VAGABONDS!: The Queer Gospel According to Eloghosa Osunde

Midway into Eloghosa Osunde's dark and hopeful novel of human desire and differences, a character, Wura, close to her demise from cancer and having lived her life for the validation of others will have her only child questioning why she chose societal norms over her "ultimate want."

In Vagabonds! Eloghosa reveals a world populated by the locomotive 'ghosts' of desires, loss, hope and love.

She writes about the city, Eko, through the lives lived by its denizens. Lagos is not her playground of description as much as she tries to make it with her gossip narrator, Tatafo. It is her people, dead and alive, famous and unrecorded, who bring the truth of the city from the complex scars it marks on their lives.

They struggle against the spirit of Eko only to live in the hungry shadows of its desire.

Eulogizing a frail city can be the life of its denizens as it is for many Lagosians, but the author bemoans what dies in all its tangible beauty and grace, rather than celebrate what lives in the torments of the dead.

Yes, Eko is scary; what is exciting is what is shown on the outside. And the mayhem it wreaks sit in stark contrast to "the many-eyed god, the master and minister of excessive enjoyment; the roiling mass of flesh seated on a gold-plated throne made from the trained backs of its children, agbada pouring down in threaded gold, hallowed by thousands of hands".

Johnny takes up a job where silence, a lifesaver, guaranteed continuity and benefits. He worked in Lagos for his master, a wealthy man of brutal means, but when he held up the privilege of beneficial allegiance to his master, his ultimate choice for freedom and love came at a tragic cost.

In lyrical and wise overflowing sentences of truth, 'Vagabonds!' crafts the realities of a world steeped in silence for the perceived continuity of a majority.

They are bleak tearful stories of ghosts reliving the tales that led to their demise. A tale where the undeserving die in numbers while their ghosts roam in countless statistics to keep the city population in the service of its capricious mission.

At the beginning, the author braces her readers to weep for the tragedy that awaits them, but toward the end of the novel she behooves us to jointly fashion a sordid name (Vagabonds) into the joy, truth and pains of our yearned freedom.

Lagos exists in the abundance of its manifold spirits living in all Lagosians. To peer into the city is to behold the honest curious face of the one who wishes to know Eko. For to "look at it closely is to look at yourself, to watch your own face, to meet who you are when there’s no witness and only you can see you. So, as there are twenty-one million of us, there are twenty-one million of it".

Eloghosa opts for a character whose gender is unknown. A character whose name is the role it performs for the reader, "Tatafo. Blabbermouth. Minder of all business. Gossip."

Reading 'Vagabonds!' one is occasionally moved to ask: Who is to blame for the prevalent mayhem in Lagos? The spirits of the city, the failed leaders of Eko, or mere humans acting from repugnant strange endearments?

Like the fairygodgirls who save little girls from the pressures of a world lost to their needs, Eloghosa comes to our rescue. For anyone who has felt like an outsider, who looks at the world for clearer answers with hopes for understanding us beyond the inadequate confines of vagabonds, this is the book.

For LGBTQ individuals seen as minorities in our society, Eko dotes numbers, but Eloghosa insists in giving names and lives to these numbers. In one of the interlinked stories, "Grief Is the gift that breaks the spirit open," the writer draws into the hoovering desires of the dead, like the living, seeking the fullest expression of self. Toju, dead but alive in the multiple bodies of strange connections, reaches for love with multiple men. Sex and passion couldn't mould her feelings to stay with these men until she met a woman, Agbon, at a club, who bares the truth of Toju's feelings with questions for more.

Many African novels detail abusive male characters in clichéd acts of physical violence against women, but a story in the novel, 'After God Fear Women' explicates the good male abuser whose violence has no physical evidence for public criticism nor judgment.

In the rising myth of disappearance for a better life, women, burdened by the patriarchy of men, decide to follow a 'roiling power' that evacuates them out of their community. Having seen the consequences of inhabiting a world almost devoid of women and girls, the men began to think to themselves that "they’d made this world intentionally in their image, hadn’t they? But now that they’d been left to face it alone, it felt too much like hell."

The imperfect woman with the fears and passion that freedom requires of love slowly becomes the center of Eloghosa's beautiful queer work of imagination.

Lines freely leap up with the wonders of truth and the clarity of emotional loss. In "The Only Way Out is Through", an ex-lover writes a letter to her deceased partner baring the sordid unspoken realities of fickle queer desires in our homophobic society. Unable to navigate 'forbiddenness' , she writes to Wura:

"Can’t you see? This is a bubble, a fantasy, an unsustainable fiction. Can’t you see the brutal setting of the story we’re faking? This is Nigeria . Even if we manage not to kill each other, they might still find us and eat us."

As the novel of interlinked stories progress, the ghost lives of vagabonds becomes a teaming world of valid queer desires.

When the writer, Jude Dibia began the courageous narration of Nigeria's sexual minorities in his acclaimed debut novel, 'Walking with Shadows' published in 2005 , the novelty of the out and queer central character in contemporary African works of literature never envisaged the new breed of defiant queer voices in the works of Chinelo Okparanta, Diriye Osman, Akwaeke Emezi, Chike Edozien, Unoma Azuh, Elnathan John, Binyavanga Wanaina, and more recently, Arinze Ifekandu and Eloghosa Osunde with her polyphonic queer gospel of Nigerian vagabonds in a novel laced with painful loss and hovering spirits; death and grief; desires and small miracles

Tatafo, the gossip, arguably becomes the reader's favourite character, for bearing witness. For squashing the pretence that desire is singular; that there's only one kind of love. Death, a certain condition of inevitability, cannot erase the existence of LGBT Nigerians as it multiplies them in the afterlife of ghosts.

In the end, the devout reader can't help but salute Eko's Tatafo for the courage and honesty to tell the stories of people whom the city despises and considers as outsiders.

"Celebration is the acknowledgment, not the welcoming, of a presence. It is the courtesy of giving to everybody his due," writes Chinua Achebe in the collection of essays, "The Education of a British Protected Child." Eloghosa celebrates by acknowledging the presence of varied queerness in a country that persistently finds ways to erase it with laws, bigotry and brutality against sexual minorities. How courteous she is at giving her characters the recognizable courtesy of their humanity.

Here the real and the imagined are fused to personify truth. Hence the deftness of realism with which Eloghosa bears on sexual pride and shame is a testament to the courageous beauty of queerness where what is imagined comes from what is real.

To strip away the shame and fear, these vagabonds insist on "showing their real faces, their real bodies." They are resistant to the burdens of being "permanent mask-wearers," showing us the many ways we can live and thrive.