roles are automatically assigned to women and “instrumental” ones to men (Hernando Gonzalo 2000). This idea can be easily applied to Ijeoma’s mother, who deems a woman incomplete/failed without a proper husband and children, which entails the giving up of any form of female agency, individuality and autonomy. Serón-Navas 133 It is through these restricted patterns of interaction and socialisation that women acquire very specific formulations of womanhood that imply submissiveness, dependence and lack of sexual agency. As I have discussed in relation to Ayobami Adebayo’s novel, and drawing on Remi Akujobi’s ideas, this situation also reflects on this when stating that “[i]t is no longer a secret that the Nigerian woman considers herself [and is also socially considered] a real woman only when she has proved herself to be fertile and the ‘halo of maternity’ shines over her” (4). Okparanta also mentions in an interview: ‘it seems to me that in too many societies, people are obsessed with telling women how to be women. Men tell women how to be. Women tell other women how to be. Womanity is often being defined in relation to men or in relation to other women or in relation to children. I wanted to write this novel about a woman who goes on a personal journey at the end of which she comes to terms with herself and with her own personal beliefs; a novel about a woman who succeeds in defining herself outside of those restrictive societal constructs.’ (Okparanta qtd. in Ramakrishnan, “‘Queerness’”) The lesbian character questions the viability of the normative family by destabilising the traditional conception of womanhood, especially their roles as nation-building figures. Currier and Migraine-George stress this idea in their article “‘Lesbian’/Female Same-Sex Sexualities in Africa” (2017): “for decades, ‘lesbian’ women have been accused of betraying their traditional roles as bearers and reproducers of cultural traditions in countries that have been heavily gendered by postcolonial nationalist agenda and rhetorics. In this light, Afroqueer women are doubly “subalternised” because of their status as woman and lesbian, even more so if the queer individual is a divorced, single mother, as Ijeoma eventually becomes. Ijeoma, with her questioning of prescriptive gender norms, actively demands to enact her agency so as to seek a life of her own choice; a life unbound by her gender and Serón-Navas 140 decides not to clear the reasons why Niru was murdered, this novel also becomes a platform to denounce how “WHITE LIES COST BLACK LIVES” (Iweala, Speak 236; capital letters in the original), together with the police brutality that African Americans and other black citizens experience on a daily basis in the US, being George Floyd with his “I can’t breathe” plea one of the most recent and painful examples of this brutality. Likewise, it is worth exploring the combination of two first-person narrators. While Iweala provides readers with two testimonies about shared events, I think it is questionable how Meredith’s narrative voice complements Niru’s story or helps Iweala reclaim new horizons for blacks in the US and, more specifically, for Nigerian-American queer males. Even though Meredith’s part can be of aid to understand the emotional turmoil she is in after Niru’s death, her testimony rather than working as a tool to denounce white on black crimes, “interrupts” Niru’s coming-out process. As Lindsey Green-Simms and Brenna M. Munro state in their online article “The Coming-Out of the African Same-Sex Novel:” “[w]hile the first two thirds of the novel deftly and compellingly follow the ups and downs of Niru’s coming out, the last section [Meredith’s part] cuts this narrative short, turning away from questions of sexuality, and focusing instead on race politics in the United States.” This “cutting short of the coming-out narrative” in order to re-direct readers’ attention onto racial questions is one of the reasons that makes Green-Simms and Munro read Speak No Evil as a novel that intentionally complicates the (traditional) coming-out model. Another reason why Iweala’s text challenges this genre has to do with the “modes of privacy and publicness” that end up being “more complex than ‘out’ or ‘closeted’” (Green-Simms and Munro, “The Coming-Out”). When Ryan contacts Niru in one of these apps, the latter is discovered by his father, accused of “gallivanting with the gays” (Iweala, Speak 39) and reprimanded because of this Serón-Navas 141 “A BOMI NATION” (Iweala, Speak 38; capital letters in the original). Later, Niru is taken back to Nigeria to “undo this psychological and spiritual corruption” (Iweala, Speak 57). Upon his arrival to the US, Niru ends up meeting Damien, an African American gay dancer, but the latter rejects him because he is not “nobody’s sickness” (151), as Niru is not prepared to come out to his family and friends. It is at this point that Niru goes to a party with Meredith and they end up having a fight, which a police officer misread and shot him four times. Thus, Niru is permanently negotiating the tensions between “out” and “closeted.” Whereas the story makes us believe that Niru will eventually come to terms with this tension that mainly arises due to the fact that his parents openly reject his sexual orientation forcing him to remain a closeted man, he is shot dead and Meredith takes over the narrative voice. In the second part, Meredith meets Niru’s father and the former offers to tell the truth about Niru’s death, which implies “outing” Niru –a revelation Niru’s father is not ready to make public. Consequently, the idea of “out” and “closeted” is fluid, changeable and, oftentimes, “unavailable” to Niru (Green-Simms and Munro, “The Coming-Out”), as he is denied the agency to decide his own position regarding his homosexual status. 2.2.2. Black Queer Diaspora and Afrodiasporic Conceptions of Home In this section, I analyse Speak No Evil as a diasporic novel belonging to the field of Black Queer Diaspora that explores sometimes opposing conceptions of home as approached by Niru and his family. It is necessary to distinguish between Niru’s parents −Ify and Obi−, who legally migrated in their adult years and Niru and his elder brother OJ, who were born in the US. In the novel, Niru’s parents, especially his father Obi, are depicted as apprehensive migrants who, despite “all the years they’ve lived abroad, they are still so very Nigerian” (Iweala, Speak 23). Indeed, Iweala does not reveal under which circumstances Niru’s parents decided to leave Nigeria (voluntarily or involuntarily); he only mentions that Nigeria is “a Serón-Navas 142 country that [Niru’s] father loves so deeply he had to run away from it” (Iweala, Speak 63). In this light, Nigeria is held as this family’s “real home,” which they periodically visit, while the US is perceived as this family’s “second home” characterised by a palpable hostility towards black individuals. Delphine Fongang claims that African emigrées may “find themselves in racially charged environments, coupled with hegemonic ideologies and structural inequities,” which, as a consequence, can “thwart attempts at self-definition” and force diasporans “to redefine their positionality as migrants in unsettling environments” (“Introduction” 1). Indeed, this is the oppressive atmosphere experienced by Niru’s parents, particularly by his father, who “thinks the safest place for a [black] man to be, especially in the US, is inside his own house” (Iweala, Speak 24). It is not clear if Niru’s father is unable (or reluctant) to renegotiate his own identity and other forms of identification in the new environment because of the US’s inherent racism or because he negatively associates integration with national assimilation or acculturation. His own reluctance to belong to his “new home” could explain why he is always trying so hard to protect their children against the US, instilling a marked Nigerian and Igbo identity in them. This Nigerian/Igbo identity is, in the case of Niru, painfully associated with heterosexuality and not with other transgressive forms of desire, which is why Niru is constantly in the process of disidentificating from colonial notions of the self and of desire (see Esteban Muñoz 1999; Hayes 2000; 2011; Hirsch and K. Miller 2011). In this novel, heterosexuality works as a strategy to realise and activate a very specific form of Nigerianness (and even Igboness) so that heterosexual desire is used as a way of retaining their Nigerian identity and, consequently, of “remain[ing] connected to their ancestral roots” (Onuzulike 31). However, the revealing of Niru’s homosexuality not only disrupts the familial order but it also shatters Nigerian “heteronormative national narrative” Serón-Navas 143 (Wesling 31). Therefore, anxieties about the loss of the offspring’s ethnic and national loyalties, about their being devoured by the country of residence (Americanisation) and hence permanently losing the connection with the (parents’) motherland together with certain homophobic/heterosexist views that are reproduced in the African diaspora lie at the heart of Niru’s parents’ crusade against same-sex desire: “I [the father] told your mother, I told that woman that we should have sent you to school in Nigeria, not this useless place [The United States]” that is “living under the shadow of that abomination, homosexuality” (Iweala, Speak 38 and 19). This evinces the parents’ conception of same-sex love as “Western corruption” or even as a “colonial import.” However, it is important to emphasise that, in the novel, OJ and Niru never identify as exclusively Igbo or Nigerian, but instead, they have developed “bicultural identities and loyalties” (Onuzulike 30) that are not exempt from inherent tensions and contradictions. As promoted by this bicultural and hybrid identity, Niru attempts to reconcile his Nigerian and queer identities. In fact, there are some instances that exemplify Niru’s opposition against the conception of homoerotic desire as “a product of Westernization” (Currier and Migraine- George, “‘Lesbian’/Female” 195). Before meeting Ryan, he tells Meredith that he is not “unclean” for liking men (Iweala, Speak 28) and, once he is back from his trip to Nigeria to “cure” his “malady,” he asserts that maybe he is wrong for being naturally attracted to men, but that this is not the result of Americanisation (“Maybe I have spent too much time in the United States soaking up ungodly values and satanic sentiments” [Iweala, Speak 68]), but of his own natural tendencies (“Or maybe I’m just me” [68]). Then, it is at the crossroads of homoerotic desire, hybridity and transnationality that I situate this novel and its protagonist as belonging to the field of Black Queer Diaspora. Serón-Navas 144 In her article “Why Queer Diaspora? (2008)” Meg Wesling explores the intersections between queer theory and diaspora studies in an attempt to unearth the effects globalisation can produce on these diasporic queer selves. She claims that Queer Diaspora explores “the diasporic queer as the exemplary subject of globalization, in order to posit an analogy between queerness as that which subverts gender normativity, and diaspora as that which troubles geographic and national stability” (31). African American scholar Jafari S. Allen (2012) lays bare in his seminal study several innovative visions of what he conceptualises as Black Queer Diaspora: “[this] is at once about particular locations (actual and imagined); roots/uprooting (principally understood as from Africa, but just as much to and within Africa, in other cases); and routes that bodies, ideas, and texts travel. By diaspora, we refer to these conditions of movement and emplacement, and to processes of (dis)identification, but also to relationality” (216). In this vein, scholar Eithne Luibhéid posits as well that the black diasporic subject participates in “the decentering of nationalist frameworks premised on space-time binaries, developmental narratives, and static models of culture, community, nation, race, gender, identity, and settlement” (173; see also Ncube 2018). Therefore, and as queer afrosporic subjects thwart national coherence and gender normativity, they must be read “extra-nationally” (Wesling 31) or even “post-nationally,” as they propose “new modes of postnational citizenship” (Mirzoeff 1). This idea is even more disruptive in a contemporary scenario where there is an ongoing “call for a retreat, back, into the comfort of ‘the family’ and ‘the nation’ and ‘traditional values’ at a time when all seem under threat” (Gevisser 14). In this context, the proliferation of extra-national identities is partly an effect of the breaking with the homo-hetero binary logic of the nation as much as with nationalist, uni-/patrilineal conceptions of modern societies. In the novel, Niru, as a second-generation migrant, decentres a heteronormative conception of Nigeria and, even though Niru does not claim national belonging to Nigeria Serón-Navas 145 since, for him, the US constitutes his primary place of identification, their parents take him back to Nigeria “for spiritual revival” (Iweala, Speak 40). As Niru’s mother states: “I’m sending you back to Nigeria, no more of this rubbish, no more. I will clean you up. I will clean you – Obi, chelu, my mother says as she holds me up” (Iweala, Speak 41-42; italics in the original), because “God said man is for woman and woman is for man. That’s how it’s supposed to be. And God was always right” (20). These negative conceptions of homosexuality are responsible for Niru’s being disciplined by their parents (as with Mama in Under the Udala Trees) with the blatant objective of “straightening” his “deviant” desires and adopting a “right” sense of Nigerianness. It is ironic that, Nigerians, in following what they believe to be truly African paradigms, are actually perpetuating Western dictates of the African self. Furthermore, it is worth highlighting the use of pidgin or African languages in this novel. Iweala writes mainly in English and adds scattered Igbo expressions throughout the text. Although I offer a translation of some of these words and expressions, they are not translated into English right after the Igbo expression in the novel, or gathered at the end in a glossary. Both languages cohabit but each one is employed to convey different meanings. English is seen as the language to convey vehicular meaning while Igbo adds an emotional layer to the message. The characters use Igbo expressions (e.g. Tufiakwa, [p. 37; “God forbid”], kwusi [p. 41; “stop it”], mba [p. 41; “no”], chelu [p. 42; “sweetheart”], etc.) to show anger or disappointment, as previously exemplified, and they revert to English when dealing with everyday issues. Moreover, Niru is very much constructed as based on their parents’ conceptions of desire, which are highly influenced by pervasive Christian beliefs and other colonial legacies: “No, you are going back to Nigeria. I [Niru’s father] will personally escort you to Holy Spirit Chapel or Mountain of Fire or whichever one so we can burn this sinful nonsense from your body” (Iweala, Speak 39), to get rid of “this satanic rubbish” (37), of “such abominable evil” Serón-Navas 146 (41). Like in Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees, Christian religious beliefs and the Bible are used as powerful tools to discredit other dissident sexualities and to define them as un-African and un-Christian practices. Thus, it is not Niru whose “ungodly values and satanic sentiments . . . has created a confusion only the motherland can cure” (Iweala, Speak 68), but Nigeria which is still subject to the legacy of colonial impositions, since homosexuality was not regarded as deviation from the norm in pre-colonial times, as I have proved in Okparanta’s section. Consequently, Iweala challenges the misleading idea that queerness equates Americanisation or Westernisation writ large, while laying bare the fact that Nigerians are using Western belief systems (i.e. Christianism) as the theoretical or moral basis to justify heterosexuality and to “combat” homosexuality. Moreover, this author insits that more inclusive readings of Africanness/Nigerianness must be incorporated within African/Nigerian nationalist projects so that queer citizens are not left out of the African/Nigerian nation, but rather, positively represented and included. Additionally, the previous ideas are closely related to the meanings attributed to the abstraction of home. In this sense, I will now centre on how Niru negotiates home, knowing that his homosexual status is debated in the novel as a way of disidentificating from fixed and outmoded notions of Nigerianness, from queer and diasporic perspectives. Besides, I compare Niru’s sense of home and belonging with his father’s in an attempt to trace a parallelism between the turbulent father-son relationship and the troubled connection with the “fatherland” (Nigeria). I will not focus on Niru’s relationship with his mother because, even though Ify is portrayed as a middle-class and educated woman (Iweala, Speak 46), she tends to align with her husband’s decisions and opinions, and thus, she eventually “dissolve[s] into the background” (Miller, “‘Speak No Evil’”). Similarly, I centre on the bond between father and son because it is portrayed as central to Niru’s own process of identity formation in the novel. Serón-Navas 147 Despite the fact that Niru’s father belongs to the new African diaspora and he is a naturalised American citizen who has worked as the CEO of a company for many years, he is representative of a conception of home as monolithic and parochial. A case in point is provided when Niru’s father is said to suffer from “a bad case of Nigeriatoma, an acute swelling of ego and pride that affects diaspora Nigerian men, rendering them unable to accept the idea that a true home might exist outside their birth country” (Iweala, Speak 62; emphasis added). This statement can be partly explained by what Margaret Homans defines as an “antiquated binary logics of home and away, foreign and familiar, even of self and other” (187). Delphine Fongang also contributes to this debate when stating that “[f]irst-generation émigrés find it difficult to navigate two worlds [since] they struggle to maintain their authentic self as Africans while seemingly negotiating the racial boundaries that impede full cultural inclusion in mainstream society” (“Introduction” 2). In this light, Niru’s father’s refusal to call the US home can be theorised through this straitjacketed binary logic of home, which accurately exposes why he is not successful in “navigating worlds,” but it also explains why he behaves differently upon his arrival to the motherland. Nigeriatoma −as a made-up condition− exemplifies the psychological and even physical need to assert national belonging to the birth country for diasporans who conceive home in the singular. In contrast, for Niru, Washington D.C. is the place he calls home. As Niru adds, “I’ve always felt weird about coming to Nigeria” because, for him, Nigeria “was not home . . . even if [he] secretly loved the thunderstorms and the smell of wet red earth after the rains” (Iweala, Speak 65). I argue Niru and his brother OJ are much more successful in negotiating notions of home and belonging −conceived as fluid, multiple and malleable− than her parents are. However, Nigeria is still regarded from an ambivalent position, very possibly because it is imposed upon them, especially by their rigid father Obi: “Each summer my father’s momentum dragged us all home” (Iweala, Speak 64; emphasis added) because the US, to Serón-Navas 148 Obi’s eyes, “is not your [Niru’s] home not now, not ever” (64); but also because of Nigeria’s lacks: “I [Niru] wanted to ask how I should really feel about streets packed with potholes and gutters full to the brim with trash and sludge. I wanted to know how to relax when the cars beside you drove so close that you could see the red veins in the driver’s eyes because everyone treated the lane dividers as suggestions” (65). We also need to bear in mind that after Niru’s “sexual re-orientation therapy,” he starts regarding Nigeria as a traumatic place because it is in this country where Niru’s exorcising of “the demon of homosexuality” occurs. As a consequence, Niru does not develop (and is also denied) a sense of national belonging to a country where queer bodies and non-normative sexualities stand “as a threat to national integrity . . . perpetually outside the boundaries of nation, home and family” (Gopinath, “Nostalgia” 138). In her thought-provoking article “Making Home: Queer Migrations and Motions of Attachment” (2003), Anne-Marie Fortier aptly investigates the reconstructed nature of home in coming-out narratives in which she conceives home as a “‘moving-out’ of the childhood ‘home’ and relocating oneself elsewhere, in another ‘home’ . . . differently figured and refigured” (115). In the same article, this scholar tries to “decentre the heterosexual, familial ‘home’ as the emblematic model of comfort, care and belonging [and] offer a re-reading of the trope of ‘coming out’ of the childhood home” (115). In doing so, Fortier speaks about “migrant belongings” and “queer belongings” as she tries to unfix or destabilise the notion of “home as familiarity” (116) that does not adhere to the idea of queerness (in a broader sense), assuming a sort of “unhomeliness.” She argues that queer migrations “reprocess the childhood home differently” (116), postulating a re-imagining of home (also approached from the lens of the nation) no longer understood as a locus of heterosexualised, normative familial connections but as a re-processing of belonging and family ties from a queer prism. Serón-Navas 149 This moving-out of the heteropatriarchal childhood/familial home, as Fortier holds, is a way of finding a more hospitable place to belong and thrive for queer subjects. In the case of Niru, this idea can be debated from different perspectives: If we conceive Nigeria as the original familial home (the parents’ homeland), then voluntarily relocating to the US must be regarded as a means to find a habitable and secure place for queer citizens, and more specifically for homosexual Niru. As discussed in the section devoted to Okparanta’s novel, Nigeria holds a severe homophobic legislation together with discriminatory attitudes against LGBTQI+ people, which makes it an alien place for Niru, not only in terms of geography and cultural belonging, but also in terms of sexuality. Besides, if we approach the familial home from a US position (Niru’s homeland), then Niru disturbs his childhood heterosexual home when he is caught chatting with other African American gay men, decentring the patriarchal familial order. This decentring of the patriarchal familial order is most notably evinced through the strained relationship between father and son, as Niru feels rejected by his father due to his sexual orientation: “but now that I see myself I know what that means and I can’t look any longer. Idiot. Abomination. Not myself. Not my father’s son. Nothing. Nobody to no one. Nonce” (Iweala, Speak 123; emphasis added). This excerpt also touches upon the lack of belonging, understood in familial terms, as Niru’s sexuality is never accepted by his father, which is why he feels an outsider all the time. Likewise, if we identify Niru’s childhood home with Washington D.C., then he decentres the familial-national home as he is a second-generation Nigerian in a country highly charged with racial tensions. In this sense, the US is not generally regarded as an unwelcoming place for homosexuals but, it is considered an adverse country for black subjects if home is read through the lens of white supremacy and racial violence (the consequence being the murder of Niru at the hands of a white policeman). The following passage where Meredith asks Niru to stay at her place instead of going back to Nigeria to Serón-Navas 252 needed in the Reserve fighting in Iraq, so there is always a bit of concern about “how Americanized [Lukmon and Moriam’s] children were” (Atta, Bad Immigrant 328). This process of Americanisation is also discussed in Uzodinma Iweala’s Speak No Evil (2018) when the protagonist Niru comes out as a homosexual teenager and his parents think the United States has “corrupted him” and he is sent back to Nigeria to “cure” what for his parents is a Western malady (Iweala, Speak 87). At the bottom of these experiences lurks a profound anxiety, on the part of their parents, for their children not to be connected enough with their homeland, with Nigeria. However, we need to bear in mind that while firstgeneration migrants are rooted in Africa, second-generation has the ability to feel at home in Africa and elsewhere. And this is something positive because these hyphenated children have perfected the “capacity for transcultural manoeuvrability and negotiation” (Rask Knudsen and Rahbek, In Search of the Afropolitan 18-19). Indeed, Bashira is able to manoeuvre and negotiate cultures through literature; it is her avidness as a reader of US, immigrant, Nigerian or feminist literatures what allows her to understand disparate cultures. Actually, Bashira ends up creating her own blog −“One Muslim Girl”− after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to discuss Islamophobia (Atta, Bad Immigrant 357). This constitutes a far-reaching tool to debate transcendental issues and to open up necessary conversations that involve people from all over the world, as Lukmon says: to “listen and meditate” (361). Serón-Navas 253 CONCLUSIONS Serón-Navas 254 In this dissertation, I have discussed the centrality of the post-independence Nigerian nation through the textual analysis of a selection of contemporary Anglo-Igbo and Anglo- Yoruba novels written by Chigozie Obioma, Ayobami Adebayo, Chinelo Okparanta, Uzodinma Iweala, Helon Habila and Sefi Atta. I set out to prove that the thesis that presentday African writing has “outstripped” or even outgrown the nation (Hodapp 2020; Jones 2011; Adesanmi 2004) is not completely accurate. These theorists contend that the literary pieces created by Nigerian (transcultural) authors have left behind the first and second generations’ fixation with the nation (Jones 40). Others argue that this new generation is not as interested in “the tragedy of Africa’s colonial past and the imperfect modernity of the nation-state it engendered” (Adesanmi, “Of Postcolonial Entanglement” 227) or even in “the anticolonial defense of national culture” (Dalley 17). In a similar vein, Anna-Leena Toivanen aptly states that recent postcolonial discourses have incorporated postnationalism as central to its theorisations, while “declaring the obsolescence of the nation and treating dislocation as the paradigmatic condition” (“Daddy’s Girls?” 99). However, narratives that revolve around the realities of dislocation, displacement, transculturality and cosmopolitanism, which essentially centre on the global or the elsewhere, also incorporate the national/local, which allows authors to signify the homeland “within and outside [their own geographical and mental] margins” (Nwakanma 8). Certainly, the interest contemporary authors have in the Nigerian nation is not comparable to previous generations, but it cannot be affirmed that this interest has been left aside or even superseded because, as I have proved with the analysis of the novels discussed, the questions of home and of national affiliation are central to the literary projects of prominent twenty-first century Nigerian authors, and they are addressed as intersectionally entangled with identity politics based on sex, class, religion, race, age or education. This interest, I argue, takes centre stage in these novels for two reasons: first, the dysfunctionality Serón-Navas 255 and even failure of the Nigerian nation-state is recurrently discussed together with the circumstances that have led this country to become a place where most of its citizens would rather leave; second, and from a more utopian perspective, these authors criticise what weighs Nigeria(ns) down (e.g. the intolerance against LGBTQI+ subjects, patriarchal interpretations of womanhood and manhood, high reliance on the oil industry, religious extremism or lack of democratic practices in the political arena), but also explore alternative national horizons. In this study, I have addressed the Nigerian homeland following three distinctive approaches: family, Afroqueerness and migration/Afropolitanism. These approaches have helped me critically theorise Nigeria from diverse angles, which enables a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of this country, and also allows for an examination of the new Nigerias (note the “s”) that are slowly emerging in the literary works analysed here. Similarly, adopting a gender perspective has allowed me to articulate topics and themes that have been traditionally apprehended from a masculine (and patriarchal) lens. For instance, in the first chapter, I have claimed that Ayobami Adebayo’s Stay with Me (2017) en-genders feminine Nigeria in her allegorical discussion of this country from the position of a mother who cannot engender viable children, and originally, through the incorporation of a series of Gothic elements, as shown in section 1.2.2. “Monstrous/‘Monstrificated’ Mothers and Abiku Children: An Afro-Gothic Analysis of Stay with Me.” Besides, Adebayo’s debut novel constitutes an innovative attempt at deromanticising and de-patriarchalising motherhood that deliberately breaks with the traditional depictions of conventional and “acceptable” Nigerian womanhood. In the second chapter, I have contended that Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees (2015) “queers” the Nigerian nation in its exploration of same-sex desire as experienced by a lesbian woman. I have also argued that, even though the protagonist of this novel is (still) forced to live her relationships with other women in a covert way, Okparanta exposes the potential to create Serón-Navas 256 inter-ethnic alliances as forged in the romantic relationship of two lesbian women belonging to different ethnic groups. Finally, Sefi Atta’s The Bad Immigrant (2021) originally addresses the diasporic experience from the perspective of a male narrator while discussing national affiliation as experienced by a Nigerian family living in the US, a country marked by exacerbated (intra- and inter-)racial tensions. I have delved into how this writer introduces new ways of characterising the migrant experience in her novel, thus contributing to advance the debates on Afropolitanism. In the first chapter, “Familial Perspectives, National Allegories,” I have carried out the analysis of the Nigerian nation as approached from the familial perspective in the works of Chigozie Obioma, The Fishermen (2015), and Ayobami Adebayo, Stay with Me (2017), which I have analysed as “national allegor[ies] of Nigeria” (Harlin 685). These texts, which draw on literary predecessors like Chinua Achebe, Flora Nwapa or Buchi Emecheta, deal with the struggles of two Igbo and Yoruba families whose vital experiences are synchronous with the dramatic events that the post-independence Nigerian nation went through in the late 1980s and early 1990s, particularly during Sani Abacha’s military regime (1993-1998) and the previous annulment of the first democratic elections ever held in Nigeria where M.K.O. Abiola was elected (1993). In addition, these novels are characterised by a persistent sense of disillusionmnet with the motherland, which evinces a clear dissatisfaction with Nigeria’s present state of affairs. Thematically, the “falling apart” of the families featured in Obioma and Adebayo’s novels metaphorically exemplify the atrophy of the postcolonial nation, the impracticality of the nation-building project as based on this country’s multi-ethnic and multi-religious status (exemplified in Yejide and Akin’s dead progeny), together with the pervading consequences of the civil war between Nigeria and Biafra that took place between 1967 and 1970 (most Serón-Navas 257 clearly captured in the fratricidal relationship among the Agwu brothers). I contend that this domestic episode still constitutes a source of national and inter-generational trauma that has not been overcome and that is frequently (implicitly or explicitly) explored in the works of third-generation Nigerian authors when discussing Nigerians’ plea for national selfdetermination. In this fashion, I argue Obioma’s “invoking” of key events in Nigerian history may function as a plausible way of concealing his “exilic” or migrant status and, most centrally, of asserting cultural belonging. However, this ongoing allusion to the homeland is not exempt from criticism, especially when he has repeatedly stated in a number of interviews cited above that he would like to be an Igbo man unadulterated by colonial conceptions of home and of the self. Finally, it is worth emphasising how Obioma and Adebayo end their novels in an optimist note when talking about the remaining Agwu brothers as “egrets” that “appear in flocks after a storm . . . when everything as [we] knew it had changed” (Obioma, The Fishermen 394); or when Yejide reunites with her surviving daughter Rotimi and that becomes too “a beginning [and] a promise of wonders to come” (Adebayo, Stay with Me 296). I read these hopeful passages as symbolically proposing a more promising national scenario for a shaken Nigeria, thus imagining the homeland as a full democratic country where gender equality is common practice. In the second chapter, “Afroqueer Representations of Home,” I have discussed the Nigerian nation following the Afroqueer perspective in the works of Chinelo Okparanta, Under the Udala Trees (2015), and Uzodinma Iweala, Speak No Evil (2018). These queer narratives represent a very prominent trend in contemporary Anglophone Nigerian writing because they allow the exploration of correlated realities like gender identities and roles, wo/manhood, ma/paternity, religion or diasporic identities. Drawing on Brenna M. Munro’s idea of a “queer project” of African literature (“Locating ‘Queer’” 123), I argue that this new trend of Afroqueer fiction can be best described as a restorative project where queer Serón-Navas 258 individuals are no longer demonised or deemed un-African, but depicted in a positive and sympathetic light. Thus, I contend that the literary works belonging to this trend attempt to reinscribe the Afroqueer subject into the Nigerian national project but, as the queer subject necessarily deconstructs normative notions of identity (sexual, racial, familial), such reinscriptions involve a critical questioning of the master narratives upon which the nation is erected. For instance, Under the Udala Trees revisits the Nigeria-Biafra civil war from the perspective of a lesbian, Igbo woman in a historicising effort to, on the one hand, reinsert the LGBTQI+ collective within the nation-building project in a rather convulsive and decisive historical moment for this country, and on the other, to examine certain forms of marginalisation experienced by precarious Others in ethnic and sexual terms then and now. In Speak No Evil, a novel that can be related to the corpus of “Black Queer Diaspora,” Uzodinma Iweala addresses the queer dimension of the Afrodiasporic experience as fluid and unfinished, by focusing on the events that a gay Nigerian-American young adult goes through in the US, thus emphasising other intersecting factors such as religion, familial pressures or even racism that prevents the protagonist from being accepted or tolerated. Unlike the novels examined in the first chapter, none of the protagonists discussed in this chapter achieve such “harmonious reconciliation” with their respective societies (Okuyade, “Introduction” xxi), perhaps in response to queerness’ alleged inconclusiveness, elusiveness and indeterminacy. The protagonist in Iweala’s novel is prematurely murdered by a white police officer whereas the main character in Okparanta’s novel is married to an abusive husband and later forced to have a covert relationship with the woman she is in love with. I consider these stories try to faithfully reflect the life-threatening circumstances that characterise Afroqueer people’s realities, but they also create stories of courage and resistance because they denounce the abuses against a collective that is forced to exist underground, but who fosters its own hopes and utopias beyond homophobia. Granting voice to this community is a rather powerful act of Serón-Navas 259 literary “artivism” that brings to the fore positive representations of certain realities that have been traditionally silenced or neglected, and creates referents for those who are in a similar position. Furthermore, these novels enable the expansion of the very definition of the place adjectives African and Nigerian, while proposing transgressive ways of signifying the contemporary Nigerian nation. In this light, Speak No Evil portrays different, and sometimes conflicting, understandings of home. For instance, for the Afroqueer and diasporic protagonist, home is interpreted as multiple, inhospitable and as life-threatening all at once, whereas for Niru’s father, his apprehension of home is somewhat parochial and simplistic; one in which home is only conceptualised in the singular. This opposition between father and son in terms of how home is signified is also perceived in the contrasting masculinities that these two characters display. Whereas Niru’s father is representative of a toxic form of masculinity characterised by violence, authoritarian attitudes and intransigence, Niru shows a queer and transnational masculinity defined by the explicit manifestation of positive feelings like vulnerability or tenderness and by the attraction for the Other not only in sexual terms, but in relationships based on mutual recognition and respect. This also applies to Under the Udala Trees, where Okparanta shows two distinctive forms of femininity as embodied by Ijeoma, the protagonist, and her mother. Thus, I conclude that these two narratives interrogate intergenerational hegemonic forms of masculinity and femininity in an effort to present plausible ways of being a man and a woman as explored through the queer representations of Nigerian manhood and womanhood. In the third chapter, “Transnational Realities, Local Concerns,” I focus on the exploration of the Nigerian nation, and most particularly on the idea of (multiple) home(s), as approached from a transnational position in the works of Helon Habila, Travellers (2019) and Serón-Navas 260 Sefi Atta, The Bad Immigrant (2021). Both Habila and Atta are prominent authors defined by the contemporary realities of global mobility, as they both reside in the US but keep ties with their Nigerian and UK homes, and their most recent works can be regarded as belonging to what Pius Adesanmi and Chris Dunton define as the “transnationalist trend” (“Nigeria’s Third Generation Writing” 16). For this chapter, I have incorporated the Afropolitan perspective in an effort to prove both its validity and its limitations in regard to the present-day Nigerian diasporic experience. By choosing the aforementioned novels, I have actively sought to underline how migrant experiences are portrayed in these novels in non-prescriptive terms and as part of a “diasporic continuum” where intersecting factors (i.e. socio-economic status, gender, age, country of origin, sexuality or legal status) have to be born in mind to understand the myriad realities travellers coming from Africa go through. Likewise, these foundational factors determine the level of acceptance (or non-acceptance) African mobile subjects encounter upon their arrival in the host country. The travellers that populate Habila’s novel are mostly impoverished and stagnant African subjects harshly discriminated while in Europe. In fact, I have theorised this group as “zombified migrants” (Toivanen 2019), as non-citizens (Arendt 2007), as ungrievable bodies (Butler 2004; 2012) and, drawing on J. Kristeva’s notion of the abject (1982), as “abject cosmopolitans” (Nyers 2003). In this regard, Travellers challenges as well the single story of the migrant experience in Europe, while interrogating at the same time the mythic conception of Europe as ElDorado. It is via the revision of Europe as the Promised Land that Habila’s novel debunks the dominant colonial idea of Western (moral) superiority (see Sieber et al. 2015). In this sense, this narrative constitutes as well a symbolic lamentation for the brain drain and the loss of African human capital, because of this biased conception of the countries from the Global North. Thus, I have approached this text as a clear criticism against the failure of postcolonial states that are not making the most of their human and material potential, which is one of the Serón-Navas 261 reasons why African countries are unable to erect themselves as competitive and selfsufficient nations. Furthermore, the privileged characters in Atta’s The Bad Immigrant encounter a more promising future in the United States, where free mobility is a given, but contrastingly, they also experience intra-/inter-racial frictions, discrimination and other xenophobic attitudes. Even though the characters of both novels face multiple challenges in their respective target countries, their diasporic experiences are characterised by an obvious interweaving of the “here” (the local/the regional) and the “elsewhere” (the global/the transnational), which makes me believe that readers are equally interested in “stories about borders” as in stories about the lack or trespassing of them. It is also worth acknowledging that both texts challenge simplistic notions of diaspora and migrancy, complicating what it means to be an African migrant in the twenty-first century and evidencing the need to adopt context-specific and geopolitically-situated approaches. Besides, I have analysed these two novels from the perspective of Afropolitanism. In Travellers, I distinguish between the protagonist-narrator, whom I theorise as a “hesitant local,” following Lara El Mekkawi’s designation (203), and the other non-affluent migrants he encounters in Berlin, whom I analyse as “failed Afropolitans” (Bwa Mwesigire 112). Unlike Afropolitans, hesitant locals find it difficult to “form new localities” (El Mekkawi 206) and lead an existence characterised by apprehension, restlessness and other vital anxieties resulting from being in transit. On the contrary, the failed Afropolitans that appear in this novel are characterised by a certain type of coerced or restrained mobility, since they lack the legal documentation and economic resources to journey Europe at will. The latter group is forced to move and is denied the possibility of freely travelling the world. 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