A Novel-in-Stories of Queerness and Corruption in Lagos

VAGABONDS!
By Eloghosa Osunde

It seems like a riddle: What’s a metropolis, a deity, a masquerade ball and a panopticon, all on the identical time? The reply, in Eloghosa Osunde’s teeming debut novel-in-stories, “Vagabonds!,” is Lagos, Nigeria: the capital also referred to as the “cityspirit” Èkó, a capricious power made up of 21 million individuals all watching and being watched. “Flip your again,” town warns, in a “welcome be aware” at the start of the guide. “As a result of in case you dey watch for us to show our personal again and begin to go, then my pricey, na the burden of our eye go absolutely kill you.” Town operates on a specific algorithm, it turns into clear: Wealthy women and men commit crimes with impunity, sporting “bodymasks” that cover their true selves and demand respect, whereas the poor are scapegoated and spat out by a vindictive Èkó. Appearances are paramount. “It was Nigeria in spite of everything,” Osunde writes within the story “Gold.” “Individuals had their necks damaged for ruining the aesthetics on a regular basis.”

Vagabonds spoil the aesthetics, in fact. They’re the outsiders of town, roving or displaced — however additionally they embody, based on a particularly Nigerian definition, anybody publicly queer. The Lagosians in these tales “stay within the cracks,” in a society the place same-sex romance is unlawful and sometimes punished by violence. Intercourse occurs furtively, within the penthouses of high-rises nobody can see into; relationships blossom at home events and crumble beneath the burden of societal expectations and concern. Osunde’s Lagos can also be thronged with supernatural beings: The satan seems greater than as soon as, taking on individuals’s our bodies for intercourse and a sure darkish model of justice. Fairygodgirls — “all-the-way-gone ladies, already-dead ladies, and so, untouchable ladies” — watch over the susceptible residing ladies whom “nobody will get offended sufficient for.” However ghosts aren’t simply the spirits of the lifeless, and the road between bodily and metaphorical invisibility is without end hazy. “We’re ghosts as a result of we’ve got to be, as a result of our lives rely upon passing and being handed by,” thinks Daisy, a dancer at a women-only nightclub. “However we’re ghosts who see different ghosts usually, who maintain them and hug them” and sleep with them, “in our bedrooms, doorways closed.”

Among the most indelible characters recur via a number of tales, usually in feminine dyads: moms and daughters, lovers, pals. Wura Blackson, a genius at designing attire as loud, lovely and distracting as Lagos society requires, doesn’t fairly know what to make of her daughter, Rain, who seems in the future absolutely grown and freed from the strictures of that society. “Only a warning,” Rain says. “I don’t include a masks. Or a filter. I say what I truly assume.” Osunde is particularly good at conjuring the depth and heat of atypical intimacies, idyllic scenes of queer life that make one’s throat catch. Daisy has been with Divine for years, and “even now,” Osunde writes, “they nonetheless bonded in the identical methods: flooding the kitchen with groceries, spending a full day cooking, sharpening one another’s tastes. ‘All that work I grew up doing within the kitchen,’ Divine stated as soon as, standing between Daisy’s legs as she sat on the island, ‘wallahi, she didn’t realize it then, however my mom was elevating me to feed you.’”