Akwaeke Emezi’s Love Letter to Eastern Nigeria

In their sophomore novel, The Death of Vivek Oji, published five years ago, Akwaeke Emezi upends conventions of plot, genre and place to tell a riveting story of how three generations of an Igbo family reckon with the unpredictability of desire and the certainty of death. 

For casual readers of fiction from Nigeria, it is easy to assume that queerness is lived with the most vivacity in Nigeria’s big cities. The stories written about these cities are urgent, insistent and larger than life. The divine and the depraved seek absolution of their guilt in the heady cocktail of mood-altering substances and distance from their self-loathing in the amoral playgrounds of underground raves and pop-up orgies in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt. But if you dig a little deeper, you will find a growing collection of stories by a canon of Igbo writers that explore a different kind of queerness. The queerness that unfolds in the rustic villages and industrial towns of eastern Nigeria: sexual awakenings that consecrate childhood bedrooms, love that blossoms in the dark bellies of boys’ quarters, truths whispered in the quiet halls of seminaries and convents, and reckonings that test the strength of family and challenge the conventions of tradition. Akwaeke Emezi earns their place within this canon of Igbo writers, not just for their work, but also for their truth.

A month before the release of their first novel, Freshwater, Emezi ‘came out’ as an ogbanje, a genderless spirit being known by many names across different Nigerian cosmologies. By stepping into their identity, they could no longer be contained by the binary, either in their expression of gender or their capacity to love. As one of Nigeria’s few openly queer writers, Emezi’s debut was awaited with bated breath. Freshwater was a complex book that externalized their struggle with embracing their spirit-first identity and making peace with the emotional carnage this kind of transformation wrought on those around them. But it was their second book, The Death of Vivek Oji, that demonstrated the transformational power of those ideas, through the experiences of Vivek, the book’s titular character. The successes of both books, built on the groundbreaking work of authors like Chinelo Okparanta, gave permission to other writers to do magnificent things with queer literature...