Author: anmly_mpusod

Unholy Things

The first time I kissed a girl, it was nothing phenomenal. It was easy, as easy as breathing. It did not feel like something that needed to be learned. I was not experimenting or practicing how to kiss boys. I was a 10 year-old who liked another 10 year-old, and the movies had said that when you like someone you kiss them. So I did. She kissed me back. Then her mom walked in. 

Her mom was a Deeper Life devotee who thought the only reason I followed them to church was because I was largely interested in God. Of course, I was interested in God. I was interested in finding out why God had seemingly taken the high road of silence, instead of helping me. My cousin, who used to wake up to pray at 3am every day, had been raping me. I was interested in finding out why God seemed to be listening only to my cousin, because what else was he praying for, if not the right to rape a child and get away with it? 

However, my interest in God was not the only reason I went to church. It was her, my childhood neighbor. I liked her so much that I wanted to be around her. So, I followed her family to church, and her mom approved of our friendship. This was until I earned her disapproval when she caught me locking lips with her daughter. This was the first time I was told my desires were unnatural. Her mom scolded me for these desires and I was banned from being alone with her daughter. My mom never brought it up. No one in my family scolded me for it. I soon forgot that there was supposedly something wrong with my affections. I would not discover that my existence as a girl in love with other girls was an abomination in the eyes of those who have proclaimed themselves the S.I Unit of Righteousness, until I turned 14 and went to a Christian boarding school in Calabar.

The school had stringent rules for “lesbianism and sodomy”. If they found out that you had engaged in any acts that were considered homosexual, you were faced with a whipping from the boarding house mistress, and public ridicule. In that school, even the most intimate things you said to a counselor would end up as common knowledge in the hostels by the end of the week, and you could be expelled if they felt you were irredeemable. I learnt to hide that I liked girls. Thankfully, I had bigger issues. A boy had lied that we’d had sex. The news spread like wildfire and I became the school’s boy-crazed slut. At the same time, I began to pray the gay away. I started out thinking this was possible because the preachers at school said God could do all things. I forced myself not to question why God could not save me from sexual abuse but could save me from being gay. I was desperate. I began to think that just maybe my punishment for being gay was sexual abuse. 

I declared myself an atheist about the same time I discovered that I was also attracted to men. I was 18, and for some reason, my body decided that it would find a man’s touch less repulsive than usual. I was also tired of praying and trying to fit into heterosexuality because all the churches I had tried had labeled my affections impure. However, I was by no means done with belief, or the church, for that matter. In my early twenties, I returned to church. I figured my attraction to men meant I could still have affections towards women but 

only date men. I would no longer be committing a sin. 

The day I discovered arsenokoitai,¹ I was overjoyed. The possibility that the Bible was not exactly against homosexuality flooded my being with so much light as it provided me an opportunity to have faith and still be queer. I was already in the process of forming new opinions of God, deconstructing my faith and building new beliefs. For example, I no longer saw the Bible as the word of God. I saw it as an evolution of man’s understanding of God, which could be colored by all kinds of personal bias. Discovering that arsenokoitai, the word which had been translated to mean homosexuality, was referring more to pedophilia, and that it really meant “men lying with boys,” helped me find peace in my sexuality. Discovering that arsenokoitai was not translated to mean homosexuality until sometime in the 1940s made it easier for me to practice my faith and still be queer. 

I had finally found peace. 

But my mind and body had other plans. 

I have always felt like I was born in the wrong body; a body that learnt to grow breasts at 10, round hips by 14, a body that is curved in ways that have made me want to end myself. However, the urge to bend this body to fit my spirit had not been so intense until I turned 23 and began to feel like if I did not do what had to be done, I would un-alive myself. I filed this under the category of “one of the quirks of my mental illness.” Every Christian I spoke to told me to pray harder for myself, to focus on Jesus, and to watch the content I consumed because, to them, gender dysphoria is a disease which is transferable via social media content. Suicidal thoughts and attempts became old friends, easily accessible through my jar of pills. 

This was the turning point for me. All my life, I had felt like an unholy thing, like my queerness was a stubborn stain that required the most extreme methods to wipe—even if those methods required ending my connection to this mortal world. I knew I could not go on like this. 

First, I made peace with losing my faith. Faith is meaningless to the dead. Second, I took out time to make sense of the gender dysphoria I felt, to explore what it means to not feel at home inside my body, and to begin the journey to making this body the home it was meant to be for me. I had to come alive to Self.

I was born into this world with no manual for queerness. Nobody prepared me for the reality that I would become a social misfit in the country I call home. Nobody told me that I would fall in love with the wrong gender. Nobody told me that I would struggle with self identity on some days. Nobody prepared me for the loss; the loss of a faith I fought so hard to keep, the loss of community that came not only with being queer, but being open, too, about seeking ways to make this human vessel conform to what being queer means for the spirit that lives within it. Nobody told me how painful it would feel to be labeled unholy, when all my life I have worked to be good enough, holy enough. Nobody told me how difficult it is to build new beliefs, to find a different faith, to embrace myself as god, to accept that I have always been holy.

 

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¹ Arsenokoitai — an ambiguous, unusual Greek word used in letters by the biblical Apostle Paul. It was translated into the English as “homosexuals,” even though no such word exists in either the Greek or the Hebrew. Some scholars posit the Greek “arsenokoitai” might more specifically refer to pedophiles, pederasts, and/or older men who solicited sexual relations with catamites.

 

Chinwendu Nwangwa is a Nigerian multidisciplinary artist and an academic currently fascinated by linguistic anthropology and its use as a tool for social development. She spends her time between Calabar and Lagos where she hosts friends and loved ones to delicious, sometimes experimental meals, and runs one of Lagos city’s reputable book clubs.

 

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I Dreamt I Saw Two Black Girls Kissing in Church

& i heard a door inside my chest heave open 
it sounded like a storm returning 
to nurse green the dryness 
the drought had abandoned here 
& this is the kind of narrative we will not need 
to soften later 
& i guess it is easier to stay alive 
when you are not holding an accusation 
that always comes unbidden 
carrying erotemes that only crave answers 
of burning flesh 
& when you are free to swallow a mouthful 
of whomever your body takes home 
to go looking for something sweet 
and soft to sink your teeth into 
& not wake up with bruises 
where your name should be 
maybe this communion of ungendered bodies 
is what it means to say grace 
& this is something no baptism can free us from 
but the girls are worshipping each other’s hands 
they are going home and taking me with them 
& outside 
a statue of Jesus is holding out his arms

 

Precious Arinze is a Nigerian poet, essayist, and author of the chapbook The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us So Far, selected by Chris Abani and Kwame Dawes for the New-Generation African Poets Series (African Poetry Book Fund), 2021. Precious Arinze is a Poetry Editor for OlongoAfrica and a Poetry Reader at Up The Staircase Quarterly. Their works have appeared in Brittle Paper, Lolwe, Arts and Africa, Agbowo, The Republic Journal, Boston Review, Electric Literature, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Exposition Review, and Berlin Quarterly, among others. Author photo by Dandelion Eghosa.

 

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Slutty Prayers

God is a woman
and she bends into a perfect arch,
           her fleshy altar nestled between sturdy-soft thighs.
My tongue finds worship,
spewing incantations of reverence.

This woman breathes life

into my being. Her body,
a pilgrimage.
I long to journey into her depths.

She draws her breath across my body
mapping out new cities, imprinting her soul
on mine, whispering love
into my skin.

She tells me “Open Sesame,”
and my legs part
like the Red Sea leading Israel to promise.

Her fingers drip honey as they find their place in me.

                  Here, our desire sings.
We make righteous sex,
baptizing ourselves in holy flame.

We burn and burn  until left basking
in our true form,  drinking in the sight
of each other,  our eyes leaking love. 

                       Here, we holy.
                   Here, we sex.
            Woman, loving woman.
      Clit to clit.
Breast to breast.

There is no abomination here. Only grace.

bisexual anxiety

On the days a man’s mouth
takes me to the heavens,
I question my sexuality.
I have had more male lovers than female. My best friend tells me that I could not love a man and a woman equally.
A man I loved yesterday told me I could not
be gay if I moaned his name in pleasure. I tell him to take his homophobia off my body.
On the days I imagine crafting a life with a man, guilt nibbles my mind.
Am I less queer for finding love in the arms of a man even though I also want to walk down the aisle with a woman?

 

Olúwatamílọ́re Ọ̀shọ́, Frontier XVII, is a writer, poet and creative director from Lagos, Nigeria. Her writings negotiate sensuality, familial dynamics and identity. Her works have been published/forthcoming in online literary mags namely The Roadrunner Review, Olney Magazine, ANMLY and elsewhere.

 

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Pelagial Affinity

The sun coruscates through  pellucid water.
In pelagic nearness, waves falter to our feet,

and you zest. 

You prance the littoral spread.
You, in a teal windbreaker, break the width 

of gales. 

You pick up conches, pick me up where I lie defying
belligerent glints of sun, and smother my face with

spontaneous kisses.

We raise the effervescent content of our glasses,
exchange our flip-flops in their resplendent hues.

I’m made possible by your perennial love;
that daunting extension of adherence.

In this coastal encounter,
the sea is sprawled endlessly before our existence—

we stand before it, until we suffice. 

 

Convalescence

We robbed the disease of its nefarious glory.
Our triumph was commemorated in ululation.

In the clamor of surviving, our eyes opened
and we sought to hide from the world.

Revelry in this dank now:

The night, femur-long.
Suds overwhelm the vitreous inventions

of man. Our voices levitate without
wings; and to what extent do we hold this zeal,

to deride the conviction of dawn? 

We chose to be in delirium.
Preferred our jejune plight.

The sex, good.
Better though, 

the staggering force of love’s righteous gravity.

 

Kei Vough Korede (he/they) is a bi/queer Nigerian poet. He has works published with Woodward Review, among others. Reach him on Twitter @KayVough.

 

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How to Go to God and Remain There

I am terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long. They really don’t think I am human. I base this on their conduct, not on what they say. And this means that they have become, in themselves, moral monsters. —James Baldwin.

And this day is not such a different one, except for the heightened rage of the sun; except for the strangers in the street circling a body like vultures; except for their voices trying to name this body before knowing it, before killing it; this body; a kneeling boy, wearing the face of one who loves boys, who knows how to love boys; and these people know this face; they must peel it; must undo; how else to erase the error in a book; a tyre for his neck; a stone for his head; a fire to smoke him straight to God; an offering to purify, to cleanse, to take God’s hands and do His work; except they don’t become God; but monsters, intentional about sin; and they watch the boy burn; the boy, who searches their faces for what he has deprived these strangers of; their air? their happiness? their milk?;  the boy who, in the hell, is eager to go to God and remain there; and does; in a rising of grey smoke; and no one knows his name.

From my window, the whole madness is a movie scene; except I am an actor; and the burning boy a looming foreshadow; except I have a name, yet.

Originally published in Isele Magazine.

 

Bryan Okwesili is a Nigerian poet and storyteller. His works explore the interiority and tensions of queerness in a heteronormative culture in which he imagines a world of inclusivity. He is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a finalist for the Tupelo Quarterly Open Fiction Prize. His works appear in CRAFT, SLICE, SmokeLong Quarterly, Isele Magazine, Foglifter, Tupelo Quarterly, QWERTY, Brittle Paper, PANK, Litro Uk, and elsewhere. He is currently a student of law at the University of Calabar, Cross River State, Nigeria. You can connect with him on twitter @meet_bryan_.

 

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Oil and Water

We’ll knock your teeth 
out, bury you
in a wooden casket. 
You can’t be queer
and Moslem. No,
you can’t be. 
You shouldn’t be. 
We love you, Habibi,
but not tonight. Wait,
you shouldn’t sway 
that way. 
We’ll cut off your hands, and 
hand them over to you. 
Open your mouth— 
let’s pull the blackness out
of your tongue. Let’s gouge 
your eyes out and help you
wash them clean. 
Listen, Habibi, 
this is the only way. 
Hold your head still
underwater; let the Lord
do His will. Thirty lashes
on your back, twenty
on your palms. Let us 
draw out the darkness

inside of you. Let us stone 
the back of your head. 
This is the only way. 
We love you, Habibi, 
just not tonight. 
Close your eyes, let the water
wash over you. Please, 
just close your eyes, 
and let it happen.

 

Animashaun Ameen is a poet and essayist. His works have appeared/are forthcoming in Salamander Mag, Third Estate Mag, Roadrunner Review, Vast Chasm, and elsewhere, and he is the author of Calling a Spade. He lives and writes from Lagos, Nigeria. An oddball. A butterfly. He tweets @AmeenAnimashaun.

 

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Big sallah, small sallah

Our eid celebrations unleashed things I grew to crave: happiness, ease, my parents’ attention and the ability to breathe—almost as though the surge in joyful emotions softened our often-stiff air, miraculously making it easier to take in. I needed more than anything to feel as air, both light and easily swayed, as I often felt as deeply rooted as century old trees. The change in atmosphere exaggerated how much of a shadow I was in my daily life. I only sparkled during Eid. My voice morphed into an entity of its own, I could feel a thrumming beneath my skin, an excitement in the way I walked, a hopefulness that this happiness might stay. My sibling and I fell into the habit of re-naming things, especially if we thought their names didn’t do their meanings enough justice. We decided for our Eid celebrations to be christened according to scale, which led to Big Sallah’s title being coined due to the extravagance it required; Small Sallah just required less. My family, along with my uncle’s and the other Muslim families, would litter our compound with rams when Big Sallah reared its costly head. I remember, one year, getting hurt by one of the rams I had befriended. I’d had an especially soft spot for this ram, but after that affair, I wanted so badly to taste it and revel in how good it tasted. 

Waking up to the smell of burning firewood on Eid morning was similar to drinking water after an indication of thirst. My mother would rush into our room, attempting to wake us while simultaneously checking things off in her head, my questions going unanswered because there was quite a lot to be done. My sibling and I would wake up excited, though tired from the previous night’s restlessness—sleep evading us due to our rollercoaster of emotions. We would carefully wear our newly-made lace over freshly done hair, slight headaches here and there until the tensions came undone. We would go into the compound-where the party was happening-in search of our dad, wait for his exclamations about how good we looked, try to get a glimpse of the food being cooked and rams being slaughtered. Sometimes there’s music going, money being gifted to children, people looking to buy more plastic chairs, cousins hoping to outdo the other, mothers and aunties setting up camp in kitchens as though Eid itself was war and not a celebration, drinks and the likes. The mosque affair mattered very little to me, I was particularly drawn to the ritual done before prayers. The necessity of water during this ritual provided a sense of calm, one whose root was severely unknown to me at the time. Washing my body with the intent to pray felt like heaven. I felt heaven reach out and attempt to smoothen my spikes, I knew this was not ordinary. I was not an especially religious child—I did not know any child who truly was—I had been injured quite early in life and began nurturing my anger from there on. But washing my body seemed to dull this anger. I would wash and feel rejuvenated, engaging a sense of calm with the ability to subdue a rupturing volcano. 

I was taught to rely solely on myself, which, I think, inspired my brand of rigidity. I relied on rigidity to keep me sane, to create a home far from risk, to keep its choking grip on my every step. In exchange for this, I promised to feed it bits of my soul, hoping to one day be consumed by it. In a funny way, I saw myself as Ariel giving her voice away to Ursula, rushing to give away parts of myself that scared me. This brand of rigidity manifested itself in every square-inch of my life, down to the unbreathable hold it had on my stomach. I did not allow myself explore my obvious queerness due to the same rigidity, I only allowed myself feel shame. I attached an ocean-load of shame to the essence of who I was, so frequently that breaking out of that mold cost me everything. Not until after this sharp realization did I consider the importance of community. Holding yourself when there is no longer a community to hold you? Incredibly heartbreaking does not begin to describe the smallest atom of such experience. I suppose that catalyzed the need for a greater power in my life. I had also begun asking myself shifting questions about the person I wanted to be, and the work it would require to protect myself from everything I did not. How I perceived love, the meaning of it, who I loved, why I loved them, what their love meant to me, how I received this love: was this how I wanted to receive love? Their love, in particular? The unnecessary reverence I regarded romantic love, and the roots of that. These shifting questions provided a foundation for even more shifting questions. Who my god is, signs they are my god, how I intend to pray to this god, how this god intends to converse with me, does this god love me? These are questions whose answers I am still collecting.

Beating myself into the path of kindness, especially after experiencing cruelty, has left bigger scars on my chest than the acts themselves. But if my orí strongly wants me on this path, who am I to deny my greatest self what it needs? To choose vulnerability, to want it so badly, even when impossible, even when the hurt feels so heavy my heart can’t function, even when I so badly want someone to feel a fraction of what I feel. Who else will show me tenderness? This world?

 

Aderinsola is a fiction/creative non-fiction writer who is fully immersed in a world of emotions.

 

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