VAGABONDS! by Eloghosa Osunde
Review by Jess Moody
‘At times, you yourself are too guilty to be the narrator. So, you make way. You must make way.’
Tatafo’s name means ‘blabbermouth. Business-minder. Gossip’. A mischievous truth-telling servant named by his god, Tatafo is the perfect narrator – or curator – of this story-of-stories centring queer Lagos.
Vagabonds!, from award-winning writer and visual artist Eloghosa Osunde, is a tale of a city, told in plural, made of many things. A community of short stories which triumph on their own; ‘overheard’ conversations; fragments of lives; and otherworldly voiceover. These all complement and defy a singular story of what it is to be an outsider, queer, or dispossessed (and sometimes, literally possessed) in Nigeria’s contemporary megacity. Tatafo sees all, and holds power in the seeing.
Some stories unsettle by sounding, at first, familiar. A man moves to the city to become a rich man’s driver. But first he must become ‘Johnny’, the name more convenient for his masters. Second, he must become mute. Not only a comment on the invisibility of service in high capitalism, but a reality of survival: his employer needs those who won’t speak of the violence and corruption they see (or are made to do). Amidst the horrors and the slow undoing of self, Johnny finds love in shared silence with fellow employee Livinus. One day, supposedly private and alone in their intimacy, the other man dares a whisper to Johnny, and is immediately and brutally killed. Wealth and cruelty strike early in Vagabonds!: a clue of more sufferings to come. But the core potency in this early story is its tenderness: the glimpse of two people ‘writing closeness into their skins’. This kernel of care persists throughout the novel: a refusal to divorce resistance from vulnerability.
Through Tatafo, Osunde demands the reader to keep looking and relooking, often through the changing perceptions of their characters. In one story Thomas dares to look through and beyond the world as presented to him, glancing behind him in the market to see the reality of Lagos with new eyes. In another, an American tourist expresses shock at the true size and agency of the Nigerian queer communities. Everywhere, people cross thresholds to claim their true selves in hotel-rooms, parties, or clubs; they take off masks or put on new bodies. Vagabonds! steadily disrupts dominant discourses of what Lagos is.
‘To look at it closely is to look at yourself, to watch your own face, to meet who you are when there is no witness and only you can see you. So, as there are twenty-one million of us, there are twenty-one million of it’
Osunde is gifted not only with an astute eye for hypocrisy, but the talent to explore it with sharp insight, deep characterisation, and queer wit. She can present the calm logic of an abusive husband convincing himself that he is a protector, or the arrogance of a homophobic politician indulging in the acts he rallies against. Her writing doesn’t have to over-labour the foolishness of the psychologist unable to comprehend her client’s non-sexual romance: a love ‘real’ enough to transcend death. Osunde honestly observes too how queer communities can replicate societal norms of entitlement and invisibility:
‘Even when she was in places with just women, the ones with eyes for just women still couldn’t see her.’
Vagabonds! is written in a voice which can control chaos. It’s a steady reckoning: a looking-back at the politics of harm (gendered violence, and the 2014 Nigerian Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act cast a dangerous shadow over all the lives within). Existence is resistance, and Vagabonds! layers its narratives to presents a myriad of hopes, desires, and transformations.
‘…spinning story as lifeline…Magic like a plot-twist, like becoming the opposite of what the city expects, like looking the world in the eye while biting into the word cannot.’
Some characters will create new lives in affirmed genders; some will leave or find faith; some forge friendships across class boundaries; and some will work hard to create the spaces where they can be powerful. In ‘After God, Fear women’ the ‘#MeToo’ movement hovers implicitly, and a group of women begin to make their testimonies to each other. As they do so, they fade; disappearing one by one. Their communal truth telling is powerful enough to release them from a harmful world: moving on to somewhere they exist on their own terms.
‘Have you ever seen furious girls gather and become unstoppable?’
In such a novel – full of multiplicities, and denying false boundaries – it feels right that the artefacts of contemporary life sit alongside the fantastic and the spiritual. There are ghosts mingling, and Pose on TV. ‘Fairygodgirls’ share books from living authors (Akwaeke Emezi, Helen Oyeyemi). Clients queue for high fashion, while a child is wished into being. Decision-making of the gods is subject to SWOT analysis.
The book’s structure supports such kaleidoscopic substance. Branching stories and whispered realities balance perfectly with Tatafo’s overarching arc of defiance, contained in precise and poetic prose. Osunde’s social critique sits squarely within imaginative, compelling storytelling, and iconic yet complex characters. Crucially, Vagabonds! makes space in its truth-telling for the reverence of tenderness. This, the author conveys, is the beauty and complexity of lives which others refuse to see.
‘“You live,” she said. “You live, at whatever cost you can bear.”’