On a Progressive Platform for New African Literature

How does a hot party keep getting hotter? It takes an attentive host, interesting guests, a rich mix of familiar and new faces, great conversation, and some je ne sais quoi that makes it feel like everybody’s best-kept secret. Brittle Paper, an Afrocentric digital literary space, has nailed the formula. It’s where many of the world’s hottest African storytellers gather, including a surprising number of LGBTQ writers across all genres.

Brittle Paper hosts a dynamic, progressive, feminist, and often very queer conversation. In the nearly ten years since its founding, it’s become the go-to place to read some of the freshest writing in all genres, along with pop culture takes on film, music, and politics. Writers tackle gay desire, homophobia, and anti-gay hate crimes, as well as the nation-state, exile, colonialism, and the persecution and isolation they feel at home or abroad, especially in countries with virulently homophobic laws. In the process, they push at the conventions of Western literature in interesting, creative ways.

Some of the website’s contributors live near Lagos, where the team is based; others divide their time abroad, including in the US, teaching and studying. And a growing number have publicly come out to spotlight underground queer stories and life in Nigeria and elsewhere.

These include Akwaeke Emezi, a Tamil-Nigerian trans writer, video artist, and author of the debut novel Freshwater, who’s snagged a slew of accolades from The New Yorker, NPR, the Chicago Public Library, and Buzzfeed, along with a 2019 UK Women’s Prize for Fiction nomination (the first trans writer ever to do so), and a finalist nod for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Emezi, who identifies as trans and non-binary, wrote about their transition in an article last year for New York magazine and came out further as ogbanje, an Igbo word for ancestral trickster spirits that may embody a human form. Freshwater tells the lyrical story of young African woman born with ogbanje who attends a US university and her changing relationship to those spirits, a story clearly informed by lived experience.

At Brittle Paper, subjects like whether ogbanje have a gender aren’t treated as magical realism or fantasy or mere speculative fiction, but as aspects of Nigerian culture that reflect daily reality. Other writers similarly incorporate the everyday magic of African spirituality while challenging stereotypical notions of queerness.

The steady emergence of so many openly queer writers is particularly impressive given a homophobic backlash in several countries, including Nigeria and Brunei, linked to hardline religious fundamentalism. In August, Kenya rejected a repeal to its stiff British-era sodomy law, a decision decried by LGBTQ activists there.

At the same time, a 2017 survey conducted by NOI Polls reported a 7 percent rise in public acceptance of homosexuality in Nigeria, while 39 percent of people surveyed backed equal rights for gay citizens in access to public services like education. That’s due in part to the increased public activism, visibility, and bravery of both feminist and openly gay writers including the pioneering Jude Dibia, author of the coming of age novel Walking with Shadows (2005); followed by two other novels, Unbridled (2007), and Blackbird (2011). In May 2017, openly gay writer Romeo Oriogun won the Brunel International African Poetry Prize in May 2017 for “his beautiful and passionate writing on masculinity and desire in the face of LGBT criminalization and persecution,” a sign of growing global support.

The prize-winning writers Unoma Azuah and Chinelo Okparanta have also broken barriers. Oriogun and Arinze Ifeakandu launched new LGBTQ-themed magazines and collectives in response to being left out of mainstream publications: 14, named for Nigeria’s 14-year anti-gay law, launched in 2018, Kabaka Magazine, named after Mwanga II, a legendary 19th-century gay African kabaka, or king, who ruled in Buganda. Meanwhile, Brittle Paper has deliberately expanded its output. “It’s very important that queer writers are seen as frequently as heterosexual writers are—seen everywhere,” deputy editor Otosirieze Obi-Young said. “That’s one way to start normalizing the conversation.”

Brittle Paper’s role in promoting the visibility of gay African voices is part of the broader vision of its pioneering founding editor, Ainehi Edoro, a self-described straight ally and an assistant professor of Global Black Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Edoro founded her progressive blog in 2010 as a feminist platform for Africans’ innovative approaches to language and storytelling as it adapts to the expanding contemporary genres of speculative fiction, flash fiction, and pulp-fiction. Edoro sought to build a greater bridge between literature and popular culture, especially music; the blog reports on Africa’s literary scene the way some cover fashion shows and pop stars, including dishy gossip. She was quick to invite feminist and queer contributors on board, and today, Brittle Paper’s staff of four remains tiny, but has an expanding roster of contributors.

Deputy editor Otosirieze Obi-Young started as a contributor. At 25, Otosirieze, who prefers to be called by his first name, is also a consummate multitasker. Born in Aba, a small city in eastern Nigeria, he’s a writer, editor, journalist, scholar, blogger, and fan of English football. He used to teach English at Godfrey Okoye University in Enugu, Nigeria. At Brittle Paper, he also edits its Art Naija Series, which he founded and brought to the magazine; it is a sequence of themed e-anthologies of writing and visual art exploring different aspects of Nigerian identity. Edoro has proclaimed him “utterly brilliant” with a “good eye for generative ideas.” Brittle Paper has released 12 anthologies to date, only one in print.

I reached Otosirieze by phone on a weekend night, as the phone lines between Oakland and Aba in eastern Nigeria crackled with static. Otosirieze is a proud local, one who eschews big-city Lagos for life closer to Aba, where he still has a strong community. Aba is a bustling commercial center and also the site of the 1929 Aba Women’s Riots, a watershed feminist milestone that drew thousands of Igbo women demanding greater rights.

In the first Art Naija anthology, Enter Naija: The Book of Places, which focused on cities in Nigeria, Otosirieze and some of the contributors addressed the misconceptions people hold about Aba, including the idea that the city doesn’t produce people who read, write, and participate in intellectual life. “I tell people I grew up in Aba and they don’t believe it,” he said. Aba also features prominently in Otosirieze’s unpublished short story collection, You Sing of a Longing, and is the setting for his novel-in-progress.

Otosirieze’s father is a Christian minister and a seer in Aba; a philanthropist, he’s a role model for his son who admires his generosity. “He gives things to people, that’s what I picked up,” said Otosirieze. His late mother was also spiritual, a staunch Catholic who was interested in Buddhism, Judaism, and other religions. Shy and bookish, a young Otosirieze devoured religious texts and other books. “I read all the things as a child; I was deeply religious and spiritual,” he said.

His childhood was marked by daily outings with his father to distribute food cooked in their kitchen to street beggars. “He started this because he came from serious poverty and so, later, when he had the means, he was doing this as part of his personal covenant,” Otosirieze said. “Being a seer, he performs a community service.”

In 2005, the same year Jude Dibia released his groundbreaking book, Otosirieze’s obsession with English football led to a first writing effort. “I dreamt of all these matches where Chelsea would beat Arsenal 6-0,” he recalled, still amused. “I wrote imaginary match reports, filling so many notebooks.” In 2009, he tried an early hand at love poems for a class assignment. Then in 2012, he was asked to review the novel Half a Yellow Sun by Chimananda Ngozi Adiche. “Midway through the book, my life changed,” he said. “That was the moment I decided to pursue writing seriously.”

Otosirieze’s own fiction began to flow, and he began writing a short story modeled on a past unrequited crush for a straight boy. Such relationships usually end badly in African fiction about gay lives—often with a murder or suicide. He shared a different story, and his subject—a gay-straight male friendship—addressed queer male affection. “We need to tell the truth about our lives, the many truths about masculinity,” he said.

He feels an urgency to this task, given the increasing violence directed at LGBTQ citizens in so many African countries. Right now, he says, “a good number” of the LGBTQ writers he knows have chosen or seek exile; those who remain live in constant worry of being arbitrarily arrested or targeted by hard-line religious groups targeting gays. Nigeria’s draconian Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act in 2014 has led to arrests, beatings, targeted murders and a push among LGBTQ citizens to seek safety in exile. On April 3, Brunei’s Sultanate passed a law mandating a death sentence by stoning or whipping for sodomy as well as adultery and rape. Kenya’s court backing of the sodomy law has newly frightened gay citizens there. Women’s rights have also been under attack by some fundamentalist Islamists, including the jihadist Boko Haram militia in West Africa.

As an editor, the list of queer writers he admires is so long he protested when asked to pick his top five, then ten. “Only ten? But there are so many deserving!” He mentioned Dibia along with Arinze Ifeakandu, Romeo Oriogun, and Pwaangulongii Dauod, as well as Jude Dibia and journalist Chike Frankie Edozien, whose Lives of Great Men: Living and Loving as an African Gay Man won the 2018 Lammy for best gay memoir. Other notables are Mark Gevisser, Olumide Popoola, Chibuihe Achimba, Trifonia Melibia Obono, and Efemia Chela. He also named Unoma Azuah, whose 2011 novel, Edible Bones, won the Aidoo-Snyder Book Award and who edited 2016’s Blessed Body: The Secret Lives of LGBT Nigerian Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender.

He tells me Chinelo Okparanta’s short story, “America”—shortlisted for the Caine Prize—was the first Nigerian short story about queerness to gain a broad readership. It’s featured in her story collection Happiness, Like Water, also a Lammy winner. Her 2015 novel, Under the Udala Trees, was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and also won a Lammy.

In 2016, Otosirieze himself was among four Nigerians shortlisted for the Gerald Kraak Prize for his short story, “You Sing of a Longing.” The prize recognizes writing and visual art centered on queer experience, social justice, and gender. Now he sits on this year’s judge’s panel for the Gerald Kraak, in addition to being an editor at 14 and a judge for the prestigious Miles Morland Foundation Writing Scholarship.

Otosirieze said he’s excited to push forward lesser-known talents, because there are few African-led mainstream outlets for queer writers. “Most literary initiatives start with and run on nothing but their founder’s money, like Brittle Paper,” Otosirieze said. “There’s so much that we could do, that we want to do, but for funds. Queer writers and projects in Africa need opportunities, but their founders, so full of ideas and daring, continue to push forward without those. I imagine what could be if we had those.”