NIGERIAN WRITER WHO FELL IN LOVE WITH BINYAVANGA

BY EVAN MWANGI 

 If I were to write a novel to respond to the anti-gay politics seeping through the Ugandan border into Kenya, it would probably be like the Nigerian author Jude Dibia’s Walking with Shadows. But I’d write mine in my mother tongue.

Dibia’s novel is a fearless book that is reputed to be the first work by a Nigerian literary artiste to explore in detail the theme of male homosexuality.

Dibia is a bold writer. One of the many admirers of Kenya’s Binyavanga Wainaina, the Nigerian writer does not shy away from taboo topics, including writing graphically about incest. His other favourite authors include Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Virginia Woolf.

Besides Binyavanga, among Dibia’s contemporaries the Nigerian novelist is most closely drawn to the Zimbabwean Petina Gappah (author of An Elegy for Easterly) and NoViolet Bulawayo (pen name of Elizabeth Tshele, author of We Need New Names).

Born in 1975, Dibia belongs to the “third generation” of Nigerian writers, a loose group of artistes that comprises such household names as Chris Abani, Helon Habila, Sefi Atta, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Adichie is the best known in Kenya among these writers.

Dibia’s Walking with Shadows was first published in Nigeria by Blacksands Books in 2005.

Noting the pervasive presence of subversive queer desire, one of the leading queer theorists in the world today, Tavia Nyong’o (cousin to our golden Lupita), urges us to take seriously that “figure of absolute abjection that is, paradoxically, part of our everyday experience.”

Dibia uses language exquisitely to examine an issue that many writers would give a wide berth: homosexuality among married men in Africa.

Sympathy for gay people in Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters (1965) is very oblique. It took Gaurav Desai’s essay, ‘Out in Africa’ (1997), to clarify to most critics that Soyinka’s novel is not homophobic in its portrayal of one of its characters, Joe Golder, as both African American and gay.

Like the South African K. Sello Duiker — author of The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001) and Thirteen Cents (2000) — Dibia is more open in his sympathies towards gay men than Soyinka in The Interpreters. However, Dibia avoids the confrontational tone we encounter in Duiker, some of whose passages read like angry pornography for the queer oppressed.

Dibia’s novel is a deftly told story about Adrian, a Nigerian head of a risk business unit. His job description connotes the “risks” he has to negotiate around, as he is also a gay man in the closet, married to a beautiful woman, the father of gorgeous daughter, and a respected mentor to many young men.

It becomes public that Adrian is gay, thanks to Tayo Onasanya, a former employee whom Adrian had sacked for corruption. Tayo learnt about Adrian’s sexual orientation from a lesbian mutual friend.

The narrator depicts in detail and with great sympathy the crisis that hits Adrian when his wife, Ada, is told about his sexual past.

His relatives’ responses are varied. Younger people sympathetically reach out to Adrian, but his elder brother, Chiedu, engages a priest to exorcise the ghost of gayness from Adrian.

The novel broaches several issues about sexuality. It demonstrates that even the most liberal people might become suddenly conservative when it comes to homosexuality.

Adrian’s wife, an innovative interior designer, is not one to believe in such a thing as an immutable African culture. But it is impossible for Ada to even begin to wrap her mind around her husband’s non-normative sexual desire.

Although he insists he had not slept with a man since he met his wife, Ada cannot believe what she has heard about her husband’s sexuality even without waiting for him to put everything in context.

She asks: “You knew this and still deceived me and still married me and still had the guts to make love to me and put your thing in me!”

The infelicitous repetition of “still” signals her shock, anger and bewilderment. The narrator rubs in her disbelief to also underscore her coldness towards a man she had claimed to love.

“She could not bring herself to look at him,” the narrator says. “She kept trying to wipe out the mental image in her head about him and another man.”

Queer theorists mostly see sexual identity as socially constructed. But Dibia’s novel seems to present Adrian’s gayness as congenital. He has always liked boys and enjoys playing girls’ games as a kid.

In presenting Adrian’s homosexuality as somewhat in-born, the author is trying to enhance our sympathy towards the character. There is nothing Adrian can do about his gayness. He would even want to leave it behind him, to no avail.

MANY VIRTUES

The novel has many virtues in its characterisation. While men are usually presented negatively in novels critical of patriarchy, African feminist novels usually depict at least one good man who is sympathetic to women’s issues in order to avoid demonising all men as gender-insensitive.

Following this trajectory, Dibia added an episode in a revised edition of the novel published in South Africa in 2007, in which a straight young man, Rotimi, stands by Adrian in his troubles at work.

We learn from Rotimi, one of the novel’s voices of reason, that right-thinking straight people should always stand with the oppressed minorities.

From its inception in the 1950s, African writing has always painted the folly of a society that mistreats its minorities. For example, in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the society disintegrates partly because it pushes its minorities to defect to new religions.

Male gay novels tend to represent women negatively, including lesbians. Although we don’t see many positive traits among female characters in Dibia’s Walking with Shadows, Dibia is deferential to the few women who feature in the novel.

His next novel, Unbridled (2007) is, to the best of my knowledge, the only African novel by a male writer that convincingly uses an autobiographical female voice. It is hard to tell from the story itself that the author is male.

Reminiscent of Nuruddin Farah’s Ebla in From a Crooked Rib (1970), Ngozi in Dibia’s Unbridled narrates with great candour her experiences in abusive relationships. But unlike Farah’s novel, Dibia’s work uses the first person narrative voice.

Besides Walking with Shadows and Unbridled, Dibia is the author of Blackbird (2011), an equally provocative novel about the moral and political corruption in Africa.

Dibia’s Walking with Shadows demonstrates that queer is the new colonised. But it does not explore in detail the factors behind homophobia among African elites, except suggesting that homophobes are either stuck in the past or are negatively influenced by American Pentecostalism.

According to Richard Ryan, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, homophobes are usually closeted gay people.

The all-male anti-gay caucus in Kenya’s Parliament and the equally comical all-male Maendeleo ya Wanaume should be read in a similar light when they make statements dismissing “gayism” (sic) and “resbianism” (sic): they are acting out their repressed homosexuality.

evanmwangi@gmail.com

Culled from: http://mobile.nation.co.ke/lifestyle/Jude-Dibia-Binyavanga-Wainaina-Homosexuality-Africa/-/1950774/2235606/-/format/xhtml/-/phy7a/-/index.html

SEX IN AFRICA IS MORE DIVERSE THAN GAY-OR-STRAIGHT.

BY CHANTAL ZABUS

On 13 January the Nigerian president, Goodluck Jonathan, signed a bill against gay relationships, outlawing gay marriage, public displays of same-sex relationships and membership in gay groups. A few days later, Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, refused to sign an anti-homosexuality bill that has been in the works since 2009 on the grounds that there are other ways of dealing with “an abnormal person”. Pondering the issue earnestly, he wrote: “Do we kill him/her? Do we imprison him/her?”

Museveni is not alone in pondering how to kill sexual dissenters. In the wake of the trial for “sodomy” of the first president of Zimbabwe, Canaan Banana, his successor Robert Mugabe spoke of homosexuals in a 2002 campaign speech as “mad person[s]” who will be sent to jail. “We don’t want to import it [homosexuality] to our country,” he said. “We have our own culture, our own people.”

At least 76 United Nations member countries have laws that criminalise same-sex relations; some 37 African countries, along with Middle Eastern countries, constitute a majority of those. It is still dangerous and even life-threatening to be out in Africa.

In many places, homosexuality – itself a slippery category, with roots in 19th century medical literature – is still thought to be quintessentially “un-African”. South African Bishops were the only ones among African Anglican bishops not to help defeat the Church of England’s 1998 attempt to improve attitudes toward homosexuality. The Church in Africa, especially in its Evangelical garb, is still often ready to identify homosexuality as an abomination to God. Ugandan film-maker Roger Ross Williams, director of God Loves Uganda (2013), argues that American missionaries are often behind this frenzy against gay sex – this in a country that happens to be one of the top global consumers of gay porn.

Homosexuality is also often depicted as an import from the deviant west. But the African continent has always been more queer than generally acknowledged; it has always rainbow-hazed into a huge range of sexualities. It is therefore a serious matter of political and critical concern that homosexuality (of all kinds) and African cultures are read as mutually exclusive. In fact, many African sexualities fall outside of the purview of the law – and even of language.

Same-sex practices are common throughout the African continent; it is the claiming of homosexual identity that remains widely forbidden. The question of what constitutes “sex” in Africa, and in particular same-sex sex, is still something of a blind spot. As the work of Marc Epprecht has revealed, not all African men who have sex with men or women who have sex with women think of themselves as gay, homosexual, bisexual or queer. They are seldom members of activist LGBT organisations and are not computed as such in the health literature on HIV/AIDS. In Africa, as in Latin America and other parts of the world, there is a tension between homosexual identity and homosexual practice.

Anything but straightforward

What we see in recent legal developments is the policing of African or Islamic same-sex desire as a form of resistance to westernisation. Terms such as “gay” and “lesbian” (which reek of western liberation struggles), and more recently “queer” (a movement generated in academe), certainly point to the globalisation of sexual identity. These words were originally imported to the African continent via English, French and other western languages, and often clash with indigenous designations and practices. In South Africa, a “masculine man” playing a dominant role in a relationship with another man is called “a straight man”, and is not perceived as “gay” because he acts as penetrator during sexual intercourse.

The term “male lesbians” is an attempt at translating the northern Nigerian Hausa for “passive” male partners, or “yan kifi”; conversely, “lesbian men” in Namibia are women who play the dominant “butch” role in a same-sex relationship. Even though the terms “butch” and “femme” are not known in Namibian Damara culture, various sexual practices and dress codes have some resonance with the western butch-femme dynamic. Meanwhile, in Kampala, Uganda, where sections 140 and 141 of the Penal Code condemn same-sex relations, some Ugandan women identify themselves as “tommy-boys” – biological women who see themselves as men (rather than “lesbians”), who need to be the dominant partner during sex, and who often pass as men.

From Senegal to Southern Africa, many African gay men invoke animistic beliefs in ancestor spirit possession. A gay Shona man in Zimbabwe might claim he is inhabited by his “auntie”, whereas in Senegal, the “gor-djigeen” (“male-female” in the Wolof language) is haunted by the primordial severance between male and female in the creation of the universe.

In her autobiography Black Bull, Ancestors and Me, written in the safety provided by the new South African constitution and its ground-breaking sexual orientation clause, Nkunzi Zandile Nkabinde recounts her gradual empowerment as a lesbian “sangoma”, or traditional healer. But beyond the famed sexual orientation clause, the relationship between her and her “ancestral wife” is sanctioned by Zulu spiritual possession cults, which often privilege female men over male women.

Upon closer scrutiny, it appears that lesbian sangomas and their ancestral wives are not united in a common identity based on shared sexual orientation but rather are distinguished from each other according to gender difference, complicated by spirituality. Ancestral wives can only exist in their relation to masculine females or “male women”, the way “dees” (a term from the last syllable of the English word “lady”) exist solely in their relation to “toms” (from “tomboys”) in Thailand. Thai toms are capable (“khlong-tua”) biological women who protect and perform sexually for dees or female partners, without toms and dees being thought of as lesbians. Even though Zandile Nkabinde, unlike the Thai tom, translates her gender identity into “tomboy”, “lesbian” and “butch”, the Zulu label for her “ancestral wife” is simply not part of the global gay rights vocabulary.

Both in and outside of Africa, there is a frenzied debate raging around the instability of gender and sex, fuelled by a complex array of interests. These legal skirmishes are at their worst potentially deadly in Africa, as the Ugandan example showed. But the answer to these conflicts goes far beyond western gay/straight categories. The array of African homosexualities that is already accommodated by indigenous cultures shows how we must embrace and protect a diversity that dare not speak its many names.

CHANTAL ZABUS HOLDS THE “INSTITUT UNIVERSITAIRE DE FRANCE” (IUF) CHAIR OF COMPARATIVE POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES AND GENDER STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY PARIS 13-SORBONNE-PARIS-CITÉ, FRANCE. © COPYRIGHT © 2010–2014, THE CONVERSATION TRUST (UK).

HTTP://THECONVERSATION.COM/SEX-IN-AFRICA-IS-MORE-DIVERSE-THAN-GAY-OR-STRAIGHT-22500

- Culled from: http://www.arsrc.org/features/sex-in-africa-is-more-diverse-than-gay-or-straight.html#sthash.nZmSue8q.dpuf