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 called the “cityspirit” Èkó, a capricious drive made up of 21 million individuals all watching and being watched. “Flip your again,” the town warns, in a “welcome observe” originally of the ebook. “As a result of when you dey look forward to us to show our personal again and begin to go, then my pricey, na the load 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 disguise 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 any case,” Osunde writes within the story “Gold.” “Folks had their necks damaged for ruining the aesthetics on a regular basis.”

Vagabonds destroy the aesthetics, after all. They’re the outsiders of the town, roving or displaced — however additionally they embrace, in keeping with 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 infrequently punished by violence. Intercourse occurs furtively, within the penthouses of high-rises nobody can see into; relationships blossom at home events and crumble underneath the load of societal expectations and worry. Osunde’s Lagos can also be thronged with supernatural beings: The satan seems greater than as soon as, taking up individuals’s our bodies for intercourse and a sure darkish model of justice. Fairygodgirls — “all-the-way-gone women, already-dead women, and so, untouchable women” — watch over the susceptible residing women whom “nobody will get indignant sufficient for.” However ghosts aren’t simply the spirits of the lifeless, and the road between bodily and metaphorical invisibility is endlessly hazy. “We’re ghosts as a result of we now have to be, as a result of our lives rely on 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.”

A number of the most indelible characters recur via a number of tales, usually in feminine dyads: moms and daughters, lovers, mates. Wura Blackson, a genius at designing clothes as loud, lovely and distracting as Lagos society requires, doesn’t fairly know what to make of her daughter, Rain, who seems sooner or later 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 really assume.” Osunde is very good at conjuring the depth and heat of unusual 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.’”