Behind the dark closet

LGBT+: COMMUNITY COMES OUT IN THE OPEN IN LITERATURE AND PICTURES

Julia Hango’s entrancing photos let bodies communicate.

The poignant, kaleidoscopic 2017 Gerald Kraak anthology Pride and Prejudice (Jacana) aims to capture the breadth of women’s and LGBT+ people’s experiences in Africa.

Dilman Dila’s sci-fi tragedy Two Weddings for Amoit folds the politics of gender and sexuality into each other in near-future, drought-stricken Uganda. The ultra-Christian government introduces polygamy to deal with reproductive infertility. Two lesbian lovers, now sharing a husband, use this system to circumvent restrictions that forbid their secret affair.

Like Two Weddings for Amoit, winning story Poached Eggs by Kenyan Farah Ahamed opens on the day of Nuru’s wedding. The unmasking of the monster in her husband on their wedding night is stomach-turning, and the story gets increasingly claustrophobic with dread.

But Ahamed gradually lets some air in with the wife’s scheming, unwittingly aided by the husband’s chauvinism.

Unlike Poached Eggs, the husband in Two Weddings for Amoit is a chauvinist, but he’s more sympathetic and questioning. The resulting misunderstanding from this contradiction gives a devastating ending.

Coherence also shows up between the stories of Obi-Young Otosirieze and Amateriso Dore – You Sing of a Longing and For Men Who Care respectively.

Both stories look at the lives of Nigerian gay men, and use the second person – “you” – narration.

Otosirieze carefully weighs his breathtaking sentences. The powerful narrator is sometimes the instinctive yet frightening attraction that defies suppression. You Sing of a Longing lulls you into an aching helplessness, but then reveals this overpowering instinct to be liberating.

Dore’s For Men Who Care, however, uses first, second and third person narrators, split among the three sections and in that order. The result is a fascinating three-dimensional perspective of the gay and transgender closet. It’s a lonely place, but has room for the motives and motivations of (sometimes malicious) other who point to a way out.

Olakule Olegunro’s complex story, at turns horrifying and heartwarming, takes on the often neglected issue of domestic abuse in gay relationships.

Beyers de Vos’ disconcerting portrayal of homelessness for South African LGBT+ people starts with what seems like melodramatic fiction, but it’s longform journalism that uses intimacy to bring you uncomfortably close to Peter’s pain.

Ayodenre Sogunro’s essay launches an incisive takedown of Nigeria’s anti-gay laws.

Julia Hango’s entrancing photographs let bodies communicate the intimacy we reserve for faces, and Dean Hutton’s similarly intimate photos put bare on bodies on bare mattresses.

The two poems are highlights, especially Sindiswa Busuku-Mathese’s evocation of women’s sorrow under the ruthless, bloody capitalism of mining, while Tania Haberland’s verse is a paean to the vagina.

The decision to use two projects on albinism shows one of the book’s strengths: it uses difference to let narratives blossom in unexpected ways.

Justin Dingwall’s photos dip albinism in mythology. Joint prize-winner Sarah Waiswa strikingly situates it in the backdrop of everyday life.

Dingwall takes ideas of beauty to be a process, while for Waiswa, it’s self-evident.

It would have been easy to leave out Dingwall and Waiswa’s

photographs by focusing on sexuality and gender, but the book is adept at casting a widenet and approaches the vastness of the continent.