VAGABONDS!
By Eloghosa Osunde
It sounds like a riddle: what is a city, a deity, a masquerade ball and a panopticon all at once? The answer, in Eloghosa Osunde’s teeming debut novel-in-stories, “Vagabonds!”, is Lagos, Nigeria: the capital also known as the “city spirit” Èkó, a capricious force made up of 21 million people all watching and watching. become. “Turn your back,” the city warns, in a “welcome note” at the beginning of the book. “For if you wait till we turn our backs and begin to go, my dear, after the weight of our eye, will surely kill you.” The city operates by a certain set of rules, it becomes clear: rich men and women commit crimes with impunity, wear “body masks” that hide their true selves and demand respect, while the poor are scapegoated and spat out by a vengeful Èkó. Appearance comes first. “It was Nigeria after all,” Osunde writes in the story “Gold”. “People had broken their necks because they ruin the aesthetics all the time.”
Vagabonds, of course, ruin the aesthetic. They are the outsiders of the city, wandering or displaced – but they also include, by a specifically Nigerian definition, anyone who is publicly gay. The Lagosians in these stories ‘live in the cracks’, in a society where same-sex romance is illegal and often punished by violence. Sex happens in secret, in the penthouses of high-rise buildings that no one can see; relationships blossom at house parties and crumble under the weight of societal expectations and fear. Osunde’s Lagos is also full of supernatural creatures: the devil appears more than once and takes over people’s bodies for sex and a certain dark form of justice. Fairygodgirls – “girls who have completely disappeared, girls who have already died, and thus untouchable girls” – watch over the vulnerable living girls at whom “no one gets angry enough.” But ghosts aren’t just the ghosts of the dead, and the line between physical and metaphorical invisibility is forever blurred. “We’re ghosts because we have to, because our lives depend on passing and passing,” thinks Daisy, a dancer at a women-only nightclub. “But we are ghosts who often see other ghosts, holding and hugging them” and sleeping with them, “in our bedrooms, doors closed.”
Some of the most indelible characters recur in multiple stories, often in female duos: mothers and daughters, lovers, friends. Wura Blackson, a genius at designing dresses as loud, beautiful and distracting as Lagos society demands, isn’t sure what to think of her daughter Rain, who one day seems grown up and free from the limitations of that. society. “Just a warning,” says Rain. “I don’t come with a mask. Or a filter. I say what I really think.” Osunde is especially good at evoking the depth and warmth of ordinary intimacies, idyllic scenes of queer life that make the throat choke. Daisy has been with Divine for years, and “even now,” Osunde writes, “they still bond in the same way: flooding the kitchen with groceries, cooking all day, sharpening each other’s tastes. ‘All that work growing up in the kitchen,’ said Divine once, standing between Daisy’s legs while on the island, ‘wallahi, she didn’t know it then, but my mother raised me to feed you. ‘ †