Aretha Phiri, Senior lecturer, Department of Literary Studies in English, Rhodes University

Rocío Cobo-Piñero, Lecturer and postdoctoral fellow, Universidad de Sevilla

Queering the Black Atlantic: Transgender Spaces in Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater is a paper by Rocío Cobo-Piñero. It considers Emezi’s award-winning semi-autobiographical novel about Ada, who is an ogbanje, a spirit born in a human body. It uses the novel to suggest ways in which emerging African queer literature could disrupt traditional, heterosexist readings of the world. The paper specifically addresses Paul Gilroy’s 1993 text The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Aretha Phiri interviewed the author.

Aretha Phiri: Where queer bodies in Africa continue to be violently oppressed, what are the implications of a book like Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater?

Rocío Cobo-Piñero: African literature has witnessed a growth of memoir and fiction that deals with queer sexualities. For example, Chris Abani’s GraceLand in 2004, Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees in 2015, and Freshwater in 2018.

The three are coming-of-age novels with queer protagonists: Abani chronicles the life of Elvis Oke in a slum of Lagos during the 1970s. Okparanta narrates the story of a young lesbian girl during the Nigerian civil war. And Emezi explores the separate selves of a transgender adolescent in contemporary Nigeria and as a migrant abroad.

It is interesting and contradictory that these authors come from Nigeria, the country with some of the most draconian laws against homosexuality on the continent, as well as some of its most noted literary voices. When the anti-gay bill was passed in Nigeria in 2014, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie used her fame to speak out, calling it unjust and undemocratic.