Queering Tropical African Heteronormativity through Spirit Worlds: Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji

Abstract

This article analyzes how contemporary queer African writing participates in decoloniality by queering (hetero)normative knowledge systems for social and epistemic transformation. In my reading of Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji (2020), I argue that Trans/Queer African literature participates in a very important epistemic project of counterfactualism by offering alternatives to perceived and systemically imposed African gender and sexual realities. The novel achieves this by deconstructing the hetero-naturalization of temporality to locate queer time and queer space within indigenous African modes of worldmaking. In their rendition of the Igbo myth of the Ogbanje spirit children in narrating the transgender life of their protagonist, Emezi not only ascertains the indigeneity of queerness to Africa, but goes further to demonstrate how some tropical epistemologies are already queer in their non-binary imagination of life and death, human and spirit, gender and sexuality. By representing otherworldliness and possibilities of being ‘out of order’—beyond the heteronormative framing of identity, space, and time—the novel debunks the pervasive notion of African queerness as recolonization and ascertains the flexibility of tropical knowledges against perceptions of their rigidity.