Muristek
This energetic debut about dreamers, misfits and otherworldly beings creates a queer Nigerian phantasmagoria
Set in and around Lagos, Eloghosa Osunde’s raucous debut is dotted with glimpses of the city’s famous nightlife. At a party in the Old Ikoyi district, “[the] apartment was high out of its mind. The bodies inside were teeming with energy … They could turn the music down, but why? It was a good night to feel this alive. A great night to feel the beat in your thighs, in your stomach, in your chest, pounding through your veins. You can’t breathe, sure, but do you want to? This loud love, the rapid-fire desire, all of it is what resuscitates you after all, is what makes you want to love the world again.”
Even when it confronts darkness in its condemnation of Nigeria’s political and religious corruption and homophobic legislation, Osunde’s partly magical realist novel is imbued with this rich sense of the kinetic and the possible. As intimated by the titular exclamation mark, it is a loud work. It boldly rails against the pernicious sexual orthodoxies and hypocrisies of Nigerian life. It also joyfully resists conventional formal boundaries, both linguistic and generic. Written in “standard” and pidgin English, adopting prosaic and poetic modes, Vagabonds! is a kind of queer phantasmagoria. It consists of short story-like snapshots about disfranchised dreamers and otherworldly beings living in Lagos’s thrall, all drawn with Osunde’s skill for foregrounding moments of quiet connection amid metropolitan cacophony.
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