Equatorial Guinea, particularly its main island, Bioko (formerly known as Fernando Po), is tied in my mind to histories of the Biafran/Nigerian Civil War of the late 1960s, when Fernando Po was used as a site for aid groups to resettle war refugees and an avenue for arms to be delivered to Biafra. In a much earlier period, I associate Fernando Po with the colonial ambitions of Portugal and Spain, who went around the Atlantic world setting up sugar colonies fueled by slave labor. Under the Portuguese in the late fifteenth century and under the Spanish in the eighteenth century, the island of Fernando Po was a plantation colony complete with the racial caste system that is the hallmark of European colonies the world over. At various points in its history, parts of Fernando Po were claimed by Holland, specifically the Dutch East India company, as a way station from where they conducted their slaving activities throughout West and Central Africa. In a reversal of the island’s role in the history of African slavery, parts of it were leased by Britain from 1827 to 1843 to serve as the regional headquarters of the West Africa Squadron, anti-slavery patrols established by the Royal Navy. Although the native languages of Equatorial Guinea include, among others, Bube, Ndowe, Fa d’Ambu, Equatorial Guinean Pidgin, and Fang, the most widely spoken language, since 1844 the country has been officially Hispanophone, with Spanish being the language of formal education and governance. This outline of facts does little to distinguish Equatorial Guinea from other West African or Central African nations, or its main island from other islands around the world that have been crossed and re-crossed by colonizing states and corporations. From one point of view, particularly if one centers its islands, the territory collected under the sign of Equatorial Guinea in 1968 is a crossroads, a space of global encounter and intensive involvement with other places and peoples. All this makes the setting of Trifonia Melibea Obono’s story, away from the centers of power and the crossroads of the Atlantic world, all the more interesting.
La Bastarda is set in the early 2000s in a mainland village somewhere near a border with Gabon. Here, they are far from the capital, which is literally on an island some miles into the Atlantic Ocean. They are far away even from the large mainland cities. They are in what one might consider a “remote location,” so far away that only white missionaries find reason to seek out the isolated locals. The Indecency Club that the protagonist gets inducted into is not the ironic name of a hipster bar located in the old colonial district of the capital. Its locales are the village and the forest. In fiction from or about the continent, space doesn’t get written as more authentically African than this.
One of the key questions that has animated the politics and the study of what Marc Epprecht referred to as “dissident sexualities” on the African continent is the charge of Un-Africanness and how to address it. Based equally on mythologies about sexuality, Africa, and history, the charge of Un-Africanness is a powerful challenge for gay rights movements on the continent. In a transnational context featuring powerful LGBTI advocacy groups based in Euro-America pitted against homophobic nationalist heads of state, the possibility of being both queer and fully African could not be presumed and has had to be proven in many ways. Caught in the cross fire, activists and scholars committed to both decolonial and liberatory politics do not enjoy the privilege of dismissing the problem of authenticity or authenticity as a problem. Quite often, activists and scholars turn to history and the record it might provide of past dissident sexualities. It is even sufficient for that record to be of exceptionality, pathology, or marginality, so long as the record of an African queer past is recoverable. Diverging from this method, Obono’s La Bastarda adopts a spatial approach to the challenge of Un-Africanness.
The novel suggests that it is the “real” Africa that produces Marcelo, Jesusín, Dina, Pilar, Linda, and Okomo. It is significant that at the end, when they decide to be each other’s family, Okomo and her friends do not run away to the anonymity of the city but deeper into the embrace of the forest. For the Indecency Club members and their patron Uncle Marcelo, the forest is a place of refuge. At her induction into the club, Okomo is told that the “Fang forest is a free space. Now you’re free.” Thus the story turns the trope of the evil forest that suffuses folktales and derivative stories completely on its head.
Outside of the forest, hegemonic sexuality reigns, and it is associated with various forms of excess. The family’s “fecund patriarch Beká” is hailed by Okomo’s grandfather equally for his reproductive prowess as for his resistance to Spanish domination. Another embodiment of hetero-patriarchal excess, Ondó, is famed for having married twelve women, fathered seventy children, and pursued other women until his final days. When Uncle Marcelo comes into the story, we see that he is the most famous offender of the community. His chief offense is refusing to “do his duty for the good of the tribe,” which consists of impregnating his cousin’s wife so that her sterile husband may have heirs and the legacy of Beká the fecund may be continued. At several points—when we first meet Uncle Marcelo, when he is run out of town, and when we meet his cousin’s childless wife—the reader is reminded of this offense. Of course Marcelo refuses because he is a man-woman; or is he a man-woman because he refuses? Read against the stories of the community’s heroes Beká and Ondó, who achieved fame through and for their fecundity, Marcelo’s transgression becomes as much about sexuality as it is about reproduction.
How reproductivity may mediate ideas of sexuality was explored in a 2013 article by Veronica Sigamoney and Marc Epprecht.1 The two carried out research in two South African townships to understand what residents understood homosexuality to be and how they determined “Africanness” or “Un-Africanness” in relation to sexual behavior. When presented with the term “homosexual,” the township residents understood it in a wide variety of ways that tended to diverge wildly from the legal understanding in South Africa or the normative understanding in Euro-America. In local languages, they could provide specific terms for gender nonconformity or sexual dissidence, but their interpretations of the English-language concept were all over the map. Definitions included, “People who like porn and smoke dagga [cannabis],” “Maybe . . . it’s a boy who likes ladies [and] a girl who loves the boys who are tops—these ones who are driving the nice cars.” An officer of the law offered the following: “I don’t know any homosexuals. I only know those who are males involved with males and females that are involved with females.”2 This suggested the presence of a linguistic and epistemic divide in ideas of and approaches to homosexuality. Most telling was the discussion around sexual Africanness and sexual Un-Africanness that the researchers uncovered. For both women and men, being properly African, and thus in conformity with community norms, was to be reproductive. A “real” African man was one who had a family and his own home, and a “real” African woman was one who had children. While Sigamoney and Epprecht’s findings did confirm the presence of prejudice against same-sex relationships and practices in the townships, it also uncovered evidence of qualified acceptance, depending on conformity to normative reproductive expectations. South Africa is a long way from Equatorial Guinea, and the point is not to compare the two places. Rather, it is to suggest how, through the parsing out of sexual practice from reproductive practice that was observed in the townships, and that we glimpse in Marcelo’s story, new possibilities may be opened up for the understanding of normative and dissident sexualities in African societies.
Uncle Marcelo is blamed for every unfortunate thing that happens in the community: crop failure, shrinking numbers of fish in the river, Marcelino’s sterility, and much more besides. His penalty for not capitulating to the village’s demands is death, and the townspeople attempt to murder him in his home. Perhaps in the belief that eliminating Marcelo will reverse their environmental problems. Perhaps in a more common fit of homicidal violence against the Other. For Okomo and the other members of the Indecency Club, the penalty is rape by forced heterosexual marriage. Pilar, long abandoned to the incestuous abuse of her murderous father, continu
es to suffer under his roof even as rumors of his cruel perversions begin to circulate. Linda, “pretty as her name,” is made into a debt slave. She is forcibly married off to one of her father’s creditors, the daughter’s body bearing the burden of the father’s debts. Dina, the alleged ringleader of the Indecency Club, is forcibly married to her brother-in-law. She is made to be a replacement for her late sister, as mother to her nieces and nephews and as wife to their father.
Even Okomo is not exempt from the twisted rape remedy. Her grandmother tries to orchestrate her granddaughter’s assault, thereby enacting violence on both Okomo and her would-be attacker. After the mass outing, she is placed under the strict, uninterrupted surveillance of her grandmother. With her grandmother as her jailor, Okomo is prevented from going to school, playing games, going to the river, and even sleeping at night in the children’s room. After some time, she is made to start seeing young Pequeño, who one day accompanies her to the river. There, he grabs her and tries to forcibly touch her genitals, just as her grandmother had instructed him to.
The aggressions that Linda, Dina, and Okomo face all fall within the category “corrective rape,” which has been written about extensively. Corrective rape is frequently characterized as the actions of marauding bands of self-appointed sex and gender policemen. But in La Bastarda, close family members are directly implicated. Dina’s family, Linda’s father, and Okomo’s grandmother are all the architects of the circumstances within which the corrective rape punishments are to occur. This draws our attention to the ways in which familial violence and the homophobic sexual violence of something like corrective rape may be deeply interwoven in ways we have not directed attention to before.
The novel has a happy ending, with Okomo and her friends finally escaping to the forest, where they can create a new queer world, which extends beyond their love lives. Okomo and her tribe are not only same-sex desiring; they also live in a queer way, defying how the world around them eats, looks, dresses, and loves. For one thing, they choose to live in the forest, a space associated with danger, death, and the madness of wild animals and hunters. Secondly, the first time Okomo makes love is in a group where all the participants are showing affection and desire for one other. This behavior forms a stark contrast to the polygamous marriages that are normative in the village, which pit wives in violent and permanent hostility against one another and in competition for the attentions of their men. Thirdly, not only do they reject the punishing heterosexuality of the community—reflected in the novel through heterosexual practices of adultery, polygamy, prostitution, pedophilia, incest, and the unrelenting demand from the community that Marcelo impregnate his sterile brother’s wife—but they also critique heterosexual excess by adopting a plant-based diet. In Marcelo’s home, taking up a new life in the forest entails becoming vegetarian. Surrounded by forest creatures, they refuse to eat meat. In this last commentary on death, life, sustainability, and consumption, the story contrasts the cycles of life in the forest with the cycles of violence in the village. Marcelo, Okomo, and their free tribe of the forest will consume in new ways, finding their nourishment without the need to kill others.
Sylvia Tamale, leading feminist legal scholar and editor of African Sexualities: A Reader, has argued that “debates on sexual inequality represent the most fundamental challenge to struggles for global democracy. . . . Until we close the gap between different voices demanding justice and equality, embracing the infinite possibilities of our sexual, social, economic and political beings, the African renaissance or the transformation that we are striving for will forever remain a mirage.”3 African authors like Obono, writing different queer worlds in the languages of their hearts—Fang, Spanish, Pidgin, the language of the village, or the language of the forest—are giving life to diverse new characters that allow all Africans to embrace the infinite possibilities of our sexual, social, economic, and political beings, and in so doing advance toward the transformations in justice and equality that we are all striving for.
NOTES
1.Veronica Sigamoney and Marc Epprecht, “Meanings of Homosexuality, Same-Sex Sexuality, and Africanness in Two South African Townships: An Evidence-Based Approach for Rethinking Same-Sex Prejudice,” African Studies Review 56, no. 2, (2013): 83–108.
2.Sigamoney and Epprecht, 88–89.
3.Sylvia Tamale, African Sexualities: A Reader (Oxford: Pambazuka Press, 2011), 4.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR & TRANSLATOR
TRIFONIA MELIBEA OBONO is a journalist and political scientist who researches women and gender in Africa. She is a professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences department of the National University of Equatorial Guinea. Currently, she is pursuing her doctorate in gender studies and human rights from the University of Salamanca, Spain. Her short story “La Negra” was included in the anthology Voces feministas de Guinea Ecuatorial (Barcelona: May 2015) and her first novel, Herencia de bindendee, was published by Editions del Auge (Madrid: 2016).
LAWRENCE SCHIMEL is an award-winning author and anthologist, and has been internationally recognized for his queer anthologies, gay and lesbian erotica, and children’s books. His writing has been translated into over twenty languages. He served as cochair of the Publishing Triangle, an organization of lesbians and gay men in the American publishing industry, for two years, and also served as the Regional Advisor of the Spain Chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators for five years.
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ABOUT FEMINIST PRESS
The Feminist Press is a nonprofit educational organization founded to amplify feminist voices. FP publishes classic and new writing from around the world, creates cutting-edge programs, and elevates silenced and marginalized voices in order to support personal transformation and social justice for all people.
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