Queer Temporalities & Epistemologies: Jude Dibia's Walking with Shadows & Chinelo Okparanta's Under the Udala Trees

Summary

Nigerian gay and lesbian literature has recently experienced something of a ‘coming out,’ signalled on the one hand by the publication of two novel-length explorations of the complex identity negotiations of same-sex desiring subjects in the context of a homophobic Nigerian society, and on the other hand by scholarly attention to these works as ‘emergent’ forms. Yet, Jude Dibia's Walking with Shadows (2005) and Chinelo Okparanta's Under the Udala Trees (2015) – hailed as the first Nigerian gay and lesbian novels, respectively – are not the first literary treatments of homosexuality in Nigerian history. There have been previously the well-known character of Joe Golder in Wole Soyinka's The Interpreters (1965), the arguably queer Elvis Oke of Chris Abani's Graceland (2004), and the characters of Daisy and Ruth in Tess Onwueme's Tell it to Women (1992, 1997). What makes Dibia's and Okparanta's works resonate as significantly different from earlier works, however, is their exploration of the dual problematics of identity formation and subjectification of non-heteronormative sexualities. In these works, the same-sex desiring protagonists struggle to reconcile ostensibly private self-knowledge and desires against publicly circulating normative sexual discourses, only to find that ‘private’ desires are, from their inception, subject to public speculation and control within an already constituted normative discourse field. It is only when one's desire is outside the bounds of the recognisable that the public nature of private desires becomes apparent. Thus, a central problem in these works is how to locate an epistemological stance that would not merely pit private desire against public sexual discourse, but rather to shed light on the ways in which the knowledge of a normative public attempts to speak in place of individual self-knowledge.

Public discourses of homosexuality and anti-homosexuality at the local and national levels in Nigeria tend to be citational, arguing on behalf of either an originary heterosexual past or a past in which alternative sexual identities had a ‘traditional’ role. In both cases, the strength of the argument is presumed to stand on the idea of a citational chain stretching back to time immemorial in which the presence or absence of homosexuality is consistent over time. Only now, the argument goes, do we see something different happening in the realm of sexual knowledge.