Published by Fourth Estate (book cover: https://harpercollins.co.uk/products/vagabonds-eloghosa-osunde?variant=39507580354638)
Vagabonds! by Eloghosa Osunde (2022)
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This remarkable novel was published earlier this year. Readers who are squeamish about encountering writing that depicts persons of “unusual” sexual orientation in occasional erotic detail should steer clear of the text itself and of the present African Library entry.
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This remarkable novel was published earlier this year. Readers who are squeamish about encountering writing that depicts persons of “unusual” sexual orientation in occasional erotic detail should steer clear of the text itself and of the present African Library entry. The author spells out something of a warning on the first (unnumbered) page of Vagabonds!, which faces the publication information: “There are simple and good and straightforward and well-behaved people, I’m sure./ But this is not a book about them.” The wit and daring in this declaration provide the reader with the first clue concerning this author’s style and stance. The novel is a tour de force – unsurprisingly, perhaps, given the author’s multiple achievements: Osunde is (inter alia) an internationally exhibited visual artist, a writer in a range of formats, a filmmaker and an essayist/columnist (particularly for The Paris Review) who has been awarded prizes in several of these genres. She is Nigerian and sets her novel in that context.
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Osunde’s novel should be seen against the background of the proclamation of the notorious Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act (the SSMPA, as it came to be known) that terrified the Nigerian LGBTQ community, for this law (signed by the then president, ironically named Goodluck Jonathan, on 13 January 2014) prohibited not only same-sex marriage, but all “abnormal” sexual activities, relationships and manifestations, on pain of 10-14 years’ imprisonment.
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Osunde’s novel should be seen against the background of the proclamation of the notorious Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act (the SSMPA, as it came to be known) that terrified the Nigerian LGBTQ community, for this law (signed by the then president, ironically named Goodluck Jonathan, on 13 January 2014) prohibited not only same-sex marriage, but all “abnormal” sexual activities, relationships and manifestations, on pain of 10-14 years’ imprisonment. Apparently, not many such imprisonments occurred; however, the law empowered persecution of LGBTQI citizens by civilians and police alike, however violent – and if such attacks resulted in the death of a person suspected or known not to be cisgender (of the “normal” heterosexual kind), perpetrators were said to be seldom prosecuted. The hugely influential Christian churches as much as Muslim leaders preached against all LGBTQ people as repellently sinful and deserving of punishment, thus further fuelling hatred, self-righteous disgust and the fervour to “cleanse” society of such persons and activities. The author here focuses particularly on (mostly lesbian) women and counters the tide of disgust by depicting such characters as joyous and beautiful and free in enjoying “illicit” sexuality, but this is contrasted with many vignettes depicting states of terror, shame, denial of selfhood and forms of love that have been sullied and branded by the reigning disapproval and condemnation – whether familial, official (ie state-sanctioned) or clerical. The forbidden activities include cross-dressing, sodomy as well as any and all forms of “gross indecency” (2) – broadly understood as anything “deviant” from the norm of heterosexuality within marriage – often permitting much older men to marry underage girls. The arresting title, Vagabonds!, refers to everyone outlawed by the SSMPA, especially those who persist in their illicit activities as alluded to by this law, albeit secretly, as most are forced to do.
Osunde’s novel is very unusually constructed: it opens (following three epigraphs, of which the last is especially relevant) with different “definitions” of “vagabondage”, followed by a warning against the danger of catching the eye of anti-LGBTQ vigilantes who walk around with guns and cutlasses: this, in a supposed “Welcome Note from the City” of Lagos, in which most of the narrative is set. The tongue-in-cheek mockery and serious concerns about the levels of permitted loose-cannon acts of violence are funny and frightening at the same time. In the next section, the first of a series of these carrying the name “Tatafo” structures the multiple loosely bound individual histories that the novel depicts, as a series of observations by a non-human “character”. This character serves as one (albeit the most efficient and favourite) of the “monitoring spirits” (9), all created by the spirit of Lagos, named Èkó, a gross but hugely powerful being with godlike powers who created his informants/watchdogs/spies to keep him informed regarding events and developments in the city, even though he also is the city.
One of the multiple sections – most of which are disparate “slices” of the lives of many Nigerians, mostly women, and are too brief to be called chapters, being only loosely connected by their overarching socio-political context – gives a particularly vivid impression of how a young woman of “unusual” sexuality (and her mother) is affected by the proclamation of the SSMPA. The account (titled “Gold”, which is the name that the daughter chose for herself) occurs late in the novel (253-260). The section may be named for the daughter character, but it equally foregrounds the unnamed mother who, out of love for Gold, becomes the parent this child needs – maternal behaviour that is as tenderly adaptive to the daughter’s needs as required in the harsh Nigerian context, where the worldwide prejudice against those gendered “differently” has been legitimised by the state, as has been done in several countries (most of them, but by no means all, on the African continent). Gold first perceives her mother’s rare, deep and abiding love when she is allowed to choose her name, then when the mother scrimps and saves (“sweated out of her pockets”, 254) to pay for the expensive operation that corrects Gold’s dysmorphia. She had seen “how un-at-home Gold was in her old body” (253), and as Gold states, she “was only still here, alive, because she had a mother who asked, ‘What do you want for yourself, my child?’ and listened when she answered” (253). The narrative voice says of such a woman that she “was more than a good person. She was a fighter – the right kind to take to war with the world” (254).
Gold is born fearful, as if with the instinctive awareness that people like her “attract” persecution. But her mother explains to Gold that “it’s the violence (regular as it is in the world) not the love that should be strange”, lamenting and condemning prevalent styles of parenting: “how adults break their own spirits all the time just to do what someone else said is the right thing”. Her mother has said to Gold that “‘who you are here’, tapping her own chest with a flat palm, ‘is who I love’” (255). But Gold’s fearfulness persists, coming to a crisis on the day they switch on the news and “both froze as the reporter said illegal, as he shared the sentence: fourteen years in prison. They heard UnAfrican. They heard Same Sex. They heard crossdressers” (257). The implications – of how the very streets of their neighbourhood will become zones of danger for herself and her friends – choke Gold’s voice as if they shut off air, and she collapses in a major panic attack. But, instead of fearful, Gold’s mother gets furious. She tells Gold: “Look. Before they get to you, they’ll have to kill your mother first,” and “her voice was a lake of calm” as she adds: “this is our country too” (258). She tells Gold that she herself is a “lion” and that “your mother hunts back” (259). Her friend tells her later that, beyond assurance of her mother’s protection, people like them still have to tell themselves that they “deserve” (260) to live freely as what they are, throwing off shame and fear, but this they must achieve individually.
Some sections and aspects of the text are surreal, but Osunde constantly reminds readers of the actual Nigerian/Lagosian context in which what is described, occurs. One of the sections, in which the narrator is Tatafo, the city spirit Èkó’s observer, is subtitled “(Democrazy!)” and opens with the rhetorical question: “What did we not do in this Lagos, in Money’s name” (29). The aspect of life in this teeming city (the greater Lagos area’s inclusive population is estimated at 28 million) that Tatafo focuses on is how no one who is wealthy enough – although proven guilty of the most horrendous of crimes – will remain in jail. They are, he reveals, secretly released and go into hiding, soon resuming their opulent lifestyles under new identities. Poor inmates, or those taken into custody off the street, are put into their place. Both the billionaire criminal and the unjustly imprisoned or small-time crook are “skinned” and have their faces “swapped” (32), so that the petty criminal can more or less believably assume the criminal lord’s identity and serve out his sentence, while the man himself makes his getaway with a “new” face on his body. Èkó does not concern himself with crime, but only demands a fine or preferably an overwhelmingly glamorous appearance – aesthetics and not ethics. Tatafo boldly boasts: “Nobody is better at anything than us (Lagosians): not even corruption” (33). Èkó proclaims that “appearance” matters above “truth” (36). Èkó is not even the most powerful force in and of Lagos: wealth is.
Money buys anything in Lagos, and for money (an overpaid job as the driver of a master criminal, for example) people here will give up anything, even their voice, as shown by the tale of one “Johnny Just Come” (as most people say, “Johnny-come-lately”) (36), who gets employed by “Mr H”: a man who is the head of an “untouchable monopoly” selling so-called “spare human parts” taken from the poor and the homeless and sold to “private hospitals for people who needed them urgently, at black market prices”. He himself no longer gets involved in any of the practicalities or the messy business of this terrible trade. In addition, the author humanises him slightly by evoking his childhood and his charitable works set up to “alleviate” the ugly ruthlessness that is the source of his astronomical income. Still, he has his network “for sourcing fresh cadavers as they hit the ground” (44). The facts of his income sources may never be exposed, hence the demand that any employee of Mr H’s distinctly weird household have to “lose” their voices – literally on pain of death. Johnny, for example, falls in love with and grows gradually more intimate with the PA of the “Oga” (boss), who is named Livinus. One night, as they (as usual) cuddle together speechlessly, Livinus breaks the silence rule, saying “in the lowest whisper, ‘There’s something I want to tell you’” (50). Before Livinus can utter another word, his head is sliced from his body by the “enforcer” that Mr H has employed for years. And Johnny is given what he suspects is his beloved’s corpse to deliver to a fast-food joint. Soon thereafter, the horror of what he has done for money overcomes Johnny. There is no escape; the Oga’s henchmen will track him down. He drives to a high bridge and throws himself over the railing, thinking, “What’s the point of continuing my story if they’ve taken my mouth?” and (with Livinus in mind): “I don’t want any of it. I just want you” (54).
In Osunde’s Lagos, death does not necessarily end existence, and some of the dead actually “return” and interact with the living in some way. Her whole novel can be seen, I believe, as a type of dream vision that counters the awful realities of the horrendous numbers of rapes and acts of femicide and child abuse, and the unassailable power of evil and corrupt people in this society. In one absurdist scene, where a group of the recently dead gather under Third Mainland Bridge, they introduce themselves to one another, focusing on how (or why) they died. Soon, a dark, winged creature or personage with a face that is not quite decipherable, appears to “organise” the small group. He is the “guard” (55) and soon explains, firstly, that they are a cohort and, secondly, that they have to perform services – absurdly, such as helping people to park their cars or (for former prostitutes) “night work” (60). The guard also introduces them to their “dreamweaver”, Bankole, from whom they can (if they have good reason) request nightmares to be sent to people who deserve them. The guard even registers these recently dead and warns them that if they don’t make themselves useful, they’ll soon start to fade. But, to his delight, there is a first-night welcome party for the most recent “arrival”. It is because of this mixture of living and “undead” (Osunde does not use this term) that Tatafo warns: “This is a city for all. … You share this place with flesh and not-flesh; it’s just as much their city as it is yours.” Other advice (numbers eight and nine among his ten “commandments”) suggests that Lagosians should: “Get money. And in all thy getting, get disrespectful audacity,” and should at the same time: “Be careful, keep a few eyes at your back, and have respect” (67) – the mutually contradictory implications of these two “rules” appearing not to matter to Tatafo.
The devil (straightforwardly so named throughout) is also a character among others in this mocking narrative, and he is able to slip into human bodies at will, making them do things they did not intend while “wearing” their bodies like (say) a surfer wears a wetsuit. As the devil (in a newly “converted” woman’s body) has tempestuous sex with a man picked up at a fast-food joint, in his bedroom, he/it notices the man’s little daughter, whom he is raising as a single parent. When he needs a babysitter, he asks his brother to mind the little four-year-old, entirely unsuspecting (for he is a conscientious, loving parent) of the fact that “Uncle David” abuses his daughter. The (unusually conceived, shall we say) devil enters the girl’s teddy to hear what is troubling her, for he has sensed that she is not as happy as the face she shows her father. And this devil evidently has a violent hatred of child abusers, and he decides to exact vengeance on David. The devil does not use the girl’s father, who could not even bear to dream of what his brother is doing to his child. He instead prevents David from sleeping and sends him out on a jog to calm his mind, while in the meantime he (the devil) enters the body of a usually fairly petty criminal, a street thug, who then violently attacks and kills David, carried away by the devil’s righteous indignation against the child molester. This is in answer to the little girl’s prayer, heard by the devil in the guise of her teddy bear, to “please kill Uncle David” because “he has bad, painful hands” (73). Still, the man who was used to kill David is horrified when he comes back to himself (the devil having vacated his body) to discover the gruesomely mutilated body.
To make those who are protecting little and not-so-little girls seem more benign in spirit than the devil, more saviours than avengers, the narrative (in the next section) introduces certain “spirits” (as they might be termed) that are called the “fairygodgirls”. These are themselves girls who lost their lives in the flesh quite early for a variety of reasons – but reasons related to the harshness of both family life (for all too many) or the social context, and the vulnerability of girl children. As fairygodgirls, they retain the capacities they had as humans as well as their personality traits and other quirks, but they have important non-human powers and are equipped with wings that enable them to get around very quickly. The fairygodgirls are alerted by some sort of unexplained emotional radar when a girl is in trouble, and they take appropriate action as far as their capacities allow. The situation of a girl who needs help is depicted on a wall in the space where they are: she is “sobbing to herself, her father resting coolly against their living room wall, asking her for more frog jumps” (79). The girl is no angel; she is acknowledged to be a “rascal” by the fairygodgirl who first spotted her: she is someone her parents do not know how to handle, and hence they are resorting to cruel forms of punishment for her transgressions. The girl’s father provides some sort of justification that the girl is blamed for lack of “concentration” (it is to be assumed, on her studies) that makes the parents resent the presumably considerable school fees they are obliged to pay. The punishment continues as “her siblings watched, transfixed, and her mother went on whistling a gospel song as she made banga soup”. The parents want the impossible, requiring the girl (who is nearly 16) to “[turn] into something else”, and seem to have told this child (who wants to be “free” of the parents’ excessively restrictive attitude to child-raising) that such a desire is “demonic” (80). In view of this ugly situation, the one fairygodgirl who is considered “the brain of the group” suggests that there is a book that will help the girl to understand the legitimacy of her feelings and bring her some peace: it is Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid, the Caribbean author. The clever one explains that she chose Annie John because the title character “understands freedom” and also “fights for it”, giving herself permission “to hate and resent things” and to respond “without requiring too much justification from herself”, realising that it’s not wrong to “choose [one]self”, even to the point of leaving home – if what one needs in order to live truly is unavailable there. What the fairygodgirls contrive is to make another young woman (at the home where the mother of the troubled girl is employed) slip this book into the mother’s handbag. When the mother has returned home, they put the idea to snatch the book from the handbag in her mind. Reading the book will do the trick, the fairygodgirls know.
This rescue force is a power for good in a world where few others come to the aid or notice the suffering of the “living” girls (81), who are helped:
girls with gaslighting parents, girls who see black more often than is safe, girls who hide pills under their tongues, girls who need to flush their bodies at night, girls who fly over their own heads while sitting down, girls who run far while standing still, girls who don’t cry anymore and get beaten harder for it, girls who cry way too much but only at night in private, girls with lethal lonelinesses growing under their skins, girls with incomprehensible weather in their brains. (81-82)
Although the city will undoubtedly continue “eating girls”, the fairygodgirls are untouchable, being “already-dead girls” who “know how it feels” and who get “angry enough” to fight for the living girls (82). A lovely description of them celebrating the work they do evokes them as sharing, with the girls to whose aid they come, “a hunger for justice and freedom”, and stating that, “together, they make the holiest God you’ve seen – the kind young girls have deserved all along” (84).
An arresting figure within the series of vignettes or mini-narratives constituting the novel is that of a dress designer called Wura Blackson, the most sought-after genius in this field. Her glamorous creations clothe the wealthy women, who need dresses so overwhelmingly gorgeous that they will silence the gossips’ tongues – for women like these, moving in the upper echelons of “society”, have much to hide. Wura herself comes from that world, but extracted herself from the family business to establish her own. She is immensely successful and finds fulfilment in her work. Nevertheless, Wura wants a child. She gets herself pregnant and has a daughter: a highly unusual one who (much later in the novel) is shown to be a kind of “commander” of the fairygodgirls. Here, she has come to fulfil the deep longing of a great but lonely woman, not a persecuted girl, but she does so on her own terms. She does enter Wura’s womb as a foetus, but emerges (fully grown and “backtalking” from the very beginning) when she is ready to do so. She tells Wura that her name is Rain. She is irritable and outspoken, but always “talks straight”. It is Rain who insists that Wura needs to stop doing what people expect of her, that she should say and do what she wants, and that Wura knows what is best for herself. Since she has a form of cancer that is incurable, Wura has started thinking about how she wants to die – without the usual huge fuss and noisy, vulgar display of grief by family and friends that in Nigeria is considered not merely appropriate, but essential. In preparation for her death, Wura designs a final collection and announces a sale – something she has never done before – which has desperate customers fighting one another for the outfits. She also sends some specially personalised dresses to favourite customers, each one with an appreciative message for the recipient. It is only these select few whom she informs that, since she is dying, these will be the last Wura Blackson outfits they’ll ever acquire. The garments are gifts, not to be paid for. Wura has already established that when she “fade[s] to black” as she dies, Rain will not pine or live on, but simply go back to where she came from. So, Rain does not need to be “provided for” by her mother. Wura’s few friends respect her wishes, but one woman, a Mrs Kolawole, a fervent Christian believer, cannot bear the thought that someone as worthy as Wura, whom she loves dearly, would (as Mrs Kolawole believes) risk hellfire and damnation because she refuses to “invite Jesus into [her] heart and ask him to take over” (122). Mrs Kolawole cannot understand that Wura has made peace with dying and desires the complete extinction she believes it will bring. Wura dies alone and “quietly”, as she wants to. The heartbroken Mrs Kolawole, who has a horde of sons but longs for a daughter, has her desire fulfilled when Rain, having decided to comfort the distraught woman with her own bracing presence, manifests in the room where Mrs Kolawole has been weeping and praying, and announces herself (to this woman’s astonished delight) as Mrs Kolawole’s daughter – with the “readymade” name Rain.
In the section that follows, we are told by Tatafo (Èkó’s servant and creation, who has begun to switch his loyalties to the Vagabonds) that he is partly responsible for how boys are programmed to be bullies towards girls and to grow up into violent women-abusing men. In a brilliant metaphor for society’s shaping (or distorting) influence and requirements and macho peer pressure, Tatafo explains how sensitive boy children are brought to Èkó’s installation centre to get implants that make them conform fully to patriarchal norms. Hence “sweet boys” turn into “men with iron for bones”, men who fill their “heartvoids” with “stunning women” whom they proceed to “shrink to [the size of] a crumb” (128). This brings a “voice on repeat … telling them, You’re powerful, unstoppable, … there are no consequences for you” (129). The majority of males, Tatafo says, go along with this and enjoy wielding power. But, he adds, there are exceptions – boys or men who return to them, begging: “This cruelty is too heavy for my hands, take it back,” and then they do. But he adds a further point, that women possess a transformative strength to cope with and transcend and survive the damage inflicted on them by certain men. He calls this a kind of “magic”: “Magic like a girl generating new selves to stay alive in her body” or “Magic like staying alive despite”, etc, etc. Èkó objects against Tatafo making these revelations and maintains the facade that society is functioning, but the title of the next section indicates that the spy is loosening the hold that his creator and boss has always held over him. Paradoxically (as the reader initially notices the contradiction), the striking section title, “After God, fear women”, is immediately followed by the opening description of “Mr Osagie”, asleep while his wife, Maria, “lay in chains at the foot of the bed, where he’d kept her for three days now” (132). Mr Osagie seems to be a slightly ambivalent product of the implantation/conditioning process, in that he swore years ago to Maria never to hit her, and has during their marriage and despite severe stresses kept that promise – in the letter of the law, be it added (as Maria’s chained-up position here demonstrates). Mr Osagie’s (of course, male) friends are nevertheless nonplussed and disapproving, asking him: “What do you mean, you don’t discipline your wife?” Maria could explain, had they asked her, that “there are far worse ways to be cruel, far more damaging ways to hurt a person without leaving a single mark to prove your guilt” (134). But Maria is tough.
The context is that in their town, women have started disappearing (actually, escaping deliberately into nothingness from their oppressive, exploitative or abusive marriages), and Maria’s enchainment (along with that of her daughter, Julie, who is tied up and locked in a cupboard) is Mr Osagie’s desperate measure to prevent her joining the women’s rebellion. It was inspired by a lone, mad (or not-so-mad) townswoman, who is first spotted flying away (following what seems to have been a gang rape), but who appears later to various other women to explain to them how to achieve this liberation. Maria’s best friend and lover, whose daughter has already gone, asks her to join her, but (though heartbroken at the idea of losing her) Maria is still fearful. Eventually, though, when briefly unchained to wash herself, Maria joins a group of women at the home of one of the new women leaders. Mr Osagie and his friends track them down, pour petrol over the house and set it alight. Nevertheless, the women manage to vanish before getting burned. The men whose wives and daughters have “really gone”, as the men say in bewilderment, realise that they are “really alone now”; “pretend[ing] … that there was no reason to cry” (150). The women had worked the situation out earlier as “a hostile takeover of an inert god’s shift” (by another who can “see more than men”) – a new god whose arrival is “long overdue” (143). The desperate, deservedly lonely men are questioned by the narrative voice (Tatafo’s?): since “they’d made this world intentionally in their image, hadn’t they?” why have they only now, when left alone, “noticed” how much it feels “like hell?” (151). Eventually, the men fall upon one another – not for sex or comfort, but in rage and fury, and end up destroying one another.
There are sections of this dense narrative that are not featured in this account, which would get overlong without such omissions, but as an interlude I want to reassure first-time readers of Vagabonds! that Osunde has constructed her text in what rereading shows to be a satisfyingly, cleverly interlinked way. The mini-narratives, the “interruptions” to the main storyline, the longer and almost novelette-like pieces and the enormous cast of characters (human and non-human, alive in the flesh or dead-but-present beings – women of many ages, class backgrounds and a range of sexual orientations and preferences, and some men or male beings who are admirable, and some who are not) all inhabit the story and, from time to time, interact surprisingly and satisfyingly. Characters whose stories appeared to have been concluded, reappear (sometimes in new roles) and make fresh connections or regain old loves. Osunde’s novel is impressive in several ways, but in my view this mosaic-like but moving design is especially impressive. In the delight in which the author can be seen to take in the beauty of design, human variousness, extravagant gorgeousness and appreciation of the colours of the world, the text is a delight to encounter, like being shown a magnificent, ever-changing kaleidoscopic vision. I would also add that the omitted sections are certainly not “censored”, since it would be dishonest to “bowdlerise” a profile of what many would call a daring work that cocks a snoot at social hypocrisies. Nor are these sections in any way less interesting or fully part of the novel, as those yet to become the book’s readers will certainly see for themselves.
In any case, I believe it is a clever feature of Osunde’s design that its more explicit sections occur in more or less the final third of the novel. By this stage, the reader has learned to trust the narrative voice in its candour and in the cumulatively (socially) analytical case that it constructs to contend with prevalent gender prejudices, sexual orientation stereotyping and the repression, policing and violently punitive attitudes towards free expression of sex and gender preferences. The first section where this kind of (more open and challenging) depiction occurs, is titled, “There is love at home” (193-213). The 20-page length is in itself indicative of the care and detail with which Osunde explores both the setting and the characters and interactions depicted here. The scene is a nightclub (in Lagos) where a mature single woman named Star goes one night with her young playmate, identified only by her initial, F. Star is wealthy and powerful, a woman who can pull strings. F urges her to be adventurous, to see whether they can gain admission to “the Upper Room” (192), a whispered-about space of reportedly “endless rooms”, where “special [sexual] services” are offered to those who are allowed to enter after strict screening. Ironically, F is turned away at the door, while Star is invited to enter. Divine, the imposing woman who owns and manages the club, refers sneeringly to F as Star’s “little girlfriend” – she likes older women, “with plotlines in their foreheads and cheeks; darkness behind the eyes”. She likes women with “layers” to their being, women to whom she can show the way to “bringing the darkest of one’s desires to the surface of the skin” (195). Star first has to choose from the implements and substances available, which she wants to be used on or for her in the experience to come – which proceeds as follows, with Divine saying:
“What, you want to come, you want to come, that’s why you’re crying? Aren’t you a big woman? Don’t you run shit out in the world?” Star felt her shame (at this mockery) cartwheeling, shape-shifting, reintroducing itself wearing pleasure’s mad face and coming closer than close with the rudest mouth; a known beat forming between her legs; wet sliding down the inside of her thighs; Divine’s fingers slipping over her torso like an almost-there, then lower, to that soft flesh between her hipbone and trouble. Divine kept her eyes open, focused, stayed on Star’s and all their twinkling. Star blinked Divine gone, and then back again. “Someone smells desperate,” Divine said, squatting between Star’s legs. She never missed this part: this teasing like she might just taste it even though she knew she’d never go there. (Her tongue was someone else’s; all her clients knew this.) But it didn’t stop Star from pleading, pleading. She was here for this pain, for the torture. With a blindfold newly knotted behind her head, a waterfall of black silk tumbling behind her head, Star is all the tenses – future on past on present jamming hard, grinding in a stack. (198)
I don’t think there are many writers who could achieve so powerful and vivid a piece of erotic writing, as devoid of vulgarity as it is intense, complex and celebratory. Divine’s power in thus orchestrating this experience for Star is described as follows: “In every life she entered, she landed like a world. Even days into the [following] week, with Star in her glass high-rise office somewhere working, she knew Star would come back and back to this exact second when she let go and her body sang: ‘Divine, Divine, Divine’” (199). The woman Divine loves is known as Daisy – both their names self-chosen, both of them personae non gratae in the families they were born to, families unable to grant these splendid women the freedom to be what they are. The women’s shared, committed love keeps them steady and holds them in a tender bond:
Yes, all the things that hurt underneath a good life didn’t just go away because you were now loved. But it helped to see each other. And, they did. They saw each other so far past the pain that, no matter how hard their families tried to unsee them, they could never be invisible again. (204)
The strategy is to create and guard safe spaces for “unusual” women like themselves, hence the name of Divine’s club (where Daisy also works), “The Secret Space” (205). Still, “the working girls never deluded themselves into thinking the club was real. It only took stepping outside to remember that the place was pretty much a shiny hallucination” (206); indeed, “everything inside was a dream” (205). Something else the employees that staff the club also need to bear in mind is that only very rich sexually “aberrant” women are safe in Nigeria. In their training, they are taught from the start: “You’re from the same country, yes. But you’re not under the same law. [Although …] nothing is illegal for a rich Nigerian, [the girls need always to] remember [that their] client is not [their] friend” (206). But, at home in their own place, Daisy can tell Divine: “If they say we don’t exist, that they can’t see us anywhere except in rotten corners, in perverse bodies, how come I can see you and hold you and you’re holy?” (213).
In a late Tatafo interlude, he says of the proclamation of the 2014 SSMPA law (in a novel adaptation of Chinua Achebe’s famous novel title): “Things fell apart; people, too.” He adds: “I didn’t even need to press my ear to the road to hear that the reason they passed the bill was to secure the religious vote in the upcoming elections,” and “the air stank of self-righteousness” (217). And this in Nigeria, where the legal age of consent is set at 11! Because of this intensified threat against the life and well-being of everyone whose sexual inclinations are labelled illegal and sinful, ie Tatafo’s “Vagabonds”, he, too, sets out to help protect them like the fairygodgirls. The fact that the members of that group, as much as Tatafo himself, are fantasy figures dreamed up by Osunde, testifies to how little anger and concern there was and how few practical measures were available to assist LGBTQ Nigerians. Very few Nigerians could risk expressing these attitudes in public, and even secret attempts to help would be risky, even for usually unassailably powerful or wealthy people. Hence the writing and publication of Vagabonds! should be seen as (inter alia) a dream alternative of a “better life for all” and an act of indictment shouting “J’accuse …!” at the persecutors in state, church and social existence. The victims are, in Tatafo’s words, admirable “life-grabbers, love hunters”; he calls them “the rogues who do it, despite” (219), and in his eyes they are lovable for that. In further anecdotes, Tatafo shows us a girl whose memories of her parents’ – especially her mother’s – rejection of her for being lesbian bring her horrific nightmares, and who learns to forgive herself and to take up the responsibility of leading her own “different” life with courage. He also depicts two young working-class girls, both gay – a relationship in which the anxieties (again, expressed in nightmares) of the younger one are effectively soothed by the other’s strong faith and her powerful prayer: “God is here. God dey inside here, with me, inside my heart. God is welcome here” (226). These two young women’s Christian faith is inclusive and not a manual for ostracism and persecution of “different” people; it makes room for diversity and is able to comfort those labelled “strange” and “wicked”. However, in another mini-narrative, a deep and loving relationship is ended by one young woman’s timidity and resulting choice of resuming a life in which conventional expectations are conformed to: “Some people could be themselves without fear,” she thinks, “but she wasn’t one of them. She wasn’t one of them at all” (227). Her final words to her heartbroken but forgiving beloved are: “I love you. … More than the world, more than most things. But I choose simple. I choose normal and stable. I choose the boring script. I choose being my parent’s daughter. I choose church and the choir. I choose what I know” (228-229). Her “quaking” voice betrays her sorrow at giving up on a fulfilling love (and life), but one that (because of the presiding social and familial mores) would cause hurt to dear ones and a disturbance of all her family’s and her own “normalities” – the “safety” of a life lived within conventional boundaries. And there are, of course, others apart from herself and her female beloved to consider. It is clear that despite the foregrounding of “outright” lesbian women, many of their lives cushioned by the privileges and safety that wealth can buy, as shown in Osunde’s novel, there is an understanding of the considerations of those unable finally to abandon conformity to other’s expectations – for this, too, is a form of love. Hence Helen, the timider partner in the relationship evoked above, states that “she’d give everything to correct her heart, to love someone she could take home to her tired parents – not a girl” (229). The author evokes the making of such a deeply painful choice with compassion and (I believe) respect, rather than sneering condescension – and, in doing so, demonstrates that the text is imbued with humanity, and balances LGBTQ advocacy with recognition that, given the social realities of our time, some cannot “go there”. And the woman whom Helen loves, embodies this; it is not a creed “preached” at the reader. In her words, “she knew that breaking up, too, was sometimes an act of courage,” and she does that, letting Helen go. Even as it breaks her heart to do so, and she is “tired”, she is able to acknowledge that “a cost might be too high for someone else”, and to “tak[e] back your hand” from that person is “also love sometimes” (229). It is the tenderness with which Osunde can evoke these further and difficult implications of holding on to love in a society of skewed and unjust gender rules that sets her writing apart as a work of impressive verbal art and expansive imagination, and neither a crusade nor a pamphlet.
In a later section, the thoughts of a troubled young boy are evoked:
“God hates boys who love boys,” said the Sunday school teacher, “and God doesn’t make mistakes. Boys like that go to hell and burn there, with murderers and people who do bad things with their hands. All of it is sin, and in Godrithmics, sin equals sin equals sin.” So what am I, then? thinks Junior. If I’m still like this, then did God not make me? Or did God make me on a day when He was too tired, when He was taking a break from being God? (234)
So, Junior “repents” (235) at the thought of the pain Jesus suffered to redeem sins like his. But that very night, despite his resolve, he dreams again of his friend Ade and his gorgeous smile. He is so angry with himself and with Ade and so unable to deal with his guilt and shame (he’s only 14), that Junior, upon seeing his own face in the bathroom mirror, smashes his fist into it and shatters it. He’ll be in trouble for this, but has to calm his thoughts, so he goes out into the garden. His family members are all asleep; it is night-time, and they have no idea what is going on with him. He looks up at the sky and suddenly notices it: “he swears he can see all the stars in the sky” – and, in an instant, he hears their “message”: “can’t you see it’s not us? It’s not us hating you.” In a single instant, relief floods Junior, for he “understands this finally: God being larger than everything. God saying no. … Big enough, like that song said, to hold his love” (236). He will no longer implore God to kill him for his “sin”. In this touching, memorable vignette, Osunde’s own tender-hearted gaze permeates the scene.
Two more small narratives, both of chance encounters that grow into something more permanent, follow – one of two women, the other of two men. The next is of a woman falling to pieces because of a break-up. Aware that she’ll have huddled up, weeping throughout and profoundly depressed, for days on end, a lovingly faithful friend turns up and insists on being admitted to the flat. She has brought groceries, and she does the house-cleaning in the dirty, neglected areas, makes a simple yet very nutritious meal that she literally feeds the sorrowing friend and (when she is strengthened by the food and the company, and she has at last showered and dressed) takes her to a party in a space safe for women. This, too, is therapy, for the visitor (Julie, her friend’s “longest-standing love”) knows that:
This is always what it takes to resave your life: an odd night, some wild body volume, irresistible waists, eyes falling so low you don’t even know how the fuck you’re getting home. Here, behold your reasons. Take it far enough and you might even want to live forever. The country was going mad outside anyway, raining bodies in furious streams, so they had to move faster and madder than it (says the narrative voice). (248)
It is after this section that the thematic passage of Gold and her mother, which I transposed to help “introduce” Osunde’s text, occurs. It is succeeded by a Tatafo-narrated section enigmatically subtitled, “Water no get enemy” (261). In it, Tatafo reveals that Water has being, a capacity for choice and a “voice” – and, wearied by Èkó’s cruelties, wanton irresponsibility and inefficiencies, has decided to abandon the city that he constitutes, which will wither without her saving presence. She is by far the greater god. Tatafo’s reading of the situation is that the city spirit’s way of ignoring, neglecting and exploiting the vast majority of Lagosians, the poor, is what has brought the city to this point. He articulates at last, now that he has broken its hold on him, what he has long wanted to say to Èkó:
You can’t be the poverty capital of the world and be a megacity all at once. If 80 percent of your body is suffering/withering/dying, then you are killing your whole self. You cannot afford to neglect that much of you. Sure, there are those who have plenty, but how many are they? What will their money do when you’re facing a problem money can’t solve? They’ll do you like you did your father. They’ll carry their things and leave to find new homes. (266)
In this way, Osunde indicates the ecological vengeance (as one might term it) that will beset our world’s exploitative societies, wasteful of people at least as much as of other essential resources.
Osunde gives the novel’s concluding section an “impossible” date, “December 32, 20XX” (269), to indicate its nature as a type of wish-fulfilment fantasy in which many of the previously encountered characters play roles. This is going to involve a citywide power cut. Its initial effect is both viciously vengeful and hilarious: a loudmouthed, anti-LGBTQ politician, with “people behind bars in his name, bodies in the ground in his name” (273), who (like his friends) allows himself the use of beautiful robot toy boys, is in his pool with two of them, being sexually “serviced”, when the power cuts out. One robot’s jaw clamps on his penis, the other on a nipple as he flails about, but with everyone else (guests and staff) inside his now darkened mansion, no one hears his anguished cries as he drowns. Many of his guests (mostly fellow politicians) probably die deaths almost as agonised as his. Some of the dead and buried victims of vigilantes’ anti-LGBTQI attacks are resurrected on this, a type of “Day of the Dead” for Nigerians; Johnny, the former driver of the mega-millionaire Mr M thug, is reunited with his beloved Livinus (the PA), whose head was lopped off as he lay in Johnny’s arms and started breaking the rule of speechlessness of the establishment. They can at last speak to each other, if only for a night. A hypocritical pastor, who’s ranted against people of “different” sexual orientation, is terrifyingly burned to cinders by “firebirds”, avenging his victims in the awed sight of all his congregants. For the “revived” victims of prejudice, a wonderful concert with danceable, thrilling music is laid on – while the music of the living at their own concert is short-circuited by the power outage, forcing them into introspection: “mind[ing] their own business instead of other people’s business”; “they[’ll] have to look at who they are” and, significantly, “once you see yourself [even if only for one night], you can’t unsee yourself” (286). There are further revivals and reunions, also among the living and between those living in the flesh and beloved “undead”, revived people.
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In this celebratory context, a favourite male customer of Wura’s speaks the perfect concluding words for this outstanding novel: “If anyone deserves to live, … it is us. It is us, after all this dying we have done” (303).
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In this celebratory context, a favourite male customer of Wura’s speaks the perfect concluding words for this outstanding novel: “If anyone deserves to live, … it is us. It is us, after all this dying we have done” (303).